Tropes you hate and why

Maythe said:

Anyone who thinks damaging a girth strap is a reliable way of even seriously injuring someone, let alone killing them, has never ridden. It might injure or kill them but they might just end up in a bramble bush with a few scratches and a bad temper. It boggles my mind that's common enough to be considered a trope!

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I've run across it in two otherwise excellent fantasy novels I've read recently. Which makes me think that I'll try to find a way of working a deconstruction of the trope into a story at some point. An inept would-be killer who knows little about riding or horses tries to kill someone by damaging their girth strap, and it's either discovered when they do a cursory gear check before mounting up, or the intended victim simply comes back from the ride with a few scrapes and bruises and an awareness that someone is messing with them.

Roxxsmom said:

I've run across it in two otherwise excellent fantasy novels I've read recently. Which makes me think that I'll try to find a way of working a deconstruction of the trope into a story at some point. An inept would-be killer who knows little about riding or horses tries to kill someone by damaging their girth strap, and it's either discovered when they do a cursory gear check before mounting up, or the intended victim simply comes back from the ride with a few scrapes and bruises and an awareness that someone is messing with them.

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I actually did something like that with "Shoot to Wound," only in the opposite direction: the heroine has wrestled the villain's gun away from her, shoots the villain in both shoulders to incapacitate her... only to find out after the fact that the villain had bled out in the ambulance.

morngnstar said:

Uh-oh. I have this. Both parents. Why is this bad?

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Actually, I've done this, and in all the instances I did it, it was historically plausible and made a convincing plot. I don't find it bad, though not everybody cares for it.

One thing that makes it so useful in historical fiction, particularly historical romance set in Great Britain, is that for your hero to be economically independent (and sometimes titled), his father, at a minimum, generally needs to be dead. For instance, unless they happen to be in the royal line, dukes have no choice if they want to be dukes.

My current hero is an orphan, but has a living brother and aunt. It works.

Roxxsmom said:

So maybe that's the question to ask oneself. Is it necessary for the parents to die or be dead? Does their death or absence drive the plot, or a central part of the protagonist's arc, that couldn't be done via another means? Or is the parental death just there, even though it would make little difference if the parent were alive? And are there going to be any unusual or unexpected developments that stem from this arc?

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Yeah, it explains why the sister is the primary breadwinner for the family. The grandfather is still in the picture, but too old / in poor health to work.

Albedo said:

Humanoid aliens (especially with boobs). And by extension, alien wildlife that is basically Earth wildlife except purple. Just don't get me started.

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Even if it has 3 boobs???

GoreQuill NachoVidal said:

Even if it has 3 boobs???

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Especially if it has three boobs, but unless you can posit a good evolutionary explanation for them, any number of boobs on an alien is suspect.

Albedo said:

Especially if it has three boobs, but unless you can posit a good evolutionary explanation for them, any number of boobs on an alien is suspect.

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They're all descended from Angela Bassett's character on American Horror Story: Freak Show? (Now that I think of it, she would make an amazing starship captain. Talk about gravitas - plus I hate the trope of Future So White.)

But hey, what if they're quadrapeds with the usual line of teats low on the body to feed a litter, that's different (if still quite Earthlike). Of course, now I'm picturing Planet of the Cats...which would be a great satire that probably exists somewhere on teh interwebz.

CWatts said:

They're all descended from Angela Bassett's character on American Horror Story: Freak Show? (Now that I think of it, she would make an amazing starship captain. Talk about gravitas - plus I hate the trope of Future So White.)

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Preceded by the three-boobed Martian mutant in Total Recall.

CWatts said:

But hey, what if they're quadrapeds with the usual line of teats low on the body to feed a litter, that's different (if still quite Earthlike). Of course, now I'm picturing Planet of the Cats...which would be a great satire that probably exists somewhere on teh interwebz.

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Ain't no mammals anywhere else in the universe.

Helix said:

Preceded by the three-boobed Martian mutant in Total Recall.

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And even earlier by Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6.

Ain't no mammals anywhere else in the universe.

