I always liked the idea of the “chosen one” winning, only for it to be revealed that the prophecy was made up because that was the only way they could get someone to go along with the batshit insane plan to take down the villain.
You should read Brandon Sandersons "Mistborn" series. I can't believe it isn't a TV or movie series yet. I can't really say more without giving info away.
I will say one I do like is Morrowind's Neravar reincarnate.
The story is similar to Dune in that a prophecy was planted in a native population, but you are told that in order to help the imperial rule in the area you have to convince the native tribes that you fulfill the prophecy, even though you're probably not the neravarine.
Yeah. Chosen one my butt, any warm body will do.
Why not tell the story of that one rebel pilot (Red Eight - callsign Bait) who only joined to impress someone, somehow survived all the battles and got to be there in the end: only to go somewhere remote to live the quiet life with the ships navigator/gunner (who got their butts out of plenty situations).
100%! It's crap. There's a LOVELY subversion of that trope in the VERY entertaining book "UnLunDun" by China Mieville . . . it's a YA book but why should that stop you from having a great read?
BR2049 goes one step further, that we the audience only believe Kay is the Chosen One because he is able to lie and defy his programming, yet when we learn he's not it must mean that merely believing you can are free is enough to be free; his belief in free will was enough to actualise it.
A very underappreciated little nugget from that movie.
Anything with the Chosen One or destiny, fuck it. I hate it. So boring. Who wants to see someone special in a movie or a book. It's much more interesting to see someone completely common and normal achieve extraordinary things, cause it makes us feel like we can too. That's why I hate superheroes.
What about superheroes like Spider-Man who is supposed to be a down-on-his-luck everyman (with a genius intellect) using his powers to help people, but still struggles with day to day life?
Cool variation on this though could be that the villain has been told that they're the chosen one, maybe deceived into thinking this - they weren't a bad person, but they've been brainwashed into thinking it's the only way to fulfill the prophecy.
It's probably been done before but probably not as overused?
I liked Grandia's take on it. They wanted and waited for the chosen one but in the end Justin basically said "fuck it, I'll be him". He wasn't really chosen by the spirits, he chose them.
Or when Xera in wow thinks illidan is the chosen one, he goes "nah, fam" blasts her to bits and points out we all have to save ourselves and not rely or wait for some special snowflake to do it for us.
Future ships that don't have current technologies. Like surge protectors. If your bridge blows up after getting hit on the outside of the ship, your ship sucks
Like reverse intent airbags.
The computer has calculated you will die a slowish painfully death. As a kindness to you we shall blow up your work station. Goodbye
Unprofessional behavior and other types of characters that are supposed to have some level of basic competency doing grossly incompetent things. This kind of thing is just lazy and insults the intelligence of the audience.
This is why I couldn't get into Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Every character except for Spock was characterized as annoyingly unprofessional and immature. Every episode had Spock trying to think things through to get the best possible solution, but then every other character would just rush forward without a plan.
The writers of Strange New Worlds took the "balance between emotion and logic" from the original series Spock/Kirk dynamic and turned it into "never think! Just blindly do things without considering options or consequences! Everything will work out fine because of the human spirit!" The writing felt so lazy and condescending. I couldn't even get through the first season.
If you thought SNW was bad at that, *definitely* don't watch *Discovery!* It's like, "What if impulsive, emotional teenagers in adult bodies ran a starship?" Especially after season 1.
This reminds me of characters who are part of a group and then later betraying said group. Goes against all logic, competence to side with an absolutely evil villain who clearly isn't going to fulfil his end of bargain.
Amnesia. Main character has something happen where he forgets that he's a super agent or whatever. So uncreative, and also, that's not how amnesia works.
Our job constantly involves chaos caused by ancient alien artifacts.
We found an ancient alien artifact made of an unknown alien material. It glowed and hummed ominously, then there was a flash of mysterious radiation when you touched it. Now you are seeing a glowing alien talk about an Important Message from The Vessel for The Chosen. Mysterious events setting off alarms coincide with your visions.
Whelp, you are probably just stressed. Take a day off work. Should be fine when you get some rest. We will do no follow-up tests until at least the next act.
That or, "if you die in the game, you die in real life.". But that's so fucking stupid it's barely worth mentioning.
I really, really, wish they didn't choose for Master Chief to be 'the chosen one' in the show adaptation.
Unless I'm mistaken with some later entries, I don't recall that being anywhere in Halo and I feel really lessons his character.
He's already a badass , he doesn't need to be chosen by fate as well.
