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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 25, 2021 17:21:19 GMT -5
If we've done anything like this feel free to shunt it there, but I can't remember it.
What are some of the tropes that drive you nuts and just need to STOP! This clearly a comic initiated thread, but they tend to run across media.
This was brought to you by Ice Cream Man #7, a very modern comic that 100% should know better. In it we get a police officer saying they have to wait 72 hours before they can investigate a missing child. Usually it's 24 hours, so this was trebly flabbergasting. That rule does not exist. To the best of my knowledge it has never existed. In fact it's 100% counter productive. If you don't find a missing person in the first 72 hours the chances of finding them alive plummet.
This needs to stop now!
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Post by berkley on Aug 25, 2021 20:26:49 GMT -5
One that I especially hate and that I've complained about many times is building up one character at the expense of another. Trying to make your character seem cool by having him/her defeat and belittle another one always rubs me the wrong way: doesn't matter if I've never heard of the characters in question or even if the one being boosted is a favourite and the other isn't, it'll always be lame and a sign of bad, lazy writing to me.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Aug 25, 2021 21:04:49 GMT -5
One that I especially hate and that I've complained about many times is building up one character at the expense of another. Trying to make your character seem cool by having him/her defeat and belittle another one always rubs me the wrong way: doesn't matter if I've never heard of the characters in question or even if the one being boosted is a favourite and the other isn't, it'll always be lame and a sign of bad, lazy writing to me. I especially hated Doctor Voodoo bitch-slapping Dormammu so that new readers who didn't know him would think he was stronger than Dr. Strange and worthy to be the new Sorcerer Supreme. **** Another tired trope that has to stop: saying that someone is "the next step in human evolution". That makes no sense whatsoever. Evolution doesn't work like that, and can't be observed from one generation to the next (and certainly not in a single individual). The entire concept depends on a progressive change in allelic frequency in a population, something that can only be determined in hindsight, and usually after many, many, many generations.
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Post by kirby101 on Aug 25, 2021 21:16:53 GMT -5
Humans only use 10% of their brains. No, they use pretty much all of it, all the time. Just that some have better brains or learned to use them better.
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Post by Hoosier X on Aug 25, 2021 21:20:43 GMT -5
Batman villains attacking the Batman family because they think all these hangers-on make Batman weak.
STOP IT!
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Post by wildfire2099 on Aug 25, 2021 21:53:38 GMT -5
We just talked about this in the book review thread (which I suspect prompted Slam to start the thread)..
Any smart person that's some sort of 'scientist' is an expert in every field ever.
this one is a newer one... why do that have to mash up characters when they're adapting things (Like Dick Grayson using Tim Drake's staff, or being a computer expert).. just pick one!
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Post by Calidore on Aug 25, 2021 22:03:49 GMT -5
Any smart person that's some sort of 'scientist' is an expert in every field ever. Reminded me of this.
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Post by spoon on Aug 25, 2021 23:09:41 GMT -5
A character has a mysterious past. But then the cast runs into a character who knows mysterious guy from way back when . . . and another person, and another, and another. Until eventually half the universe is old friend/foe/acquaintance of the guy who was supposed to be shrouded in mystery. How many people knew Wolverine way back when?
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Aug 26, 2021 7:10:30 GMT -5
As seen in an early Star Trek episode and so many other places: a chess player pulling a surprise checkmate on an opponent who's supposed to know how to play. Especially silly when Mr. Spock loses! I'd expect him to have calculated all the possible situations five moves in advance!
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Post by EdoBosnar on Aug 26, 2021 8:40:15 GMT -5
A recent one that tends to bother me - and which was pointed out recently by someone (maybe Greg Hatcher?) on fb - is the "person with substance abuse problem who talks to a deceased relative/friend/spouse/next-door neighbor/etc." trope. I've noticed that it mainly pops up in TV shows over the past roughly two decades and it's just really annoying, as it's often presented as something quirky and almost humorous, when in fact it's an indication that said individual really needs psychiatric help.