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TBF if you explain away your alien mammaries as an accident of convergent evolution and your aliens also feed their young from modified exocrine glands, that's cool. But why would they be in the exact same place? Why not on the elbows? What if there's nothing a heterosexual alien male appreciates more than a ripe set of elbow glands?

My personal hated tropes:

Romance
- the main character ALWAYS chooses either the childhood best friend or the random stranger they just met, and it's immediately visible whom the author ships
- if there are multiple people interested in the MC, somehow you never see the emotional fallout of the one that doesn't end up with the MC
- the "manipulative jerk" that is thrown in just to create tension, whether by trying to steal the MC or trying to make the love interest leave the MC
- the "evil mother" that decides the MC isn't good enough for their child (why is it ALWAYS the mother? My ex-mother-in-law was the cool one, it was my ex-FIL who was an asshole)
- why do stories with multiple love interests never seem to consider polyamory except to glorify it as a "harem"?

Fantasy:
- there's always a specific magical creature that the writer focuses on repeatedly as almost a mascot of their story, like Final Fantasy's obsession with chocobos, moogles, and cactuars; if it's a well-developed world with tons of magical creatures, there should be a variety actually represented in your story (if I ever succumb to this trope, my mascot will be airhogs... flying groundhogs with wings... because fuck you, they're cute.)
- if the story has elves, elves are ALWAYS the oldest race. Humans are always the youngest and weakest race, making up for it with technology or sheer breeding power
- magic systems that always seem to have very strictly designed spells; why is it that nobody ever looks at a spell and thinks "hey, if I did a little of this and a little of that, changed this, BAM! Now I've got a spell that does this other thing instead!" I mean, hey, I loved playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the day too, but TBH, the magic system sucks. Terribly. It needs to be highly regimented and quantified to make it easier for you to just look at a list of spells and roll a few dice. Your book doesn't have dice (although that might be interesting idea for a Choose Your Own Story?) so you should be taking into account that your mages have BRAINS and are going to get creative. If they aren't getting creative, YOU aren't getting creative, and as an author you NEED to be creative. This trope is made 10x worse when your main character's defining "cool factor" is that they are somehow the ONLY creative mage... if a random mage in your story can't eventually figure out how to turn a fireball spell into a flaming sword spell, then your magic system probably sucks. (you can probably tell by now that this is in my top 3 most hated)

Science Fiction:
- translators that can translate languages that they haven't encountered before. As someone who speaks 3 languages (English, French, Japanese) and last girlfriend was a professional translator who spoke 4 languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, English)......shit don't work like that. Even if your fancy translator is able to do the process faster than a human, it still needs reference points. Which means that it will take time and exposure to that language before your translation device will have a sufficient database to begin making ANY sense out of the language. And hand-waving it as "reading the other party's mind" is lazy writing, because you're ignoring the fact that an alien life-form won't necessarily have recognizable thought patterns.
- anachronistic weapons. seriously. show me WHY your character chooses to use a high-carbon-steel broadsword to fight laser-pistol wielding aliens, and make it something interesting besides "the hero always uses a sword" (I hate to admit that even though I can't stand this trope, one of my favorite sci-fi RPG series is Star Ocean, which is pretty much a defining example of the trope)
- space battles that take place on a horizontal plane or treat tactics that aren't on the horizontal as revolutionary. THERE IS NO UP OR DOWN IN SPACE. (Bio of a Space Tyrant is an especially frustrating example of this)


In general:
- the Big Bad presented as having a wide-reaching influence and yet everything bad they do is within the hero's sphere of influence; or the hero somehow ALWAYS happens to be present for everything significant. If you are going to imply that your Big Bad has lots of power over an organization/nation/world, you need to PORTRAY that power, by building a sense of scope through off-screen events that are at least as or more significant than the ones the heroes interfere with. Not to be mean, but if your evil emperor is so pathetic that a bumbling farmboy can manage to interfere with EVERY SINGLE ONE of his evil plots, then your plot sucks. Even if the bumbling farmboy has some special power, he can't simultaneously be all over the empire that the evil emperor rules. And if it's an evil emperor, then by default, bad things will be happening in every corner of the empire. The greater the scope of power of your Big Bad, the more you need to have bad things happening off-screen to show the extent of their power. (this is in my top 3 for sure...)

