What's your pet peeve when it comes to tropes? What bothers you when you see it in a show or a movie?
I'll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter's intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there's the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
Hate to be that guy, but the federation exists in a post-money society. No one gets paid, they do what they do for prestige, pride, adventure, and the good of humanity. Maybe the management believe they can inspire their minions to do better, or maybe the SME's are so used to that shit that they under promise and over deliver.
SME: "oh no, our defences are down"
Captain: "How long do you need to fix them?"
SME: (hmm, captain will cut the time in half, it takes about 15 minutes...fuck it...) "Two hours"
Captain: "You have one"
SME: (Like candy from a baby)
But also if you know anything about engineering, it's double your expected timeline just in case Shit Happens™️. I can fairly safely predict delivery in two hours. I might be able to deliver in one. Under-promise and over-deliver, or risk vice versa.
When the driver of a car is looking more at the passenger they’re talking to than the road. Probably a dead giveaway that the scene is shot with green screen or the car being towed on the back of a truck.
I used to hate it when people kept wobbling the steering wheel around when driving in a clearly straight road but then Top Gear had an episode featuring some American cars from the 1980s and constantly correcting the steering was necessary because there was so much loose play in the system!
My friend’s mom when I was a kid used to look at us in the back seat for minutes at a time while driving. She said she used the lines behind the car to stay in the lane. It scared the shit out of us, but somehow she never got into an accident. Granted, these were long, straight, country roads, not NYC streets.
All they need to do to solve the problem is make sure to focus on the road. They don't need to actually be driving, just act like they are driving by looking at the road more than their passenger.
On any union tv show or movie in the United States, all driving sequences are either in a studio shot with a green screen or a virtual stage, or they are shot with a "process trailer" where somebody else pulls the car.
It is very much illegal to have an actor "act" while driving, though in the low budget indie world you might find productions or cast willing to risk it in some way.
Hearing the exact wrong part of the conversation, and then making a horrific assumption and spinning off into zany misunderstandings instead of, just, "Hey, what did I just hear?"
Whenever the plot entirely revolves on avoidable misunderstandings from character that nothing in the story prevents from having a clarifying chat. It's weak storytelling.
Also whenever the characters don't react to enormous thing A because advancing the story requires them to immediately ask about thing B.
Lastly whenever you end up screaming at the tv "you have enough clues to call for backup" or "enough reason to worry to call 911" yet they proceed alone. Bad writing.
I feel like there's a lot of script writers that want the emotional wrenchingness of "this character's personality and history means that they will never see the simple solution" but have no idea how to actually pull it off.
Breaking Bad pulls this off wonderfully multiple times, where the "right" decision is right there but for the character to be able to do it, they couldn't be who we've learned them to be so far.
But most directors amd scriptwriters are nowhere near that level.
Idiot balling. If your plot hinges on everyone suddenly being incompetent af, having the emotional maturity of a hamster or leaving out key details without reason, you fucking suck at writing
It doesn't bother me so much when a character in a show has to take a turn with the idiot ball, but when a video game wants me to hold the idiot ball it really makes me want to stop playing. Recently I was checking out Fallen Leaf and the very first level ends with a character politely but firmly indicating that I can't go further in this random cave I'm exploring, because there's something dangerous stored there... while standing under a stalactite that the game clearly wants you to drop on them. No, god damn it, I am not going to commit murder just to unleash the ancient evil that I would clearly spend the rest of the game stopping. I can just quit here and not be a murderer and the world can stay safe.
I did not even humor it by hitting the stalactite to see what happens, I just pressed alt-F4 and went to play something else.
Honestly this is far more believable ever since Donald Trump became a viable politician. It sure does seem like there is no bottom to the well of human stupidity these days
Having idiotic characters is one thing. Having otherwise-competent characters suddenly become idiotic because the plot doesn't work otherwise is what's bad.
