Boring.

 I'm ready for Christmas to be over.

Yes, I know it's August.

My aunt and grandma love to play the Hallmark channel...every...waking...moment... And it's been that way for over a year now. I spend a lot of my day at my grandma's house if I don't have to go out, which means that, even though I'm doing other things and not watching the TV, I'm consuming Hallmark channel for many hours a day. Every day. Over and over and over again.

Because you see all the same movies. Over and over and over again.

Everyone who watches/has watched/has heard of the Hallmark channel knows this, though. For every one movie, there's 20 that have the same female lead. 50 of them have the same storyline. All of them have the same male lead.

Oh...wait a second. They don't. Sorry. I just have a hard time telling the difference between the men. 

Except for Niall Matter when he grew that...thing on his face.

Christmas is Hallmark's prime money-making time, so they'll do anything they can to extend it as long as they can. It's a lot easier to write Christmas romances than it is to write a romance every other day of the year. Having their meet cute on Christmas practically writes itself!

Or, rather, someone wrote it once, and 99% of Hallmark's movies use it with different faces, different names, and a twist. Gasp, he's the one who loves Christmas and she's the work-a-holic? Gasp, they were high school sweethearts but they BROKE UP?! Gasp, look at all the cheeky references to this other classic piece of media everyone knows about even if they haven't seen the movie/read the book/followed the media drama. Oh my goodness, he's secretly a prince?! What's a small-town girl to do?! She is not worthy!

My mother walked into the room and said "It's like they recycle the same storyline. It's another royal family and the commoner they fall in love with."

It made me think of the fanfiction tropes I used to love so much... The royal and the peasant, the brooding dark bad boy who's actually a sweetheart, lovers who got separated for years only to meet again and rekindle their romance. The kind of fanfiction tropes that everyone loves so much that they become overused. They go from frequent to annoying to infuriating to brain melting.

Fandoms, especially hordes of raving, uncreative fans can run the cute tropes into the ground by oversaturating the blogs and the fanfiction websites and the chat rooms with the same thing over and over and over again.

Hallmark is its own fandom and it's running any good things it had going for it into the ground.

And don't even get me started on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. 

God, it's no wonder I've gotten 20% stupider over the past year.