Story Killers

RikWriter said:

Something else that bothers me is when people write novels that are purportedly SF but are actually just a military novel or a thriller or a romance "in space!" with the concomitant lack of attention to detail. Setting something in space and using technobabble doesn't make it science fiction.

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This. I appreciate, and even demand, good worldbuilding in SF, and I expect some effort.

So, a story killer for me is the robot/AI/Android that wants to be a real boy. I still remember in the Pilot for TNG (encounter at Farpoint) where Data points out that in many ways he's superior to humans and then spends 7 seasons trying to be one. It seems like this is the only character arc a robot character gets. The notable exception being Bender Bending Rodriguez.

I've addressed rape in on two seperate occasions in my stories. In a sci fi one I have a character elude to the idea that she was raped (when in fact she wasn't). She does so because she's under a false identity and she's trying to play on the Protags sympathies in hoping that they won't ask too many questions because 'she can't face it'.

In a euro-style fantasy a female character is a runaway slave who was raped several times. I haven't gone very far in this story, but one thing that happens is that she and the guy that she's traveling with are staying on a farm for a few days and the farmer's son tries to seduce/force himself on her. She rejects him/runs away from him. He tries to shout at her/shame her for not accepting her advances. He doesn't know what happened to her (but that's not really an excuse).

That's twice out of 6 or so projects and one is still in the early first draft and probably will remain that way for a few years until I have time to work through my higher priority projects. Maybe I handle them well, maybe I don't, that's a conversation I'll have with my betas when the time comes.

Important plot elements discussed after sex. Instantly shoots down the story, especially if it's a long scene. The longer it is, the less likely I am to get through it.

I also can't stand when all of the named characters have been killed before we've reached the end of the story. Sorry, my emotional investment hasn't been returned and now you're asking me to make another in your story. Sorry Mr. Martin, not doing it.

Soapboxing. When an author spends too much time hammering their social agenda instead of letting me see my interpretation of the events. You know the ones, where something happens where you can draw an interpretation either way but they're going to hammer to make sure you get THEIR idea of it.

Nivarion said:

Soapboxing. When an author spends too much time hammering their social agenda instead of letting me see my interpretation of the events. You know the ones, where something happens where you can draw an interpretation either way but they're going to hammer to make sure you get THEIR idea of it.

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God Emperor of Dune anyone? I swear, Herbert went loco during the writing of this. Or maybe he was already there. By the end, I had learned that only women should be in the military because they don't rape, but that they kind of suck in the military and fail.

And then a bunch of esoteric metaphysical crap that I can't remember.

For me, it's actually quite simple. The story is boring.

I don't care so much what tropes you use, what kinds of characters you write, or even how good the writing is. As long as the story is entertaining.

I haven't read all of the posts yet, but for me, a big story killer is female characters being abused/raped or portrayed as either witchy or sex objects. Or if the only token female is just a love interest. I am very, very sick of those tropes. Can't I have a girl with no rape/abuse/prostitute issues? Many male characters (and several MG female characters) seem fine without those issues.

I mean, you can still have some of those tropes, (except the rape one), but I dislike that they happen too often to female characters. Or that all female characters in a story has those tropes. Or that every culture is patriarchal.

I'm not into gory violence, explicit torture or rape (for either sex), so I tend to avoid such stories that have those.

Oh, and purple prose.

Johncs said:

For me it's the preaching.

Johncs, still looking for the giant robots.

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You know why there aren't any giant robots? It's like Thomas Jefferson said, until every logical circuit stands up, sits down and takes notes being totally responsible for everything, any government that doesn't make every circuit totally responsible for everything is going to spy on you until you are totally responsible for everything. It's that simple.

Thomas Jefferson, January 7, 1798.

King Neptune said:

Many women prefer men who are hair-free.

Becoming hair-free is not an "effect of aging"; it is a sign of maturation. Male children have full heads of hair, but adult males are hair-free.

Certainly some prefer to hold onto the signs of youth as long as possible, but there are many early middle-aged men (20 to 40) who shave their heads to try to gain the appearance of being older. Tastes vary.

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LOL. I've lurked these forums a while, but this. This made me post.Sounds like somebody's feeling a little jilted by his hair to me. Thou doth protest too much: *most* men experience only mild baldness, if any.

In the spirit of not derailing the thread for a pointless resurrected post, my single biggest story-killer's a run-on internal dialogue. Entire paragraphs of the protagonist considering their options/circumstances/ etc. Usually w/ (hate to say it) female protags for some reason (independent of the author's gender) and, I feel ridiculously prevalent in Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Not to say the technique doesn't have it's place- a huge advantage of novels over film is the ability to truly get in a character's head- but overkill will make me never finish a book. Much better to see the character's internal decision/indecision/whatever reflected in a few telling actions or some concise dialogue over half of every chapter with this (in the worst cases even rehashing already established facts).