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Post by Dizzy D on Aug 26, 2021 8:56:43 GMT -5
No1 and this one is very high on my list: The villain has planted a bomb/kidnapped a loved one etc. The "hero" (and I use the quotes with full intend here) beats up one of the villain's mooks (or makes a mook think that the hero is going to beat him up, because the hero is "too noble" to actually hurt a disarmed person) and the scared mook tells the hero everything. Well, this is basically torture and as we've seen throughout history: torture doesn't work to get information. Every professional interrogator and investigator knows it doesn't. But fiction sure loves their hard man making tough decisions. If would we could just stop using this, maybe less people would believe that it works.
Some person's heart stops beating, but the hero/doctor/clever protagonist restores his heartbeat with an electric shock, an improvesed device or even an actual defibrilator... YOU DON"T SHOCK A FLATINE. It's called a defibrilator to stop fibrillations (rapid/arythmic heartbeats), hence the name. Instead you are very likely just making things worse.
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Post by Dizzy D on Aug 26, 2021 9:04:16 GMT -5
We just talked about this in the book review thread (which I suspect prompted Slam to start the thread).. Any smart person that's some sort of 'scientist' is an expert in every field ever. this one is a newer one... why do that have to mash up characters when they're adapting things (Like Dick Grayson using Tim Drake's staff, or being a computer expert).. just pick one! My favourite example of that one is from the original X-Men run, where they try to subvert it, but probably make it worse:
Bolivar Trask is an anthropologist. Bolivar Trask builds giant robots (Sentinels) that he programs to protect humans from Sentinels. Sentinels turn against him, because in-story reason: [paraphrased]He was an anthropologist, not somebody with knowledge of robotics.[paraphrased] ... For somebody who is working outside of his field of knowledge, he's doing *really* well as behaviour aside, the Sentinels are very complex machines and their programming, while flawed, is still fully functional. By explicitly drawing attention to his supposed limitation, they just made his accomplishments even more absurd.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 26, 2021 9:48:09 GMT -5
One and a corollary that I don't see as often but were ubiquitous, particularly in genre fiction and comics for at least a century that never cease to drive me nuts.
Love at first sight: Yeah...I get that this happens in real life. I also think it's stupid there. It's more often lust at first sight, which I absolutely understand, but people can't face up to that. But this was just the standard way for man and woman to get together in comics and genre fiction for so long.
The corollary actually drives me even more nuts: "I'll let everyone go if heroine X marries me." Let's see, you're the dictator of BeEfDeastan, the most powerful person in the country, but you MUST marry this arbitrary woman that you know nothing about, almost certainly have no common interests and is guaranteed to despise you and want poison your oatmeal, but sure. Burroughs was horrible for this one. And I've seen it already a few times in early MU stories. It drives me bat-guano crazy.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2021 9:49:17 GMT -5
If we've done anything like this feel free to shunt it there, but I can't remember it. What are some of the tropes that drive you nuts and just need to STOP! This clearly a comic initiated thread, but they tend to run across media. This was brought to you by Ice Cream Man #7, a very modern comic that 100% should know better. In it we get a police officer saying they have to wait 72 hours before they can investigate a missing child. Usually it's 24 hours, so this was trebly flabbergasting. That rule does not exist. To the best of my knowledge it has never existed. In fact it's 100% counter productive. If you don't find a missing person in the first 72 hours the chances of finding them alive plummet. This needs to stop now! hmm. . . .
ok, I'm not sure if this would count as a myth tho, because times have certainly changed and in the 70's-80's, the police often DID wait up to 72 hours to do much investigation when someone was reported missing.
it might not have been a hard "rule". . . but I recently watched an excellent docu-series on 5 serial killers operating in the USA from late 70's-early 90's (Gacy, Bundy, Green River Killer, BTK, & Dahmer), and the main reason that (in particular) Gacy & Bundy got away with it for so long was due to the Police waiting ~3 days before actively pursuing a Missing person (to see if they make their way back home eventually).
to be fair, the fact they all also primarily targeted groups that no one would really notice right away if they went missing (such as Prostitutes, or teenagers during the height of runaway/hitchiking times).
the docuseries actually made a point that Police work changed in the mid 80's to NOT wait up to 3 days to start investigating when someone is reported missing.
which is NOT to say you don't have a point - it doesn't seem like it ever was a hard/fast rule. . .. but it did factor into Missing Persons cases back then (per the Docuseries).
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Post by Deleted on Aug 26, 2021 9:49:57 GMT -5
as to my personal trope that I find annoying?
"everything you know (or thought you know) is WRONG"
ugh..I hate that.
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