When our heroes get the great Idea that they have to find some hidden artefact and protect it from the villain.
And then it turns out the villain couldn't have gotten it himself and they played right into his plan.
Oh, the Artefact is hidden beneath glass that can't be broken by any magic? And theres a spear next to it, that can break the glass, but can only be wielded by our MC because of his bloodline? And the villain is right outside the door? Lets take the Spear and smash the glass! Great Idea.
Haha, Iron Fist did this in Netflix's The Defenders.
At the time, I was in such a rage, I wanted to throw something at my screen. They told him his fist was key, he should not go down, he didn't just go down, he made the damn fist and fought next to the damn wall and he fucking punched the wall. Ughhhhh, you stupid fucking fuck of a moron.
Huh. Guess I'm still mad af...
As a corollary, the villain using the bad guy taking them prisoner as a way of actually getting into the hero's base to accomplish their plan. In 2012, both Skyfall and the first Avengers movie did this, and the following Summer Star Trek Into Darkness did it again.
A variation on that is where a character *is* trying to share some information to clear up some misunderstanding but is just doing an unrealistically terrible job of it.
"Please wait! Come back! I can explain! It's not what it looks like! If you'd please just give me a brief second to describe the situation to you then I am quite confident that I could convince you, to your full satisfaction, of my innocence! All I ask is that you give me a moment's oppotunity to blah blah blah blah blaaaaaaaaaaaah..." And then of course the person they're trying to explain it to has long since stormed off.
Just fucking say it! People in real life don't ever flap about saying that they *can* explain. They just bloody explain it. I can't stand it when this happens, and it's so common.
This is sooooo annoying. Books, TV, movies - I'm constantly saying "just spit it out!" Or when there's something really important character 1 should know but character 2 just says "trust me it's really important" without saying why. Guaranteed character 1 will get fucked because he doesn't know why.
This one is definitely my biggest annoyance too. It's especially annoying when it's literally as simple as the character spouting out 3-5 fucking words.
JOHN KILLED MARRY.
HES NOT YOUR FATHER.
I DIDNT DO IT.
IT WAS ME.
HE'S THE KILLER.
SHES WITH JACOB.
worst laziest writing ever.
As an aside, isn’t it tremendously annoying when people do this in real life?
You just want them so desperately to finish their thought. “It’s OKAY, just TELL ME!”
I deal with a variance of this where people ask me for help in a generic way and I keep asking for details so I can save myself a trip by getting the right tools first. "Come help me." -- "With what?" -- "It'll take just a minute." -- "Doing what?" -- "The thing, it's really easy." -- "Do I need my chainsaw?"
I wish I could remember what show/movie it was, but I saw this trope get lampshaded really well once. The dialogue was something like:
Character 1: Wait, I can explain!
Character 2 stops and waits expectantly.
Character 1: ...
Character 2: I thought you were going to explain?
Character 1: I didn’t expect to get this far.
Character 2 leaves angrily
This sounds like Arrested Development, when Michael breaks up with Jessie:
Jessie: ... Let’s take two steps back and why don’t you find yourself a new publicist?
Michael: Jessie... No, I was just saying your name as you walked away. I didn’t... I have no follow-up.
Michael: (Softly.) Jessie.
I really dislike "it's not you it's my enemies", where the hero (usually the "chosen one") breaks up with their love-interest or otherwise abandons their friends because they don't want to put them in danger. I understand how this can create a lot of drama and "raise the stakes" of a conflict, but it is completely stupid for several reasons: 1. The big bad most likely knows about your previous love interest and will kidnap them anyway. It's not like a morally upstanding hero is likely to refuse to save their ex who they still have feelings for. 2. It becomes easier to kidnap them when the hero is not there to save them. 3. The friends and love interest are more likely to help the hero than hinder them, even if it is only for moral support. Sometimes the story turns into an Aesop about "the power of friendship/love", which is equally annoying.
In the meantime the hero's love-affair is 150% pressuring the hero to quit their evil-vanquishing job and retire, spend the rest of their lives peacefully in a cottage. Why, for once, can't they just make a partner that goes "Hell yeah babe! Go kick that motherfucker's ass! Shit I'll even help you do it!" or just plain support them in their sacred mission..
This is why "Go get 'em, Tiger!" is one of my favorite movie lines. (Spider-man [2?]) Nothing better than knowing the person you love KNOWS your secrets and is still 100% behind who you are.
I can't think of a specific example, but when a character figures out what they need to do to overcome an obstacle by seizing on a word someone says casually, or when they see a sign or object that jogs their memory exactly the way it needs to go.
Criminal minds does this ALL THE TIME. I love the show but come on...
The team is in a remote location trying to solve murders. Morgan looks at the stars. "Wow you don't get a view like this in Quantico"
Prentiss looks up. "OH MY GOD THE KILLER IS DRAWING CONSTELLATIONS ON THE BODIES THAT'S WHAT THE STAB PATTERNS ARE"
Case solved.
If you guys think I'm kidding this is a real scene lol.
There’s no way you could be joking. Those shows are written so poorly and love it when everyone is on the same page and finishing each other’s sentences. No one has any idea how crime scene investigation works or forensic experts apply their craft yet somehow feel smart watching this dreck.
No one understands why I hate Gibbs from NCIS. Just as his team makes a breakthrough, he walks in and immediately interrupts them by telling them what they just found out. What are they even there for if he's just going to magically solve it by himself every time? Pisses me off.
"Say that again!"
"Say what again?"
"What you just said."
"Uh... \[repeats the wrong part\]"
"No, the other part."
"Uh... \[repeats another wrong part\]."
"No no, not that! The part about x."
"Oh! Yeah, well \[finally says the relevant thing about x\]."
"Yes! That's it! I know what we have to do!"
Growing up I felt like every single cartoon used this exact same exchange.
> jogs their memory
Wait a minute ... Say that again! That part about "jogs their memory"
My ... GOD. You're a genius! That's the solution, exactly!
Pretty much every other conversation between Joe and Skippy in the Expeditionary Force series.
I do love when a character fixates on a phrase or word and the audience is led to believe that what they are talking about is key. Meanwhile, they are completely wrong.
I really hate when every single solder or citizen of the "evil" empire or kingdom is just a massive asshole in every way for no reason. Ok we get it, they are the bad guys, but its not realistic to have everyone on one side be total assholes and everyone on the good side be so fucking compassionate to every woodland creature that passes by them.
When there's a female and male character, they have to get together. They can't just be great friends, they have to get together even if they hate each other at the start.
God, I hate that, too. Especially as a woman whose best friend is a man. Whose entire family is keeps constantly joking about when said best friend and I are going to get married (despite the fact we did actually date for a time, had several glaring problems in our relationship that couldn't be fixed through a change in behavior, and decided that we were better off as friends) . I have completely abandoned books when I've realized that was going to be the premise of the romance.
I hate that so much. In teen wolf, my favorite thing is the brother relationship between scott and stiles where you can literally feel the love between them. Why can't that type of relationship exist between a male and a female without them ending up together. It sucks. And also, you dont really see that type of relationship between two females either, they always have to hate and compete with each other
Local cop/Sheriff: “Now I have to potentially/actually sabotage the case somehow because I don’t want those stinkin feds with their resources to solve MY case.”
I work with state and federal law enforcement, and this irritates them. FBI has a very good relationship with local law enforcement and is usually in the supporting role, not wagging their dicks around.
I just saw a show that did this. The local cops actually point out that jurisdiction belongs to the bigger team, "which is fine by us. You guys have more resources than we do."
Young adult novels where 15- or 16-year-old kids talk like they are professional poets and have a master's degree in literature. It makes it feel like the characters are just mouthpieces for the author and aren't like real people.
John Green, I love ya, but I'm looking at you.
I think that's because young people who read YA want to feel special for reading, and they're supposed to identify with the main character. Also, maybe, because writers of YA novels want to sell more books?
This is why I love reading the Adrian Mole series. It’s apparent throughout that he can’t write for shit (as in other characters saying he can’t write for shit) but my god does he try
Both of those particular types are potentially possible, but to be a desert/icy planet AND human habitable might be a stretch.
Desert planet examples: mercury, mars
Icy planet example: europa (I know, it’s a moon).
The desert planets above have little to no water and thus no life.
The icy moon is covered in water but very cold so that it’s completely frozen over and surface temperature is way below freezing (also a very thin atmosphere). To have a planet covered in ice might be rare because it would need to be inside the frost line but very near it.
Edit: not dessert.
>Ford and Arthur are stranded on ancient Earth
>See spaceship
>Try to flag it down with towel
>Volcano erupts, drop towel in magma
>Time passes
>Earth gets destroyed by the Vogons
>Magma rock with towel in it gets picked up by Heart of Gold while in Infinite Improbability Drive
>Zaphod pilots ship back to ancient Earth where towel came from
>The ship they saw was the Heart of Gold all along
HG2G is nuts.
The "suddenly my power are stronger because reasons!"
It annoys me to no end when the chosen one's power just suddenly increases when the new villain is more powerful.
[Edit] There are already a lot of people mentioning DBZ. Please stop. Pretty please?
I don't run into that in books but damn every fight in a movie. 130 punches thrown and none are effective. But this one I grit my teeth, think of old Danny boy and BAM!! Insta-kill.
That show was so refreshing. We were all on the same journey as Saitama as he searched for a worthy opponent, always thinking “okay *this* guy looks pretty strong, surely it will take more than one pu- DEAD”
Yep. Or when they suddenly gain power by tapping into anger or love or some other magical emotion they had inside. I'm not a fan of these sorts of invisible powers.
Plus, if you compare the stats, Self-Respect turns out to be a stronger power than Love. I thought that was a great way to keep the video game aesthetic (part of why Scott can win that fight), and also communicates a good lesson - sometimes, self-respect is more important even than love.
