Your pet peeve tropes

I love that trope, as long as the narrative acknowledges that it is an ultimately selfish choice/the wrong thing to do. Infinity War presents Star Lord as sympathetic and I think that the vast majority of people would be exactly the same in his situation, but it also clearly shows him to be in the wrong. If not, then yes, it is annoying.

My pet peeve trope would have to be: Status Quo Is God. There are some shows for which it works and arguably enhances (e.g. Sponge Bob), but for the most part it just stops the story evolving and, often, cuts off interesting developments/changes that are brought up.

Edit: That's another reason why it works in Infinity War, he, naturally, struggles but is willing to do it to save the universe.

Edited by king15 on Apr 11th 2024 at 6:01:56 PM

I recommend rewatching the movie. He's the only one who does actually pull the trigger. It doesn't work, but he does it.

Gamora gives up the Soul Stone location to protect Nebula. Strange gave up the Time Stone to save Tony (and maybe the galaxy, since he's already seen the future and knows the path he has to take). And everyone decided to risk giving up the Mind Stone to protect Vision. The only person in the entire film who actually pulls the trigger is Starlord.

Again, he pulls the trigger! It's right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRpJvBz2X4w&t=3s It's a big deal!

Fair, Wanda does also pull the trigger.

Edited by ECD on Apr 11th 2024 at 1:57:03 AM

Mm, fair. Been a while since I saw it and I mostly remember just being annoyed at him.

But hey, Wanda sacrificed Vision and destroyed the stone. She pulled the trigger. It was Thanos that just rewound time to kill him again.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 11th 2024 at 4:14:52 AM

Thor also messed up not killing thanos when he had the chance and people don't give him as much shit.

Anyway. Some thoughts from stuff I watched with my boyfriend last night. Split up based on topic and show.

• I don't hate this totally since it can be done very well, but I get frustrated when a character's entire motive for crimes, like murder, is off-screen backstory. It's almost always that they had been wronged and are now reacting, which is fine enough, but I find it less interesting since it's often just stuff we learn through exposition and often just serves to retroactively give us an Asshole Victim. At the very least I prefer them to be reacting to stuff we see in the story, not just stuff that happened in the past.
• In general I tend to find backstory less engaging than the normal story. Again I don't absolutely hate the concept but it should be handled well, not just spouted out to explain stuff randomly. If the backstory is super important often I'd rather just we have a story about it, rather than watch everyone react to and talk about stuff we never saw.

• I prefer underdogs that we watch grow into their roles, so I find it frustrating when the protagonist is already OP. This happens a lot in anime and it just makes me annoyed that we're jumping in when the characters are already done gaining power and experience. Just let us watch them become how they were, or I'll be far less invested.
• Going along with the above, battles where the characters have some special unexplained ace up their sleeve every time drives me insane. If they're strong then I already have no fear they'll lose, but I at least want to know all the rules before we go into the battle. It keeps it engaging and prevents the story from just making up new abilities and rules on the fly, especially if it's just explained afterwards. Let me care about something in the fight, if you won't let me worry that they could fail.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 14th 2024 at 12:25:13 PM

Referring to something as being a character's weakness when in reality the character is just as vulnerable to the "weakness" as anyone else. Kill It with Fire is a frequent example. Yeah, who wouldn't be weak to fire?

The domestication of fire left such an impression on early hominids that hundreds of thousands of years later their descendants still think of it as the ultimate expression of dominance over the unknown.

It's the same thing with some vampire weaknesses. A stake through the heart would be pretty damn lethal to a human. It's like saying we have a weakness to getting shot.

That's why I love that joke in Hotel Transylvania.

"So, can I ask you a question? Is it true? About the garlic thing?"

"Yes, I cannot have it. My throat swells."

"Huh, wooden stake through the heart?"

"Yeah, well, who wouldn't that kill?"

The stake isn't meant to kill the vampire but to staple it to the coffin.

x6

But not before the last minute, resulting in Thanos knowing when it happened and finding the right spot to rewind time to. Everybody's refusal to do it earlier is still basically this trope, since they knew there was no other way to keep the stpne out of Thanos' hands.