The greatest accumulation of tropes can be found watching film noir. And, most of the crummy plots too.

Ehlionney said:

- translators that can translate languages that they haven't encountered before. As someone who speaks 3 languages (English, French, Japanese) and last girlfriend was a professional translator who spoke 4 languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, English)......shit don't work like that. Even if your fancy translator is able to do the process faster than a human, it still needs reference points. Which means that it will take time and exposure to that language before your translation device will have a sufficient database to begin making ANY sense out of the language. And hand-waving it as "reading the other party's mind" is lazy writing, because you're ignoring the fact that an alien life-form won't necessarily have recognizable thought patterns.

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I'm guilty of handwaving this one away a lot. To be fair, the universal translation is provided by a bunch of aliens who are basically the librarians and ethnolinguists of the universe, with an aeons-wide corpus. If anything can be said in any way, shape or form, they can understand it quickly.

How about when those fancy universal translators manage to translate most speech flawlessly, but breaks down as soon as it encounters alien profanity? Lazy. I'd much rather read creative alien swearing than see this tired old gag again and again.

How about 'aliens of a particular species all speak the same language (and have the same culture, beliefs, etc. etc.)'? Why are humans the only non-homogenous culture in the universe?

In general, I'd like to see more thought put into character names in fantasy and science fiction. Most names in the real world have meanings (even if the meanings are opaque in a lot of Western languages, they're not in other cultures). I want to know what those random sequences of syllables mean.

- space battles that take place on a horizontal plane or treat tactics that aren't on the horizontal as revolutionary. THERE IS NO UP OR DOWN IN SPACE. (Bio of a Space Tyrant is an especially frustrating example of this)

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A corollary to this one is 'spaceships all have their decks arranged like an ocean liner', parallel to the axis of thrust. Even if you have artificial gravity (and if you have artificial gravity, why do you need thrust at all?), wouldn't space naval tradition dictate that the decks be arranged thrust-downwards? Or even concentrically, if your ships used to spin about their axes for gravity?

Add anything else that takes the 'spaceships as actual ships' metaphor too far.

Albedo said:

How about 'aliens of a particular species all speak the same language (and have the same culture, beliefs, etc. etc.)'? Why are humans the only non-homogenous culture in the universe?

In general, I'd like to see more thought put into character names in fantasy and science fiction. Most names in the real world have meanings (even if the meanings are opaque in a lot of Western languages, they're not in other cultures). I want to know what those random sequences of syllables mean.

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I completely feel you there, and these are distasteful to me but not big enough to drive me crazy like the ones I listed lol. I have to admit that I do my own bit of handwaving of lingual diversity in my series by way of active presence of the Gods (it's a fantasy world where all of the Gods present on that world live openly in and among society). Because the Gods are present, and are the ones who taught the mortals language in the first place, they control lingual drift from going too far. The only cultures that are an exception are ones that have logical setting-driven reasons to BE an exception.

The two prime examples: a race with wings developed a language that uses tones and frequencies that the others are incapable of reproducing, that can more easily be heard over the wind. Another of the races slowly crystallize in their old age, until their body becomes a statue and their spirit roams free in a second life-stage; they are able to communicate with the living members of their race as ancient repositories of knowledge, by re-inhabiting their crystallized body and using spiritual energy to cause the crystalline structures to "hum" and this has evolved a unique language (this race is the most highly technological in my setting, because they theoretically have no loss of knowledge and the spirits in their second life-stage are still able to theorize, etc). Other than those two, the rest of their world has a single unified language with only moderate levels of regional slang that are added to the official language core over time by the Gods.

A corollary to this one is 'spaceships all have their decks arranged like an ocean liner', parallel to the axis of thrust. Even if you have artificial gravity (and if you have artificial gravity, why do you need thrust at all?), wouldn't space naval tradition dictate that the decks be arranged thrust-downwards? Or even concentrically, if your ships used to spin about their axes for gravity?

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An addendum to this corollary would be the "why the fuck do spaceships that don't have inner-atmosphere capability always follow inner-atmosphere aerodynamics" issue -_- (ETA: OK, OK, I know that at the very least, Star Wars and Star Trek DO have notable exceptions to this rule... still doesn't change the preponderance of offenders)

Albedo said:

And even earlier by Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6.