With both Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 'idealized' civilizations which aren't flawed in the slightest irk me to end. Same thing with perfect love interests. Sorry, this isn't fairytale, don't get a free pass on human flaws just because the protag's in love with this character. Everyone has bad days where they're a total jerkface and unpleasant traits.

With Sci-Fi specifically, if I read another "Insert Genre Here, But With Barely Used Spaceships", then I'm a Muppet. In a barely used Spaceship.

With Fantasy, anything that sounds too much like a Tolkien/Rowling ripoff past the first thirty pages has failed to prove itself unique enough to deserve my attention. Basically, if there's an Evil Artifact and a Long Journey/Quest involving an Interracial Company, or there's a Vaguely Powerful Youngster/Possibly The Chosen One, attending an Institution For 'Otherly' People, it had better get pretty friggin' unique pretty friggin' quickly.

Alright, I'm going to leave another post in this thread. I see in this fantasy stories from time to time and it really gets under my skin.

I don't normally read YA urban fantasy, but I was bored so I picked up this novel called Wings. In it, there are trolls disguised as humans, except when they're humans they look very ugly and very odd. The protag doesn't realize they're trolls until she meets a fairy that tells her so. Cue the, "Tell me about trolls" discussion.

The fairy info dumps a whole history about trolls and how they've managed to exist in our world. The trolls are currently trying to find the portal to Avalon, the fairy world. But we learn Avalon wasn't always the fairy world. Trolls used to live there too. And in this info dump, we're told that fairies and trolls did not get along. So one day the fairies decided to rise up and kick out the trolls because they're different and the trolls stole a lot of stuff from the fairies. So the fairies launched war on the trolls and killed almost all of them. Except the few that slipped through the portal to the human world. So now, the few remaining trolls left are trying to get back into Avalon through this secret portal. They're the Big Bad in this story, and they are not nice to humans. Or fairies.

Okay, fine and dandy. I get it's a fantasy story. I get that you needed a Big Bad to cause drama. I understand all that, but when I read this back story I literally put the book down and walked away because it sounds like what the colonials did to the Native Americans. Or what Hitler did to the Jews. It's a genocide! The fairies couldn't get along with the trolls so they decided to kill them by the thousands??! What?! How does that make me like the fairies?! Maybe the trolls are upset and have a right to be upset. If you killed my people by the thousands, then kicked me out of my home you bet I'd have a big bad chip on my shoulder.

I was also really put off by how the author kept using the word ugly in connotation with the trolls. The uglier the troll is, the more higher ranking it is. As if evil things are automatically ugly thing. I also see some authors do this with fat people and it drives me crazy. You can be ugly/fat and good. Those traits are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other. (And of frickin course, the "good" people are drop dead gorgeous. Weren't we just talking about that in this thread?)

Anyways, these fairies are elitists and conquerors in a really horribly violent way. I'm just supposed to accept that and keep rooting for them? Blahhh I can't, maybe because I'm Jewish, or maybe because I'm married to a Cherokee man. idk, maybe I just don't think launching a massive war on another race is acceptable on the basis of "we couldn't get along." The faries in this story suck, and unfortunately I've seen this in other fantasy stories where there's some big bad ugly race (orcs, trolls, goblins) that are just bad for the sake of being bad. It's a plot device for a "good" group (elves, wizards, humans, warriors) to come in and be conquerors.


m'kay, stepping off the soap box now...

Lawks that bugs the hell out of me too (and I've no Jewish in me and I'm not married to anyone but another Anglo Saxon)

If you fuck with someone and ruin not just their lives but their entire culture....well tbh my sympathy is with them, not you. I read a book a while ago -- I don't recall the name -- where the "good" guys had driven the "Bad Guys" from their homeland and all but eradicated them. And then wondered why they were so upset? That was a flinger right there.



Confession: I have used the fat one in a series (but to be fair, 95% of the population were surviving on gruel and/or rats so anyone who looks even well fed will be suspect as in suspected of being part of the ruling class who get all the good stuff and revel in it...) It's not like everyone has access to lots of food. And historically, fat = rich, it was even a status symbol -- hey I'm so rich I can afford all this food AND afford to have people to do all the things for me! (see Henry VIII and similar) so I was kind of riffing on that.... But that is probably something I could have been more subtle about also.

Mr Flibble said:

Confession: I have used the fat one in a series (but to be fair, 95% of the population were surviving on gruel and/or rats so anyone who looks even well fed will be suspect as in suspected of being part of the ruling class who get all the good stuff and revel in it...) It's not like everyone has access to lots of food. And historically, fat = rich, it was even a status symbol -- hey I'm so rich I can afford all this food AND afford to have people to do all the things for me! (see Henry VIII and similar) so I was kind of riffing on that.... But that is probably something I could have been more subtle about also.

