What tropes get on your nerves, fellow writers?

Thoroughly agreed.

I'd say I'm being refined Into the web I descend Killing those I've left behind I have been Endarkened

I don't understand what Joker Immunity has to do with Thou Shalt Not Kill. I don't like Joker Immunity either (except in certain cases when I just happen to love the character) but I don't see how they connect. What do you mean?

Fear is a superpower.

I think he was actually referring to the Cardboard Prison trope, but I get what he meant.

I'd say I'm being refined Into the web I descend Killing those I've left behind I have been Endarkened

There's a certain amount of overlap, I think, but yeah, maybe I should've said Cardboard Prison.

edited 31st Jul '13 8:12:38 PM by Robotnik

I adore The Chessmaster trope, and my Works tend to feature at least one of them somewhere. Guile Hero is also very frequent. I am a firm opposer of Good Is Dumb, after all, so expect virtually all of my heroes to be at the very least very cultured.

While we're on that, yes, Good Is Dumb is really fucking annoying to me. Anti-Intellectualism in general is. So both my protagonists and villains are usually very intelectual and of high cultured.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Totally agree.

I'm actually the exact opposite. I generally hate chessmasters, magnificent bastards, wicked culture and all those types of "intellectual bad guys" tropes. But I generally like "good is dumb" or dumb heroes and things like that.

Well, I guess I can add another name to my list of people who I'll never read if they'll get published.

In other words, ditto the above on the suckiness of Good Is Dumb and especially Anti-Intellectualism. My hatred of them is such that I'm not sure I can say anything else without violating forum rules, actually. Except maybe that, while I don't believe in Rooting for the Empire, I find it extremely difficult if not impossible to root for a dumb hero.

edited 2nd Aug '13 7:58:40 PM by nrjxll

...why?

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me, i dont generally use chessmaster, since it feels way above my capabilities.

use guile hero all the time however.

edited 2nd Aug '13 7:58:41 PM by Tarsen

Yeah, I can't get into the Anti-Intellectualism mindset at all - in fact, the kind of person who would willingly slot themselves into that mindset, I cannot picture being redeemable in any way. Note that this is purely based on "anti-intellectual" in the sense of anti-thinking - I fully support attacks on academia and the "intellectual" elite power structure, just not attacks on the concept of searching for information and analyzing what would be best to do before making a decision and making well-thought-out plans.

I'd say I'm being refined Into the web I descend Killing those I've left behind I have been Endarkened

edited 3rd Aug '13 10:46:10 AM by WSM

I cannot stand stupid characters of any description. The Idiot Ball tropes feel like a cheese-grater across my raw nerve ends and plain stupid characters make my blood boil.

I won't write stupid characters - though I don't tend to write Chessmasters.

If you honestly believe that your view on (morality, heroism, absolutism, etc) is the correct one, then why is that belief inversely correlated with intelligence level?

I'd say I'm being refined Into the web I descend Killing those I've left behind I have been Endarkened

I like to write a mix of smart, stupid, and average intelligence characters on both sides. I tend to think it seems more realistic that way, unless the setting can justify it (e.g., if you're writing a sci-fi story where most of the main characters are scientists, it's naturally going to be difficult to fit a stupid character into that cast so it would be kind of silly to shoehorn one in).

Then again, I also like playing with the idea that intelligence is quantifiable in my stories as well.

edited 3rd Aug '13 1:09:03 AM by FingerPuppet

A character or person does not have to be stupid in order to be moral. I don't know if this is your intention or not, but your statement comes across as stereotyping, almost like you're saying, "Since all villains are smart, all smart characters are therefore villains or morally ambiguous." That is neither true or right.

I usually make my Protagonists smart, not a Guile Hero, but smart. I also make them moral and this works for them.

This, pretty much. I've never really had my protagonists play politics like a chess master, but I certainly try to keep their actions reasonable and based on thought.

I'd say I'm being refined Into the web I descend Killing those I've left behind I have been Endarkened

I like smart villains, but only when you're shown how smart they are.

If the protag is captured in an ambush and taken to the big bad's base, and he's there with a chessboard and launches into this massive monologue about "Oh you fell right into my trap! I'm so clever [seriously reader, he's so smart believe me]"; then it's just annoying. Scorpius in Farscape was a good example, he was always one step ahead, and you could believe that he was capable of that. He never told you how smart he was, you realised it.