TBF if you explain away your alien mammaries as an accident of convergent evolution and your aliens also feed their young from modified exocrine glands, that's cool. But why would they be in the exact same place? Why not on the elbows? What if there's nothing a heterosexual alien male appreciates more than a ripe set of elbow glands?

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Even among mammals, human breasts are a weird abberation. Other female mammals have visible breasts only when feeding young. Other male mammals find visible breasts a turn-off because they're a sign the female isn't on for mating.

Albedo said:

Especially if it has three boobs, but unless you can posit a good evolutionary explanation for them, any number of boobs on an alien is suspect.

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Trilateral symmetry? Hmmm. Could be fun. There are people who have occasional supernumerary nipples, though they aren't functional as far as I know. I'm guessing misfiring HOX genes are involved somehow.

But as per the plausibility of mammaloid aliens, or aliens that look like they belong to an Earth-evolved clade without an explanation, most people (even quite a few with some biology under their belt_ don't understand cladistics and the nature of homology vs analogy and what evolutionary convergence can and can't produce. Humanoid, or mammaloid at least, aliens that look like they evolved from an Earth species, are so common in SF that they've become an expectation. I've enjoyed books that have aliens that really aren't terribly alien, but my acceptance or not is a matter of how "hard" the SF is meant to be.

Still, the boobs as a meta marker for femaleness bugs me. Even among humans, some women are nearly (or completely) boobless, and some men have boobs. Obviously we cue off many different things when we assign gender to someone in real life (and sometimes we still get it wrong). And I can't think of any other mammal that has breasts like ours either, so what are the odds than an alien would have them, even if they were descendants of mammals that were "seeded" to their planet long ago?

It might be fun to place anterioirly placed lobules that aren't boobs on an alien (maybe they house digestive or sensory organs) that isn't female, or even possessed of gender as we understand it. Even though the underlying anatomy and functionality is very different, humans keep assuming the alien is female because they've been so conditioned by the media to think a pair of boobs=femaleness on everything nonhuman, from insects to robots.

Ehlionney said:

- translators that can translate languages that they haven't encountered before.

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That's one thing I thought Cherryh handled very well in her Chanuur books. The alien crew and human character had to work hard to get a halfway functional translator, and even then it was severely limited.

The Hani were definitely mammaloid, though, and looked like bipedal cats. No boobs were ever mentioned, even though the entire crew was female. Didn't even know if Hani nursed their children or not. It worked, since the author had based their social system on that of liions. The book was so good the parallel evolution didn't knock me out. I just assumed there was a reason for it no one knew (and some of her aliens were much more alien too).

I think many tropes are things that may not be too realistic, however, but they're needed to move the story along. A realistic treatment of language barriers works for some stories but not for all. Especially in movies where the character needs to be able to talk to other beings right away.

Even in Arrival, where the whole movie was about deciphering an alien language, they skipped over most of the nuts and bolts, and I never got a sense of how long it took for the protagonist to accumulate the lexicon of all those printouts of the little circles with the various appendages that meant different things, nor for how long it took for her to be able to glance at one herself (without computer help) and understand it.

Do even linguists really have skills that allow them to decipher and become conversational in a completely new language (not based on anything remotely like any ones she speaks already) in a matter of weeks?

Cyia said:

LoL. I know what you've mean. I made up my mind early that my huntress character was keeping the scars from a wild-animal attack when she was a child. Her face is gouged into three sections cheek-to-chin. It just didn't seem right for the "faint line" near her eye kind of thing.

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Cool. Presumably you're not going with the trope that this makes her Evil. I get sooo sick that - also Death by Disfigurement/Disability.

Roxxsmom said:

Still, the boobs as a meta marker for femaleness bugs me. Even among humans, some women are nearly (or completely) boobless, and some men have boobs. Obviously we cue off many different things when we assign gender to someone in real life (and sometimes we still get it wrong). And I can't think of any other mammal that has breasts like ours either, so what are the odds than an alien would have them, even if they were descendants of mammals that were "seeded" to their planet long ago?