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There are proper ways to do it, and this is one of them. If it's a status cultural symbol, that's okay as long as you make me believe it. The story I read had ugly people as bad guys for no logical reason except...well...wait no...there was no reason. They just were.

If you make a fat/ugly person evilish 'just because', well, that bothers me. Stereotypes like that don't need to exist.

Blinkk said:

.
If you make a fat/ugly person evilish 'just because', well, that bothers me. Stereotypes like that don't need to exist.

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If you make anyone evil "just because" it bothers me (although I daresay I've done it without realising ....) Tattoos = evil, biker wearing leathers = stupid and evil, blonde = stupid...


I get that it can be a handy signpost (we all make assumptions) but the trick is to either twist those assumptions (that leather clad biker is in fact the leading neuroscientist...) or somehow show them to be more than the stereotype.

Mr Flibble said:

Lawks that bugs the hell out of me too (and I've no Jewish in me and I'm not married to anyone but another Anglo Saxon)

If you fuck with someone and ruin not just their lives but their entire culture....well tbh my sympathy is with them, not you. I read a book a while ago -- I don't recall the name -- where the "good" guys had driven the "Bad Guys" from their homeland and all but eradicated them. And then wondered why they were so upset? That was a flinger right there.



Confession: I have used the fat one in a series (but to be fair, 95% of the population were surviving on gruel and/or rats so anyone who looks even well fed will be suspect as in suspected of being part of the ruling class who get all the good stuff and revel in it...) It's not like everyone has access to lots of food. And historically, fat = rich, it was even a status symbol -- hey I'm so rich I can afford all this food AND afford to have people to do all the things for me! (see Henry VIII and similar) so I was kind of riffing on that.... But that is probably something I could have been more subtle about also.

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I read that series and it does work- they weren't just fat but smug too.

Jacob_Wallace said:

Vampires that don't act anything like vampires.

Magic that pretends to be science.

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~~There is no natural history of Vampires. However they behave depends entirely on the author.
~~Magic can be treated in a scientific way: "Using these ingredients in this spell gives this result. Changing frankincense for amber gives this other result."
What bothers me is the "Magic, magic, do what you will," nonsense, which denies human control beyond the invocation.

Two reasons for me to put a book down:
1. I continue to successfully predict what will happen next.
2. The audiobook narrator READS to me instead of being the narrative voice. Doesn't help the writer much, but there it is.
3. Honorable mention: the new and awesome love interest of the protag is the/a bad guy directly involved in the main plot problem.


On balding:

Bald can be attractive. Hair can be attractive. Balding is about as attractive as a man with poor hygiene and bad credit who lives in his mother's basement with only video game "achievements" on his list of personal accomplishments.


On rape in books:

If you've ever poured through accounts by rapists, then you'll find a running theme. It's insidious, it's sick, but it's reality. Sex is a commodity. Given certain opportunities, certain mindsets (including feeling owed, often), and/or certain social validations (think group/crowd settings at their worst) these guys engage with little to no regard to who or what s/he is.

One rapist account likened his victims to a pack of smokes left out on a table, a valuable, addictive commodity left out for anyone to take. As simple and as callous as that.

There is a sex industry. Again, commodity. Crude, but reality. I liked the smokes analogy from the self-report because it put things in terms of an itchy addiction. Even non-smokers who quit itch for cigarettes now and again. Helps me crawl inside that alien perspective, at least with words.

I think rape happens in books because we build action by pulling from our own societies and then slapping those acts onto the worlds we build. Unfortunately, rape isn't uncommon. (See: South Africa) Even less so when the lizard brain is tapped.

You can flip it around. I have a matriarchal society in one region of my fantasy book. The matriarch of a household doesn't like the way her indentured/owned servant looks at her daughter. She makes him a eunuch to stave off a perceived threat, and no he doesn't have a say in the matter. No one even blinks. Her act is accepted within that society when she'd likely be put to death in another. (His value as a servant, btw, then doubles.) Rape is punishable by public castration on the first offense. Rape is fairly rare in this society. Maybe you can do this without being matriarchal. Certainly ground for world-building opportunity provided you tap on some dis-incentive that clearly isn't present in American society.

I just look for plausibility in human nature and in the world presented. If it doesn't gel or feel "real" on some level, then it bothers me. But to flat out put a book down because I hate what's happening to the character? No.

DarthLolita said:

In terms of fantasy, I kind of dislike it when dragons pretty much behave and communicate like humans. Hearing them talk just...bothers me.

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~~I don't get that at all. I have always assumed dragons can pass the Turing Test. As for behaving and talking like humans, see above, but also why shouldn't they talk to us or to dolphins or whoever?
Talking beasts are a very old convention. Currently we may have switched to androids/robots, but communication with the Other is an ancient practice.

