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.
Normalization of the protagonist using violence before any attempt of diplomacy, without the narrative condemning this action
“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
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.
It’s all same same and it’s really sad.
Star Trek is awful for this, but this conversation:
Subject Matter Expert: Oh no, the defences are down
Captain: How long do you need to fix them?
SME: Two hours
Captain: You have one
No, motherfucker, the person that you fucking PAY for their expertise on this very subject said it would take two hours!
Management is full of these cunts that think they can just dictate a timeline and have people that actually know their shit dance to their tune.
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)
Software devs already do this IRL
“Here, I got you this gift.” Hands wrapped gift to the recipient. Recipient: “What is it?”
Motherfucker I swear every movie character does this. It’s like they’ve never received a gift before what the hell
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 in general are a lost cause at this point. Even shooting a 22 outside is doing hearing damage, but plots rely on people shooting 9s and 45s indoors and having normal conversations immediately afterwards.
A 22 can penetrate all the way through a car and still be dangerous
Anything but a direct hit on the head or heart is going to take at least a minute for someone to die. Conversely, the chance of dying from a non-lethal shot (or having lifelong complications), even to an appendage, is nonzero.
At the same time, getting hit by most calibers isn’t gonna knock someone down or blast them back like they got hit by a car. Human skin is soft, very little energy is transferred into the body’s mass as the bullet travels through.
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.
I want villains with understandable goals. Evil for evil’s sake has struck me as stupid since adulthood.
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.
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.
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.
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’m sure it been said already but:
The villain who wanted to change society for the better but took it too far (which invariably involves just doing something randomly evil with the implication that their criticisms are now invalidated)
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.
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.
Then there’s noise in space.
The bad guy that is omniscient and omnipresent. Everywhere you go, oops! There’s the bad guy and he totally kicks your ass and ruins your plans.
We call it Neganing. He’s the reason I eventually stopped watching the Walking Dead.
Or like Sylar (from Heroes), where the writers find a baddie they just love too much to kill so the whole show becomes about them.
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.
