There’s a certain sort of reader who thinks of everything in tropes and also hates tropes. So as soon as a character is introduced, they’ll pigeon hole that person into the nearest applicable archetype, then complain about it.
I think part of this comes from maladaptive novelty-seeking, the kind of guy who wants just once for the villain to win at the end, for the romance to tear itself apart in the 11th hour and never be repaired, who wants “realism” but not actually realism, just subversion because at least that would be different.
My cousin is one of those guys. He’s much younger than me, still in college, but we were talking at a family get together, and he expressed disdain at the very concept of a work of fiction having conflict in it, at the building of tension before its release, at character arcs or even development.
So I asked him what it was he wanted from a story, out of professional curiosity, and he said, “I want,” and then he bit his lip and grabbed at the air like he was going to pull it out of the aether.
I never figured out what it was he actually wanted, but I sometimes try to rotate the problem in my head, like I’m going to be able to see the shape of the solution if I just spend enough time working at it.
It’s a huge untapped market: people who like reading but don’t seem to like any of the things stories have.