Pet-Peeve Trope

[watching a kung fu movie]
Buffy: Oh, give me a break! This is all wrong. See, first you would get the big guy, with a flying kick. Then you would take out all the little ones, bam, ba—see, now with the flying kick. From a dead stop! What's powering it, raw enthusiasm?
Riley: Hey Buff, maybe you ought to leave the work behind sometimes. You're not always on Slayer duty, you know?
Buffy: It would drive you crazy if we were watching an army movie and they were all saluting backwards and... invading all willy-nilly.

— Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "The Replacement"

Not an index, but a Trope Trope: When a trope is either so played out, so stupid, so inaccurate, or so racist/sexist/whatever, that seeing it makes some people go berserk.

Part of the death cycle for a trope; any trope that qualifies is already at least close to becoming a Discredited Trope.

Sometimes this is due to Values Dissonance making a trope obsolete. Continuing to use such a trope when the underlying morality behind it has been discredited is sure to get some annoyed reactions.

Note that subversions and deconstructions are probably already playing too close to the line, and playing them with even a hint that they're being played straight will get certain people up in arms.

See also Trope Enjoyment Loophole for possible reasons why a trope that's normally a pet peeve is, in one particular case, not pressing your Berserk Button.

See also Tropes Are Tools. Contrast Favorite Trope. Often overlaps with Opinion Myopia and Bias Steamroller — it is frequently baffling to a person that anyone could possibly like their pet peeve trope.

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In-Universe Examples Only:

• Zero Punctuation

Anime & Manga

• Combined with a Bait-and-Switch in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: One chapter ends with Shirogane seemingly getting dragged into peeping on the girls during a Hot Springs Episode. The next chapter opens with...Ishigami and Iino (back at school) discussing how a lot of fanservice tropes involving hot springs are deeply unfunny and somewhat creepy; Iino specifically notes that "peeping on the girls" is actually a crime that would get a student expelled. Indeed, Shirogane and his friends are doing something else entirely, and take offense when someone thinks they're doing something lewd.
• No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!: In chapter 132, Tomoko mentions that she hates the shōjo trope where a rival girl bullies the main heroine, only to be Easily Forgiven and become best friends with her; Yuri agrees with her opinion. Interestingly she doesn't mind it at all when it's done in a shounen action series even if the "bully" has gone beyond schoolyard pettiness in scope. Listening to their conversation convinces Minami that it would be a bad idea to try to get along with them in order to hang out with Mako.

Fan Works

• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines: As befitting of Sabrina's The Social Darwinist and Sparing the Aces characterization, she detests Tall Poppy Syndrome, and believes that anyone who partakes in it deserves to die.
• This Bites!: Cross viciously punctuates his frustration with Amnesia Episodes while slamming Tatsu, the memory-stealing seahorse, against a tree.
  Cross: I! HATE! AMNESIA! EPISODES! NOW! GIVE! US! BACK! OUR! MEMORIES! AND! SCREW OFF!

Films — Animation

• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Pavitr is not a fan of the Mystical India trope that tourists bring with them to Mumbattan, and calls The Spot out on the insinuation.
  The Spot: I'm on a journey of self-improvement!
  Pavitr:...and you came to India. That is such a Western culture cliché! Don't Eat, Pray, Love me, bro!
  The Spot: Nonono, I didn't mean it like that!
  Pavitr: Lemme guess: you're gonna ask me about saffron, cardamom, and naan bread, which is the same as saying "bread bread" which is the same as saying "chai tea"!
  The Spot: Oh, I love chai tea!
  Pavitr: NOO!!!

Films — Live Action

• Small Soldiers: Gil Mars, the CEO of GloboTech Industries, dislikes Very False Advertising. He hates commercials of cars that drive around on Mount Rushmore or shampoo commercials that claim you can look like a celebrity in one use. This inspires him to have the newly purchased Heartland Toy Company use GloboTech's military-grade technology to create a line of toys so sophisticated that they can, in his own words, "actually do what they do in the commercials." The rest of the plot happens when said toys do exactly as advertised.

Literature

• Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!!: Isuna, being obsessed with glasses, hates the trend of The Glasses Gotta Go in society.

Live-Action TV

• Lewis: Grammar Nazis are Hathaway's pet peeve, to the extent that he even gets Lewis noting apostrophe misuse around town.