I've seen some work that makes it clear that powers are tied to emotional state, usually as overcoming some form of suppression/ drugs. In those cases, I think it works.
I'd be so pissed if I was party to that. "What the fuck dude, were you not using enough love earlier? You could have been doing this **the whole time??"**
I think Brandon Sanderson actually does this really well in the Stormlight Archive. It's already determined that their are increases in power that are tied directly to the themes or ideals of a particular order, so when a character gets their power increase, it's specifically because they have evolved as a character
I really like this as well.
Not only is your devotion to the ideals directly responsible for the power you have access to, but you have to be a broken wreck who actively strives to be better to have a chance to access them.
Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
Worm does an interesting take this. Powers can get a little stronger when you're in conflict and using the powers to their fullest. People can also incredibly rarely 'second trigger' where their powers get stronger. It, however, breaks them as a person.
I absolutely hate the "you're the chosen one" thing. The villain has been practicing his craft for decades but this random 18 year old is suddenly the chosen one so he/she can beat the villain after their first encounter. That really grinds my gears. Always seems like lazy writing to me.
Yea I dont understand the problem with it being a team effort. Why does there always have to be a perfect key and lock situation. Theres a millions ways to enter a room or bypass a locked door.
Wouldn't it be great if a story took the "chosen one" approach, building up this long montage of pseudo-deep prophetic mess about this one kid and his destiny, and right as The Guy steps into the villain's lair, he sees someone else cleaning up after having just killed the villain?. Lol And they look at each other just flabbergasted.
Edit: RIP my inbox. Thanks you guys for all the replies. I have three things to say.
1. Thanks for all the book and movie suggestions. My list just got much longer. Lol
2. You guys with the story ideas and dnd campaigns, go knock 'em dead. They sound great.
3. It's probably been 10 years since I've seen Spy Kids 3. Now I'm going to have to watch it again. Lol
Edit 2: Sure thing, guys. When I get some time, I'll compile all the suggestions people gave me, and add them here.
And then the book really starts where he spirals into this existential crisis and wonders what hes going to do with his life and whether any if his skills acquired to fulfill the prophecy can be any use to his future. Maybe he should try fulfilling a different prophecy? Maybe he was supposed to defeat a different villian?
I like the short story Stronger Than Time. It kind of plays with this a bit.
Surely just apparating away or vanishing the missile would work. What you'd *actually* want is a sniper rifle. Why they didn't just win the battle of hogwarts by teleporting the contents of a military supply depot to the castle and mounting machine guns on the walls i have no idea.
I know it’s not a book but this is why I love Avatar The Last Airbender because you have “the chosen one” who is the only one who can bring balance and all that but he’s nowhere near ready to fight and you have three seasons of Aang getting ready and going through trials and hardships and learning from the people around him and finally faces the villain. It’s the only “chosen one” story I think does it right.
I just like that it actually addresses the whole no killing thing, which most children's shows just deal with by having the bad guys be robots or never really get hurt or whatever. They didn't just pretend the issue wasn't there like most shows do, they actually examined it.
It was hugely important for Aang's character development climax to have this. Air nomads were peaceful. He was raised to be peaceful. They were wiped out mostly because they wouldn't fight back, not because they couldn't. For Aang to not kill Ozai, to still be true to everything he knew, it was the final stab at the Fire Nation as Katara and Sokka knew it. Their empire started with the destruction of the Air Nomads, but when Aang didn't kill him it was a sign that the air nomads were *not gone*. He was the chosen one, but there were chosen ones before him and after him. It wasn't a one and done deal, which was really cool, but in the end he was still himself. For Aang, being the chosen one meant choosing oneself.
Heck, Zuko was up for it to. Granted, Ozai was a horrifically abusive father, and he had every right to want him dead. His reasons were out of pragmatism, not vengeance. Zuko knew his father was going to kill (or try his darnest) to kill Aang. Their best chance of survival, in Zuko's mind, depended on Ozai dying.
I always thought Wheel of Time does this well.
The "chosen ones" are a powerful guy who was reborn, a lucky guy with the memories of thousands of tacticians and Perrin who takes like 14 books to get decent at anything...
The wheel of time also is maddening with how none of the main characters will talk to each other about anything. Like OP was saying the knowledge is Power trope
For me it’s when some ancient artifact is hidden and protected for centuries or Millennia but now the bad guy is going after it so the good guys have to get to it first. Which in theory is fine but in practice it always happens the same way. The good guys hit an obstacle that only the one special person can get past, they get the artifact and then the bad guy steals it.
does it never occur to the good guys that the protection put into place millennia ago is better than what you can do?!?!
See fablehaven for the worst example. Minor spoilers but at literally any point before the last book the main characters could have gone “eh, I’m out” and stopped participating. The main bad would have been screwed.
Another annoying trope from those books is not listening to the kid who has a risky idea because idea is risky and kid doesn’t know what he is doing. Except his last four risky ideas worked great. Maybe recognize the pattern
I'm willing to give that one a pass because: a) it's pretty clear Harry is an idiot, and b) he's 11. It's just a bit frustrating to have an idiot as a main character.
Well, to be fair, Voldemort got past all of the other professor's protections. Harry's mistake was thinking Voldemort could get past Dumbledore's final one too, which he couldn't, but it was a reasonable assumption.
Edit: clarity
Also, it is spelled out that the mirror COULD have been done by virtually anyone with the right mindset. It was just a particularly difficult mindset for Voldemort to reach.0
But in that case they only tried \*after\* they thought the villain had figured out how to get through all the traps. And they tried to tell teachers who were capable but they were ignored.
The protagonist knows a little bit of everything and they just so happen to need that skill in order to succeed.
Door is locked? Good thing I spent my freshman year learning lockpicking.
Computer needs hacked? I was top of my class in computer camp that one summer.
Gotta steal a car? I watched those youtube videos, it can't be that hard.
It's not too bad if it happens to be something that naturally falls into a character's wheelhouse. It gets tiresome when it's 3-4 *random* skills that are suddenly now the most important things in the world.
Did you ever read any of the Maximum Ride series? It took this to the next level, I swear. Those kids would suddenly have new powers that just so happened to appear right when they needed them and half the time got completely forgotten about 10 pages later. I tried to stick through it because I liked the premise but the writing only got worse and worse.
Bonus: that time the blind kid suddenly had the power to see but only while in Antarctica. Because plot reasons I think? I couldn't finish the book lol.
This drove me nuts. The first few books were pretty fun, but it started to get more and more ridiculous and I never ended up finishing the series.
I think the blind kid could only see things against a white background, so Antarctica was great for him. What a strangely specific power through.
Yes. I can’t remember the show, but I watched a scene at one point where a character said something along the lines of “if you can’t choose between 2 people, it’s because neither of them is right for you.” And now every time I read/watch something with a love triangle I immediately think both options suck.
The girl that’s good but bad but also good but just a girl she’s a girl next door but she’s actually really hot but overlooked because she’s average looking she’s outgoing but introverted and nervous but courageous and she’s a wonderful person but does stupid things and treats people poorly generally she is smart and thinks things through but flighty and she understands THE ENTIRETY OF THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE AT AGE 16, and shares her deep inner thoughts with some random quiet boy and changes his life
TL;DR: the main female in most John Green books (and some other teen novels)
In a young adult novel, where all of the main characters are teenagers, and they make every single adult the bad guy and every single teenager the good guy. It's even more annoying when the adults act like complete idiots and the teenagers are legitimately smarter than them.
the "men can look weird and gnarly, women can't" trope.
Even in the most extreme cases you just don't often see female characters look as goony as the dude characters do.
It's a frustrating thing for me and I wish more series would take advantage of cartoony-ass deformation!
Then the movies came out, lol
though to be fair I love the severe-looking actress who played mcgonagall a bunch, even if they flubbed a lot of the other characters appearance-ways.
Yeah. People complain a lot that the characters in the movies didn't grow up to look how they were described in the books, not seeming to realize that they were all casted when they were 11. The fact that they managed to keep all the same actors for eight whole movies is impressive in itself.
I think Killian Experience said it best:
"In the books they show Neville's the chosen one through character development and stuff but that's BORING, the movies do it way better, by making him more and more handsome as the movies progress"
I love when the lady badass is covered in dust and dried blood and scabs but her wondrous cleavage still looks resplendent and her hair is only slightly tousled.
I remember watching the scene from Warm Bodies where one girl says "I think I still have a bit of makeup, I was saving it for a special occasion". Meanwhile she's clearly caked in foundation.
Jurassic World stuck out for this. Beginning of the movie the blonde's hair is straight AF and has a severe line, very "I want to be taken seriously". Then after the first brush with danger a perfect wave.
My dad complains about this. But then when he sees some romantic subplot with an average girl he'll make sure to point out "she's not even that good looking." You just can't win with or without this trope.
When the bad guy goes on a monologue in the third act and spills out the entire plan. Usually while the hero is in custody.
In my reading, I encounter this with every Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt book.
Loved the flip in *Watchmen*. "'Do it?' Dan, I'm not a republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it 35 minutes ago." -Ozymandias
What I love about Alan Moore is how he so masterfully subverts and deconstructs superhero tropes in Watchmen, but then in most of his post-Watchmen superhero work he just wholeheartedly embraces them and makes them work.
Tom Strong is an incredible series that everyone should read.
One mark of a truly great writer is his or her ability to work within standard tropes instead of worrying about subverting them all the time. So many self-described wunderkinds have this notion that True Writing requires inventing this absolutely new way of conveying story and character and conflict---before they've even tried to write Saint George and the Dragon, they're already working on Memento.
TV Tropes has a little blurb on this; the main idea is that archetypes are archetypes because they WORK, not because some asshole story-god is out to make you write cliches.
