I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
I have grown to really fucking hate deus ex machina in any form. Luck is always a factor, but c’mon. It usually comes down to lazy writing and they just couldn’t be assed to come up with an explanation.
Explosive decompression in space. It seems to always last forever, suck EVERYTHING out, even if it’s a tiny hole through which a giant xenomorph is liquified. The delta P is like one atmosphere, pathetic really.
Then there’s noise in space.
Star Trek is awful for this, but this conversation:
Subject Matter Expert: Oh no, the defences are down
Captain: How long do you need to fix them?
SME: Two hours
Captain: You have one
No, motherfucker, the person that you fucking PAY for their expertise on this very subject said it would take two hours!
Management is full of these cunts that think they can just dictate a timeline and have people that actually know their shit dance to their tune.
Honestly this happens a lot. Generally people give estimates reflecting other responsibilities when cutting time is possible
But also if you know anything about engineering, it’s double your expected timeline just in case Shit Happens™️. I can fairly safely predict delivery in two hours. I might be able to deliver in one. Under-promise and over-deliver, or risk vice versa.
I have two.
When a woman’s child is threatened she goes stupid and hysterical. Like in Lost when she just keeps screaming “my baby!”. Yes parents get highly motivated when their child is in danger but they don’t get stupid and lose agency.
In any setting where rope would be rare and expensive and they just cut the bonds instead of untying them. It’s understandable when time is critical like a prisoner break or the building is on fire. But in a society where someone spent a week making that rope and you just cut it instead of taking 5 min to preserve the rope.
For that matter, when someone gets shot center mass and they collapse like Cypher just pulled them from the matrix
Cliffhangers are getting out of control. It used to be that a movie or season would end by wrapping up the story and maybe throw a little teaser in at the end for next season. That’s fine. But it seems like now they just try to stretch out a story or plot for as long as humanly possible.
It has gotten to the point where I will not watch a show until I either know it doesn’t end in a major cliffhanger or the next season is being filmed. Not confirmed, but actively in production.
A good example is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I’m still mad about that ending, even more so with the next movie being delayed.
Not quite a pet peeve, but close. The whole “We’re not in a (movie/show/game/whatever)!” type of dialogue.
That, or cliffhangers that will never be resolved due to the show/movie either being cancelled, discontinued, whatever. Looking at you, Sliders season 5 ending!
I see Sliders mentioned, I cry.
Cutting or stabbing through full plate armor with a sword. Why would anyone wear an armor that is easily cut or stabbed through?!
A lot of that sort of armor is more designed to deflect hits off of it. If someone can get a solid hit in, it’s possible to cut through it.
Which leads to another pet peeve of mine, which is armor that’s clearly designed in a way that it wouldn’t be good at deflecting hits. Particularly anything for women that has cups for the breasts.
In real life it’s more like going after a man sized can of tuna, with the bastard child of an axe, a hammer, and a crowbar.
Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.
Better yet, don’t use an explanation at all!
If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it’s no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it’s not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don’t waste time with useless technobabble!
Slap a “Zephyr FTL Communications” logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn’t always need to know how, just what. And show, don’t tell.
You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just… have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device “Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls”.
“The mentor/parent has to die so that the hero can prove they’re self-actualized” or whatever. It’s okay for your hero to have living parents, even if their parents are also heroes. I promise your story won’t be less interesting if your character’s mentor figure survives.
In my tabletop RPG campaigns I always make it a point for my characters to have at least one living parent, and usually two. These games are always so full of haunted orphans whose villages were burned to the ground or whatever.
The fat funny character.
The “I can fix them” love interest.
Any situation that could have been resolved with any modicum of healthy communication.
Superheroes that cause more damage to the place they’re trying to “save”.
When there’s a breakfast table full of food but the protagonist is running late so they only take a bite of toast and then leaves.
I’m pretty tired of the sanctity of life trope. Especially when the hero kills a thousand henchmen to get to the villain, and then all of the sudden decides it would be wrong to kill a guy who is trying to destroy the world or whatever.
Also the hostage trope where they point a gun at someone and say “drop your gun” and the hero does so. How fucking stupid are you? Just shoot the guy in the face.
Also major injuries that take a year to recover from, but somehow Mr. Average guy is running around and fighting 2 minutes later.
I despise the “flashback to a thing that literally happened five minutes ago to make sure you connect that with whatever just happened/is about to happen.”
Total fucking turnoff. I’m here watching the show and I’m not an idiot. Flashback to something last season or a number of episodes ago? Fine. Some people need a reminder. Within the same episode? GTFO of here with that shit.
Most movies and TV shows are created these days with the assumption that people are on their phones at the same time. I mean actual studio notes to that effect when the plot becomes too difficult for the average person to follow when they have it on while they’re also watching TikTok.
I get it. But I still hate it.
“you biiig fuckin idiot. You’re such a dummy, you need this flash back from 5 minutes ago because you’re too stupid to connect the moment otherwise”
I despise it when a character has had a long arch proving their worthy of what they do, and then it turns out late in the game they’re a chosen one or some shit. If you’ve been successfully fighting monsters for 15 books, going from a moderate combatant to a super mega awesome fucking wizard who wipes out an entire fucking species to save someone then you have proved your badass monster fighting chops, and you don’t need to be the chosen one. What made you awesome is that you were a (mostly) normal dude who became amazing through hard work and sacrifice. Now you’re just someone the gods chose or whatever and it completely ruins the entire concept of what the character was.
Two of my absolute favorite series of all time just recently did this, and I am devastated.
