What tropes annoy you?

Agree with Allmywires, Thaddeus6th & Dante DiBenedetto about the unpronounceable names! I find i have to guess how to say it, get comfortable with that guess, then find it really hard to switch in my head to the intended name after hearing it! :eek:

Also agree with Grimbear about the grasshopper & master scene. Although as Grimbear said, as well as others, tropes can be used well and not so well. Good writing will forgive anything I suppose.

AJB
 
Hex said:
I liked that circularity too, Karn, although of course at the end of the series that starts with The Book of Three,
Taran becomes the High King of all Prydain, so the advance is there, just delayed by another four books...
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I see circularity as a good thing in some cases-when the character is established as competent to begin with and their ifestyle is what leads to adventuring but every once in a while something big and storyworthy happens.

But to have the farmboy go back to the farm. Almost any young man who had become a hero would chafe under ordinary life. It's why so many soldiers have problems reintegrating. They don't need to go and become King or anything, but they should be using the skills they picked up, even if it does mean they wind up as a mercenary whose life is actually pretty miserable(that could be a fun story.) The mercenary who saved the world his first time out and has been coasting on repuation since then, but has come to loathe what he's become and feels he should have been given more for saving the world.
 
Aminar said:
But to have the farmboy go back to the farm. Almost any young man who had become a hero would chafe under ordinary life. It's why so many soldiers have problems reintegrating. They don't need to go and become King or anything, but they should be using the skills they picked up, even if it does mean they wind up as a mercenary whose life is actually pretty miserable(that could be a fun story.) The mercenary who saved the world his first time out and has been coasting on repuation since then, but has come to loathe what he's become and feels he should have been given more for saving the world.
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Yeah, something realistic. It's not a big jump to go from farmhand to soldier of some kind. Any character would undergo some kinds of change as his experience broadens. What more I meant was something from the pre-Crusades era winding up in the industrial revolution simply because of what had happened. Too big a jump for one time. But someone undergoing an adventure and winding up selling his new skills? Good times.


And the whole "lost prince" scenario still chafes my backside.
Especially in something like Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn where the reader really never finds out about the main character's true status until the end, where I just felt Tad Williams threw in to give justification for getting Simon and Miriamele together.
 
I HATE (yes, in caps) the unnecessary mystery. People that start holding secrets for three quarters of the damn book with NO END IN SIGHT! COME ON! I literally groan inside each time I read a Wheel of time book and some character or another is holding everything damn secret. Maybe if they freaking talked about what was going on instead of hiding everything, things would move along and find a solution.
Each time I run into something like this I just feel like I'll eventually get angry on the characters. One drop of honesty would shorten a lot of stories by at least a third. Harry Potter is another series that is particularly very guilty of this, especially in regards to everything that Dumbledore did.

I love the Malazan books for just this reason. People stumble unto something big, they identify it, discuss it, and move on. I love seeing a series in which people understand there is no damn need for a billion, trillion secrets that hold the story in place.
 
CyBeR said:
I HATE (yes, in caps) the unnecessary mystery...
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It seems much of television has adopted this trope (Lost being the prime example), and as much as I enjoyed the show, towards the end I kept finding myself saying, "Oh, for the love of Pete, tell someone about it!"

On the other hand, since "telling someone" often involves pages of history infodump, sometimes I feel like we're better off...
 
Ah, Lost. I watched the whole first series and bits and pieces after that before giving the damned thing up.

It's one thing to have an deep and alluring mystery, it is quite another thing to just make **** up as you go along, blatantly having no real sense of direction and milking a series until it is finally and blissfully over.
 
Steve Jordan said:
It seems much of television has adopted this trope (Lost being the prime example), and as much as I enjoyed the show, towards the end I kept finding myself saying, "Oh, for the love of Pete, tell someone about it!"

On the other hand, since "telling someone" often involves pages of history infodump, sometimes I feel like we're better off...
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Not necessarily (the involvement of pages of info-dump, that is). Often the mystery is totally unnecessary, as it has only been introduced to be a mystery and has no other purpose than to pad out the script, and draw the tension out (assuming the audience hasn't noticed that it's purely a padding exercise).

So if anything, the answer is to reduce the number of pages by removing the false mystery.


On those odd occasions where I've been unable to avoid seeing/listening to a soap on the TV/radio, it's clear that most of these misunderstanding are only there to fill the broadcast hours, as each character gets to know of one tiny bit of something that would require probably two lines of script to clear up. There's lots of "should I tell him?" and "what will he do when he finds out", followed by "Why didn't you tell me?" and "if only I'd known earlier!". And most of these false mysteries involve nothing more serious than bumping into an "old boyfriend" or an "old girlfriend" (of whom we've heard nothing before) and often a good deal less. Fair enough, I suppose - one doesn't usually have to watch/listen to soaps - but the presence of these false mysteries in what are meant to be proper dramas should be seen for what it is: padding because the producers/writers are themselves lost, wanting to keep the show going but lacking the imagination to do so properly.
 