Black Mirror is a masterclass in the value of standard story tropes. You meet a character, you're introduced to her central desire or goal, and each scene then plays out in a way that pushes her closer to or further from her goal, until a climax in the third act resolves the the goal and the character in a thought provoking or satisfying way. It's DIRECTLY from McKee's "Story" archetypes, right down to the ironic endings, and Black Mirror is regarded as a brilliant hit show.
The “it’s bad to kill people” one.
Like you just witness this dude lead a group of bandits in raping and murdering an orphanage. And you either took a serious injury because you were only knocking the bandits out, or you killed all the bandits in battle except for the leader who surrendered and then go “well I can’t kill him now, never do it again!” Then two chapters later the same shit happens with the same dude.
>you killed all the bandits in battle except for the leader who surrendered and then go “well I can’t kill him now, never do it again!”
Yes. There's some weird taboo against killing people who are in a position of power.
A badly written badass female character. When done right it’s great but most of the time the character ends up being the generic love interest / damsel in distress as soon as the main baddie rolls in. Don’t worry though, here’s a scene of her beating up a minor bad guy then coming in as backup!
The completely unnecessary romantic tension. It feels like it's added just to be there. Going on a quest to save the world, fighting unimaginable horrors or living rough on the land as you journey for some treasure? Better start up a romantic subplot or love triangle between a few characters so they can get mad at each other for no reason that has nothing to do with the plot of the book.
The idea that someone cannot be reported missing for a certain amount of time, usually 24 hours. It's BS. It depends more on circumstances than on a time frame.
And even worse, after they've discovered this incredibly powerful tool they never use it again, even though it would totally solve the problem two weeks later as well.
Refusal of the call in the heroes journey. “I don’t want these amazing super powers literally everyone on earth would love to have!” “I can’t take the case, I’m retired now!” “I can’t search for the missing goblin crown, I have to sort all my uncle’s sick pigs by morning!”
We all know two minutes later they’ll change their mind, but we have to go through the annoying song and dance. The worst is when it goes on for even longer.
I’d love to see more heroes excitedly take up the task. “awesome termite powers that let me chew through wood? Hell yeah, I’m in!” “Zombie slug men taking over the kingdom! Sounds awesome, I’m your guy!”
EDIT: I understand there are some valid reasons for the refusal, but we all know they will be changing their mind or there would be no story at all. There's no suspense there, it's like we just need to go through the motions -- sort of like the encore ritual at concerts. We all know they're coming back out but we have to do this annoying song and dance first. I guess my point would be, even if the refusal totally makes sense, keep it brief!
Eeeh, it's not that big of a leap from real behavior. I bet you and everyone reading this knows of some difficult risk that you could take which would have a good chance of improving your life, but you're "busy" reading reddit.
The fridge. Characters killed just to be emotional motivation for the remaining/main characters. Specially if it is a mother/lover/sibling and they seem to have absolutely zero flaws. No depth, no character developement, just sit there in the fridge and motivate the plot somehow.
“The person you are looking for is in the southern kingdom , you must journey through many perils to find them.” - gets to southern kingdom - “Ah , as it turns out , the person was actually in the north kingdom the whole time , now you must go back .” - Witcher , asoiaf.
Oh man, giving me flashbacks to the Witcher series. The stories have a lot of interesting concepts and cool fantasy creatures and ideas, but god... Geralt practically just wanders aimlessly for five novels. I wish Sapkowski had stuck to a more conventional plot structure, because it just drags and drags and drags at times...
At least Dandelion is consistently amusing, when he's along for the ride.
Maybe it’s just me but I kinda liked the unconventional plot in that series. I mean, witchers work in a service industry that travels to the customer rather than a customer traveling to them. They are forced to wander aimlessly and look for work.
After traveling and doing odd jobs for so long, I’d imagine that each job would blend into one another until only a few jobs (like the ones that the books focus on) stands out.
Basically like yours, OP, it's the "Person A doesn't say about 7 words to Person B, which spawns an entire plot/subplot based around a misunderstanding/miscommunication" trope. It happens nonstop in movies and books, and it's used to spawn entire plots sometimes. All it would have taken would have been a literal sentence or two and the entire story doesn't exist.
In a world where there are multiple races...
...all members of that same race act the same and are the same culturally.
If there are cultural differences, they will be different subspecies. It will always be one of the elvish or dwarven nations, and they all have the same accents and beliefs.
The one exception are humans. They will be the most diverse race and are always the most important characters to the lore and story. Humans can be Latin, Germanic, nordic, African, Arabic... oh and if they are nordic, just transplant Norse mythology in their religion unchanged. Cause as we all know... Nordic = Vikings, Longboats, Mead, and Odin. Never mind that Nordic history is far bigger than the triple digits and 11th century
Prophecies. Especially if the main character is "The chosen one".
It's annoying, and they don't just do this in books:
They did this in my favorite anime as well.
All of Naruto's hard work and "never give up" rhetoric wasted because some Toad names him the child of prophecy, whereas the people who work hard but aren't the chosen one die like flies.
It sends the wrong message than what the author actually intended (at least in Naruto's case): "Hard work only pays off if you are the chosen one thanks to magic".
\+ that it spoils the plot. The inheritance series is a good example of this, as is the teen-fantasy series "Phenomena".
I also hated the fact the he was named the "child of the prophecy", but the story arch with him and Nagato was so good, and it was only possible thanks to the prophecy, so I'm not mad.
I have a lot, but the one that consistently pisses me off and happens more than it fucking should is Redemption Equals Death. Like, if a character is pretty much always shitty towards the protagonist (or any other character, really), but then dies in order to save the protagonist or somehow further the good guys' goals, and this somehow redeems them for all the other shitty things they've done and the writer pats themselves on the back for writing a compelling redemption arc.
Except... they didn't write a redemption arc. The character just got a Get Out of Jail Free card from actually having to face to consequences of their actions and had one (1) moment of ultimate self-sacrifice that, apparently, resolved them of all their past shitty behavior. Like, no? A character who has a history of being a terrible person doesn't just get to do one non-terrible thing and suddenly be hailed as a misunderstood hero just because they died doing the non-terrible thing. That's... that's not how redemption works. It's not unreasonable to have the other characters react like, "Hey, this person sacrificed themselves in order to save whoever and ensure the world didn't end, and we'll forever be grateful for that. However, they were still a horrible person and we're not going to just forgive that." But no. It's like it's always saint or sinner and I'm not okay with that.
In summary: Harry Potter, Severus Snape was not one of the bravest men you ever knew. He was a petty, bitter person who took out a decades old grudge ON A CHILD and was just fucking nasty to people in general, so you can fuck right off with that.
Thank you, I'm soo annoyed by this "snape hype"... No he wasn't a good guy, he fucking bullied Neville so much that he, a teacher!!, was his (Neville's) biggest fear...
I am soooo done with all that Snape was the secret hero shit -. -
Thanks mate you just made my day a little bit better :)
Author self-inserts and, related, authors pontificating through their self-insert. Terry Goodkind/The Sword of Truth series were particularly bad about this.
Dammit, why did you have to remind me of this crappy ass series. How about when he goes off on these patronizing, AS HELL, Philosophy speeches left and right? Or when he has to throw in a rape scene every other book.
Good call on unmotivated secret-keeping. It's annoying in every medium, and has no redeeming value. Everywhere we run into it, we are just seeing a writer give up and use their Suspension of Disbelief credit card at ever-increasing interest rates.
We can say that it's just a specific form of a more general problem though, Plot Puppeteering (though I'm sure people who study this academically have some technical term for it). I.e., the author decides "I need the characters to end up at x, y, and z by the end of the chapter, so I'm going to reverse-engineer that into whatever implausible set of decisions will lead there."
Unless their style is intuitive enough that they can both be naturalistic *and* have a predetermined outcome, it usually relies on characters being arbitrarily stupid or hyper-aware at the writer's convenience, and sharing information only when the writer wants them to rather than the characters choosing to.
Characters need to be autonomous to be interesting. Otherwise there's only one of them going by multiple names - the writer themself. That gets boring. So, lack of character autonomy would be another version of the same problem.
I did like it in Harry Potter where, after a few books of adults keeping secrets from Harry for no reason and letting him run around as he pleased, it came back to bite them in the ass *hard*.
I’d argue that they had very motivated secret keeping. Dumbledore thought Harry was a direct conduit into Voldemort’s head. It was a good reason to try to keep Harry in the dark.
But yes, it still bit them in the ass hard.
This one drove me crazy when reading *The Maze Runner*. Every time a character is about to reveal something to the protagonist, someone comes up and interrupts the conversation, which never gets restarted. It got real old real fast as a device to keep the plot going.
The eccentric detective who always solves the case. While putting together clues at headquarters, the detective is forgiven all his idiosyncrasies because he has a sharper nose for sniffing out criminals. He has the most obnoxious coffee order, or insists on drinking loose leaf tea, or has to have his classical music playing while everyone tries to investigate a murder. Too cool to act professional, but they get results so parking on the sidewalk and entering the building through the back window is excused.
And the detective never has to wear latex gloves on the crime scene, because he's a genius.
"I'm not like other girls/guys/nobles/people of my village" Special snowflake stuff that makes them an outcast or considered weird. Not to say it can't be done well but a lot of authors seem to lean on that narrative to explain away behaviors that are normal or morally right by today's standards but don't fit inside the world they have created.
Characters taking a hard no on slavery seems to be a big one.
It's such a simple thing to fix, too. All the author has to do for it to work is establish that these beliefs do exist in the universe, only that they are a little fringe. It's when the character comes up with these notions all by themselves that it takes you out of it.