I’m pretty tired of the sanctity of life trope. Especially when the hero kills a thousand henchmen to get to the villain, and then all of the sudden decides it would be wrong to kill a guy who is trying to destroy the world or whatever.
Also the hostage trope where they point a gun at someone and say “drop your gun” and the hero does so. How fucking stupid are you? Just shoot the guy in the face.
Also major injuries that take a year to recover from, but somehow Mr. Average guy is running around and fighting 2 minutes later.
I despise the “flashback to a thing that literally happened five minutes ago to make sure you connect that with whatever just happened/is about to happen.”
Total fucking turnoff. I’m here watching the show and I’m not an idiot. Flashback to something last season or a number of episodes ago? Fine. Some people need a reminder. Within the same episode? GTFO of here with that shit.
Most movies and TV shows are created these days with the assumption that people are on their phones at the same time. I mean actual studio notes to that effect when the plot becomes too difficult for the average person to follow when they have it on while they're also watching TikTok.
It actually started decades ago with daytime soaps which were designed to still make sense to someone who was busy with housework. Now it just applies to way more shows.
The expert who somehow knows all things science and engineering, like they're all just basically the same. Just once I'd like to hear, "I'm an astrophysicist, not a cybersecurity expert. I don't have the first clue where to begin hacking any computer, let alone an alien one that I've never seen before."
Bonus points if the characters have to look for a different solution due to their lack of on-hand expertise in a particular area.
My friend’s dad somehow seems to know everything about everything. He’s wicked smart though, and basically spends all of his time learning and doing stuff.
Cliffhangers are getting out of control. It used to be that a movie or season would end by wrapping up the story and maybe throw a little teaser in at the end for next season. That's fine. But it seems like now they just try to stretch out a story or plot for as long as humanly possible.
It has gotten to the point where I will not watch a show until I either know it doesn't end in a major cliffhanger or the next season is being filmed. Not confirmed, but actively in production.
A good example is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I'm still mad about that ending, even more so with the next movie being delayed.
Not to mention that you really can't trust the producers to provide a consistently good product. You create a cliffhanger for an otherwise good movie and the sequel just turns out to be garbage. If the show is garbage, at least have the decency to make it garbage from start to finish, Don't betray long time fans.
I agree with you! Also unhappy to say that cliffhangers might get more common. Movie makers learn they get more sales / rentals / subscriptions with cliffhangers: because then you’re invested & curious & HAVE to see the next one :/ hate it, but that’s capitalism
Netflix reality competition shows are awful for this. Especially the Korean ones where they cut back to show like every single person's reaction to the thing before either showing it or ending the episode.
I'm already watching this shit, you don't have to manipulate me into continuing to watch it and dramatize every mundane thing. Or pad the time out.
Also Dan Brown.
Used right, it can be effective, but some shitty writers lean way to much on them.
Oh man, I was so disappointed with the show Siren: Survive the Island. I thought it had an awesome premise and was hopeful since it was Korean that it won't be your typical "reality show manufacturer drama". I was so disappointed.
Knights getting stabbed with swords through plate armor.
We're re-watching GoT and were at the Brienne/Jaime fight on the bridge, and I was just yelling at the screen. He's in rags and she's in plate, both wielding swords, he doesn't have a snowballs' chance in hell if she protects her head and just tackles him. That's what the fucking armor is for!
Coincidentally that also would be way more likely to achieve her goal to subdue but not hurt him.
In the opening sequence of Final Fantasy XII, two separate characters get stabbed through the "stylish" gaps in their armor... and somehow this doesn't prompt anyone else to reconsider their armor choices.
Explosive decompression in space. It seems to always last forever, suck EVERYTHING out, even if it's a tiny hole through which a giant xenomorph is liquified. The delta P is like one atmosphere, pathetic really.
"The mentor/parent has to die so that the hero can prove they're self-actualized" or whatever. It's okay for your hero to have living parents, even if their parents are also heroes. I promise your story won't be less interesting if your character's mentor figure survives.
