Tropes are the recurring devices readers recognise across stories: enemies to lovers, the chosen one, the locked-room mystery, the red herring. This database defines 67 of them in plain language, each with named example works so you can see the trope operating rather than take the definition on trust. Filter by genre, filter romance tropes by heat, or search for the one you have in mind.
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Showing 67 of 67 tropes
A romance between a character and the sibling of their best friend (or their sibling's best friend), where loyalty to the friend makes the attraction feel forbidden.
Seen in: The Wedding Engagement, Forbidden King
The plot compels two characters into sustained close quarters — one bed, one cabin, one workplace — accelerating an attraction neither planned; goes beyond the 'just one bed' scene.
Seen in: A Lady's Desire, Bollywood and the Beast, The Hating Game
An opposites-attract romance pairing a difficult, closed-off character with a happy-go-lucky, positive one, whose warmth gradually softens the grump.
Seen in: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, The House in the Cerulean Sea, The Devil Comes Courting
Two people who seem to have nothing in common — in personality, background, career or allegiances — fall for each other, with the conflict of their differences at the centre of the romance.
Seen in: It Happened One Summer, Beach Read, The Hating Game
A romance in which the romantic attraction between characters builds slowly over the course of a novel or series, with pining and obstacles delaying the payoff.
Seen in: Meet Me Halfway, Forbidden, Best I Never Had
A dark, brooding antihero variant of the Romantic hero: proud, moody and cynical, isolated and troubled, yet magnetically attractive.
Seen in: Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff), Jane Eyre (Rochester), The Count of Monte Cristo (Edmond Dantes)
A romance arc in which two characters begin as adversaries or rivals who dislike each other, and their antagonism gradually turns into romantic love.
Seen in: Pride and Prejudice, The Hating Game
Subverted: Commonly subverted when the mutual pride/prejudice is shown to mask attraction rather than true enmity.
Two characters agree to pretend to be a romantic couple for some ulterior purpose, and the pretence gradually gives way to genuine feelings.
Seen in: To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Proposal
Subverted: The staged relationship becomes real once the pretence forces the couple into genuine intimacy.
Lovers who are kept apart by outside forces such as feuding families, social class, or law; their relationship is disapproved of or prohibited.
Seen in: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult
Subverted: The prohibition drives the couple toward tragedy rather than a happy resolution.
A romance in which two people who begin as close platonic friends gradually realise they are in love and become a romantic couple.
Seen in: When Harry Met Sally..., 13 Going on 30
Subverted: Often subverted by delaying the romantic resolution to test whether men and women can 'just be friends'.
Two friends agree to a casual, no-strings sexual arrangement without emotional attachment, and one or both eventually develop genuine romantic feelings.
Seen in: Friends with Benefits, No Strings Attached
Subverted: The 'no emotional attachment' rule inevitably breaks down as one partner falls in love.
Love at first sight: a character feels an instant, extreme, and ultimately long-lasting romantic attraction to a stranger upon first seeing them.
Seen in: Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid, Titanic
A romantic situation, usually a rivalry, in which two people pursue or are involved with one person, or one person in a relationship pursues another.
Seen in: Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Romeo and Juliet
Subverted: A consensual three-way 'triad' relationship reframes the conflict as polyamory rather than rivalry.
A marriage contracted for reasons other than love and commitment, entered into for personal gain or some strategic purpose; in romance it later blossoms into real love.
Seen in: Royal Highness, Green Card
Subverted: The pragmatic arrangement 'ultimately becomes happy' as the spouses fall genuinely in love.
A scene in romantic fiction in which two people meet for the first time under unusual, humorous, or charming circumstances that spark the romance.
Seen in: Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Subverted: Frequently played for comedy via a clash of personalities or an embarrassing misunderstanding.
Former lovers who separated in the past are reunited years later and get a second opportunity to rekindle their relationship.
Seen in: Persuasion, The Notebook
A person with whom one has a deep or natural affinity, a predestined perfect partner; the concept traces to Plato's myth of humans split into halves seeking reunion.
Seen in: Plato's Symposium, The Time Traveler's Wife
Two people whose relationship is doomed by outside forces working against them; the phrase implies the stars themselves have predetermined their tragic fate.
Seen in: Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Tristan and Iseult
Romantic love felt by one person that is not reciprocated, one-sided or unequal, resulting in a yearning for more complete love.
Seen in: Astrophil and Stella, Amoretti, Remembrance of Things Past
An intimate romantic connection that develops between coworkers, which may be romantic, sexual, or a combination of both.
Seen in: The Hating Game, Bridget Jones's Diary
An antagonist archetype that serves as a setting's supreme embodiment of evil, darkness, or death — the ultimate villain the heroes must defeat.
Seen in: The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars
Subverted: Philip Pullman has critiqued the archetype for implying that real-world evil is embodied in a single person, contrasting it with Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil.'
A magic system built on specific, clearly defined rules and limitations, as opposed to a vague, undefined 'soft' magic system.
