Your pet peeve tropes

I tend to enjoy villains who are just evil without being made to have a sympathetic past or motives and stuff, but yeah when their motive is simply "I'm evil muahahaha" and it's not either a joke or the result of agency loss... eugh.

Would we consider "I enjoy the suffering of others" as motive or is that too close to being "I'm evil, lol"?

From my perspective, the motives of a lot of serial killers are very close to seeming random, because in many ways they don't make any sense. When I was watching Mindhunter, it was a pretty enjoyable show, and you can see how hard they are trying to make a big chart of all the serial killers and figure out how they work. However, when you find out that the attempt of the FBI to categorize and make sense of serial killers... failed completely, it shifts how you perceive serial killers.

There are all kinds of crimes that tell us things about the person who did it. We can look at writing and know things about the writer. We can look at painting and see the painter in it.

However, despite decades of trying, we can't look at five murders by the same person, and figure out what the next murder will be. And something that can not be predicted may not be random, but it looks random.

If I had perfect control over my body, I could toss a die upwards in such a way that it would have very high odds of landing on a 5 or 6. However, I don't have that ability, so to me, rolling dice results in random outcomes. Even flipping a coin looks random, and I bet someone made a chart somewhere about how hard you toss it up, and how many flips it does in that time.

I'd say no. Sadism and Despotism Justifies the Means are both more legitimate and less hackneyed than generic "i'm evil lol" imho.

Right, the issue is when it wants us to take a Card-Carrying Villain who does things For the Evulz as a serious threat, not if the villain is driven by something like sadism, pleasure, boredom, etc. Basically, any actual motive.

I feel like serial killers are kind of boring in general at this point. The fact that analysts can't predict when and where the next victim will appear isn't because the killer is striking at random but because they choose their victims opportunistically. The way shows like Mindhunter or Hannibal portray serial killers as masterful artists of death doesn't reflect reality, so it's misleading to make a comparison to writers or painters. (Or rather, identifying an author by their writing is possible, but not trivial, and no amount of literary analysis will help you predict when and where they'll publish again.)

I'd say one major peeve of mine is a fantasy or sci-fi story having non-human species, yet having all the main characters be humans anyway. It both seems a massive waste of having these different species and yet doing nothing with them, not to mention being very boring.

Can't say I'm free of that sin, but granted that is because the characters came first (granted I am toying around with the twist that they are actually Ridiculously Human Robots and avatars of certain deities) and I used VRoid Studio to make them. The character creation program can do non humans, but you're still gonna be limited to bipeds.

the biped-only thing is more of a issue in Live Action works for obvious reasons, and why the two most iconic sci fi works with titles beginning with "Star" have Rubber-Forehead Aliens. Even if CGI is cheaper than a plastic cup, people are still gonna want to use human actors.

That said I think Humans Are Special might also be a reason, conscious or otherwise, why people in general put humans in starring roles where non-human sentient species are abundant from Monster Musume to the aforementioned "Star X" works. Thes ame could be said for the unfounded but pervailent idea that people cannot relate to non-human protagonists.

Xenofiction being niche is also relevant to this somehow.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 6th 2023 at 9:30:03 AM

Reminds me of the annoying adaptation trope of having the sentient animal /non-human protagonist have to team up with a human. I forgive Detective Pikachu because Pokemon having trainers is the whole deal of the franchise. I forgive Sonic the Hedgehog less because even though I know the movie pulled it off, I still don't understand why they couldn't just make a normal Sonic movie in the Sonic universe. This trope just comes off as lazy to me because the human characters tend to be superfluous and just take away screentime from the actual protagonist and the other characters from that world.

I figure that a lot of this is speciesism - unless the work is written by an AI or someone who has extensively theorized on non-human minds, any human-made work tends to be anthropocentric.

I'd assume that 99% of ChatGTP's output would also be anthropocentric as it currently stands.

I brought up Monmusu in the previous post, but I think that specific case is derived from its nature as a harem and as such how that genre deals with relatability. The genre specially wants an "everyman" Vanilla Protagonist or Pinball Protagonist that the haremettes can form and attraction to and bounce off of for the fantasy of women begin attracted to plain at best and incel at worse dudes. That means that because the work focuses on monster girls and the setting is Urban Fantasy, the protagonist has to be a human. (this is also why This Loser Is You is pervailent in works in the animesphere)

An annoying side effect of this is "Because He Is Nice To Me", Something I'm sure is a trope but I have trouble finding the right name. But to explain, it is that because the protags of said stories tend to have 0 personality, the only way for any woman to be attracted to him is because he is a Nice Guy, which naturally gives toxic expectations on how relationships start and leads to shit like the Dogged Nice Guy when it turns out women aren't so desperate as to date the first guy that is nice or "nice" to them.

