I know this is probably a common topic. For me, I’m not sure if it’s a “trope” or just totally misinformed writing, but it’s how many authors approach alcoholism. Some examples are Girl on the Train and The House Across the Lake, among HUNDREDS. If anyone else here has struggled with alcoholism, you know it’s not just "i woke up after downing an entire bottle of whiskey but was able to shower, down a cup of coffee, and solve a murder. "
I don’t disagree, but I think authors do this because it is otherwise extremely difficult to capture the experience of being targeted.
What I mean is, if a character is being specifically targeted for abuse by multiple people over the course of years—an experience not uncommon among children who are “different” in some way—it’s hard to write that sense of frequent harassment, because this type of cruelty might happen a couple times a week but maybe you don’t want to just infodump “highlights” from the last few months, so instead it comes out like this. And to the character it might feel as if everyone is unrealistically cruel all the time, because even though the cruelty isn’t literally constant, it still greatly outpaces kindness. It’s really hard to get the reader to have empathy for that kind of experience if they haven’t personally experienced it, because any examples you give will feel to that reader like merely an isolated incident, but aren’t.
Does that make sense? I don’t know if I’m explaining this properly.
It’s still not really a good solution.