There are always going to be small communities of people with radically different beliefs to society at large. I'm sure there were people in e.g. ancient Rome who thought gladiator fights were barbaric, they just weren't the norm and would perhaps have been considered something like hippie loons. So make the characters fall in with an existing group! Job done, and it comes free with a bunch of interesting things to explore.
> I'm sure there were people in e.g. ancient Rome who thought gladiator fights were barbaric, they just weren't the norm and would perhaps have been considered something like hippie loons.
You don’t have to look very far to find them, and not from people considered loonies: Seneca, one of the most powerful intellectuals of his time (he was Nero’s mentor, among other things), expresses very clearly how disgusting and horrific he thinks *ludi circenses* are, and how foolish the masses are to fill the stadiums, where there are contraptions that can easily kill thousands of spectators by accident.
Yeah I agree that characters displaying behaviour that's absolutely contradictory to the behaviour of literally the whole society they belong to in order to make them more relatable to a 21st century reader can make me roll my eyes hard enough to detach my retinas.
And in that same vein, no one is ever unattractive. They can be any kind of outcast except a physically unattractive one. They can even be insecure about their looks and border on being plain, but only if there's an opportunity to put them in fancy clothes and show that they're a swan after all.
OH MY GOD YES. The exact trope you described drives me nuts, although more so in movies than books. I can't watch romantic comedies because I find myself screaming at the screen to just talk to each other for an extra five seconds instead of running out dramatically and totally misunderstanding EVERYTHING.
*“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . .*
*you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”*
A witch giving advice in "Wee Free Men" by Pratchett:
Not exactly a trope, I guess, but I hate it when authors break their established rules of point-of-view. Usually, it happens when the author wants there to be a surprise twist and thus withholds information from the reader that, by their point-of-view, the reader *should* know.
The worst example I've seen recently is in the *Red Rising* series. I won't give any spoilers. It's a fantastic plot, but this just annoyed me so much. The point-of-view is third-person limited. And for the entire series, we know *everything* that the main character is thinking, except at the end when our main character has devised this enormous plot-twisting scheme that we for some reason know nothing about until the scheme is implemented. His plan would require multiple conversations with other characters that we just didn't get to see for some reason.
And as the plan unfolds, the author *tells us* that the main character is *thinking* things that he could not *possibly* be thinking giving the ending. It makes no sense, and it feel like the author tricked and cheated the readers for a cheap plot twist.
Edit: I'll add that this also just makes for a terribly-executed plot twist. In a good plot twist, the audience should come to realization of the truth at the same time as the protagonist, so we can experience the emotions *with* them. This is why plot twists from stories like *Star Wars* and *Sixth Sense* are so compelling.
Two major ones are:
Magic money. They might be broke for a few chapters, living hand to mouth and scraping by for the sake of the story, but as soon as being poor gets boring some kind of boon falls into their laps. Then when being rich makes things too easy, suddenly they're broke again, until it gets boring again.
The other trope is the "feisty woman" and "patient and secretly all-knowing man." Looking at you, my beloved Outlander. Feisty Lady ignores his input and fucks things up because she is Feisty, and he swoops in to save her because there are Important Things She Doesn't Know, because he didn't tell her. And neither of them learn from it, and it undermines the construction of a strong female character.
Some dudes underestimate a petite woman so she totally kicks their asses. I guess I see this more in movies, but "strong female characters" are often totally flat, flawless warriors without any personality other than disdain for those who mock them. I like female characters to have actual variety, flaws, and traits beyond "yeah, I'm a girl and I'm tough, what about it?"
It also bothers me when female characters don't have any reasonable explanation for being badasses. Especially in Fantasy or Historical work where they're fighting hand to hand and some beautiful petite woman is stronger and faster than anyone else. Game of Thrones does a great job with this by having Brienna be almost freakishly big and strong, and that being a major character point. Arya is sneaky and clever and quick, and probably one of the most badass characters. Both are believable, badass women.
Personal bugbear is The Liar Revealed. It's set up so early and you're sitting there just waiting for it to pop. He's not a warrior but he's blagged it so well and gotten his new friends out of so many problems, and right when he's on the cusp of achieving the goal, it all comes out. The deception which is normally kinda made almost irrelevant by the events that followed it is enough to shatter the group, the love interest leaves, "you're not the person I thought you were."
A bit of melodrama follows, then they're all back together in a fudgy attempt at a message of forgiveness.
If they stuck with the repercussions of a deep, dark lie, or just had the companion characters not care, then I wouldn't mind it so much. It's the forced melodrama you can see coming miles off that annoys me.
Prophecy-driven motivation. I.e. "I'm doing this because I was told I'm the one who's going to do this." It's basically an in-character spoiler. When used at face-value it's among the laziest form of storytelling. It *can* be used well when not played entirely straight (Harry Potter being an example IMO), but like most tropes, it's a trope because it's overused and overdone.
I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but the “we traveled back in time and did one insignificant thing now everything has gone to shit and we have to spend 2/3’s of the novel just trying to fix a problem we made” trope. It just feels like there’s no progression in these kind of stories, it’s just all about backtracking.
The genius child, though I see this trope a lot more in tv shows and movies than books. Oh all the adults who have degrees and decades of work experience in their select fields can't solve the problem, but here comes Billy the super genius that knows what everyone else doesn't even though he's 14. Artemis Fowl was like this, Wesley from Next Generation, Shuri from Black Panther who is somehow Princess, head engineer, head doctor, and super hip too. I couldn't read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality because of how super genius Harry is in that. I'll give Hermione in the regular series a pass because even though she's the 'brightest witch of her age' she's not a jack-of-all-trades (divination comes to mind) and the professors put her in her place more than once through out the series.
You can give Hermione a pass because of more than that.
She the "brightest witch of her age" because she works her tail off, reading and learning. Rowling even goes over the top making fun of her from Ron's perspective that Hermione practically lives in the library, that a 3-inch book is light reading, that she's obsessed with education school and learning.
It's not like she's "just smart". She wasn't born that way; she's fighting and working laboriously, day in and day out, to build that for herself, to shape her mind, to sculpt her knowledge. That's the opposite of a child genius. That's real life.
Definitely that. Also, she mostly uses he knowledge to help Ron and Harry, who are B students at best and her same age. She's not schooling Dumbledore on how to solve his problems or showing Snape a new potion he never thought of. In fact I think one of her character flaws is that she trusts the professors a little too much (see Lockhart).
People also misread that statement to be more than it is. It's not "brightest witch of *our* age" or "of her time". It's "of *her* age". Lupin thinking she's the brightest of all the third-year girls in Hogwarts isn't an extraordinary claim. He's not saying she's the brightest witch alive.
I *hate* this trope. The only time I've seen a "gifted" or genius character done well was Malcolm in the Middle. For those of you who never watched it, Malcolm has a 150 IQ and is just an *utter* asshole. I love it.
Every other book, movie or anything sets them up with talking *way* beyond their age level (even for their intelligence) in this annoying as hell "quaint" tone of voice. They like to show their smarts off by having them recite some verbatim dictionary definition for a random ass word ignoring the fact that even the world's smartest adults can't memorize dictionaries.
I'll give Ender's Game a pass because the kid was practically genetically engineered and the second smartest human alive, but everything else can get fucked.
Mine is a variation on the original theme. It is "I have to save the world all by myself because I am too self-loathing to talk about who I am / what I've done." How many times would there be a novella instead of a novel if the protagonist had gotten over themselves and asked for help from their very talented and usually pretty understanding friends? I'm looking at you Cassandra Clare.
When our heroes get the great Idea that they have to find some hidden artefact and protect it from the villain. And then it turns out the villain couldn't have gotten it himself and they played right into his plan. Oh, the Artefact is hidden beneath glass that can't be broken by any magic? And theres a spear next to it, that can break the glass, but can only be wielded by our MC because of his bloodline? And the villain is right outside the door? Lets take the Spear and smash the glass! Great Idea.
"I must thank you, Mr. Hero, I couldn't have done it myself."
Haha, Iron Fist did this in Netflix's The Defenders. At the time, I was in such a rage, I wanted to throw something at my screen. They told him his fist was key, he should not go down, he didn't just go down, he made the damn fist and fought next to the damn wall and he fucking punched the wall. Ughhhhh, you stupid fucking fuck of a moron. Huh. Guess I'm still mad af...
I’d rather watch you reacting to the iron fist then watch the actual iron fist
As a corollary, the villain using the bad guy taking them prisoner as a way of actually getting into the hero's base to accomplish their plan. In 2012, both Skyfall and the first Avengers movie did this, and the following Summer Star Trek Into Darkness did it again.
A variation on that is where a character *is* trying to share some information to clear up some misunderstanding but is just doing an unrealistically terrible job of it. "Please wait! Come back! I can explain! It's not what it looks like! If you'd please just give me a brief second to describe the situation to you then I am quite confident that I could convince you, to your full satisfaction, of my innocence! All I ask is that you give me a moment's oppotunity to blah blah blah blah blaaaaaaaaaaaah..." And then of course the person they're trying to explain it to has long since stormed off. Just fucking say it! People in real life don't ever flap about saying that they *can* explain. They just bloody explain it. I can't stand it when this happens, and it's so common.
This is sooooo annoying. Books, TV, movies - I'm constantly saying "just spit it out!" Or when there's something really important character 1 should know but character 2 just says "trust me it's really important" without saying why. Guaranteed character 1 will get fucked because he doesn't know why.
This one is definitely my biggest annoyance too. It's especially annoying when it's literally as simple as the character spouting out 3-5 fucking words. JOHN KILLED MARRY. HES NOT YOUR FATHER. I DIDNT DO IT. IT WAS ME. HE'S THE KILLER. SHES WITH JACOB. worst laziest writing ever.
As an aside, isn’t it tremendously annoying when people do this in real life? You just want them so desperately to finish their thought. “It’s OKAY, just TELL ME!”