.

Though modern fiction often depicts vampires as not vulnerable to some other things that would kill a human, so tha t could just be mentioning the exception?

Though they should also actually explain why a stake does it.

In the original Dracula book, essentially any damage to a vampire's heart could kill them. Dracula himself was killed by being stabbed in the heart with a knife.

I actually really liked Dracula's weaknesses in the original book. He could be out in the sun, but his powers were severely limited, and he could only transform at dawn, noon, or dusk.

An analogy one friend used: “During the day, he’s Billy Batson. Come nightfall, SHAZAM!”

Two related Tropes I think are irritating is No Delays for the Wicked and Offscreen Villain Dark Matter. Specifically, when the villains never seem to suffer any kind of long-term losses despite all the damage the heroes do to them. It makes it feel like there's no real progress and they have to rely on some kind of contrivance to win the conflict.

Not a dealbreaker for me when consuming media, but there are certain Time Travel Tropes that I feel don't really make logical sense if you're striving for anything remotely like realism, and seem to exist largely for the sake of plot. Especially where time paradoxes are concerned. Things like:

• The Delayed Ripple Effect seems to exist mostly for the sake of providing some easy means of showing how a character's effect on the timeline changes without them having to wait to go back to the future, and to be fair if it could exist you probably wouldn't notice it if it did happen. Furthermore it seems to rely on the notion that only one timeline can possibly exist, and if you change something, it makes changes to that one timeline, which doesn't do much to resolve paradoxes.
• On that note, many sorts of Time Paradox and especially the Grandfather Paradox being handled in questionable ways. Logically inconsistent things, or things which interfere with the laws of nature, simply shouldn't happen. Either You Already Changed the Past (so the timelime is immutable) or you create an Alternate Timeline existing in parallel with the original one (justified perhaps by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?)
  • As an example: you go back in time and try to kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother. Either you will find you always fail (as you never killed your grandfather, since you were born, weren't you?) or you succeed and nothing seems to happen to you... but when you travel forward in time again, nobody knows who you are (as you never existed in that new timeline).
• The Time Crash: no, causing a paradox should not cause the universe to melt. Nor will there be any Clock Roaches taking advantage of the fact. Again, this only seems to be justified to provide some dramatic tension for your story.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Yes, Time Cop, I'm looking at you. The same matter is not necessarily part of your body at two points in time and the Pauli exclusion principle would at least stop that matter from sharing the same quantum state. The psychological impact of meeting yourself (a simple example might be in Back to the Future Part II where Jennifer bumps into herself and passes out in shock) might be a better thing to explore. Also: if you go to the future, will you ever meet yourself? As you will have been gone all that time... unless you travel into an alternate timeline where you never left.
• The Time Police, but more in a legal sense: it violates the principle there should be no ex post facto laws, or otherwise if the Time Police have to go back into the past, they have no legal basis to do anything because the laws which enable their existence don't exist yet. Contemporary law enforcement in the past is also likely to take a dim view of their activities. You could of course have some particular group of Well-Intentioned Extremist types which fall technically under this trope, or some clandestine group which operates in a similar manner to certain secret services/security services, or Deliberate Values Dissonance could be in play (changing the past in unethical ways might have got to the point where the old rules are simply unworkable without changing them) but it certainly violates currentlyaccepted notions of jurisprudence as far as I know (I am not a lawyer).
  • There is also the question: why is the Time Police justified, if the timeline cannot "break"? If what happened, happened, you don't need to ensure it happens. If the many worlds hypothesis is true, then who is to say one timeline is any less valid than another? In which case the point of the Time Police could be simply to stop time travellers from altering the past to produce a much worse scenario in some timeline, or simply to prevent criminal exploitation of time travel, or to pursue criminals who have escaped to another time period, or to prevent unlicensed time travel (which is, so to speak, not a toy and may need to be regulated to prevent reckless or improper behaviour in the past).

One thing I think is definitely underestimated is the Butterfly of Doom: every little thing you do in the past could potentially change the timeline. Maybe nothing particularly devastating, but go back before you were born,

I think one day I should try and launch an "Artistic License: Time Travel" supertrope for these sorts of things, but since that's off-topic I'll leave that suggestion there.