In my tabletop RPG campaigns I always make it a point for my characters to have at least one living parent, and usually two. These games are always so full of haunted orphans whose villages were burned to the ground or whatever.
Well adjusted individuals with a good social/familial network rarely become wandering mercenaries, but it's so refreshing when everyone else is an orphaned lone-wolf prodigy with secret ancestry in the royal family
Lazy villain characterization. Someone dresses in black or snarls a lot or is albino or has some physical marker that makes them different from others, therefore they are the villain.
Thanos was a great villain by this standard. He had lived through the suffering and collapse of his homeworld due to overpopulation, so his motivations actually made sense.
Meh, there are plenty of people in the real world who just want power and money for themselves, who will shit on anybody and anything to get it and teach others to hate on people for just being different in order to gain power. I don't think it's at all implausible that absurdly nasty and selfish people exist.
That can be tricky, though. Done well and you get a villain like Gul Dukat. Done slightly less well, such as with Killmonger and the villains from both Incredibles movies, and you have to make them at least resort to "for the evulz" methods to prevent the audience from sympathizing with them, and even then you may be left with a broken Aesop at the end.
Personally I’m super disinterested in plotlines that suddenly shift and have the main female character desperate to reproduce, or happy about falling pregnant unexpectedly, even, perhaps especially, when it’s wildly out of character for her badass self as she’s written, or makes no sense at all given the circumstances.
So obnoxious and overdone. And so very very lazy, because it’s almost never well-written, it’s just pandering nonsense. I straight up stop watching shows that pull that shit.
People doing creepy things and it being portrayed as romantic. Like stalking, or not taking no for an answer.
Love triangles. I spend a lot of time with polyamorous people, and would like to see more representation. and not like "a cishet monogamous person's idea". But even if you are monogamous, you can date different people for a bit before going all in on someone.
I get what you’re saying, but I had to ask my wife for a date around six times over a period of around 3 months before she said yes. We’ve been together almost 20 years now. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, and it’s okay to ask again if you’re not crazy.
There may be some small amount of nuance. Like if she says a hard no vs a not now, or if time has passed and circumstances changed significantly maybe.
But I'm confident that far more often than not, being repeatedly asked out after having said no is upsetting and may be a sign of danger. Is this person who isn't accepting no on a date going to not accept no on sex, on me having friends, on other things?
Also, big norm breach, the person who said no could change their mind and reach out on their own.
When there is a computer problem and they call some guy who presses like two keys and fixes it. Or when they type really fast and click a lot of things and then it fixes it.
Because of Hollywood way too many people believe that’s how you actually fix a computer or technology, and then when your boss sees you not clicking or typing that fast, your boss thinks you’re an idiot and don’t know what you’re doing. Thank you, Hollywood for brainwashing people.
Movies that need to exposition dump to tell the audience what's going on. This isn't radio. If you need to explain everything to me so I can understand what's going on in the plot, it's bad story telling. Show, don't tell.
I heard Outlander is great, but I can't get past the second episode because the narration pissed me off.
Okay, I get it, it's based off a novel, but if you're inserting a monologue to explain what just happened, or foreshadowing what is about to happen, you can just fuck off.
"Little did I know, this blunder would cost me everything" fuck off
Watch Mad Max Fury Road "theatrical" release then watch the original or director's cut. I watched the original in theaters the day the movie came out and loved it! But I rewatched it on streaming and thought I was going crazy with the Tom Hardy narration they added in the begin and end. I was like, was that added between the time I watched in theater and now? Looked it up and the production company forced them to add the narration a couple weeks into the release. Apparently an executive couldn't follow the story without Max telling him. Shows that the people in charge don't always know what's best.
That’s something I appreciated about the extended version of Lord of the Rings. Gimli was still used as comic relief a lot, but in the extended version he’s a fuller, more rounded out character. Better character development just made the comic relief bits funnier.
