pet hate trope: the kiss-and-shove
This is totally a YMMV issue, but as this trope keeps cropping up in every damn place, I feel moved to state my feelings on it.
You know that thing, where the (overwhelmingly straight) protagonists-slash-love-interests of a story finally kiss, and then the guy suddenly pulls back and goes out of his way to brutally tell the girl that he doesn’t really like her, that she’s a shit kisser, that he only kissed her under duress and/or otherwise shuts her down cold to disguise the fact that He Really Secretly Loves Her But Can’t Admit It Because Reasons? I call it the kiss-and-shove, though it possibly has a different name elsewhere. Whatever: it’s ubiquitous.
And I hate this trope so. fucking. much.
There are two main reasons for this:
- It’s a bargain-basement ploy, the cheapest of cheap shots, shoddiest of smokescreens and lowest of low blows, because we, the audience, just read all about how amazingly passionate a kiss it was and are privy to all the narrative signposting that screams Here Be Sexual Tension - it’s just so fucking obvious, and there’s never any subtlety to it: the kiss is always extraordinary, the subsequent rejection dissonantly brutal, and the girl is never portrayed as being confident, observant or angry enough to tell the guy, “Bullshit that meant nothing! What are you hiding?”, even when this is 100% the appropriate and logical thing to do, because:
- Its effectiveness (such as it is) hinges on our tacit acceptance of the idea that women have a predictable, socially conditioned response to being shamed for our sexuality (which is basically what this trope amounts to): silence. More worryingly still, it means that the hero, in using this tactic, is trading on his knowledge of the fact that a woman, if shamed about her body, sexuality or attractiveness, will feel so guilty and terrible that she won’t challenge him, even when it’s blindingly fucking obvious that it is a ploy, and not a reflection of his actual desires. And that makes the hero a sexist asshat: so I’m sorry, no, this isn’t the work of a bad boy, it’s a highly gendered form of emotional abuse, and I loathe how casually it’s both deployed and excused, as though the fact that He Really Loved Her All Along somehow makes this sort of bullshit acceptable.
For me, there’s only one scenario that can make this trope even halfway acceptable: if the lie is given only to deceive a third party and then instantly rescinded and apologised for once that person is out of earshot. Otherwise, NO.
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razziecat said:
I can’t say I’ve seen this ever, but then I don’t watch rom-coms. Is this common in movies, TV, or what? dukenarrativium reblogged this from fozmeadows
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robothyenawasteland said:
yuckyuckyuck yep
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