Karn Maeshalanadae said:
Also for once, I'd like to see a story come around truly full circle.
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*spoiler alert*

One of the Black Company series does this, quite well I might add.

And from a movie perspective, so does Kingdom of Heaven.

*end of spoilers*


And yes, it's not always appropriate, or believable. There should be some underlying motivation to escape it all, and go back to your base existence.
 
Something I'll never forgive Peter Jackson for, that involves the very circularity that I also like: he left out the scourging of the shire. In the book Sam was the only one who settled back, without a care. ( I think he was too thick to understand what he'd been through.) Frodo was troubled both spiritually and physically and Pippin and Merry were always going away from the village for periods of time. They'd returned, but they were changed...
 
That absence was disappointing for another reason, Boneman. The ending of LotR, as we all know, lasts aaaaages. Yet they cut a piece from the book which is genuinely interesting and replaced it with a prolonged ending. It would've been better to either end when Aragorn becomes king or include the business with the Shire.
 
thaddeus6th said:
Ah, Lost. I watched the whole first series and bits and pieces after that before giving the damned thing up.

It's one thing to have an deep and alluring mystery, it is quite another thing to just make **** up as you go along, blatantly having no real sense of direction and milking a series until it is finally and blissfully over.
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I watched it all, and yes, I'd hoped they would've developed one good mystery at the beginning to base the entire arc... and was duly disappointed to see they hadn't. It took all the impact out of all the excellent writing that was done for that show (because there was some excellent writing done), knowing that there was no THERE there.
 
"Luke, I am your father"

I wouldn't necessarily say the "I am your father" trope annoys me, but for me it's expected now that the main character's father is a significant and powerful person.
 
Wolf, I didn't know until fairly recently either.
 
Oooh, see now, I'm going to be a bit controversial. It's Saturday, the weather is miserable and I'm bored.

Many other genres have tropes, and they don't seem to get as hung up about them. In fact, a trope can be used by the author to bring the reader along quickly. So, eg, I have been known to read the odd chick lit from time to time. :eek: and in that genre when the nice chap turns up and gets turned down by the girl, I don't go, oh here we go again, I go, well let's see what you do with this one... if you can buy me in with the characters, I'll stay with you and see what you do. *
So, some of the tropes mentioned here - dad is the evil overload. Grand, I'm halfway to knowing what type of book it is, and know I've liked such things in the past. Get me engrossed and I'll probably curl up nice and tight with it. Aliens have been discovered, but vanished, probably to jump on our hero's head with their acidic blood. Coool, who doesn't like a nice alien story. But make me care that they're going to jump on him/her. Quest, that's fine. They can even traipse over to Mordor if they want, and provided I like the characters and what's happening, I'd read it. (I'd argue it's almost certainly going to be better than the first time it happened...)

What I don't like is deriative stuff (which a trope doesn't have to be, it's only derivative if you do the same thing with it, in the same way, with the same language), cardboard characters, flat dialogue, slow plot.

But, if there's a trope in there, it won't stop me reading. It actually might make me feel quite comfy.

*I feel I should mention, though, that I hate the trope of the gang coming together before the quest and them fitting into the prescribed roles. ;)
 
Steve Jordan said:
Just think "cliche." Anything that's been used to death in a particular genre, for instance, aliens arriving in menacing city-sized space ships.
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A trope isn't a cliche, it's a plot device that can become cliched if writers keep doing the same thing with it.

For example, the evil overlord claiming fatherhood over the hero. Having an "I am your father" moment is becoming cliched, if it isn't already. However what if the evil overlord is just lying to catch Our Hero offguard or stop him striking the fatal blow in their climatic duel? Or what if the overlord only thinks he is Our Hero's father? It's still the "I am your father" trope, only used in a way that isn't cliched.

On thinking about it, maybe this thread should have been "What cliches annoy you".
 
MemoryTale said:
A trope isn't a cliche, it's a plot device that can become cliched if writers keep doing the same thing with it.

For example, the evil overlord claiming fatherhood over the hero. Having an "I am your father" moment is becoming cliched, if it isn't already. However what if the evil overlord is just lying to catch Our Hero offguard or stop him striking the fatal blow in their climatic duel? Or what if the overlord only thinks he is Our Hero's father? It's still the "I am your father" trope, only used in a way that isn't cliched.

On thinking about it, maybe this thread should have been "What cliches annoy you".
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Exactly. However, tropes do carry a negative connotation, even if they aren't all bad.

I use tropes, but I love plot twists and scenarios that are atypical. That doesn't mean they aren't tropes; in fact tropes can account for most plot devices there are, especially as the list of them has been growing daily for years.

Right now I have a character who was just saved by someone who murdered his father. Talk about awkward.

And that's a trope that I just haven't heard of yet, but has definitely been done before.

The main drawback with cliches and tropes, to me, isn't so much that they've been done before. It's simply that the outcome of the story becomes quite a bit more predictable, which does detract from the story.
 
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