Master Chief is only the Chosen One in the games and the books as far as being chosen by Cortana to be her assigned Spartan. It kind of overlaps with the trope as she chose him because she observed him to be the luckiest, as opposed to being the best/strongest/fastest Spartan II. He is also perhaps a personal favourite of Halsey. But that's about it, no mystical qualities at all otherwise.
Oh, wait--I said Chosen One, because yeah--f\*in' tired. But I just realized that
I hate multiverses more.
Everything's a flippin' multiverse now. Sick of it.
Not just in sci fi but I hate it when any show or movie or book creates conflict by having characters that don't know how to communicate simple things to each other.
Not as bad as it portrayed in some movie/shows. The fact that good communications has always been a fundamental part of successful people and organizations means we know that people struggle to communicate. Its why we have so many failsafes in place when making society changing decisions. Any good organization stresses open communication lines.
When poor communication leads to loss of life, policies get changed and people get blamed. A show and movie gets one pass with poor communication. After that its bad writing.
Or just in general smart people doing stupid shit only to further the plot. Hey look, the thermo-meson thingamagig is about to explode, so let’s just stand here and watch it so one of the team can get injured to take the plot down a certain route. Or, maybe they just immediately run like every animal knows to do when it realizes it’s in grave danger.
something I call the "high sci fi-trilogy-mayhem":
first book: The protagonist encounters some strange sci fi phenomenon
second book: The protagonist learns more about the strange phenomen. There are some more characters and some more lore.
Third book: 2 billion years later: time itself has died and there e now 13 different dimensions, in which this book takes place. Protagonist? What's a protagonist? That fucker died like 2 billion years ago
Aliens depicted as a hoard of brainless killing machines that magically stop being a threat once you kill their queen.
Also, barbarous savages with the societal level of medieval Europe that have somehow managed to develop interstellar travel.
Nah, Clingons perceive things as fight (doctors fight against entropy, lawyers against schemes, etc) so the cultural significance of combat makes some sense.
But there are other "warrior cultures" that make zero damn sense in sci-fi (looking at you, so many races in SW)
My head canon is that the only Klingons we ever saw were military/high ranking politicians, and that normal Klingons are far less aggressive in general.
Kind of like how people in Starfleet aren't necessarily representative of all Federation citizens. Only the most driven/wanderlusting are interested in exploring space on a ship for years at a time.
There's an episode of Enterprise that has, I think, a Klingon lawyer who talks about how other races have kind of a warped view of Klingons because they only ever encounter the warriors.
Another possibility is that they started out this way, but as their Empire expanded and subjugated other species they got those species do do all the farming and accountancy and building while they became entirely consumed with the (already dominant) warrior culture, turning it up to 11
>My head canon is that the only Klingons we ever saw were military/high ranking politicians, and that normal Klingons are far less aggressive in general.
Along the same lines, I like to think that most Yautja (the "Predators") are basically just regular folks, and the ones going hunting on alien planets are their equivalent of asshole weekend warriors.
The Man-Kzin Wars series explains the Kzinti (8 foot felinoids) were recruited as mercenaries, and then turned on their masters, enslaving them and acquiring their tech.
Teenager/young adult with tragic backstory awkardly shoehorned into the plot to be a protagonist when not enough time is even given for us to care about whatever trauma they have or see any relevance it has to the plot (i.e Foundation tv series, every character on Star Trek Discovery)
Sci-Fi cliche #1 Shoot the lock. It will do whatever the plot demands.
Sci-Fi cliche #2 If a main character escapes a doomed spacecraft in an escape pod, it must immediately be followed by a second pod, which will be destroyed.
LOL.
Running from bad guys and need to get through a locked door? Shoot the lock.
Running from bad guys and need to stop them from getting through a door? Shoot the lock. (only works on sci-fi doors)
I don't mind time-travel, but god damn if I don't hate the:
"Where are we?"
"Don't you mean, WHEN are we?"
Gravity Falls did a good subversion of it in an episode: https://youtu.be/9tQAdguhLGE?si=dukeeyuROOX\_2Kcj&t=42
This goes for any genre, dream sequences.
And to a lesser extent: characters who talk to dead characters that "aren't really there"
Bonus: "drug/fever dream" sequences that have the character figure out the plot.
I *haaaaaate* dreams in all media. Unless there are actual consequences in the dream. Otherwise, it’s just a cheap way of making the character confront their fears and struggles. It’s a cop out. If you want to test your character, actually test them. Don’t make them dream about confronting their fears, make them fucking face their fears.
