Your pet peeve tropes

What are your pet peeve tropes in fiction?

I think the one i hate the most is Planet of Hats and Always Chaotic Evil. They both boil down to "these people are all the same but it's ok because they aren't a real human group (usually)". It feels very dubious, especially when the heroes just massacre them all.

Faceless Mooks works similiarly i suppose, but what ticks me off about that is how killing named villains is treated as an evil slippery slope, but the minions who've propably done less evil are killed left and right without any introspection, but killing is suddenly wrong when the Big Bad is confronted.

Edited by Nukeli on May 22nd 2023 at 12:59:39 PM

I am going to cite All Planets Are Earthlike and in particular All Gravity Is the Same, for settings where force fields and perfect health are a thing. Gravity is a liability for people with perfect health and force fields, not an asset.

Also Artificial Gravity too, due to the disregard of practical tradeoffs that almost invariably accompany it.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on May 22nd 2023 at 12:00:39 PM

Freudian Excuse stands out to me as one that just grinds my gears. I have nothing against giving villains a motive or a backstory when it's done well, but in many cases...

• The world around the villain is so cruel that you have no choice but to see them as a sympathetic victim
• The story expects you to sympathize with the villain instead of fearing or rooting against them
• The villain's tragedy is disproportionate to their suffering
• Their Heel–Face Turn is portrayed as a sudden "snap" to being evil instead of a process

I also tend to hate Love Triangle, though that's mostly because I already find romance plots kind of frustrating to sit through and when a Love Triangle happens it tends to consume everything and boil it down into frustrating, petty drama.

^ Same for me on Love Triangles. To me they just come off as being pointless dramatic for its own sake.

Prophecies. I can't stand them. 90% of the time they're just nothing but the laziest, most contrived way of getting the protagonist involved with the conflict of the story to fight the Big Bad while depriving them of both their own agency and volition in the matter.

I strongly dislike the Chosen One for similar reasons as well.

Edited by Angelspawndragon on May 25th 2023 at 9:28:44 AM

Brainwashing is frequently portrayed as a sort of cognitive suppressant, which can be easily applied without the victim's cooperation and dispelled without lasting consequences, neatly avoiding having to think about a character's personal identity or complicated motivations or how psychology works. More than Mind Control is the only interesting kind.

Also, Heroic Willpower, because I find "victory by wanting it enough" narratively unsatisfying.

Whenever robots and artificial intelligences have normal-sounding human names, they're actually contrived acronyms that conveniently spell a name.

Let an AI's name just be Bob for once.

Edited by Nukeli on May 30th 2023 at 7:52:59 PM

Also superheroes patrolling and beating up and arresting random purse snatchers and other petty thieves who are propably only doing it because they're poor, propably injuring them so they need to pay for the american medical care.

Said superheroes are also wasting their own time there, when they could be sleeping, having free time, or getting their studies/work done, instead of pulling three shifts every day and suffering for it.

Edited by Nukeli on Jun 29th 2023 at 11:08:48 AM

And Protagonist Title also annoys me (particularly when it's the character's real name and not a codename or anything) because i've experienced trying to find content about title characters specifically, but their name has been in literally every fic/post about the story because it was the media's title.

Maybe try specifying that you're looking for the character like "Protagonist character"?

Mine in general is the Unspoken Plan Guarantee, at least as far as main characters is concerned. Mainly because as soon as you introduce the idea that your character could have an amazing plan up their sleeve, it rattles my suspension of disbelief and oftentimes kills all tension in a story. Why should I feel worried in any situation when I know the main character could have some amazing plan that will get them out of it? How can I take any threat seriously when I know that they could have already been outsmarted?

At that point it becomes a game whether you can correctly anticipate the character's plan.

That, or the character in question doesn't have an actual plan in mind and improvises on the fly at the first best opportunity. From there, he makes a basic idea of what he wants to accomplish and makes it up as he goes until he either wins or lose.

It's like this.

Point "A": Where the character stands.

Point "D": Where he needs to go.

How he makes it to and through "B" and "C" in-between is all up in the air though.

One that comes up often in the genre in which I write is One-Hour Work Week. It does no favor to Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and it makes the character less relatable to the reader (or at least to me). I consciously try to avoid it in my writing.

Any romance tropes that derail or clog up the pacing of a story or sex tropes in general. Is the latter even necessary most of the time or does it just exist because writers think that titillation is a substitute for story content that would actually be interesting?

I assume that can (and your case has) be addressed by making the job plot relevant in some fashion. Or by deconstructing the intersection by having the escapist aspects (and I'm sure that trope came about party due to escapism, same reason as "Friends" Rent Control) jeopardize their job. Possibly to the point of getting them fired.

I don't actually know if we have a trope page for this, and it's not really something that bugs me that much. I just find it very silly.

The whole trope where two characters engage in an epic 1 on 1 duel that lasts for at least 24 hours straight.

The reason this bugs me is because this is almost entirely used as a backstory trope. I never really see a 1 on 1 fight last for days on end during the actual events of a story. It's always something that's brought up in a character's backstory to sell how epic they are. But since I never actually see it, I struggle to fully buy into the concept. I don't even know how it works most of the time.