Music

• MC Frontalot: List Songs are a pet peeve of his, despite having a handful of his own.

Video Games

• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Ryme hates Piss-Take Rap. After effortlessly beating an overconfident cashier in a rap battle, she expresses her annoyance that he was trying to be funny at the expense of his bars.

Webcomics

• The Cartoon Chronicles Of Conroy Cat: If there's one thing Doggy hates the most about today's cartoons, it's Totally Cool Dudes. Ironically, Doggy sheepishly reveals that he went through a Totally Radical phase in the review of The Looney Tunes Show.
• Dinosaur Comics: T-Rex is not a fan of Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer.
  I don't like when they encounter something amazing in Engineering or wherever and call up to the bridge and say 'Captain, you'd better get down here.' Explain what it is! THAT IS WHAT PEOPLE DO. I don't call up my friends and say, 'Utahraptor, you'd better get down here.' and he says 'Why?' and I say 'Oh Utahraptor, if only we had descriptive language; if only I could describe something using my words. But you know as well as I that I can only point and say, lookit.'

Web Original

• Cracked: 6 Stupid Characters That Hollywood Now Puts In Every Movie takes aim at films like Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys and Avengers: Age of Ultron for their insistence on putting these tropes in their movies: No One Has Any Fear Of Death, Movie Villains Can Instantly Pick Up The Skills Of The Heroes, Everyone Gets Magic Expositional Plot Visions, "Kickass" Female Characters Who Don't Really Do Anything, and Main Characters Are Now Fated To Be Heroes.
• Overly Sarcastic Productions:
  • In Red's Trope Talk video on grimdark, Red admits that her pet peeve is pessimism, and she hates any story that paints hope as childish as a general rule of thumb. As a creator who studies history, she knows that society doesn't always stay the same and the idea of an afterlife is too interpretive to give a concrete answer. Red believes that hope is a good thing and necessary for society's progression.
  • Downtime Downgrades are discussed in both of Red's videos on romantic subplots and sequels. Red makes it very clear that she really, really dislikes this trope, arguing that splitting up an Official Couple between sequels or installments makes it seem like writers are afraid to write characters in a relationship. Red especially dislikes it when a writer makes the characters undergo the Will They or Won't They? dance all over again after they've canonically hooked up and split apart, saying that it just feels cheap.
• Despite being the platonic ideal of a Caustic Critic, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation actually detests the World of Snark trope, because it usually means none of the characters in a story have a unique voice or personality, the tone is generally uneven due to the constant effort to turn every other line into a smartass quip, and —since it's so frequently attempted but so rarely handled well— it simply grates on his nerves. He often invokes Joss Whedon (who puts tons of snark into everything he writes) in a derogatory way with games that overdo it on the sarcastic "wittiness". His specific point is, especially with Whedon, is that when every character is a snarker, they all start sounding the same.

