An incomplete list of tropes that give me the squick
No moral judgments, only personal preferences
Perhaps I am Old™ and viewing the world through rosy-colored nostalgia, but I remember the days when we had a word that could express our dislike for something without passing moral judgment on the people who do.
And that word was squick.
I miss the word squick. When it did disappear from our collective online lexicons? Whither goest thou, squick? Whence didst thou turn into “problematic” or “toxic”? I miss thee, squick. Return to me, I beseech thee.
Anyway, none of the list below is necessarily a deal-breaker for me when it comes to the media I consume (a lot of media I like actually does contain many of these tropes) but their appearance usually makes me look like the photo of Jin above.
So without further ado:
🤢 an incomplete list of tropes that give me the squick
Love triangles in which there is one girl caught between one broody boy and one golden retriever of a human because she always chooses the broody boy and never the golden retriever of a human
Teacher/student (or equivalent power dynamic) romances that don’t end with the character with less agency claiming their power and destroying the person who took their innocence with the skills they learned from the person they once loved and that betrayal is both PAINFUL and BEAUTIFUL — cough, not that I might be writing something like this in the future, cough
Any time sexuality is described in animalistic terms
Posessiveness
Any mention of “mating” in romantic and/or sexual terms between human-like characters
“Breeding”
Romances that end with a pregnancy as the be all, end all of a happy ending
A white cis man with unnamed, existential dread about his place in the world
Any time “baby” is used as a romantic term of endearment
Girl-bossing
Feminism stemming from a binary conception of gender
Negging and bickering that thinks it is sexual tension but is actually just being mean
“For your own good”
An inexplicable loss of brain cells in order for a plot to make sense
Fated mates
A writer withholding information critical to the plot in the name of a “shocking” twist (the most egregious example of this is the first series of the TV show Broadchurch)
This list could probably go on ad infinitum, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it here.
What about you, 친구들? Do you have any tropes that give you the squick? Are any of you old enough to remember the term squick at all?
징그럽게,