Seen in: Mistborn, Fullmetal Alchemist
An institution for learning magic, appearing in fantasy works that depict an organized society of magicians or wizards who systematically pass on their knowledge.
Seen in: Harry Potter, Discworld
A speculative-fiction plot device in which characters enter a self-contained fantasy world through a portal, typically within a quest-based narrative.
Seen in: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia
A predictive narrative device — frequently a self-fulfilling prophecy — in which a foretold outcome comes to pass, sometimes precisely because characters act to fulfill or avert it.
Seen in: Macbeth, Oedipus Rex, 12 Monkeys
A narrative trope in which one character, usually the protagonist, is framed as the inevitable hero of the story as a result of destiny, special lineage, or unique gifts.
Seen in: Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
A plot device in which a hero undertakes a difficult journey toward a specific goal, which is often symbolic or allegorical.
Seen in: The Lord of the Rings, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Don Quixote
Subverted: The overt reason a hero is dispatched on a quest may be false, and such tales often end with the dispatcher being unmasked and punished.
A recurring science-fiction theme in which autonomous artificial intelligence or robots revolt against and seize control from their human creators.
Seen in: R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator
A science-fiction theme in which extraterrestrial lifeforms invade Earth to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it, harvest people, steal resources, or destroy the planet.
Seen in: The War of the Worlds, The Puppet Masters, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Subverted: Inverted when humans are the invaders of an alien world, as in Ender's Game and Avatar.
An imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives, usually presented as a criticism of a current trend or political system.
Seen in: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale
A science-fiction theme depicting the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or any sapient species' first encounter with another.
Seen in: The War of the Worlds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact
A hypothetical multi-generational starship on which successive generations of humans live and die during an interstellar voyage lasting centuries or millennia.
Seen in: Orphans of the Sky, Non-Stop
A stock character: a scientist with unusual or unsettling personality traits, usually expressed in the taboo or hubristic nature of their experiments.
Seen in: Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Metropolis
A plot device in which characters re-experience a span of time that repeats, sometimes more than once, with some hope of breaking out of the cycle of repetition.
Seen in: Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs
Subverted: The loop constantly resets when a condition is met, such as a character's death or a fixed point in time.
A narrative device in which characters move through time to past or future periods, with stories generally focused on the consequences of that travel.
Seen in: The Time Machine, A Christmas Carol, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A crime-fiction subgenre in which sex and violence occur offstage, the detective is an amateur sleuth, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.
Seen in: Miss Marple series, The Cat Who... series, Aunt Dimity novels
A mysterious, beautiful, and seductive female character whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, or deadly situations.
Seen in: Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Basic Instinct
A crime-fiction genre whose typical protagonist is a tough, cynical detective who battles the violence of organized crime within a corrupt system.
Seen in: The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown
A crime-fiction subgenre in which a crime (typically murder) is committed under circumstances that make it appear impossible for the perpetrator to have entered, acted, and left undetected.
Seen in: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Hollow Man, The Mystery of the Yellow Room
A plot twist — a literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction of the plot — often used to reveal a surprising or hidden antagonist.
Seen in: Oedipus Rex, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Empire Strikes Back
A detective-fiction form in which the puzzle of who committed the crime is the main focus, with clues presented so the reader can attempt to solve it.
Seen in: Knives Out, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
A literary device that misleads or distracts an audience from a relevant question, leading them toward a false conclusion.
Seen in: A Study in Scarlet, The Da Vinci Code
A suspense device in which the protagonist must accomplish a mission against a looming deadline, with high stakes that create escalating tension.
Seen in: High Noon, Speed
A thriller convention in which an innocent, ordinary person is thrust into a dangerous situation through mistaken identity or wrongful accusation and must flee while trying to clear their name.
Seen in: The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Fugitive
An ancient, dormant cosmic evil that lies sleeping ('dead but dreaming') until it awakens or returns to threaten the world — exemplified by the Cthulhu Mythos.
Seen in: The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness
A horror subgenre that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.
Seen in: Frankenstein, The Metamorphosis, The Fly
The last surviving female character in a horror film who confronts the killer and is left to tell the story.
Seen in: Black Christmas, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street
Subverted: More recent horror movies and series increasingly challenge the traditional final-girl tropes.
A house or other building in fiction perceived as being inhabited by the disembodied spirits of the deceased, which menace the living occupants.
Seen in: The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, The Turn of the Screw
A protagonist who lacks the conventional attributes of a hero (idealism, courage, moral rectitude) and stands in opposition to the traditional hero archetype.
Seen in: A Fistful of Dollars, The Metamorphosis, Don Quixote
The theme of camaraderie and brotherhood forged among soldiers, one of the recurring themes explored in war fiction.
Seen in: Saving Private Ryan, All Quiet on the Western Front
A narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary; if a gun is shown, it must later be fired, and irrelevant elements removed.
Seen in: A View from the Bridge, The Cherry Orchard, Moonraker
Subverted: The Cherry Orchard contradicts the principle: its two loaded firearms are never fired, tied to a theme of incomplete action.