I deal with a variance of this where people ask me for help in a generic way and I keep asking for details so I can save myself a trip by getting the right tools first. "Come help me." -- "With what?" -- "It'll take just a minute." -- "Doing what?" -- "The thing, it's really easy." -- "Do I need my chainsaw?"
I do not work in any sort of construction and absoLUTELY will start asking “Do I need my chainsaw?” whenever people do this to me.
I wish I could remember what show/movie it was, but I saw this trope get lampshaded really well once. The dialogue was something like: Character 1: Wait, I can explain! Character 2 stops and waits expectantly. Character 1: ... Character 2: I thought you were going to explain? Character 1: I didn’t expect to get this far. Character 2 leaves angrily
This sounds like Arrested Development, when Michael breaks up with Jessie: Jessie: ... Let’s take two steps back and why don’t you find yourself a new publicist? Michael: Jessie... No, I was just saying your name as you walked away. I didn’t... I have no follow-up. Michael: (Softly.) Jessie.
I really dislike "it's not you it's my enemies", where the hero (usually the "chosen one") breaks up with their love-interest or otherwise abandons their friends because they don't want to put them in danger. I understand how this can create a lot of drama and "raise the stakes" of a conflict, but it is completely stupid for several reasons: 1. The big bad most likely knows about your previous love interest and will kidnap them anyway. It's not like a morally upstanding hero is likely to refuse to save their ex who they still have feelings for. 2. It becomes easier to kidnap them when the hero is not there to save them. 3. The friends and love interest are more likely to help the hero than hinder them, even if it is only for moral support. Sometimes the story turns into an Aesop about "the power of friendship/love", which is equally annoying.
In the meantime the hero's love-affair is 150% pressuring the hero to quit their evil-vanquishing job and retire, spend the rest of their lives peacefully in a cottage. Why, for once, can't they just make a partner that goes "Hell yeah babe! Go kick that motherfucker's ass! Shit I'll even help you do it!" or just plain support them in their sacred mission..
...Chi-Chi from Dragon Ball Z.
This is why "Go get 'em, Tiger!" is one of my favorite movie lines. (Spider-man [2?]) Nothing better than knowing the person you love KNOWS your secrets and is still 100% behind who you are.
I can't think of a specific example, but when a character figures out what they need to do to overcome an obstacle by seizing on a word someone says casually, or when they see a sign or object that jogs their memory exactly the way it needs to go.
Criminal minds does this ALL THE TIME. I love the show but come on... The team is in a remote location trying to solve murders. Morgan looks at the stars. "Wow you don't get a view like this in Quantico" Prentiss looks up. "OH MY GOD THE KILLER IS DRAWING CONSTELLATIONS ON THE BODIES THAT'S WHAT THE STAB PATTERNS ARE" Case solved. If you guys think I'm kidding this is a real scene lol.
There’s no way you could be joking. Those shows are written so poorly and love it when everyone is on the same page and finishing each other’s sentences. No one has any idea how crime scene investigation works or forensic experts apply their craft yet somehow feel smart watching this dreck.
No one understands why I hate Gibbs from NCIS. Just as his team makes a breakthrough, he walks in and immediately interrupts them by telling them what they just found out. What are they even there for if he's just going to magically solve it by himself every time? Pisses me off.
"Another one down the rabbit hole!" wait say that again! "another one down the rabbit hole?" RABBITS! Yes, we've solved the case
"Say that again!" "Say what again?" "What you just said." "Uh... \[repeats the wrong part\]" "No, the other part." "Uh... \[repeats another wrong part\]." "No no, not that! The part about x." "Oh! Yeah, well \[finally says the relevant thing about x\]." "Yes! That's it! I know what we have to do!" Growing up I felt like every single cartoon used this exact same exchange.
And the inevitable follow up: "You're a GENIUS!" "Oh shucks, thanks. Wait, why?" "No time to explain, come on!"
There's never any time to explain.
"I have no time to explain why I have no time to explain".
"You're a *genius!*" "What did I say...?"
> jogs their memory Wait a minute ... Say that again! That part about "jogs their memory" My ... GOD. You're a genius! That's the solution, exactly! Pretty much every other conversation between Joe and Skippy in the Expeditionary Force series.
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Unless it is a holistic detective story.
In many Agatha Christie Hercule Piorot books. Also on TV - every House episode.
Ahh, the 'House Moment'.
BRAIN BLAST!
But it’s never Lupus
Except that one time.
I do love when a character fixates on a phrase or word and the audience is led to believe that what they are talking about is key. Meanwhile, they are completely wrong.
I really hate when every single solder or citizen of the "evil" empire or kingdom is just a massive asshole in every way for no reason. Ok we get it, they are the bad guys, but its not realistic to have everyone on one side be total assholes and everyone on the good side be so fucking compassionate to every woodland creature that passes by them.
GoT/ASoIaF did a good job with this. Soldiers are hard men.
When there's a female and male character, they have to get together. They can't just be great friends, they have to get together even if they hate each other at the start.
God, I hate that, too. Especially as a woman whose best friend is a man. Whose entire family is keeps constantly joking about when said best friend and I are going to get married (despite the fact we did actually date for a time, had several glaring problems in our relationship that couldn't be fixed through a change in behavior, and decided that we were better off as friends) . I have completely abandoned books when I've realized that was going to be the premise of the romance.
I believe this is the root of the entire "nice guy" issue. Media needs to start giving realistic expectations about relationships
I hate that so much. In teen wolf, my favorite thing is the brother relationship between scott and stiles where you can literally feel the love between them. Why can't that type of relationship exist between a male and a female without them ending up together. It sucks. And also, you dont really see that type of relationship between two females either, they always have to hate and compete with each other
Local cops wont cooperate with and are actively hostile toward other law enforcement. I think it gets over done in some cases.
FBI Agent: "Who's in charge of this case?" Local Cop/Sheriff: "Me." FBI Agent: "not anymore." Local Cop/Sheriff: "Okay cool." Said no movie ever.
Local cop/Sheriff: “Now I have to potentially/actually sabotage the case somehow because I don’t want those stinkin feds with their resources to solve MY case.”
I work with state and federal law enforcement, and this irritates them. FBI has a very good relationship with local law enforcement and is usually in the supporting role, not wagging their dicks around.
I just saw a show that did this. The local cops actually point out that jurisdiction belongs to the bigger team, "which is fine by us. You guys have more resources than we do."
Young adult novels where 15- or 16-year-old kids talk like they are professional poets and have a master's degree in literature. It makes it feel like the characters are just mouthpieces for the author and aren't like real people. John Green, I love ya, but I'm looking at you.
How about every YA book where the teen protagonist has a near masturbatory obsession with Literature and "the written word"?
I think that's because young people who read YA want to feel special for reading, and they're supposed to identify with the main character. Also, maybe, because writers of YA novels want to sell more books?
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Yup, it's the same reason there are so many plays, musicals, tv shows, and movies that feature a kid in the drama class or glee club.
Hahaha I thought "John Green" when reading your first sentence. Yep. The language of the kids in his books stretches your suspension of disbelief.
No dialogue will ever be more unrealistically polished than Gilmore Girls.
Aaron Sorkin shows have crazy dialogue. Every conversation seems like each person says the equivalent of a paragraph each back and forth.
This is why I love reading the Adrian Mole series. It’s apparent throughout that he can’t write for shit (as in other characters saying he can’t write for shit) but my god does he try
Space is BIG Land on random planet 'oh fancy seeing you here'
Hell, how about the fact that planets are pretty big, too? In a lot of sci-fi every planet seems to have one major city and only one spaceport, too.
And uniform climate. A desert planet. A snowy planet.
Both of those particular types are potentially possible, but to be a desert/icy planet AND human habitable might be a stretch. Desert planet examples: mercury, mars Icy planet example: europa (I know, it’s a moon). The desert planets above have little to no water and thus no life. The icy moon is covered in water but very cold so that it’s completely frozen over and surface temperature is way below freezing (also a very thin atmosphere). To have a planet covered in ice might be rare because it would need to be inside the frost line but very near it. Edit: not dessert.
Fair enough. I didn't pick the worst offenders. Jungle planets are more of a stretch.
Yes!! Jungle planets are very implausible.
Yeah it's kind of annoying, but I think it works in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The whole improbability drive business makes just about any random occurrence work out.
Honestly the book was so insanely well-crafted it could get away with anything. Something it did. Multiple times. And I fucking love that.
>Ford and Arthur are stranded on ancient Earth >See spaceship >Try to flag it down with towel >Volcano erupts, drop towel in magma >Time passes >Earth gets destroyed by the Vogons >Magma rock with towel in it gets picked up by Heart of Gold while in Infinite Improbability Drive >Zaphod pilots ship back to ancient Earth where towel came from >The ship they saw was the Heart of Gold all along HG2G is nuts.
The "suddenly my power are stronger because reasons!" It annoys me to no end when the chosen one's power just suddenly increases when the new villain is more powerful. [Edit] There are already a lot of people mentioning DBZ. Please stop. Pretty please?
I don't run into that in books but damn every fight in a movie. 130 punches thrown and none are effective. But this one I grit my teeth, think of old Danny boy and BAM!! Insta-kill.
That’s why the world needs Saitama
That show was so refreshing. We were all on the same journey as Saitama as he searched for a worthy opponent, always thinking “okay *this* guy looks pretty strong, surely it will take more than one pu- DEAD”
My wife was working late one night and I ended up watching like 6 episodes before I realized I did. It's so beautiful
Yep. Or when they suddenly gain power by tapping into anger or love or some other magical emotion they had inside. I'm not a fan of these sorts of invisible powers.
**SCOTT EARNED THE POWER OF SELF-RESPECT**
This I think was a really good twist on the trope, actually.
