I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
“The mentor/parent has to die so that the hero can prove they’re self-actualized” or whatever. It’s okay for your hero to have living parents, even if their parents are also heroes. I promise your story won’t be less interesting if your character’s mentor figure survives.
In my tabletop RPG campaigns I always make it a point for my characters to have at least one living parent, and usually two. These games are always so full of haunted orphans whose villages were burned to the ground or whatever.
Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.
Better yet, don’t use an explanation at all!
If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it’s no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it’s not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don’t waste time with useless technobabble!
Slap a “Zephyr FTL Communications” logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn’t always need to know how, just what. And show, don’t tell.
You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just… have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device “Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls”.
I despise it when a character has had a long arch proving their worthy of what they do, and then it turns out late in the game they’re a chosen one or some shit. If you’ve been successfully fighting monsters for 15 books, going from a moderate combatant to a super mega awesome fucking wizard who wipes out an entire fucking species to save someone then you have proved your badass monster fighting chops, and you don’t need to be the chosen one. What made you awesome is that you were a (mostly) normal dude who became amazing through hard work and sacrifice. Now you’re just someone the gods chose or whatever and it completely ruins the entire concept of what the character was.
Two of my absolute favorite series of all time just recently did this, and I am devastated.
When there’s a breakfast table full of food but the protagonist is running late so they only take a bite of toast and then leaves.
I’m pretty tired of the sanctity of life trope. Especially when the hero kills a thousand henchmen to get to the villain, and then all of the sudden decides it would be wrong to kill a guy who is trying to destroy the world or whatever.
Also the hostage trope where they point a gun at someone and say “drop your gun” and the hero does so. How fucking stupid are you? Just shoot the guy in the face.
Also major injuries that take a year to recover from, but somehow Mr. Average guy is running around and fighting 2 minutes later.
I despise the “flashback to a thing that literally happened five minutes ago to make sure you connect that with whatever just happened/is about to happen.”
Total fucking turnoff. I’m here watching the show and I’m not an idiot. Flashback to something last season or a number of episodes ago? Fine. Some people need a reminder. Within the same episode? GTFO of here with that shit.
Most movies and TV shows are created these days with the assumption that people are on their phones at the same time. I mean actual studio notes to that effect when the plot becomes too difficult for the average person to follow when they have it on while they’re also watching TikTok.
“you biiig fuckin idiot. You’re such a dummy, you need this flash back from 5 minutes ago because you’re too stupid to connect the moment otherwise”
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.
How every injury requires blood to be spit up.
Picking a lock with just one pick. That’s not how it works, you need one to apply a rotating force and another one to lift the individual pins. Sometimes shows even get it right in one season and then totally blow it in the next one.
Oxygen tanks are not bombs.
I think the worst example of this was a Robert Redford move I saw once where an oxygen tank was loaded in a tube, the stem was knocked off, and the tank flew into a guard tower and exploded like it was an RPG.
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.
“We don’t have time (to explain why were doing this)”
Proceeds to have time to do dozens of other useless things
avoidable misunderstandings
You didn’t watch a lot of Three’s Company, did you? :-D
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.
or not taking no for an answer.
I get what you’re saying, but I had to ask my wife for a date around six times over a period of around 3 months before she said yes. We’ve been together almost 20 years now. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right, and it’s okay to ask again if you’re not crazy.
There may be some small amount of nuance. Like if she says a hard no vs a not now, or if time has passed and circumstances changed significantly maybe.
But I’m confident that far more often than not, being repeatedly asked out after having said no is upsetting and may be a sign of danger. Is this person who isn’t accepting no on a date going to not accept no on sex, on me having friends, on other things?
Also, big norm breach, the person who said no could change their mind and reach out on their own.
Yeah, how you ask and how they answer has a lot to do with it. I wasn’t like “do you want to go on a date and be my girlfriend?”. It was more like “hey, want to grab some lunch today?”, or “hey, want to go for sushi Friday?”, or “want to meet for a drink tomorrow?”. They were all pretty open ended questions, asked in person. You definitely have more opportunities when you know someone IRL than when you’re just asking a stranger on the internet. It turns out that she always liked me, but was dealing with some personal tragedy when I started asking her, so the timing was just wrong. Once she was somewhat finished dealing with that, she said yes, plus we had gotten to know each other better during that time.
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
Having idiotic characters is one thing. Having otherwise-competent characters suddenly become idiotic because the plot doesn’t work otherwise is what’s bad.
I’m a lot more understanding of the dumb characters in zombie movies since covid
Hearing the exact wrong part of the conversation, and then making a horrific assumption and spinning off into zany misunderstandings instead of, just, “Hey, what did I just hear?”
“Wait! I can explain. Just hear me out!”
“Never!”
*runs out of the room and then actively hides from the character until it’s convenient for the plot that they finally listen
Such stupid writing
When the driver of a car is looking more at the passenger they’re talking to than the road. Probably a dead giveaway that the scene is shot with green screen or the car being towed on the back of a truck.
I used to hate it when people kept wobbling the steering wheel around when driving in a clearly straight road but then Top Gear had an episode featuring some American cars from the 1980s and constantly correcting the steering was necessary because there was so much loose play in the system!
Leaf spring suspension probably doesn’t help either…
My friend’s mom when I was a kid used to look at us in the back seat for minutes at a time while driving. She said she used the lines behind the car to stay in the lane. It scared the shit out of us, but somehow she never got into an accident. Granted, these were long, straight, country roads, not NYC streets.
What the hell 😳
For realz.
Yes, so much this, so hard to watch 😬 (And probablysetting a really bad example for the real world.)
I mean with the complexity of shooting in a moving car I have to wonder if it’s ever done now (in all but the most extreme necessity).
All they need to do to solve the problem is make sure to focus on the road. They don’t need to actually be driving, just act like they are driving by looking at the road more than their passenger.
Well that’s to solve the appearance, but I’m commenting with an actual physical car, on a closed road, being towed or not, etc. Don’t need the bother when you can green screen it.
Filmed in a real setting always looks less distracting than a green screen.
I agree, I’m just saying that I doubt many will go through the trouble unless it’s really necessary.