Mr Flibble said:

If you make anyone evil "just because" it bothers me (although I daresay I've done it without realising ....) Tattoos = evil, biker wearing leathers = stupid and evil, blonde = stupid...


I get that it can be a handy signpost (we all make assumptions) but the trick is to either twist those assumptions (that leather clad biker is in fact the leading neuroscientist...) or somehow show them to be more than the stereotype.

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Case in point, I met an older guy a while back who was covered in tattoos and goes around in Harley Davidson Leathers. He has been married to his wife for almost thirty years, has two kids who are college graduates and professionals, and has a little bitty dog whom he dotes on (and dresses in a tiny Harley Davidson coat). And he really is a nice guy.

Some negative stereotypes probably do more harm than others. In spite of the "dumb blond" stereotype, Blond women actually tend to make more money than their demographically matched dark-haired peers (while heavy women earn less), so the dumb blond thing doesn't seem to prevent gainful employment overall. This may be why some of my blond friends love blond jokes and say things like, "Sorry, I was having a blond moment." I assume it's because there's no legislation that restricts where they can live, whom they can marry, or that allows people to deny them employment or service.

So it's probably not a good idea to create false equivalencies (as in saying something like, "Sure, black people are discriminated against, but I'm blond, and everyone thinks we're airheads, so we're even.")

Still, I've seen the blond stereotype do harm. One of my cousins, who is blond and attractive (and also quite smart) has always had to deal with her (dark-haired) father's quips about how amazed he is at her achievements, considering she's "not the sharpest knife in the drawer." This has affected her self perception over the years.

It is so cool to read a book where people who are usually treated in a shallow, stereotyped way are actually given some love. This can mean a lot to a person, especially a kid, reading the story.

Roxxsmom said:

Case in point, I met an older guy a while back who was covered in tattoos and goes around in Harley Davidson Leathers. He has been married to his wife for almost thirty years, has two kids who are college graduates and professionals, and has a little bitty dog whom he dotes on (and dresses in a tiny Harley Davidson coat). And he really is a nice guy.

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I met the nicest woman a year ago. She was heavy in a really warm fuzzy way, like a warm auntie who bakes lots of cookies. She wore pink sweaters and loved hugs and had the cutest way of saying how adorable everyone was. She had to make sure everyone else was fed before she sat down and ate. She seemed like the greatest mom ever.

I saw her speak at an AA meeting and she told her back story. When she was 16 she dated a guy from Hells Angels and had a baby. Then lots of drama happened and when they broke up, he hired a hit man to kill her. She ran away, lived under dumpsters and stole from grocery stores, purses, and parked cars while trying to raise a baby. I think she became a hooker at some point. There was a part in the story where she met the guy that was trying to take her out, but I really don't remember what happened. Something with a gun...

Anyways, just sayin, I would've never guessed this precious fifty-something year old, warm, fuzzy, woman had a history like that!

I have no issue with stereotypes (they do exist for a reason). When they're used in excess I tend to roll my eyes. Also, if they're used as a crutch I just shiver. It tends to make characters flat.

A story killer for me is homogenous cultures, be they human or alien. Even in a hive mind I'd expect we'd find some variation, and humans alone on our single planet produce variety.

For example: One alien race are mostly pure warriors, another are mostly greedy merchants, etc, etc.

In Fantasy I will stop reading if the author gets away from Plot to show us boring everyday aspects of the world. I read one novel where it would go on for CHAPTERS of the MC growing comfortable in the new world. She painted, she ate dinner with fairies, and occasional she would go out hunting. None of this had any urgency and really didn't show any aspects of the world that I would call thrilling. It was like the author wanted to take a vacation in the world and didn't want to worry about all the "bad things" that kept the story moving forward.

I need world building WITH plot.

Karasue said:

I read one novel where it would go on for CHAPTERS of the MC growing comfortable in the new world. She painted, she ate dinner with fairies, and occasional she would go out hunting.

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That sounds weirdly like this story. If so, I assure you there is a plot and it doesn't go where you think it will (thank goodness), although admittedly I nearly stopped reading before getting to that point.

ZOMBIE THREAD!! AIGH!! **runs away**

The Package said:

I got about three chapters in and the line "wind tickled his feet and he giggled like a schoolgirl" jarred me so hard.
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I know I'm late to this party but I literally lol'd at that quote. This is why I am very cautious with metaphors/similes.

BethS said:

That sounds weirdly like this story. If so, I assure you there is a plot and it doesn't go where you think it will (thank goodness), although admittedly I nearly stopped reading before getting to that point.

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Haha! That is totally it! I finished it and it did pick up at the end but then she does the same thing in the next book and I had to stop.