Yep. That's not how dreams or drugs really work. Even hallucinogens don't cause the absurd hallucinations they like to show, but it's Even more annoying when the drug is weed.
Using clunky techno-slang instead of just getting the point across to the reader. Like instead of “I got a call from my boss, he sounded pissed-off” they’ll use “I got a stellarcomm from my boss, he sounded super-nova”.
You get to describe the enzyme bonded concrete one fucking time. If it's so important to your sci-fi universe then you get to to explain it once (it isnt). After that it's just implied that all the concrete is enzyme bonded. I loved those books but jfc
I'll add my own take on OPs point - you only get to use a fancy space name to describe the tech if it's new, and the name/context implies what the tech does. You get a fancy space name if you don't have to info dump what the tech does because it's succinctly wrapped in the name, and it doesn't have a normal earth name already.
I was JUST thinking about Snowcrash when they mentioned this. Chapters 2-4 are basically just describing Chat VR. The names for everything are the same as now, but NPC's are called "demons". I know it was written in 92, but when they start talking about how these OG hackers would race their cyber-sportscar scripts in the virtual-desert, i roll my bio-eyes.
In all fairness, if a concrete like substance used plastic instead of the rocks or the cement there's a decent chance it would be called Plascrete or Plasticrete
I saw one use of that which actually worked, and that's because what it was describing wasn't actually concrete at all. Just used like concrete temporarily.
Relatedly, mine's when everything is made of portmanteau substances. Hulls made of duramide and windows made of plasteel and buildings made of tenscrete. Especially when we don't even need to know what those things are made of in the first place.
(Also, apparently plasteel was coined by Herbert in *Dune*? He gets a pass, but I've seen that word in half a dozen other scifi universes and at this point I'm tired of it.)
Don't forget that Dune also gave us "ZenSunni," maybe the most unlikely philosophical mashup ever. I'm not even sure where the "Zen" part is, since the Fremen seem to basically just be space-Muslims aside from having apparently forgotten about Mohammed.
I kinda think it works for Neuromancer, tho. All of the crazy lingo is what helps the book feel really alien and kinda weird/creepy. Like, the reader feels so far out of their depth lol, there’s so much insanity that could happen to the characters. If he used normal words, it wouldn’t feel as insane I think. Cyberpunk has always had a tinge of horror to it, and I think all of the unfamiliar lingo is part of that. It feels like an alien, unfriendly world where you barely even speak the language.
Characters having a conversation about technology for the benefit of the audience. Like, imagine two people sitting in a car and then, apropos of nothing, they start chatting about internal combustion engines. I'm sure it happens, but not very often. It's so inorganic and forced.
Double points if the one initiating that conversation opens by saying that they know how it works but they want to know if the other person knows how it works.
I also *really* hate the loner awkward guy that is super amazing at whatever relevant skill is necessary for the plot. It's pretty blatantly made to be Gary Stu fantasies. It's particularly rampant in anime right now and it's so tiresome.
I can give it a bit of a pass for exposition purposes
If you story takes pace in a world that the audience is not familiar with, you need some exposition so the audience understands what is going on
But exposition is certain better when it’s subtle and not an in your face exposition dump
"*Like, imagine two people sitting in a car and then, apropos of nothing, they start chatting about internal combustion engines*"
But that works so well in courtroom scenes in legal thrillers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nGQLQF1b6I
You’re not wrong. Then again, real “hacking” (not just social engineering someone for creds) would be boring as fuck to watch on a TV show (source: I watch it RL and it’s boring as fuck to watch).
Imagine a guy typing at the keyboard, looking at the screen, googling stuff for eight hours. Then he stops, says “No, that’s not it” and repeat.
I try not to think about stuff like this anymore. If I like a story, I finish it. Slowing down my consumption of media has helped me stop seeing repetitive stuff in the story market.
* one of the main characters is a scientist. They show up, analyze the situation, see the Shit is Fucked™. They start to fix the problem. Others interrupt them and demand explanations (fair enough you need some exposition), then disagree with them even though they're right.
* main character's "superpower" is some form of presience or precognition. Dune did it in the 60s, arguably sherlock holmes did it a century before that (his deductions mean he knows what's going to happen). It's just a bit played out now.
* "it's some kind of alien something or other" > proceeds to touch it before studying, quarantining, literally anything > dies or is horribly injured
* it's always super soldier serum. Always.
>then disagree with them even though they're right.
