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.
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.
Rightful heirs and similar shit. I hate this monarchist propaganda with a passion.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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