Edited by TheLyniezian on May 1st 2024 at 10:26:52 AM

You may find this post interesting.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16193769000A07471200&page=0

I get annoyed when every conflict in an ongoing series needs to stem from the same source, or when the characters all need to be somehow connected to the original hero and villain. In works like Star Wars and Warrior Cats I feel it just gets annoying to have the same villains keep returning, the protagonists all related to the heroes and villains of the past...

I hope I'm describing it adequately. I just like stories to shake up the formula, break away from nostalgia and familiarity, and do something totally new. The whole deal with Palpatine irritates me to no end, and Warriors refusing to let go of original arc characters just makes things dull (I especially find the arc with new character Flamepaw dumb as half of the Clan is related to Firestar now; he isn't special). I know the same applies to more franchises too; any time these stories fail to stop hitting you over the head with stuff from the past, instead of just making a new and original conflict.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 3rd 2024 at 5:27:49 AM

You mean Hijacked by Ganon?

Basically, but it also applies to every character being a descendent of the hero or villain. It just makes the scope feel small, and like they expect me to automatically care based on bloodline; I never do.

I guess I just dislike excessive nostalgia pandering when it gets in the way of creating new and original content.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 3rd 2024 at 1:00:46 PM

I like how they handled in Back to the Future, by making it so that, not only is everyone related, but they all go through the exact same experiences across multiple points in time to the point where it becomes a massive Running Gag across the entire trilogy. It's especially funny if you're like me and treat the three films as three acts of one giant, interconnected film.

Edited by AmateurStorytime on May 3rd 2024 at 2:59:54 AM

Oh, yeah. Those ones are fine, haha. It's a trilogy focused on one dude and his nemesis and time travel.

I'm talking more with regards to large franchises with multiple stories across generations and series, but that keep coming back to the same characters and conflicts over and over rather than let new heroes and villains emerge.

I think in stories that explore the concept of the Time Police in any depth, the fact that that the timeline whose laws they enforce has no intrinsic moral superiority over any others is often the point (three examples offhand: Doctor Who, Loki, C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet).

This one's very game-specific, but stock desert levels (All Deserts Have Cacti and Shifting Sand Land) really bother me.

Earth has a bazillion different cultures that exist in deserts with their own iconography and local wildlife. (US Southwest, Central American, South American, Egyptian, Indian, Ethiopian, DOZENS of different Middle Eastern/Arabian cultures, Chinese, Mongolian... and that's without getting into edge cases like arid canyons, cold deserts and savannahs!)

Boiling the desert climate down to just sand dunes with Egyptian pyramids and American saguaro cacti is a disservice to all the potential such a climate has. It's created a false perception among gamers that deserts are boring, because game devs make them boring.

On a similar note, the habit for specifically platformers to make deserts inexplicably always the second climate doesn't make sense to me. It's an inherently dangerous and inhospitable biome, surely it would make more sense to be a more interesting and dangerous level than level 2. This is most common with Mario games, but Kirby, Sonic, and multiple indie titles have followed this trend as well.

I'm sure others find similar issue with other stock video game climates and how they're represented, like snow levels, jungles and the like, especially if they come from parts of the world with such climates. Deserts are just my personal pet peeve.

Uh, should probably list something applicable to things other than games... Bumbling Dad is definitely a bit of a dead horse at this point. Boiling fathers down to being out-of-touch incompetent idiots while mothers are always the more intimate reasonable parent is absolutely done to death and has long been wrung out of all the logical jokes and plotlines since Homer Simpson codified it over 30 years ago. It CAN still be funny, but not as a main character anymore.

I'm glad more recent animated series have started going out of their way to avoid this, leaning more into Parents as People instead.

Sorry for the wall of text and apologies if any of these were discussed prior, I haven't read through all 17 pages of this thread quite yet. I'm doing so as we speak, it's my first time on the TV Tropes forums and I find this thread super enthralling!!

Neither have been discussed yet, actually :)