I write stuff sometimes. I also sometimes make youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/majormarks

I second that. Villains that are supposed to be smart, but acts in a way that makes you Facepalm is just annoying. I like the villains that are smart, not the ones that say that they are.

None of my villains has ever explained that they're smart, they just show it, or not, it depends on how smart they are, not all of them are.

edited 3rd Aug '13 11:58:21 AM by david

Scorpius is a great example. If just about any other villain was shot and buried onscreen and came back seemingly unharmed, it would be somewhat unbelievable. But when Scorpy does it, it makes sense, because we know he's that smart.

Fear is a superpower.

I don't know if there's a trope for it, but there seems to be this persistent idea in fiction that rebels are always right and that any kind of governance that 'oppresses' people is automatically bad, or morally ambiguous at best. Like, you cannot be told what to do by the law or an authority figure, even when it makes sense, but when a friend tells you to do the same thing it's fine.

I don't want to get too political, but I do wonder if this might just be an American thing, what with you lot being a bunch of rebel scum, or whether it's just because most of my exposure to literature is on TV Tropes, which frankly has a very obvious libertarian bias. No doubt fiction which has similar tones would prove more popular and thus get more coverage here.

Stuff like this really bugs me, because the protagonist of my novel becomes a very important and influential authority figure. His strong sense of justice combined with his life experiences leads him to be much more assertive and strict once he's able to exert enough power to impose changes on at least a part of society. It's not like he has dissidents shot or anything like that, but it is along the lines of "You can think and say what you like about my authority, but if you get too loud or try to make a move, I will find a way to shut you up. Preferably non-violently, but if you push your luck I won't pull any punches."

His authority, his morality and the changes he imposes upon society are portrayed in a fairly neutral manner throughout the story and he is ultimately a pragmatic anti-hero at worst, becoming celebrated as a hero and guiding figure by future generations, but it occurred to me recently that a lot of readers, particularly the younger generations, are going to perceive him as, unequivocally, a villain, simply because he's telling people what to do and doesn't permit any threat to his authority. This very black-and-white view of law and order is surprisingly common in this era of fiction where Grey-and-Gray Morality is the new hotness, and I feel that it's very narrow-minded of people to just default to the viewpoint that authority is inherently bad and that people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't have a direct, negative effect on other people.

Maybe I'm just ranting about something that annoys me rather than a specific trope. Whatever, I needed to get it off my chest, and I'd like to think that I'm not alone in this (though that seems unlikely).

I don't think I've ever seen a work where the rebels are viewed or portrayed as the bad guys. Rebelling is always the right thing to do in fiction, it seems.

Fear is a superpower.

The list of Idiot Heroes I can enjoy is extremely short. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are only two characters on it.

I'm not above using characters who are ditzy and intelligent in different respects, however, nor average characters who end up in situations well outside their proficiency to handle on their own.

I'm troubled by the implication that moral absolutism is definitionally naive and black-and-white. There are lot of philosophers who would take issue with that...

, I can think of a few works that consider the revolutionaries to be as pathetically self-serving as the governments they're trying to replace (Les Miserables and Discworld come to mind). That's all, though. I think we have a trope somewhere about how rebellion is always right.

edited 3rd Aug '13 12:10:50 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

arguably, the game FTL, wherein you are a federation ship trying to get information from one end of the galaxy to another. or something.

the main enemy are the rebels- who are actually no longer rebels since they won prior to the game, but still.

they're called rebels, and they act like thugs.

I don't disagree, but in terms of drama, "I'm off to go change the world!" sells better than, "I wish to maintain the status quo and try to improve things bit by bit, because revolution would result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and, even if it succeeded, would have long-term repercussions."

The Federation has, when it's not completely corrupted, come to the conclusion that you simply can't fix everything. You can improve things, but there are far too many factors that you have to take into account before you decide that there's a black and white solution.

This is fine when you're focusing on a single member going off to save everybody—both The Federation and La Résistance—from evil space wombats or whatever, but if the focal point of the story is the actual struggle between the two sides, an active hero is easier to write than a passive one. Heroes aren't supposed to say, "I'm going to accept the world's corruption and do what I can." A good person might say that, but heroes tend to act a bit more selfish—they gamble everything they care about.

edited 3rd Aug '13 12:20:10 PM by Rem

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.