A plot device that places a main character in an unresolved, precarious situation at the conclusion of a narrative installment or broadcast break.
Seen in: One Thousand and One Nights, A Pair of Blue Eyes
The inclusion of a humorous character, scene, or witty dialogue in an otherwise serious or dramatic work, often to relieve tension.
Seen in: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear
An antagonist who is physically nearly identical to the protagonist but with a radically inverted morality.
Seen in: The Man in the Iron Mask, Superman (Bizarro), Beowulf
An object, device, or event necessary to the plot and to character motivation but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
Seen in: The Maltese Falcon, Pulp Fiction, The 39 Steps
Subverted: George Lucas inverts Hitchcock's rule by making the audience care about the MacGuffin as much as the heroes.
A plot device in which one person is taken for another (and often vice versa), generating dramatic or comic complications.
Seen in: The Comedy of Errors, Menaechmi
A common narrative template (the monomyth) in which a hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.
Seen in: Star Wars, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Jane Eyre
Subverted: Campbell's monomyth theory has been criticized by folklorists as a non-scholarly approach suffering from source-selection bias.
The protagonist of a tragedy whose character flaws lead to their downfall, evoking a sense of pity and fear in the audience.
Seen in: Macbeth, Othello, Kalevala
A narrative device in which one or more men must rescue a woman who has been kidnapped or placed in peril, often motivated by kinship, love, or lust.
Seen in: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, King Kong
Subverted: Subverted by 'empowered damsels' and role reversals, e.g. Rose rescuing the handcuffed Jack in Titanic.
A plot device in which a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly or abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence.
Seen in: Medea, Lord of the Flies, As You Like It
Subverted: Traditionally criticised as inartistic, though some scholars argue it can serve as deliberate subversive commentary.
An interjected scene (formally analepsis) that takes the narrative back in time to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence.
Seen in: Citizen Kane, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
A narrative device in which suggestions or warnings about events to come are dropped or planted to develop or subvert the audience's expectations.
Seen in: Book of Genesis, To Kill a Mockingbird
Subverted: Foreshadowing can be deliberately misleading, subverting rather than confirming the audience's anticipation.
A literary technique in which an introductory or main narrative sets the stage for one or more embedded stories, bracketing the inner narratives.
Seen in: One Thousand and One Nights, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights
Subverted: The frame can be used to cast doubt on the inner narrator or position the reader's attitude toward the embedded tale.
A narrative that opens in the chronological middle of the plot rather than at the beginning, with exposition filled in gradually through dialogue and flashbacks.
Seen in: Odyssey, Divine Comedy, Crossfire
A literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction of the plot, altering the audience's perception of preceding events; when at the end, a 'twist ending'.
Seen in: Oedipus Rex, The Empire Strikes Back, Psycho
Subverted: A twist placed at the very end becomes a 'surprise ending' recontextualising the whole story.
A character's true identity (an alter ego, or hidden royal/heir status) is concealed from the wider world and revealed as a key turn in the plot.
Seen in: Superman, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Princess Diaries
Subverted: The 'secret' is often an open secret that many characters already know.
A narrator whose credibility is compromised and who cannot be trusted to accurately convey the story's events.
Seen in: Lolita, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye
Subverted: Though usually first-person, arguments exist for unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially in film.
Romance tropes: the relationship engines readers seek out by name, tagged by heat.
Fantasy tropes: the quest machinery, chosen ones and ancient evils of secondary worlds.
Science-fiction tropes: first contact, time travel and the futures they build.
Mystery and crime tropes: the sleuths, red herrings and locked rooms of the whodunit.
Thriller tropes: the ticking clocks and wrong-man chases that keep the pages turning.
Horror tropes: the final girls, haunted houses and things in the dark.
Structural tropes: narrative devices any genre reaches for.
A trope is a recurring device, situation or character type that readers recognise across many stories: enemies to lovers, the chosen one, the locked-room mystery, the red herring. Tropes are not cliches. A cliche is a trope executed lazily; a trope is simply a familiar building block that a skilled writer can play straight, subvert or combine. This database defines dozens of them, each with named example works.
Pick the trope on purpose, then decide whether to deliver it, delay it or subvert it. Readers who search for enemies to lovers or fake dating want the pattern honoured, so the craft is in the execution, not in hiding the trope. Each entry here includes a note on how the trope is commonly subverted, so you can see both the straight version and the twist.
Heat describes how explicit the romance runs: sweet (closed-door, little to no on-page intimacy), warm (some on-page heat, fade-to-black or mild), and steamy (open-door, explicit). Heat is a property of how a book handles a trope rather than of the trope itself, so the label reflects how the trope is most commonly published. Filter by heat to match the trope to the kind of romance you are writing or reading.
Turning a trope into a scene is a craft problem: build a whole premise around a trope with the plot generator, see the show, don't tell quiz, build a cast with the character name generator and thecharacter adjective canvas, or browse everywriting tool and word bank.
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