I despise it when a character has had a long arch proving their worthy of what they do, and then it turns out late in the game they're a chosen one or some shit. If you've been successfully fighting monsters for 15 books, going from a moderate combatant to a super mega awesome fucking wizard who wipes out an entire fucking species to save someone then you have proved your badass monster fighting chops, and you don't need to be the chosen one. What made you awesome is that you were a (mostly) normal dude who became amazing through hard work and sacrifice. Now you're just someone the gods chose or whatever and it completely ruins the entire concept of what the character was.
Two of my absolute favorite series of all time just recently did this, and I am devastated.
When a story starts to bring in prophecy as part of the writing. As soon as a character does something "because the prophecy speaks of...", I feel that the writers ran out of plausible ideas and use that as a cheap crutch.
Battlestar Galactica was a great show, but they should've skipped that part.
I think monster should have rules. Zombies aren't fast, there's just so many they over take you. Dracula dies from a stake through the heart, and the Wolfman dies from a silver bullet
I'm okay with fast zombies as long as they are short-lived.
Like they should tear their own bodies apart and consume their own internal resources to be fast zombies until the point where they physically shut down and cannot operate anymore.
Interesting that you like the tropes. I like the fact that there's some variation depending on your preference.
I like zombies that are infected and not reanimated. They're fast but die from normal damage. 28 Days Later is one of my favorites and it's a major point of emphasis.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is hard to take seriously sometimes because of the contrivances from slow moving zombies, and the fact that 10 year old zombies are still around bothers me. Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
I can get behind fast zombies that are infected, I'm with you there. But I can't suspend disbelief if a rotting corpse out of the ground can run like Usain bolt. Side note I would like to see monster stories that follow traditional folklore that isn't well known. Werewolves can revert to human through their true love and vampires can't be seen in mirrors only because silver was used to make mirrors but not anymore so we should be able to see vampire reflections in some mirrors. I think that would be cool if made plot relevant
Zombies in the George Romero tradition are basically just animated through magic. Otherwise it would be a World War Z (book) situation where the zombies would eventually just decompose entirely.
The Walking Dead (tv series at least) is a great example of inconsistency undermining the overall rules for their world. Instead of the danger of the dead overrunning everything from outside, the danger of the recently deceased causing an outbreak in any sizeable community was a far more interesting threat in that setting. But they only did that for a little bit and went back to the overwhelming masses of dead and 'people are the real monsters' over and over.
People getting shot with a shitty handgun and they're dead as soon as they hit the ground. Even if its a fatal shot, chances are quite high you're going to die minutes or hours or days later if you make it to a hospital.
People hiding behind cars from bullets. Bullets being shot at the car and somehow not hitting them. Only the engine block could stop most bullets.
Guns don't blow the user backwards, unless it's a truly monster rifle fired from a standing position, and they certainly don't blow the bullet recipient backwards. The first cowboy movies showed people dropping straight down when shot and audiences thought that unrealistic. Yes, that's realistic and, I think, far more horrifying seeing someone's strings cut. There's a finality that showcases how deadly guns can be.
Rattly guns. Jesus. Guns don't rattle you Nimrods. They might make tiny sounds here and there, but Hollywood guns sound like they left out some screws or pins after assembly. I have a Colt .45, a somewhat loosey-goosey design, can't hardly get a sound even shaking the shit out of it. You can punt about any modern gun and not hear metal on metal.
Constantly cocking, racking, charging. Look! Here's our super badass who's been in danger the last 20-minutes, and he's just now chambering a round?! Or, Mr. Badass has to charge his weapon, kicking out a perfectly good round, to show he means business! And if it didn't eject an unspent round? Action hero was running around with an unloaded weapon. What's funny is that a real badass would fire all but the last round and then swap magazines. No charging required! Yes, that's way harder than it sounds.
Once the silencer is on nobody can hear the gunshot or the supersonic bullet or impact on a wall or the bloody wound. That John Wick scene was particularly bad.
Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other's state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like "I'm just going to ignore that second part." I don't even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn't literally impossible and well known why it's impossible for God's sake.
If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it's no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it's not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don't waste time with useless technobabble!
Slap a "Zephyr FTL Communications" logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn't always need to know how, just what. And show, don't tell.
You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just... have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device "Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls".
Looking for a double-helix transistor to magnify your oblidisk? Want to discuss ballooning algorithms or Dormison's Paradox? Ever wondered about Swedish teutonic logic commands, the Hans-Rodenheim Law of Vectoral Momentum, Fankel readings, Mornington axions, the Armistan Codex, Envels, or the newest breakthroughs in ion insulate module technology?
When a woman's child is threatened she goes stupid and hysterical. Like in Lost when she just keeps screaming "my baby!". Yes parents get highly motivated when their child is in danger but they don't get stupid and lose agency.
In any setting where rope would be rare and expensive and they just cut the bonds instead of untying them. It's understandable when time is critical like a prisoner break or the building is on fire. But in a society where someone spent a week making that rope and you just cut it instead of taking 5 min to preserve the rope.
Picking a lock with just one pick. That's not how it works, you need one to apply a rotating force and another one to lift the individual pins. Sometimes shows even get it right in one season and then totally blow it in the next one.
when they try to make you sympathize with an unredeemably evil character. like the mirror universe giorgieu in startrek discovery, who was literally "worse than hitler" but they decided they wanted upstanding dogooder characters to love her for some reason
Not quite a pet peeve, but close. The whole "We're not in a (movie/show/game/whatever)!" type of dialogue.
That, or cliffhangers that will never be resolved due to the show/movie either being cancelled, discontinued, whatever. Looking at you, Sliders season 5 ending!
When they provide exposition about something that lead to the current story, but the exposition is about something way more interesting than what is happening in the current movie because the current movie is just generic whatever.
People in zombie movies and shows that don't know what zombies are. I know it's so they can use cool descriptions like "the infected" or "walkers" or "the dead". The zombie word sounds kinda silly. But I still don't like it.
There might be trademark law involved with this. One of the creators like George Romero or someone might hold a trademark on the word "Zombie" for use in films.
I can tell you've never been to Baltimore in August.... You see a junkie slowly shuffling down the street wearing sweats in 100° weather... Zombies make a bit more sense.
I don't know if this is a trope or not but I hate it when movies fail to live up to their potential.
The new Beetlejuice movie is like that.
(I'll try for no spoilers)
There's a couple of events that are shown as really big ordeals, huge events that you could base the entire movie around, and then the movie rug pulls your expectations and just kind of brushes those huge issues aside like it's nothing.
And part of me gets it that that's like a Beetlejuice thing, not complying with your expectations, but in this case I feel like the movie was made much worse for it and they should have really reconsidered doing the things they did.
It just made the entire movie feel like there were no actual risks, nothing bad can possibly happen, there's nothing scary or dangerous in the world.
It's like everybody in the movie was bored of living in that universe. It was ridiculous.
I watch movies for escapism and I don't want to see the people that I'm escaping from my life watching escaping from their lives in the same process, having everything handed to them without having to work for it, with no real risks and no real adventure and no real humanity in their story.
And I'm honestly kind of surprised at how many movies lately have failed to give real stakes, real risks to the main characters, real goals to achieve, a real character to operate with, or has attempted to elevate the genre in any way.
I think the worst example of this was a Robert Redford move I saw once where an oxygen tank was loaded in a tube, the stem was knocked off, and the tank flew into a guard tower and exploded like it was an RPG.
According to Quora it takes 5 minutes, with a willing participant.
Anaesthesia that's injected right before an operation can knock you out in about 30 seconds (and until then you could still struggle, technically speaking), but that's a thick-ass tube of drugs they're pumping inside of you. Some vapours from a rag is going to do jack shit.
