Hush, Hush/YMMV

The following contains Subjective Tropes to the Hush, Hush literature.

• Alternate Character Interpretation: A good many people see Patch as an abuser who breaks down Nora's will and mentally and spiritually rapes her with his hallucinations and when he possesses her at the end. Similarly, there are a lot of people that argue that Nora's love for Patch is just a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
• Evil Is Sexy: Rixon, in Crescendo
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: It's perfectly fine to fall in love with the guy stalking and scaring you. He secretly loves you and it will all work out fine. Also, if your female therapist warns you to stay away from the guy treating you very inappropriately, just ignore it. She's just a jealous bitch trying to get in the way of True Love and wants the guy for herself. And if your friend also warns you away, ignore that too because your friend has just been tricked.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Nora is a human albeit descended from a Nephilim and Patch is an angel. They're in a relationship together. If they had a child, said child would also be a Nephilim. In the books, Nephilim are hunted down by fallen angels and forced to take an oath that makes them immortal and lets the angels possess them for two weeks every year. And in Crescendo, we see fallen angels are willing to do that to Nephilim younger than sixteen. By forcing it with a gun.
  • We also see that between only having two weeks in a year when they can experience physical sensations and a desire to conceive Nephilim to get back at the angels in heaven, fallen angels enjoy possessing their Nephilim vessels to have sex. According to Jules, Nephilim are completely conscious for this.
• Idiot Plot: The story would probably have finished a lot sooner if Nora would have just told her mother that she was being harassed and stalked, or reported Patch and her Biology teacher to the school Superintendent (both of whom were violating the School Code Book, promising all students safety on school grounds).
• Les Yay: Nora's description of Dabria in Silence is questionable at best.
• Strangled by the Red String: There is really no reason at all for Nora to be attracted to Patch. Nora even says several times that she sees nothing good about him.
• Unfortunate Implications: A few.
  • It doesn't matter if a guy stalks you, scares you, manipulates events to get you alone with him in an isolated area, and generally forces his will on you. If you put up with it, he'll change his mind and fall in love with you and you'll have a hot boyfriend who will always watch over you and follow you around.
  • Patch is pretty much the perfect stereotype of an ethnic gangster - swarthy, dark complexion, extremely Italian last name, a love of hanging around in bad areas of town, and seducing/taking advantage of a pretty white girl.
  • At several points in the novel, Nora is told by the school guidance councilor that Patch is not safe to be around and that she highly recommends that Nora does not hang around Patch off school property or by herself. The advice is perfectly logical, given that Patch is scaring Nora with his behavior, but Nora instantly is suspicious of the advice. And then the end of the book proves Nora's suspicions right, by having the councilor be a Clingy Jealous Girl who wants to drive her away from Patch.
• The Woobie:
  • Nora, in the early parts of the book when she clearly doesn't want anything to do with Patch.
  • The Nephilim in general. They have no control over their parentage and half of the time they have no idea they're Nephilim at all. But if a fallen angel finds them, they're forced via Mind Rape to put themselves for an eternity into said fallen angel's service. They then get their bodies stolen for two weeks out of every year, during which time they're forced into an And I Must Scream situation while the fallen angel uses them for various things, including sex.