(this also pops up in Gacha Games as well, if not more so because the protags there are literal blank slates as per their nature as a Silent Protagonist)

I am speaking generally of course. I think Monmusu's male protag does has a personality compared to other harem works.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 6th 2023 at 10:29:42 AM

The closest I could find was Because You Were Nice to Me.

And Single Woman Seeks Good Man.

that's the one.

that...is not the one, but it does seem close (I kinda thought that it was specifically about evil women being redeemed by love for a good man)

x7 I'm reminded of a discussion on the politics in media thread where someone pointed out that star wars tends to have more extravagant designs for its aliens than star trek but ironically gives them much less focus. I'm typically more forgiving of live-action media that uses mostly human characters due to the aforementioned budget reasons but star wars seems to almost always have its main characters be human, even in mediums were the budget would be an issue, such as animation or video games.

Discount Lesbians. Not the alleged phenomenon itself (which i kind of doubt actually exists), but the fact this site summarily declares that human X nonhuman / nonhuman X nonhuman gay relationships are somehow magically not gay and are somehow a cop-out. Are that page's writers going to declare catadora not "really" gay because Catra is a Cat Girl?? Are they goind to decree the characters i, an actual gay person, make as that because they dare to be fantasy creatures and animals?

As i said, i genuinely doubt that's even an actual thing that actually happens. Homophobes aren't okay with nonhuman gay relationships because "they're not gay", but will get just as mad at them as they would a human gay relationship. And writers and corporations who want both homophobes' and gay peoples' money aren't going to put in an actual explicitly gay relationship with the defense "they're not gay because they aren't human!" because that's a stupid idea and as i said it isn't going to work and propably nobody actually thinks that way — they'll just go Ambiguously Gay instead. I have literally never seen anything do what the trope page claims gets done.^note  (This "trope" feels like it wants to complain about something (Speculative Fiction LGBT??), like Twofer Token Minority seems like it just exists to whine about intersectionality and make it out to be bad/"unrealistic")

Edited by Nukeli on Aug 14th 2023 at 11:05:47 AM

~Nukeli you can always make a Trope Talk thread about that trope if you feel that it's not an actual phenomenon or the site got it all wrong.

I think the article is saying that writers are saying a human and alien being lesbians, doesn't count, not that the article is saying that.

Also it gives examples of aliens that don't have male or female, or have radically different ways sex or gender work.

I think the species of entirely female looking aliens is more fan-service then trying to get crap past the radar.

Edited by WorkingOnBeingGood on Aug 16th 2023 at 1:12:16 AM

Oftentimes, I notice a certain kind of snobbery or pretentiousness from many Postmodern works. Spec Ops: The Line is a particularly obnoxious example, being a first-person shooter that berates and accuses the player for playing the first-person shooter. What makes it obnoxious is that the player is implicitly railroaded into the position where they can be berated and accused—implicit because while the option to simply stop playing does exist, doing so defeats the usual purpose of a video game.

Now, to be fair, I recognize that postmodernism does not have to have that pretension. An example of a more respectful implementation of it is Doki Doki Literature Club!, where the postmodernist aspects are either limited to horror elements like jump scares or in-game commentary that analyses and critiques both dating simulators and the kind of person who would most likely play one without casting any kind of derogatory judgement on the player.

OFF also does the same you mentioned about Spec Ops: The Line as it's attempt to deconstruct the RPG genre. Undertale does it better because you can actually choose to kill everyone, kill some monsters or do a Pacifist Run and the game only berates you for choosing to commit mass murder or if you unlock certain Neutral endings depending on who you kill.

Some people argue that the third Bioshock sorta has a similar problem, or at least it does if you refuse to have a character you play get baptized in a game.

However, to defend Spec Ops: The Line, it's not exactly standing on the shoulders of giants. Any first or first popular attempt at something is going to have a lot of flaws, as they have no idea what they are doing.

I do agree that it's rather unfortunate that the incident with the war crime can be foreseen by the player, but not avoided.

Yeah, I agree, it is super irritating. I like to have some level of agency in the games I play, so it's always frustrating when I'm forced to do an action that the game then condemns. I appreciate the surreal horror elements in The Line but I think the handling of the moral is poorly done. I think it would have been neat if there were alternate scenarios.

Even Undertale's way of doing this "stop playing" sort of thing grates on me because it's kinda frustrating to me to insult the player for going down a route that was coded into the game and has one of the best boss fights in the entire game. Like... I absolutely get the point of why it's done that way, but I suppose I just don't like works that try to slam a moral down my throat and force me to feel bad for wanting to play the way I want to.