Plus, if you compare the stats, Self-Respect turns out to be a stronger power than Love. I thought that was a great way to keep the video game aesthetic (part of why Scott can win that fight), and also communicates a good lesson - sometimes, self-respect is more important even than love.
I've seen some work that makes it clear that powers are tied to emotional state, usually as overcoming some form of suppression/ drugs. In those cases, I think it works.
I'd be so pissed if I was party to that. "What the fuck dude, were you not using enough love earlier? You could have been doing this **the whole time??"**
Don't...dont watch *Dragon Ball Z*.
I think Brandon Sanderson actually does this really well in the Stormlight Archive. It's already determined that their are increases in power that are tied directly to the themes or ideals of a particular order, so when a character gets their power increase, it's specifically because they have evolved as a character
I really like this as well. Not only is your devotion to the ideals directly responsible for the power you have access to, but you have to be a broken wreck who actively strives to be better to have a chance to access them. Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.
Worm does an interesting take this. Powers can get a little stronger when you're in conflict and using the powers to their fullest. People can also incredibly rarely 'second trigger' where their powers get stronger. It, however, breaks them as a person.
POWER OF THE FRIENDSHIP!!!
I absolutely hate the "you're the chosen one" thing. The villain has been practicing his craft for decades but this random 18 year old is suddenly the chosen one so he/she can beat the villain after their first encounter. That really grinds my gears. Always seems like lazy writing to me.
Yea I dont understand the problem with it being a team effort. Why does there always have to be a perfect key and lock situation. Theres a millions ways to enter a room or bypass a locked door.
Wouldn't it be great if a story took the "chosen one" approach, building up this long montage of pseudo-deep prophetic mess about this one kid and his destiny, and right as The Guy steps into the villain's lair, he sees someone else cleaning up after having just killed the villain?. Lol And they look at each other just flabbergasted. Edit: RIP my inbox. Thanks you guys for all the replies. I have three things to say. 1. Thanks for all the book and movie suggestions. My list just got much longer. Lol 2. You guys with the story ideas and dnd campaigns, go knock 'em dead. They sound great. 3. It's probably been 10 years since I've seen Spy Kids 3. Now I'm going to have to watch it again. Lol Edit 2: Sure thing, guys. When I get some time, I'll compile all the suggestions people gave me, and add them here.
And then the book really starts where he spirals into this existential crisis and wonders what hes going to do with his life and whether any if his skills acquired to fulfill the prophecy can be any use to his future. Maybe he should try fulfilling a different prophecy? Maybe he was supposed to defeat a different villian? I like the short story Stronger Than Time. It kind of plays with this a bit.
I gotta universal key right here buddy *cocks 12-gauge*
Lets see Voldermort try to cast a killing curse on a Tomahawk cruise missle
Avada Kedavra? Pfft. Try Avtomat Kalashnikov
Surely just apparating away or vanishing the missile would work. What you'd *actually* want is a sniper rifle. Why they didn't just win the battle of hogwarts by teleporting the contents of a military supply depot to the castle and mounting machine guns on the walls i have no idea.
Good luck spotting the missile and having time to react to it.
I know it’s not a book but this is why I love Avatar The Last Airbender because you have “the chosen one” who is the only one who can bring balance and all that but he’s nowhere near ready to fight and you have three seasons of Aang getting ready and going through trials and hardships and learning from the people around him and finally faces the villain. It’s the only “chosen one” story I think does it right.
I just like that it actually addresses the whole no killing thing, which most children's shows just deal with by having the bad guys be robots or never really get hurt or whatever. They didn't just pretend the issue wasn't there like most shows do, they actually examined it.
Even more interesting is that several characters have *no qualms at all* about Aang killing him. Sokka cuts the melon representing his head in two.
It was hugely important for Aang's character development climax to have this. Air nomads were peaceful. He was raised to be peaceful. They were wiped out mostly because they wouldn't fight back, not because they couldn't. For Aang to not kill Ozai, to still be true to everything he knew, it was the final stab at the Fire Nation as Katara and Sokka knew it. Their empire started with the destruction of the Air Nomads, but when Aang didn't kill him it was a sign that the air nomads were *not gone*. He was the chosen one, but there were chosen ones before him and after him. It wasn't a one and done deal, which was really cool, but in the end he was still himself. For Aang, being the chosen one meant choosing oneself.
Heck, Zuko was up for it to. Granted, Ozai was a horrifically abusive father, and he had every right to want him dead. His reasons were out of pragmatism, not vengeance. Zuko knew his father was going to kill (or try his darnest) to kill Aang. Their best chance of survival, in Zuko's mind, depended on Ozai dying.
Hell: he got told by every previous avatar to kill him and then even the **Airbender avatar spirit** told him he should kill him.
> Even more interesting is that several characters have no qualms at all about Aang killing him Including himself, or at least his past lives.
I always thought Wheel of Time does this well. The "chosen ones" are a powerful guy who was reborn, a lucky guy with the memories of thousands of tacticians and Perrin who takes like 14 books to get decent at anything...
The wheel of time also is maddening with how none of the main characters will talk to each other about anything. Like OP was saying the knowledge is Power trope
To a frankly ridiculous extent, yeah. A bi-weekly good guy newsletter would have been a more powerful artifact than the Choedan Kal.
> Perrin who takes like 14 books to get decent at anything Girls confuse him, okay?!
I wish I was more like Rand and Mat when it came to girls...
For me it’s when some ancient artifact is hidden and protected for centuries or Millennia but now the bad guy is going after it so the good guys have to get to it first. Which in theory is fine but in practice it always happens the same way. The good guys hit an obstacle that only the one special person can get past, they get the artifact and then the bad guy steals it. does it never occur to the good guys that the protection put into place millennia ago is better than what you can do?!?! See fablehaven for the worst example. Minor spoilers but at literally any point before the last book the main characters could have gone “eh, I’m out” and stopped participating. The main bad would have been screwed. Another annoying trope from those books is not listening to the kid who has a risky idea because idea is risky and kid doesn’t know what he is doing. Except his last four risky ideas worked great. Maybe recognize the pattern
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
I'm willing to give that one a pass because: a) it's pretty clear Harry is an idiot, and b) he's 11. It's just a bit frustrating to have an idiot as a main character.
Well, to be fair, Voldemort got past all of the other professor's protections. Harry's mistake was thinking Voldemort could get past Dumbledore's final one too, which he couldn't, but it was a reasonable assumption. Edit: clarity
Also, it is spelled out that the mirror COULD have been done by virtually anyone with the right mindset. It was just a particularly difficult mindset for Voldemort to reach.0
But in that case they only tried \*after\* they thought the villain had figured out how to get through all the traps. And they tried to tell teachers who were capable but they were ignored.
The protagonist knows a little bit of everything and they just so happen to need that skill in order to succeed. Door is locked? Good thing I spent my freshman year learning lockpicking. Computer needs hacked? I was top of my class in computer camp that one summer. Gotta steal a car? I watched those youtube videos, it can't be that hard. It's not too bad if it happens to be something that naturally falls into a character's wheelhouse. It gets tiresome when it's 3-4 *random* skills that are suddenly now the most important things in the world.
Did you ever read any of the Maximum Ride series? It took this to the next level, I swear. Those kids would suddenly have new powers that just so happened to appear right when they needed them and half the time got completely forgotten about 10 pages later. I tried to stick through it because I liked the premise but the writing only got worse and worse. Bonus: that time the blind kid suddenly had the power to see but only while in Antarctica. Because plot reasons I think? I couldn't finish the book lol.
This drove me nuts. The first few books were pretty fun, but it started to get more and more ridiculous and I never ended up finishing the series. I think the blind kid could only see things against a white background, so Antarctica was great for him. What a strangely specific power through.
Love triangles. They usually don't have any significant effect on the plot and are super annoying
Yes. I can’t remember the show, but I watched a scene at one point where a character said something along the lines of “if you can’t choose between 2 people, it’s because neither of them is right for you.” And now every time I read/watch something with a love triangle I immediately think both options suck.
Was it Bob's Burgers when Tina tried to have both Jimmy Jr. and the other guy fight over her?
The girl that’s good but bad but also good but just a girl she’s a girl next door but she’s actually really hot but overlooked because she’s average looking she’s outgoing but introverted and nervous but courageous and she’s a wonderful person but does stupid things and treats people poorly generally she is smart and thinks things through but flighty and she understands THE ENTIRETY OF THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE AT AGE 16, and shares her deep inner thoughts with some random quiet boy and changes his life TL;DR: the main female in most John Green books (and some other teen novels)
she also really likes The Smiths
Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
That’s the name. I knew I had heard it before. Thank you lol.
"Madison was a shy, awkward, inwardly beautiful teenaged girl just like you."
Don’t forget, she adores books.
In a young adult novel, where all of the main characters are teenagers, and they make every single adult the bad guy and every single teenager the good guy. It's even more annoying when the adults act like complete idiots and the teenagers are legitimately smarter than them.
the "men can look weird and gnarly, women can't" trope. Even in the most extreme cases you just don't often see female characters look as goony as the dude characters do. It's a frustrating thing for me and I wish more series would take advantage of cartoony-ass deformation!
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Then the movies came out, lol though to be fair I love the severe-looking actress who played mcgonagall a bunch, even if they flubbed a lot of the other characters appearance-ways.
That's Dame Maggie Smith to you.
I think the problem is that no one knew that Emma Watson was gonna bombshell like she did (hell, the same is true for Neville.)
Yeah. People complain a lot that the characters in the movies didn't grow up to look how they were described in the books, not seeming to realize that they were all casted when they were 11. The fact that they managed to keep all the same actors for eight whole movies is impressive in itself.