Villains who vocally support some unconventional ideology but whose evil acts are actually not related to that ideology. For example, I like Bioshock but the moral lesson which the game tried to teach about libertarianism is undermined by the fact that any place where the entire population used drugs that turned them into homicidal maniacs would have problems.
(One could say "Everyone used the drugs because of libertarianism." I don't find that convincing. I think the drugs could have been incorporated equally plausibly into a story about any ideology.)
It's been a minute, but I thought the audio logs showed that it was just people fucking each other over and doing morally shitty things WAY before everyone went crazy.
Also, the lack of regulation allowed the drugs to be created and allowed it to be distributed to the level that it was. You could come up with different methods for the same disaster, but that doesn't undermine it. It still caused this disaster and was seemingly preventable.
Also, you could argue that absolutism is the real evil. I think in the second one they tackle socialism. I didn't play much of it and the timeline in comparison to the original confuses me. Buy it kinda implies that going to the extreme with no safeguards is problematic.
The second one was even worse, IMO. It was so heavy-handed with its moral lessons. I suppose it's not entirely unrealistic since many IRL socialist movements ended up horrible to the point of absurdity, but I was still rolling my eyes often when I played that game.
I agree that a good lesson would be that absolute certainty in any ideology is what leads to disaster but my impression is that that lesson is more sophisticated than what the developers had in mind.
A lot of that sort of armor is more designed to deflect hits off of it. If someone can get a solid hit in, it's possible to cut through it.
Which leads to another pet peeve of mine, which is armor that's clearly designed in a way that it wouldn't be good at deflecting hits. Particularly anything for women that has cups for the breasts.
My pet peeve is that screenwriters, directors, and producers know and recognize even more tropes than we do. Somewhere along the line, things were rushed and/or lazy. Someone just said “aw, fuck it.”
If the filmmakers don’t give a shit about the final product, why should I?
Tropes are not something one should avoid at all times. Tropes are there because they work. It's the lazy use of tropes as a crutch that is the problem.
Talking head montages, especially at the beginning of a movie or TV show. I think directors try to ground some fiction in reality by having a bunch of news reporters comment on some event but as someone who tries to avoid that garbage it just feels like the movie is made for someone else and it's been used so many times it's irritating.
Also product placement seeing a soda can or car perfectly framed to see the brand name or logo cheapens any sense of artistic integrity and feels like watching an advertisement.
And if I can indulge in a meta trope of streaming service monetization since it's become so common these days having a subscription + ad tier. Sub no ads or ads no sub, mixing them is the same greed as cable TV and shouldn't be supported by subscribing (Disney, HBO Max, prime, Netflix, etc).
One shot can definitely instantly kill you. Recently killed things don’t just lay there. They kick, and thrash, and shit, and piss, and it’s incredibly gruesome to watch. That’s probably why they don’t show realistic deaths.
The problem with this one is that, as a reader/watcher/whatever, it affects your experience even when it doesn't happen. I was so convinced that Dumbledore was alive at the end of book six. Fell off a balcony? Point of view character gets dragged to the infirmary so we can't see what happens after that? There's a phoenix, a bird associated with healing and rebirth, conspicuously singing? That guy is pulling a Gandalf in the next book for sure.
So I spent the whole next book waiting for the dramatic reveal that never came...
The worst is when a show or movie establishes that X can't be done, because Y. Then in a later scene X is done without addressing anything about Y. It's actually pretty common, especially when run time needs to be padded with a side quest.
I have grown to really fucking hate deus ex machina in any form. Luck is always a factor, but c'mon. It usually comes down to lazy writing and they just couldn't be assed to come up with an explanation.
Eh, you are if you’re tossing it around a concrete wall. We tossed grenades into bunkers while laying half a foot from the opening when I was in the Army, and it was fine. You feel it, but you’re uninjured. Now if you mean something like a commercial office wall, then yes, you gonna die.