Love Island: The 10 worst tropes from the show

Love Island is a wickedly funny reality series, but some of its tropes are a bit corny, and some of them aren't good to begin with.

Love Island aired its first and so far only winter season in early 2020, and the show will be set in a new location in South Africa rather than the familiar Mallorca villa. In January 2023, Love Island finally returns to South Africa for its second and ninth winter seasons.

The show plans to continue airing for two seasons a year from now on, which is great news for its many loyal fans. However, the series has repeated many of the same well-worn tropes throughout its formula over the years. If they continue, the tropes will only grow more obnoxious with the double-dose of the show every year.

The Day 1 Couple

Basically every cast member of Love Island was quarantined in a building where they only saw each other all day for months, no wonder their relationship, romantic or platonic, It felt like a middle school or high school relationship.

Like in high school, there's usually a "long-term" power couple who get together on day one and stay loyal throughout the season, or at least most of it. Usually, the couple is playing to win, so They deluded themselves into thinking they were compatible, and only realized it deep into the season they were incompatible. Then they break up because it's too late to start over, like Jack and Liberty. Otherwise, they'll end up winning the season, just like Dani and Jack, and it'll just make TV boring.

Young Islanders

Another reason why the Love Island drama felt so high school-like came down to the youth of the contestants, many of whom had just graduated from high school themselves. Each season has an islander or two in their mid-30s, but most are in their early 20s, some in their teens.

There's nothing wrong with picking young, but that doesn't seem to be necessary for the format, and the relationship between seasons isn't obvious right now. Picking a wide range of age groups in a season can be problematic, but having a season with islanders in their 30s and 40s, and maybe some divorced folks, can refresh the dynamic of the show without changing the formula .

The "Nice" Guy

Almost every season of Love Island has a guy who, even though he's a sweetheart everyone loves, can't find love. audience support It was him at first, but over the weeks and months it became increasingly frustrating to watch him constantly sabotage himself, like Dr. Alex in season 4, or he became less friendly, like in Hugo in Season 7. ^Casting for this genre makes some sense as it's a solid storyline. The problem is that a good guy's bad luck usually ages like a sack of spinach, veering into dreaded territory by the end of the season, leaving viewers pretty sick.

In the Love Island season, a couple, possibly Day One couples, apparently take the giant step of calling each other boyfriends after weeks and weeks of sharing each other's company and the same bed and girlfriend.

The Boyfriend/Girlfriend Proposal

This innocuous, even childish, title change is similar to a marriage proposal in the Love Island world, and often leads to a more dramatic proposal than most people actually propose. Many pomp and circumstance have ended with one half of a couple "officially" asking the other to be their boyfriend or girlfriend. Making a fuss out of a molehill, making a fuss out of a molehill, it's ridiculous. To be fair, the Islanders don't have many All day long, so they create their own fun. But still: cringe.

Best Recurring Love Island Challenge - "Hearts on Fire"; "Rough Rough Match"; and "Snog, Marry, Pie" (to name a few) are classics that fans hope will never go away. If others were funny to begin with, they've lost their luster. Baby Challenge is one of the latter.

The Baby Challenge

During the baby challenge held during the final week of the season, each couple is assigned a doll to care for for a day. It's like high school parenting homework, where students are given an egg or a sack of flour to take care of, except the egg makes a high-pitched electronic squeal all day long. This was meant to annoy the Islanders, but it was just as annoying to the audience.

Casa Amor is a turning point where all boys or all girls are sent to a second villa for a week, and a new batch of boys and girls are sent to each villa to lure the islanders, inevitably breaking the established couples.

Early Casa Amor

Casa Amor is one of the highlights of each season, few Love Island fans want to give it up. But like the holidays, Casa Amor seems to come earlier and earlier each year, to its detriment. It's always going to stir up drama, but that's why it should go deeper this season. Love Island seasons are long, and they tend to drag out to the end. The producers should have saved the Casa Amor bomb for later, as it would shake tired islanders.

Every once in a while, the islanders throw a "party", which means they're each given a token cocktail and allowed to listen to music for a few minutes while they obediently dance for the glamorous camera. Once a season, though, the party takes the form of a live performance by a visiting pop star.

The Pop Star Visit

Those islanders crave entertainment, so they deserve bread and a circus. But for the audience, watching a famous pop star perform their stage-shattering hits on a small backyard stage to less than a dozen people is awkward. Its setting is too intimate and the crowd is too small for the epic blowout they want us to see. The whole atmosphere gives a feeling of being forced.

Love Island offers a plethora of challenges and games designed to entertain, humiliate, expose, destabilize, and yes, objectify the islanders. Then there's the food challenge, where one person from each couple stuffs their throats with as much sticky food as they can placed in the warm sun, then regurgitates it into their partner's mouth like a mother bird. Whichever pair brings the most offensive chaos "wins".

The Food Challenge

Why, why, why is this part of the show? Apparently, the sole purpose is to make both the islanders and the audience throw up. Does Love Island have a bloodthirsty executive producer who refuses to be vetoed on the matter? No other explanation indicated itself.

It is unclear why Love Island has an owner. There have been a few so far, and they rarely appear after introducing the Islanders in the first episode of the season, usually officially hosting the dump of one or two Love Island contestants.

The Pointless Host

But dumping can and does happen more frequently in the absence of a host. In those cases, Islanders will receive a text message advising them how the game will be played. Meanwhile, the show's narrator is the audience's guide, an unseen figure who describes the action (and pokes fun at the islanders) in each episode's voiceover. The ever-present narrator is thus the true "master" with whom the audience forms a relationship.

To be invited to experience life at a Love Island villa is actually a prerequisite for hopeful Love Island cast members to have an impressive social media presence, and they were not chosen because of their Instagram Accounts with the cutest dogs or the most epic dog food pictures.

Instagram Influencer Cast Members

Sexy people need love, but so do other people, and many Love Island fans have long hoped that the show would attract more normal people of all shapes and sizes. People who are not suitable to be models can still make reality shows. Who knows? They might even have fun personalities like a bunch of perfect 10-year-olds in their 20s.

More: Love Island Season 8 couples who are still together (and who aren't)