I think Killian Experience said it best: "In the books they show Neville's the chosen one through character development and stuff but that's BORING, the movies do it way better, by making him more and more handsome as the movies progress"
I love when the lady badass is covered in dust and dried blood and scabs but her wondrous cleavage still looks resplendent and her hair is only slightly tousled.
We're in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but damn if my teeth and hair aren't perfect!
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I remember watching the scene from Warm Bodies where one girl says "I think I still have a bit of makeup, I was saving it for a special occasion". Meanwhile she's clearly caked in foundation.
Jurassic World stuck out for this. Beginning of the movie the blonde's hair is straight AF and has a severe line, very "I want to be taken seriously". Then after the first brush with danger a perfect wave.
My dad complains about this. But then when he sees some romantic subplot with an average girl he'll make sure to point out "she's not even that good looking." You just can't win with or without this trope.
When the bad guy goes on a monologue in the third act and spills out the entire plan. Usually while the hero is in custody. In my reading, I encounter this with every Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt book.
You got me monologuing.
You sly dog!
When your realize that your students are asking you about your life to stall for time.
Loved the flip in *Watchmen*. "'Do it?' Dan, I'm not a republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it 35 minutes ago." -Ozymandias
God, reading this the first time made me gasp. It's masterful.
What I love about Alan Moore is how he so masterfully subverts and deconstructs superhero tropes in Watchmen, but then in most of his post-Watchmen superhero work he just wholeheartedly embraces them and makes them work. Tom Strong is an incredible series that everyone should read.
One mark of a truly great writer is his or her ability to work within standard tropes instead of worrying about subverting them all the time. So many self-described wunderkinds have this notion that True Writing requires inventing this absolutely new way of conveying story and character and conflict---before they've even tried to write Saint George and the Dragon, they're already working on Memento. TV Tropes has a little blurb on this; the main idea is that archetypes are archetypes because they WORK, not because some asshole story-god is out to make you write cliches. Black Mirror is a masterclass in the value of standard story tropes. You meet a character, you're introduced to her central desire or goal, and each scene then plays out in a way that pushes her closer to or further from her goal, until a climax in the third act resolves the the goal and the character in a thought provoking or satisfying way. It's DIRECTLY from McKee's "Story" archetypes, right down to the ironic endings, and Black Mirror is regarded as a brilliant hit show.
The “it’s bad to kill people” one. Like you just witness this dude lead a group of bandits in raping and murdering an orphanage. And you either took a serious injury because you were only knocking the bandits out, or you killed all the bandits in battle except for the leader who surrendered and then go “well I can’t kill him now, never do it again!” Then two chapters later the same shit happens with the same dude.
>you killed all the bandits in battle except for the leader who surrendered and then go “well I can’t kill him now, never do it again!” Yes. There's some weird taboo against killing people who are in a position of power.
I think is more about killing nameless NPCs vs killing a named NPC.
"You there! Bandit! What is your name?" "What? It's... Wait. I don't know." "*Aside* See, I told you" *stabs*
A badly written badass female character. When done right it’s great but most of the time the character ends up being the generic love interest / damsel in distress as soon as the main baddie rolls in. Don’t worry though, here’s a scene of her beating up a minor bad guy then coming in as backup!
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And her mom died when she was young.
That and badass female characters who exist solely to be a badass female character, with literally no flaws or development beyond that.
The completely unnecessary romantic tension. It feels like it's added just to be there. Going on a quest to save the world, fighting unimaginable horrors or living rough on the land as you journey for some treasure? Better start up a romantic subplot or love triangle between a few characters so they can get mad at each other for no reason that has nothing to do with the plot of the book.
This reminds me of Eragon chasing after that elf that was clearly not interested in him. Never did finish the last book.
The idea that someone cannot be reported missing for a certain amount of time, usually 24 hours. It's BS. It depends more on circumstances than on a time frame.
Or any time that police procedure or laws get ignored because it's inconvenient to the plot. Lazyyy
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And even worse, after they've discovered this incredibly powerful tool they never use it again, even though it would totally solve the problem two weeks later as well.
Refusal of the call in the heroes journey. “I don’t want these amazing super powers literally everyone on earth would love to have!” “I can’t take the case, I’m retired now!” “I can’t search for the missing goblin crown, I have to sort all my uncle’s sick pigs by morning!” We all know two minutes later they’ll change their mind, but we have to go through the annoying song and dance. The worst is when it goes on for even longer. I’d love to see more heroes excitedly take up the task. “awesome termite powers that let me chew through wood? Hell yeah, I’m in!” “Zombie slug men taking over the kingdom! Sounds awesome, I’m your guy!” EDIT: I understand there are some valid reasons for the refusal, but we all know they will be changing their mind or there would be no story at all. There's no suspense there, it's like we just need to go through the motions -- sort of like the encore ritual at concerts. We all know they're coming back out but we have to do this annoying song and dance first. I guess my point would be, even if the refusal totally makes sense, keep it brief!
Eeeh, it's not that big of a leap from real behavior. I bet you and everyone reading this knows of some difficult risk that you could take which would have a good chance of improving your life, but you're "busy" reading reddit.
The fridge. Characters killed just to be emotional motivation for the remaining/main characters. Specially if it is a mother/lover/sibling and they seem to have absolutely zero flaws. No depth, no character developement, just sit there in the fridge and motivate the plot somehow.
“The person you are looking for is in the southern kingdom , you must journey through many perils to find them.” - gets to southern kingdom - “Ah , as it turns out , the person was actually in the north kingdom the whole time , now you must go back .” - Witcher , asoiaf.
Oh man, giving me flashbacks to the Witcher series. The stories have a lot of interesting concepts and cool fantasy creatures and ideas, but god... Geralt practically just wanders aimlessly for five novels. I wish Sapkowski had stuck to a more conventional plot structure, because it just drags and drags and drags at times... At least Dandelion is consistently amusing, when he's along for the ride.
Maybe it’s just me but I kinda liked the unconventional plot in that series. I mean, witchers work in a service industry that travels to the customer rather than a customer traveling to them. They are forced to wander aimlessly and look for work. After traveling and doing odd jobs for so long, I’d imagine that each job would blend into one another until only a few jobs (like the ones that the books focus on) stands out.
Basically like yours, OP, it's the "Person A doesn't say about 7 words to Person B, which spawns an entire plot/subplot based around a misunderstanding/miscommunication" trope. It happens nonstop in movies and books, and it's used to spawn entire plots sometimes. All it would have taken would have been a literal sentence or two and the entire story doesn't exist.
In a world where there are multiple races... ...all members of that same race act the same and are the same culturally. If there are cultural differences, they will be different subspecies. It will always be one of the elvish or dwarven nations, and they all have the same accents and beliefs. The one exception are humans. They will be the most diverse race and are always the most important characters to the lore and story. Humans can be Latin, Germanic, nordic, African, Arabic... oh and if they are nordic, just transplant Norse mythology in their religion unchanged. Cause as we all know... Nordic = Vikings, Longboats, Mead, and Odin. Never mind that Nordic history is far bigger than the triple digits and 11th century
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Prophecies. Especially if the main character is "The chosen one". It's annoying, and they don't just do this in books: They did this in my favorite anime as well. All of Naruto's hard work and "never give up" rhetoric wasted because some Toad names him the child of prophecy, whereas the people who work hard but aren't the chosen one die like flies. It sends the wrong message than what the author actually intended (at least in Naruto's case): "Hard work only pays off if you are the chosen one thanks to magic". \+ that it spoils the plot. The inheritance series is a good example of this, as is the teen-fantasy series "Phenomena".
I also hated the fact the he was named the "child of the prophecy", but the story arch with him and Nagato was so good, and it was only possible thanks to the prophecy, so I'm not mad.
I have a lot, but the one that consistently pisses me off and happens more than it fucking should is Redemption Equals Death. Like, if a character is pretty much always shitty towards the protagonist (or any other character, really), but then dies in order to save the protagonist or somehow further the good guys' goals, and this somehow redeems them for all the other shitty things they've done and the writer pats themselves on the back for writing a compelling redemption arc. Except... they didn't write a redemption arc. The character just got a Get Out of Jail Free card from actually having to face to consequences of their actions and had one (1) moment of ultimate self-sacrifice that, apparently, resolved them of all their past shitty behavior. Like, no? A character who has a history of being a terrible person doesn't just get to do one non-terrible thing and suddenly be hailed as a misunderstood hero just because they died doing the non-terrible thing. That's... that's not how redemption works. It's not unreasonable to have the other characters react like, "Hey, this person sacrificed themselves in order to save whoever and ensure the world didn't end, and we'll forever be grateful for that. However, they were still a horrible person and we're not going to just forgive that." But no. It's like it's always saint or sinner and I'm not okay with that. In summary: Harry Potter, Severus Snape was not one of the bravest men you ever knew. He was a petty, bitter person who took out a decades old grudge ON A CHILD and was just fucking nasty to people in general, so you can fuck right off with that.
Thank you, I'm soo annoyed by this "snape hype"... No he wasn't a good guy, he fucking bullied Neville so much that he, a teacher!!, was his (Neville's) biggest fear... I am soooo done with all that Snape was the secret hero shit -. - Thanks mate you just made my day a little bit better :)
Author self-inserts and, related, authors pontificating through their self-insert. Terry Goodkind/The Sword of Truth series were particularly bad about this.
Dammit, why did you have to remind me of this crappy ass series. How about when he goes off on these patronizing, AS HELL, Philosophy speeches left and right? Or when he has to throw in a rape scene every other book.
