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.
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.
“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.
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.
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”
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.
How every injury requires blood to be spit up.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?”
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.
Since prophecy was such a core part of BSG, I feel it was done quite well
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.
Yes, so much this, so hard to watch 😬 (And probablysetting a really bad example for the real world.)
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.
