What's uhhh *shuffles papers* the worst/most annoying fanfic trope?

this is literally from november but im going to answer it now because i finally thought of the worst fanfic trope all across the board. are you ready..... here it comes...

the worst fanfic trope is... drumroll please....

"and they all get therapy."

holy FUCK this is such a shit ass trope. the therapist is usually the most bland as shit whitebread character to ever exist because theyre a therapist and they kind of have to be calm about everything and exclusively reactive and in fiction that makes for a boring ass character and nobody has ever thought "hey what if we made this character like.... a character"

AND BEFORE I GO ON LET ME TALK ABOUT TWO EXCEPTIONS:

you and catalyst. That's Fucking It. because honesty hour is a deconstruction of the "character gets therapy" trope and is actually realistic in terms of what zim going to therapy would be like (or so ive heard, i cannot read it because unreality/gaslighting-y stuff is a major major trigger for me, sorry bout that ^^; my friends rly like it tho) and the catalyst au is a character study first and foremost where red and zama are both allowed to be actual characters and the process of therapy is the main point- especially red's journey thru therapy and the very specific intersection of "yes i want help yes i am perfect we exist." the journey thru therapy portrays an actual change in the characters.... so why do i hate it anywhere else?

because USUALLY when characters go to therapy, it's not to savor the journey of change. it's to Fix them.

this fandom has a plague in it and the plague is this fandoms media literacy is piss poor

(immediately i get a reply saying theyre going to doxx me for accusing them of pissing on the poor)

the invader zim characters cant just be themselves. in order for them to be worthy of sympathy from the audience, they have to change.... and by change, the fandom of course means change into the perfect pitiable cookie-cutter version of mental illness.

so they go to therapy, which here is less of a process and more of an easy bake oven response to characterization- bad person goes in, good person comes out. and now you can sympathize.

a therapist is also inserted so the creator can go "see? see?? the character DOES want to change! theyre in therapy! which is what the Good People do!! so theyre good and we can like them :)" because as i said the fucking plague of media illiteracy is so prevalent that a morally dubious character like say, zim or tallest red, cant just change in an organic narrative way that actually has to do with the plot of whatever it is theyre in. they HAVE to get stuck in the Therapy Box so we can ~see that theyre Good People since theyre Working On It~ and they get shat out as nice good people that we can feel morally justified in rooting for. and i see this a lot in other fandoms too. if youve ever written anything starring bakugo for the BNHA fandom, you know the pressure to soften his character and portray him as a Good Pure Boi is REAL, because otherwise youll be accused of justifying his ~irredeemable nature~ (read: he was a middle school bully.) you as the author either have to plunk him in some off screen nebulous Therapy Program that fixes helps him, or you have to make the narrative constantly punish him for daaring to be a less than stellar person at the age of Fourteen, wether it be by misfortune upon misfortune befalling him, or by you writing bakugo to be self-flagellating to the point where it disrupts the narrative. and this same thing is expected here, with pretty much every single fucking character. and at some point, them beating themselves up for their entire in-show character or the narrative putting them through a trauma conga line of catholic atonement gets real fuckin old.

so they go to therapy.