Edited by GNinja on Jul 8th 2023 at 9:20:50 AM

FWIW a card storyline in the Yugioh card game does memtion that the battle between the heroes of said story and the respective final antagonist lasted for a thousand days and nights.

But given its nature of telling story though trading cart artwork and that this little tidbit was an All There in the Manual case, I'm not sure if it really counts.

For me. Closest thing would be Stuffed in the Fridge. No, putting the hero's closest female companion on death's door or damselhood to "motivate" them is not a good way to set up the plot. Its lazy, usually misogynistic and overall trite.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jul 8th 2023 at 4:35:27 AM

That popular thing in media where the aliens are morally superior to humans, wiser than humans, in harmony with nature which makes them better than humans, and somehow no longer have or never had racism/sexism/etc.

A weird amount of people seem to think "has interstellar travel = developed beyond bigotry" which doesn't make sense. Technological progress ≠ social progress. I'm also tired of misanthropic Humans Are the Real Monsters wank, and the presumably-similiar-in-origin New Age bullshit.

If highly intelligent aliens with complex technology exist, they aren't going to be Incorruptible Pure Pureness, they're going to be inviduals with lots of bad ones among them just like humans, and the bad ones might be in charge. Not a trope, but people who actually believe in aliens blindly trusting them to be benevolent is also a bad idea.

Edited by Nukeli on Jul 9th 2023 at 11:38:11 AM

Hoo boy, Well-Intentioned Extremist tends to be quite annoying when done badly, because it means that the work in question expects me to forgive the other person and gloss over all the horrible things they did because they had "good intentions".

(To be clear, this is without arguing against the peeve.) Let me add that I suspect that one other reason that writers include such aliens is in order to provide a model for humanity: "Here is what we could be; what I feel that we should aspire to be.

As to what actual aliens might be like, I wouldn't be surprised if their psychology were so different to ours that it's something that we haven't thought of.

(I do agree that it seems unwise to blindly expect that aliens will be benevolent; although conversely, also that they'll be hostile.)

, the same could be said of elves as well. But tbh, there is a slighter higher chance if aliens existing then there is for elves.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jul 10th 2023 at 1:10:40 AM

TBH, I honestly have an issue with stories where the All-Loving Hero decides not to kill the totally evil villain, and resolves to leaving them to a fate that's far more inhumane.

This is something I noticed about Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Kipo constantly debates whether to kill Emilia and even saves her from being trapped as a giant monster, only for Emilia to get a horrifying Fate Worse than Death at the hands of Fun-Gus, dying a slow and cruel death in her former bunker.

Emilia deserving it aside, that's actually horrifying when you stop and think for a moment, probably even worse than if she was killed. If this had just ended with Emilia dead, imprisoned, or maybe even left as a Mega-Mute the way Song was that would've been fine. Instead we're left with the confused moral of "killing your enemies is wrong, but leaving them to suffer in torturous fates is okay."

Oh god, I totally agree with the alien thing. I don't hate it in every instance, but it drives me up the wall when humanity is painted in a negative light simply for being, well... humanity. Additionally, it bothers me so much when humanity's achievements are instead credited with aliens (Doctor Who does this from time to time), because it's like... just let the humans have something, god damn.

I also dislike the trend where humans fighting back against monsters is seen as the humans being inherently bigoted. Like, sure, sometimes. But it gets super preachy and old if the human viewpoint isn't even considered, especially if the monsters have done genuinely dangerous things or are equally at fault for the conflict. It's why I can't manage to get into Undertale — it bothers me that we're expected to sympathize so much with the monsters, but the human's side of the initial fight is never really explored or accounted for so it just comes off as "mean humans banished the monsters and now the monsters are justifiably upset and may kill you for it".

I guess I just don't like stories where humanity is not given a more nuanced viewpoint. I don't need us to always be the heroes, but I don't want us to always be portrayed as incompetent bigots (except for the protagonist, who always transcends that). Let the conflicts have complexity.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 12th 2023 at 2:06:51 PM

I agree with the OP about Always Chaotic Evil. I find it disturbing that there is an entire race of sapient humanoids who are irredeemably evil. If you are a member of that race, then you are evil and there is nothing you can do about it. It's basically implying that it's okay to mow through a horde of orcs because they are evil. Are there no peaceful orcs?

That's what annoys me about the Redwall books. Certain animals, notably rats, stoats, foxes, etc, are always the bad guys. No exceptions (at least from the books I have read.)

My other pet peeve is the Religion of Evil. What does one get out of following an obviously evil god? Sure, there's the promise of power, but even then, there's no guarantee that the literal god of evil won't backstab you or reveal that he lied about it. I find it more believable if the followers of the said religion and its god(s) simply don't see themselves as evil.

What about the predator animals that we know for a fact enjoy playing with and torturing their prey, and we know they like to hunt when they're entirely full and not hungry.

Is it down to if both males and females hunt?

There is many many signs that male dolphins and ducks are extremely cruel, but we don't see such behavior in female dolphins or ducks.

Is the problem that such a cruel animal wouldn't be communal enough to evolve into something capable of speech?