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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.
Grenades. A hand grenade has a kill radius of 5 meters and an injury radius of 15 meters. You're not going to toss one around a corner and survive.
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)
Oh boy, another excuse to link this article!
Wait, the goodies tell us. Wait for Albion. It’ll arrive. Just be patient. Well, Albion is a very old promise… and, whatever the panglossian liberal morality plays we call family entertainment may say, we’re still bloody waiting. At least the villains, unlike Merlin, are trying to kick up a stink about the delay.
Rightful heirs and similar shit. I hate this monarchist propaganda with a passion.
One shot and the bad guy drops dead. Ten shots and the good guy goes to the hospital and lives.
Also you don’t instantly die when you’re shot.
Kinda depends where you get shot and with what gun/ammunition
My pet peeve is that screenwriters, directors, and producers know and recognize even more tropes than we do. Somewhere along the line, things were rushed and/or lazy. Someone just said “aw, fuck it.”
If the filmmakers don’t give a shit about the final product, why should I?
Guns. Fuck me.
Guns don't blow the user backwards, unless it's a truly monster rifle fired from a standing position, and they certainly don't blow the bullet recipient backwards. The first cowboy movies showed people dropping straight down when shot and audiences thought that unrealistic. Yes, that's realistic and, I think, far more horrifying seeing someone's strings cut. There's a finality that showcases how deadly guns can be.
Rattly guns. Jesus. Guns don't rattle you Nimrods. They might make tiny sounds here and there, but Hollywood guns sound like they left out some screws or pins after assembly. I have a Colt .45, a somewhat loosey-goosey design, can't hardly get a sound even shaking the shit out of it. You can punt about any modern gun and not hear metal on metal.
Constantly cocking, racking, charging. Look! Here's our super badass who's been in danger the last 20-minutes, and he's just now chambering a round?! Or, Mr. Badass has to charge his weapon, kicking out a perfectly good round, to show he means business! And if it didn't eject an unspent round? Action hero was running around with an unloaded weapon. What's funny is that a real badass would fire all but the last round and then swap magazines. No charging required! Yes, that's way harder than it sounds.
My pet peve is people who insist I know how to disassemble an M14 blindfolded before my opinion about shooting children is valid.
(I know how to unload most guns, which is the only useful thing to do with them)
I know very, very little about guns. If a mistake is bad enough for me to notice, it must be truly lazy and terrible writing/directing.
Some romance tropes.
People doing creepy things and it being portrayed as romantic. Like stalking, or not taking no for an answer.
Love triangles. I spend a lot of time with polyamorous people, and would like to see more representation. and not like "a cishet monogamous person's idea". But even if you are monogamous, you can date different people for a bit before going all in on someone.
People in zombie movies and shows that don't know what zombies are. I know it's so they can use cool descriptions like "the infected" or "walkers" or "the dead". The zombie word sounds kinda silly. But I still don't like it.
I can tell you've never been to Baltimore in August.... You see a junkie slowly shuffling down the street wearing sweats in 100° weather... Zombies make a bit more sense.
When they provide exposition about something that lead to the current story, but the exposition is about something way more interesting than what is happening in the current movie because the current movie is just generic whatever.
When a story starts to bring in prophecy as part of the writing. As soon as a character does something "because the prophecy speaks of...", I feel that the writers ran out of plausible ideas and use that as a cheap crutch.
Battlestar Galactica was a great show, but they should've skipped that part.
Whenever the plot entirely revolves on avoidable misunderstandings from character that nothing in the story prevents from having a clarifying chat. It's weak storytelling.
Also whenever the characters don't react to enormous thing A because advancing the story requires them to immediately ask about thing B.
Lastly whenever you end up screaming at the tv "you have enough clues to call for backup" or "enough reason to worry to call 911" yet they proceed alone. Bad writing.
avoidable misunderstandings
You didn't watch a lot of Three's Company, did you? :-D
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.
More of a cliche at this point maybe?
When there is a computer problem and they call some guy who presses like two keys and fixes it. Or when they type really fast and click a lot of things and then it fixes it.
Because of Hollywood way too many people believe that’s how you actually fix a computer or technology, and then when your boss sees you not clicking or typing that fast, your boss thinks you’re an idiot and don’t know what you’re doing. Thank you, Hollywood for brainwashing people.
Often we do press 2 keys and fix it. That's what they see when tech support drops by so they thinks it's magic and all fixes work like that.
Yup. That’s when I get the “what do we pay you for if it was that easy to fix?” … it was that easy to fix because I know what I’m doing!
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
For reference, £10 in 1908 would be worth roughly $1000 today and there were 20s in a pound, so 10s would be worth about $50 today.
Chefs and cooks scattering as a fight is taking place in the kitchen.
Good people listen: this is a small containment of probably tired, most likely angry, and definitely hungover professionals (armed with a variety of sharp, stabby instruments) that are working their ass off on deadlines... YOU DID NOT JUST KNOCK OVER MY TRAY OF 700 PETIT FOURS FOR TONIGHTS RECEPTION!!!
MOTHER! FUCKER! Would most likely be followed by a royal (icing) ass kicking.
Coffee/drink cups that have nothing in them. At least put water in them so they don't look obviously empty. Lol
The comic relief only character.
No they're not funny, you can't write.
That’s something I appreciated about the extended version of Lord of the Rings. Gimli was still used as comic relief a lot, but in the extended version he’s a fuller, more rounded out character. Better character development just made the comic relief bits funnier.
Villains who vocally support some unconventional ideology but whose evil acts are actually not related to that ideology. For example, I like Bioshock but the moral lesson which the game tried to teach about libertarianism is undermined by the fact that any place where the entire population used drugs that turned them into homicidal maniacs would have problems.
(One could say "Everyone used the drugs because of libertarianism." I don't find that convincing. I think the drugs could have been incorporated equally plausibly into a story about any ideology.)
It's been a minute, but I thought the audio logs showed that it was just people fucking each other over and doing morally shitty things WAY before everyone went crazy.
Also, the lack of regulation allowed the drugs to be created and allowed it to be distributed to the level that it was. You could come up with different methods for the same disaster, but that doesn't undermine it. It still caused this disaster and was seemingly preventable.
Also, you could argue that absolutism is the real evil. I think in the second one they tackle socialism. I didn't play much of it and the timeline in comparison to the original confuses me. Buy it kinda implies that going to the extreme with no safeguards is problematic.
The second one was even worse, IMO. It was so heavy-handed with its moral lessons. I suppose it's not entirely unrealistic since many IRL socialist movements ended up horrible to the point of absurdity, but I was still rolling my eyes often when I played that game.
I agree that a good lesson would be that absolute certainty in any ideology is what leads to disaster but my impression is that that lesson is more sophisticated than what the developers had in mind.
Idiot balling. If your plot hinges on everyone suddenly being incompetent af, having the emotional maturity of a hamster or leaving out key details without reason, you fucking suck at writing
Honestly this is far more believable ever since Donald Trump became a viable politician. It sure does seem like there is no bottom to the well of human stupidity these days
Whooshing rocket noise in space, people outrunning explosions, "hero"'s every shot a kill while "baddies" hit nothing.
when they try to make you sympathize with an unredeemably evil character. like the mirror universe giorgieu in startrek discovery, who was literally "worse than hitler" but they decided they wanted upstanding dogooder characters to love her for some reason