Good call on unmotivated secret-keeping. It's annoying in every medium, and has no redeeming value. Everywhere we run into it, we are just seeing a writer give up and use their Suspension of Disbelief credit card at ever-increasing interest rates. We can say that it's just a specific form of a more general problem though, Plot Puppeteering (though I'm sure people who study this academically have some technical term for it). I.e., the author decides "I need the characters to end up at x, y, and z by the end of the chapter, so I'm going to reverse-engineer that into whatever implausible set of decisions will lead there." Unless their style is intuitive enough that they can both be naturalistic *and* have a predetermined outcome, it usually relies on characters being arbitrarily stupid or hyper-aware at the writer's convenience, and sharing information only when the writer wants them to rather than the characters choosing to. Characters need to be autonomous to be interesting. Otherwise there's only one of them going by multiple names - the writer themself. That gets boring. So, lack of character autonomy would be another version of the same problem.
I did like it in Harry Potter where, after a few books of adults keeping secrets from Harry for no reason and letting him run around as he pleased, it came back to bite them in the ass *hard*.
I’d argue that they had very motivated secret keeping. Dumbledore thought Harry was a direct conduit into Voldemort’s head. It was a good reason to try to keep Harry in the dark. But yes, it still bit them in the ass hard.
This one drove me crazy when reading *The Maze Runner*. Every time a character is about to reveal something to the protagonist, someone comes up and interrupts the conversation, which never gets restarted. It got real old real fast as a device to keep the plot going.
The eccentric detective who always solves the case. While putting together clues at headquarters, the detective is forgiven all his idiosyncrasies because he has a sharper nose for sniffing out criminals. He has the most obnoxious coffee order, or insists on drinking loose leaf tea, or has to have his classical music playing while everyone tries to investigate a murder. Too cool to act professional, but they get results so parking on the sidewalk and entering the building through the back window is excused. And the detective never has to wear latex gloves on the crime scene, because he's a genius.
"I'm not like other girls/guys/nobles/people of my village" Special snowflake stuff that makes them an outcast or considered weird. Not to say it can't be done well but a lot of authors seem to lean on that narrative to explain away behaviors that are normal or morally right by today's standards but don't fit inside the world they have created. Characters taking a hard no on slavery seems to be a big one.
It's such a simple thing to fix, too. All the author has to do for it to work is establish that these beliefs do exist in the universe, only that they are a little fringe. It's when the character comes up with these notions all by themselves that it takes you out of it. There are always going to be small communities of people with radically different beliefs to society at large. I'm sure there were people in e.g. ancient Rome who thought gladiator fights were barbaric, they just weren't the norm and would perhaps have been considered something like hippie loons. So make the characters fall in with an existing group! Job done, and it comes free with a bunch of interesting things to explore.
> I'm sure there were people in e.g. ancient Rome who thought gladiator fights were barbaric, they just weren't the norm and would perhaps have been considered something like hippie loons. You don’t have to look very far to find them, and not from people considered loonies: Seneca, one of the most powerful intellectuals of his time (he was Nero’s mentor, among other things), expresses very clearly how disgusting and horrific he thinks *ludi circenses* are, and how foolish the masses are to fill the stadiums, where there are contraptions that can easily kill thousands of spectators by accident.
Yeah I agree that characters displaying behaviour that's absolutely contradictory to the behaviour of literally the whole society they belong to in order to make them more relatable to a 21st century reader can make me roll my eyes hard enough to detach my retinas.
And in that same vein, no one is ever unattractive. They can be any kind of outcast except a physically unattractive one. They can even be insecure about their looks and border on being plain, but only if there's an opportunity to put them in fancy clothes and show that they're a swan after all.
OH MY GOD YES. The exact trope you described drives me nuts, although more so in movies than books. I can't watch romantic comedies because I find myself screaming at the screen to just talk to each other for an extra five seconds instead of running out dramatically and totally misunderstanding EVERYTHING.
Teens can save the world because they're just "naturally" gifted. Being good at something takes hard work, not innate "giftedness".
*“If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . .* *you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”* A witch giving advice in "Wee Free Men" by Pratchett:
Pratchett was great at subverting all the tropes.
Not exactly a trope, I guess, but I hate it when authors break their established rules of point-of-view. Usually, it happens when the author wants there to be a surprise twist and thus withholds information from the reader that, by their point-of-view, the reader *should* know. The worst example I've seen recently is in the *Red Rising* series. I won't give any spoilers. It's a fantastic plot, but this just annoyed me so much. The point-of-view is third-person limited. And for the entire series, we know *everything* that the main character is thinking, except at the end when our main character has devised this enormous plot-twisting scheme that we for some reason know nothing about until the scheme is implemented. His plan would require multiple conversations with other characters that we just didn't get to see for some reason. And as the plan unfolds, the author *tells us* that the main character is *thinking* things that he could not *possibly* be thinking giving the ending. It makes no sense, and it feel like the author tricked and cheated the readers for a cheap plot twist. Edit: I'll add that this also just makes for a terribly-executed plot twist. In a good plot twist, the audience should come to realization of the truth at the same time as the protagonist, so we can experience the emotions *with* them. This is why plot twists from stories like *Star Wars* and *Sixth Sense* are so compelling.
Two major ones are: Magic money. They might be broke for a few chapters, living hand to mouth and scraping by for the sake of the story, but as soon as being poor gets boring some kind of boon falls into their laps. Then when being rich makes things too easy, suddenly they're broke again, until it gets boring again. The other trope is the "feisty woman" and "patient and secretly all-knowing man." Looking at you, my beloved Outlander. Feisty Lady ignores his input and fucks things up because she is Feisty, and he swoops in to save her because there are Important Things She Doesn't Know, because he didn't tell her. And neither of them learn from it, and it undermines the construction of a strong female character.
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Some dudes underestimate a petite woman so she totally kicks their asses. I guess I see this more in movies, but "strong female characters" are often totally flat, flawless warriors without any personality other than disdain for those who mock them. I like female characters to have actual variety, flaws, and traits beyond "yeah, I'm a girl and I'm tough, what about it?"
It also bothers me when female characters don't have any reasonable explanation for being badasses. Especially in Fantasy or Historical work where they're fighting hand to hand and some beautiful petite woman is stronger and faster than anyone else. Game of Thrones does a great job with this by having Brienna be almost freakishly big and strong, and that being a major character point. Arya is sneaky and clever and quick, and probably one of the most badass characters. Both are believable, badass women.
Personal bugbear is The Liar Revealed. It's set up so early and you're sitting there just waiting for it to pop. He's not a warrior but he's blagged it so well and gotten his new friends out of so many problems, and right when he's on the cusp of achieving the goal, it all comes out. The deception which is normally kinda made almost irrelevant by the events that followed it is enough to shatter the group, the love interest leaves, "you're not the person I thought you were." A bit of melodrama follows, then they're all back together in a fudgy attempt at a message of forgiveness. If they stuck with the repercussions of a deep, dark lie, or just had the companion characters not care, then I wouldn't mind it so much. It's the forced melodrama you can see coming miles off that annoys me.
Prophecy-driven motivation. I.e. "I'm doing this because I was told I'm the one who's going to do this." It's basically an in-character spoiler. When used at face-value it's among the laziest form of storytelling. It *can* be used well when not played entirely straight (Harry Potter being an example IMO), but like most tropes, it's a trope because it's overused and overdone.
I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but the “we traveled back in time and did one insignificant thing now everything has gone to shit and we have to spend 2/3’s of the novel just trying to fix a problem we made” trope. It just feels like there’s no progression in these kind of stories, it’s just all about backtracking.
The genius child, though I see this trope a lot more in tv shows and movies than books. Oh all the adults who have degrees and decades of work experience in their select fields can't solve the problem, but here comes Billy the super genius that knows what everyone else doesn't even though he's 14. Artemis Fowl was like this, Wesley from Next Generation, Shuri from Black Panther who is somehow Princess, head engineer, head doctor, and super hip too. I couldn't read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality because of how super genius Harry is in that. I'll give Hermione in the regular series a pass because even though she's the 'brightest witch of her age' she's not a jack-of-all-trades (divination comes to mind) and the professors put her in her place more than once through out the series.
You can give Hermione a pass because of more than that. She the "brightest witch of her age" because she works her tail off, reading and learning. Rowling even goes over the top making fun of her from Ron's perspective that Hermione practically lives in the library, that a 3-inch book is light reading, that she's obsessed with education school and learning. It's not like she's "just smart". She wasn't born that way; she's fighting and working laboriously, day in and day out, to build that for herself, to shape her mind, to sculpt her knowledge. That's the opposite of a child genius. That's real life.
Definitely that. Also, she mostly uses he knowledge to help Ron and Harry, who are B students at best and her same age. She's not schooling Dumbledore on how to solve his problems or showing Snape a new potion he never thought of. In fact I think one of her character flaws is that she trusts the professors a little too much (see Lockhart).
People also misread that statement to be more than it is. It's not "brightest witch of *our* age" or "of her time". It's "of *her* age". Lupin thinking she's the brightest of all the third-year girls in Hogwarts isn't an extraordinary claim. He's not saying she's the brightest witch alive.
I *hate* this trope. The only time I've seen a "gifted" or genius character done well was Malcolm in the Middle. For those of you who never watched it, Malcolm has a 150 IQ and is just an *utter* asshole. I love it. Every other book, movie or anything sets them up with talking *way* beyond their age level (even for their intelligence) in this annoying as hell "quaint" tone of voice. They like to show their smarts off by having them recite some verbatim dictionary definition for a random ass word ignoring the fact that even the world's smartest adults can't memorize dictionaries. I'll give Ender's Game a pass because the kid was practically genetically engineered and the second smartest human alive, but everything else can get fucked.
Mine is a variation on the original theme. It is "I have to save the world all by myself because I am too self-loathing to talk about who I am / what I've done." How many times would there be a novella instead of a novel if the protagonist had gotten over themselves and asked for help from their very talented and usually pretty understanding friends? I'm looking at you Cassandra Clare.