Web Video

• The titular host of The Angry Joe Show states that he dislikes the Four Pointscale concept. The "Angry Reviews", "Extended Review Discussions" and "Rapid Fire Reviews" have all used just about every number on the 1-10 scale (whole numbers only with no decimals). According to Joe and his team, a 5/10 is their flat average, with reviews for video games building towards the team justifying a higher or lower score. For instance, a 3/10 to Joe will have some decent points, yet he'll detail the negatives and why it's ultimately not worth recommending to his audience; conversely, Joe will preach for a 9/10, but explain why it falls short of a 10/10. Still, there are some examples in the show's history where the trope is Played With.
• The Angry Video Game Nerd:
  • The Nerd absolutely detests Checkpoint Starvation. It was his biggest complaint toward the Dick Tracy NES game, and in Jurassic Park on the SNES, there's no save feature at all!
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory! is quite a Berserk Button for him.
  • Fake Difficulty is the primary source of his rage.
  • Guide Dang It! really winds him up. Put some of this into your game and The Nerd WILL stop the review for several minutes to rip into the fact. As he points out several times, it's a justified complaint since most of the games he reviews were made back when walkthroughs and guides were not as easily available as they are today.
  • Mercy Invincibility, when absent, is a source of anger.
  • He hates having to do a No Death Run.
  • Obstructive Foreground is a source of annoyance, especially combined with enemies, powerups, or collectibles that are already small and difficult to see.
• Counter Monkey:
  • Spoony is obviously no fan of Villain Protagonists, feeling that they're usually created an excuse for player(s) to act like violent, psychopathic assholes and disrupt the game For the Lulz. He devoted one whole video ("So You Want to Be Evil") to shooting down the concept^note Though he says he'd be okay with Evil characters who still have a conscience, spends portions of several Vampire: The Masquerade videos complaining about how the current World of Darkness setting practically forces you to play a completely unsympathetic character, and of course "Shadowrun: The Code" is all about him taking his revenge on a party who went kill- and torture-happy for no good reason.
  • He hates the attempts to add balance and prevent death later editions of ''Dungeons and Dragons" put forth, feeling that making things too easy takes away from the accomplishment of actually getting a high-level character.
  • Munchkins and Min-Maxing are a pet peeve for Spoony, who feels like an interesting, flawed backstory makes a great character, not high stats. He even has a book for using 3d6 dice rolls to determine a character's backstory and flaws virtually at random. He even notes, the few times a player got undesirable rolls from that book, Spoony told the player they didn't have to keep it. The players inevitably chose to keep the bad rolls anyway, since it got their wheels turning.
• The Dom Reviews: Dominic discusses how he dislikes Belligerent Sexual Tension because he sees it as an unrealistic representation of actual relationships at best and actively encouraging toxic ideas about love and romance at worst. If a story uses jealousy or bickering as a sign of romantic spark, he can be relied upon to point it out and complain about it.
• Familiar Faces: Merchandise-Driven works are a pet peeve for Chad, with that being a key reason why he hates Ben 10: Alien Force and Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, as well as the reason he can't enjoy Generator Rex, fearing it'll get the same treatment given that it was from the same producers of the original Ben 10.
• Gaijin Goombah dislikes Highly-Visible Ninja. In discussing who the best video game ninja is, the likes of Ryu Hayabusa and Strider reduce him to Angrish and the lead character of Mark of the Ninja turns him into The Knights Who Say "Squee!".
• Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware: Coomer hates anything with a Sickly Green Glow, like the green sludge spills from the nuclear reactors. As he says, he's "horribly allergic!" (To radiation?)
• JesuOtaku: invoked Forced drama, Moe pandering, Ecchi, "Exactly like the Japanese version" dubs, shoddy endings, Gorn, and flat-out wasting the potential of your premise are stated to be pet peeves.
• Movie Rehab:
  • Jack Skyblue is not a fan of people people telling viewers to subscribe to their channels.
  • Judging from his review to Being John Malkovich, he really hates the Butt-Monkey trope or at least the way it's executed.
• Outside Xbox: A pet peeve for the cast is when actors in games do shoddy accents, especially Fake Brits. Makes sense, since they're actually English themselves.
• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • The Critic dislikes the Barbaric Bully trope, partly because the bullies tend to be so one-dimensional, and partly because they never seem to be having fun with their bullying (just doing it because they're evil).
  • He dislikes when kidnapped people are far too relaxed in their situation and tends to point out that they should be at least afraid. These comments tend to be foreshadowing Hyper making an appearance in the next episode so it'd make sense for Critic to be irritated about, but it annoys Doug in his own vlogs too.
• OneyPlays: They love making fun of the Not Afraid of You Anymore trope, especially if a character in whatever they're playing says it word-for-word.
• raocow:
  • He is not a fan of bridge-building segments. In one video he says that the only videogame task he dislikes as much as bridge-building is taking care of a pony, "because, seriously, if I'm going to take care of an equine, it might as well be a full-grown horse".
  • He's not too fond of stair-making.
  • He strongly dislikes elevator sections.