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What really bugs me is the fantasy trope of lizardpeople and dragonfolk with breasts. They're reptilian FFS! Though I don't mind them on Madame Vastra for some reason.

Maryn said:

Supernova, opposite James Spader.

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Thank you. Must have been kicking around in my subconscious.

Roxxsmom said:

Still, the boobs as a meta marker for femaleness bugs me. Even among humans, some women are nearly (or completely) boobless, and some men have boobs. Obviously we cue off many different things when we assign gender to someone in real life (and sometimes we still get it wrong). And I can't think of any other mammal that has breasts like ours either, so what are the odds than an alien would have them, even if they were descendants of mammals that were "seeded" to their planet long ago?

It might be fun to place anterioirly placed lobules that aren't boobs on an alien (maybe they house digestive or sensory organs) that isn't female, or even possessed of gender as we understand it. Even though the underlying anatomy and functionality is very different, humans keep assuming the alien is female because they've been so conditioned by the media to think a pair of boobs=femaleness on everything nonhuman, from insects to robots.

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Why are the breasted aliens the women, anyway? Maybe the males evolved breastlike glands to feed their young, as their ancestors had a strong male parental care strategy. It might be fun to write a story where a Capt Kirk analogue alpha xenophile is forced to reevaluate his sexual preconceptions when he visits the Planet of the Man Boobs.

Roxxsmom said:

That's one thing I thought Cherryh handled very well in her Chanuur books. The alien crew and human character had to work hard to get a halfway functional translator, and even then it was severely limited.

The Hani were definitely mammaloid, though, and looked like bipedal cats. No boobs were ever mentioned, even though the entire crew was female. Didn't even know if Hani nursed their children or not. It worked, since the author had based their social system on that of liions. The book was so good the parallel evolution didn't knock me out. I just assumed there was a reason for it no one knew (and some of her aliens were much more alien too).

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Cat-like aliens are a whole trope on their own, I think. Again though my acceptance varies depending on whether they got roughly feline shaped by convergent evolution, or whether I'm actually expected to believe that kitty cats evolved independently on another planet (no).

I have animal-like beings in my own writing, but they were engineered/'uplifted' David Brin style and aren't really aliens at all.

Albedo said:

Cat-like aliens

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Cats = trope. Also overdone.

<- These guys are better

mccardey said:

Cats = trope. Also overdone.

<- These guys are better

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yea dogs are way cooler. Every story needs more dogs.

Albedo said:

Every story needs more dogs.

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So long as they don't die. Dead dogs are overdone.

On cats, I personally have had more than my fill of the nine-lives trope in cat fiction, not to mention Egyptian ties. Other cultures had cats, too. (I say this as a cat lover. I have my limits...)

Came across another trope today.

Thin lead actress with "toned" arms enters battle wielding a (plastic, presumably) heavy-looking sword. Waves said sword around for a while and kills some people. Does not get tired.

Whereas in the Roman Legionary system, muscular men get tired after 15 minutes max and are replaced at the front by fresh soldiers.

Keithy said:

Came across another trope today.

Thin lead actress with "toned" arms enters battle wielding a (plastic, presumably) heavy-looking sword. Waves said sword around for a while and kills some people. Does not get tired.

Whereas in the Roman Legionary system, muscular men get tired after 15 minutes max and are replaced at the front by fresh soldiers.

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That's a subtrope of the Ridiculously Huge/Heavy Swords. Note that most real swords weighed around 2 or 3 pounds. Here's a rundown by expert Matt Easton (I highly recommend his YouTube channel): https://youtu.be/03HIYgLWGu0

Those Roman legionnaires' shields weighed over 20 pounds though, so no wonder they tired out.

ETA: That said, I agree that a believable swordswoman should have a physique that's more Wimbledon than Waif Model.

CWatts said:

I agree that a believable swordswoman should have a physique that's more Wimbledon than Waif Model.

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Definitely. I'm a petite gardener and the physical nature of my work means I have substantial biceps (for a 5' tall woman anyway - I'm not going to enter a bicep-off with The Rock any time soon). It adds to the difficulty of finding well fitting petite clothes that's for sure! It's as if fit, strong and thin have become confused.