Admittedly though I've never been a huge fan of works that try to play on my emotions in a very overt or manipulative way. I can get very attached to characters I enjoy and from there I'll react naturally to the issues they face; I just want to get to care about the characters in question first, otherwise their problems don't mean much to me. And a work that tries too hard to make me feel something usually just does the opposite.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 30th 2023 at 6:39:08 AM

Agreed. I read something about The Line originally giving the player the option to just make the protagonist leave or something like that and not continue comitting terrible actions, and it was removed because most test players picked it. To me, that would sound like the test alone already disproved the game's message. "Players would do heinous things in a video game if given the choice" could be a powerful theme, but based on the test plays it needed to be changed to "Players would do heinous things in a video game if that is literally the only option available besides just stop playing the game," which I think is much less impactful. Also regarding OFF, the Blamed for Being Railroaded part is the only thing I do not like about its story. While I do believe Undertale would handle it better when it came out, even then I still think it had some issues.

Anyway here's my PPT list, at least what comes to mind right now:

• Always Chaotic Evil and Always Lawful Good. It just comes off as lazy-ish world building to have a "good race" and/or "evil race" where literally every member is pure of heart/a murderous jackass, and that's without getting in to the implications that poor use of them may carry.
• The Chosen One, Because Destiny Says So, Showy Invincible Hero (I'm... fine with Comically Invincible Hero though), etc... I don't like stories about the main character either being born better than everyone else or getting handed some gift that makes them stronger than anybody else. I don't find a hero winning every fight and saving the world just because it was literally in their blood or something to be very compelling.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet. Depending on the other rules of time travel, it doesn't make sense that meeting your past self is an inherant paradox. There's the obvious solution that it could play off in a Stable Time Loop where the "past" version of someone first sees the "future" version, then later "becomes" that future version after going back in time. Plus the whole "touching a past version causes explosion" raises the question about air molecules or microbes that were breathed out/taken with the time traveller drifting through the air and meeting their own past selves, if that sort of thing would also cause random explosions depending on the number of time travellers. Gah, I just dislike Time Travel in general.
• Soft Water just because it's in almost every video game. In fact Dwarf Fortress is the only exception in games I'm familiar with, at least that comes to mind right away. I even reach the point where I try to avoid using water to negate fall damage unless it's absolutely required in the game. (eg The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's opening.)
• Recycled Script. Particularly, like, sequels of games and stuff. It's not as bad as some of the others, but I'm disappointed in a sequel to a game or movie, or a new story arc if it just heavily takes the same story beats as the previous one, just "bigger and flashier."
• All the Worlds Are a Stage, some times. It can be neat if done right, but don't like it if the final level of a game is just "Here go through an abridged version of the whole game all over again;" where you've already seen everything unique the game had to offer by the start of the final level except the final boss, and the last stretch is just the game's content again.
• Will They or Won't They?, Last-Minute Hookup, etc. I'm neutral on the idea of a story just having romance, but oh dear lord, please write that romance in some way other than having the two main characters constantly being in denial over hooking up and yet everyone around them pushing the two as a couple, until they kiss at the last picosecond.
• This one's a bit random but Godiva Hair, specifically the common chest variant. No idea why, but I've always disliked that look. I would seriously prefer if a work covers bare chests through pretty much any other method, no matter how distracting or bizarre. I just don't like the whole "magical hair that happens to be in two spots to keep modesty, even with wind-blowing, the person being upside down and doing complex acrobatics, etc," and I have no idea why. Heck for some reason I mind it less if the hair doesn't drape directly over the chest, like with Bayonetta's demon summoning.
• Also it's not quite one single trope but I seriously dislike sexual harassment being played for humor and/or fanservice. I will immediately be turned off a work if there's a glorified creeper in it. Looking at you, Seven Deadly Sins.

Edit: Sorry this is a bit jumbled and disorganized, I've written like three different drafts of trope lists on different days that I scrapped, I just wanted to get a post out here so I didn't do too much looking over or planning this out.

Edited by greatpikminfan on Aug 31st 2023 at 6:26:00 AM

Hahaha, I had a very similar rant about Never the Selves Shall Meet / "Don't disturb anything in the other universe" in general because I agree, the line gets drawn arbitrarily and doesn't account for the very fact that by existing in the AU / other timelines at all the character would be breathing new air and displacing new molecules.

One trope I've grown to dislike (not sure if there's a name for it) is one common in fantasy and sci-fi. Specifically, when a setting as hostile or benevolent races/species, they make the hostile ones look obviously mean and threatening and the benevolent ones look cute and friendly. It's doesn't bother me too much if it only pertains to things like the aesthetics of their armor or buildings but not the species itself. I can be a bit more forgiving in fantasy works if they establish that their appearance is due to some kind of magic, but its pretty egregious in more scientific works.

Beauty Equals Goodness and HG Wells' influence writ large.

For my part I plan on maintaining beauty and cuteness standards across the entire cast, partly to avoid the whole ugly=evil thing.