  • He does not like puzzles that consist of "find item here, backtrack to previous place, get new item, backtrack again" and so on.
  • He dislikes levels with wind that blows you backward.
  • He loathes bullet generators.
  • Bosses that have to have objects thrown at them to be defeated. He admits as such in MaGL X that he's terrible at throwing.
• Shadow Streak: invoked He admits in his "Save The Date" review, that size-changing tropes are Nausea Fuel for him, though he isn't sure why. Despite this, "Save The Date" still managed to be one of his more positive reviews of the series.
• Some Call Me Johnny: invoked Johnny dislikes Difficulty Spikes, or rather, any game that exponentially increases challenge, as mentioned at the end of Cave Story.
• The author of Springhole dislikes the Saving Christmas trope as they listed it on a list of Christmas Tropes that "need to die".
• Sonic Dissected:
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall is a pet peeve for Roger since he feels it cheapens both the humor and the story with the characters being aware they are fictional.
  • Roger takes offense with post-Unleashed Sonic's over-reliance on Non Sequitur based Surreal Humor with him especially hating the over-reliance on random food puns and Inherently Funny Words. He often finds that it's relied on so much that it makes the writing resemble something made for babies rather than the more general audience that Sonic is ostensibly supposed to be made for.
  • Roger has avoided reading the Sonic comic books because he personally dislikes serial storytelling in comic books, much preferring self-conclusive stories.
• Storm Dain Productions: He dislikes people asking for subscribers and sub-for-subs, which he shows great disdain when annotations were introduced to YouTube because of the potential of people using them to easily ask for subs without effort.
• TB Skyen:
  • He goes on a bit of a rant about You Dirty Rat! in the Royal Rat Authority & Vanguard Boss Designs episode since he keeps pet rats and knows that they're actually pretty fastidious.
  • He has a chip on his shoulder regarding Horny Vikings, seeing it both as unrealistic (an enemy could grab your horns and pull off the helmet or pull you to the ground) and because it's a stereotype of vikings, from whom Skyen is descended.
• Todd in the Shadows:
  • He dislikes the Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male trope, particularly if it's Beyonce-on-male, but Todd in general doesn't like the idea that women are "allowed" to get away with abusing their male partners.
  • When it comes to Clark Kenting, people's inability to recognize the obvious fact that Hannah Montana is Miley in a wig drives Todd up the wall. Todd even references Clark Kent and Christopher Reeve's performance of the character.
  • He struggles to avoid making Domestic Abuse the focal point of his review of "I Can Transform Ya", although he doesn't let what Chris Brown did to Rihanna ever pass by without commenting on it.
  • Todd feels that there's very few variations to songs that take place In Da Club, and that a song has to be very good in order for him to let this slide. He does like ironic club songs that spin the scene into something empty or depressing, however.
  • Not only does Todd consider such Child Pop Stars in general to be not very good, he feels like the music industry is consistently abusing young talent.
    One crisis at a time, Todd...
  • He'll not only point it Lyrics Video Mismatches, but it will be the focus of a good part of his reviews if the music video is especially egregious with not matching the lyrics.
  • His dislike of Painful Rhymes form the basis of his Running Gag: "Finish the Rhyme!"
  • The Rhyming with Itself trope annoys him quite a bit, as he considers it lazy.
  • He dislikes any excessive parts of Scatting. Not the case for Scatman John, however, whose rapid jazz scatting elicits respect from Todd. Also, background vocals singing "HEY!" or "OH!".
    Todd: Hip hop! Stop. Shouting. Ohhh.
  • The Four Chords of Pop are popular for a reason, he considers such chords to be creatively bankrupt.
  • He dislikes when choruses in party/love songs end with the word "tonight".
  • In the Trainwreckords episodes on Liz Phair's Funstyle and Metallica's St. Anger, Todd mentions the idea that Music Is Politics and that he loathes anti-music-industry rants from successful artists, considering it the bottom of the barrel in terms of creativity.
• Vampire Reviews: The trope she really seems to loathe is the All-Loving Hero / Messianic Archetype.
• What We Had to Watch: In regard to Jim easily forgiving Silver in Treasure Planet despite the latter betraying him, Il Neige himself takes issue with how happy this ending came off in comparison to the more Bittersweet Ending in the source material and other adaptations, like Muppet Treasure Island.
• Mr. Coat: His list of Top Ten Annoying Film Cliches, which includes blatant Product Placement, Celebrity Voice Actors chosen for their name rather than skill, The Evil Developer, overuse of Slow-Motion, jerk boyfriends, The Workaholic Father, shaky-cam, Never-ending Epilogues, Food Fights, and The Misunderstanding.

Real Life

• George Carlin said Air Quotes are a pet-peeve trope of his during a standup routine.
• Ironically, Shigeru Miyamoto dislikes Floating Platforms and once stated in an interview that he still has some issues with floating platforms, due to the lack of any real logic behind them. He then said that he pretends that they are attached to the background in the 2D games.
• The authors of The Witcher: Game of Imagination have Armor Is Useless, Shields Are Useless, Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, and Good Is Dumb as pet peeves. Especially Shields Are Useless. The entire game mechanics and setting are aimed at averting those tropes.

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