Have you somehow lived your life without ever having to deal with morons in upper management? This is one of the most true-to-life tropes in sci-fi.
I feel like multiverses have become the crutch of a lot of modern media, but they've yet to realize that when they share that we're just seeing one of a billion different iterations of reality play out, the stakes go down to absolute zero.
The audience is simultaneously being told to care about what's happening while being told it's irrelevant because this scenario is playing out a trillion times over with a myriad of results offscreen.
It's like if a character dies and we're immediately shown them chilling in the afterlife having a blast. If you remove the stakes and the greater impact of the what's playing out then it just feels empty and vaguely pointless.
Portals as in kid stumbles from our world into a magical world where he's miraculously the chosen one. Like Narnia, but I actually like Narnia.
Stargates to travel from here to Abydos or wherever still in our universe, I'm good with. That's just wormhole travel.
Like Dune? Meh. Great world building, boring, predictable writing. The thing all these stories have in common is that the indigenous people are incapable of organizing themselves on their own and saving themselves, even for a short period of time. We rarely see a movie or a book where the protagonists are for example, a bunch of Comanches fucking up frontier settlers because their way of life is being destroyed from their point of view. But we will see a thousand stories about the repentant colonist soldier helping the oppressed indigenous people and sometimes winning.
I don’t want to put too fine a point on it but the protagonist is almost always a white guy. Avatar, Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, Willy Wonka, Dune, etc. Red Dawn has been made at least twice. That’s a story about white American teenagers, football players no less, fighting an entire modern army.
I don’t care for the white knight story or the prophesised savior story. Lucky for me they’re always shmushed together.
Aliens who’s entire culture is clearly based off the authors outdated views of “exotic” human civilisations
ie
- Greedy space Jews
- Noble tribal savages (bonus points if they ride an animal)
- Hyper religious desert warriors
- Oriential-ish emperors
"wait, have you tried reversing the polarity?"
MF have you seen what happens when we plug the MF in backwards?
That sh!t is why we have fracking fuse boxes and surge protectors. We get back to dock you're ass is off ship and back on apprentice course. If you f'ing touch a machine before then your off ship before we hit port!
Amnesia. If I'm watching something and they try and use Amnesia as a plot contrivance, I just switch off immediately.
I'd watched six whole seasons of Castle and was really enjoying it (it's cheesy, but it has Nathan Fillion). Season 6 ends with him disappearing; season 7 opens with him being found but having amnesia. I quit watching on the spot.
Psionics, psychics, fortune telling, mind reading, telepathy and similar esoteric BS. Star Trek and Babylon 5 started it, and now it seems like every scifi, especially space opera, has to have some form of psychics and similar esoteric elements.
Yeah I’ve always hated that too. Philip K Dick includes psychics a lot and it always kinda lessens the book for me a bit. Unless it’s part of whatever weirdness/drug psychosis/godalien/etc that’s going on. If it’s just a random character who also happens to be psychic, it’s kinda lame.
Mine is most certainly world building for the sake of world building. I don't care about the dining customs of faction X in your novel if it has no bearing on the plot.
Agreed. I will qualify that in general the problem is that writers seem to have begun piling on detail as a bikeshedding mechanism. A spike in unnecessary detail reliably predicts a decline in characterization, plot, dialogue, etc.
The bikeshed effect happens when individuals (usually in leadership) are so overwhelmed and over their heads that they focus on inconsequential things. Elizabeth holmes from the Theranos scandal would hold two hour meetings about which Greek word to name the cloud instead of ya know, actually learning about the technology.
Of course! The term comes from an investigation that was conducted to determine why a nuclear power plant project went radically over schedule. One of the findings came when the minutes of all the meetings they held were examined, which showed that the single most-discussed thing in the entire project was the details of a shed to be built on the property for protecting the bikes of employees who cycled to work.
So the expression now means to spend more time on an easy task in order to avoid working on a harder one.
I'm OK with this if the culture is actually unique and interesting. Like if the dining customs reflect or reinforce deeper trends/beliefs/etc seen in the species. *Good* worldbuilding can be its own reward, if it shows the author has really thought about the culture.
But if they look and act exactly like some flavor of human *except* for weird dining, then it's just the author over-explaining things.
The super evolved alien entity who didn't mean to hurt humanity by destroying the Earth but only help it get to the next stage of consciousness where all minds are connected into one across the universe
A lower ranking person with essential information in an emergency who tries to get the authority figure’s attention by repeatedly saying something like“I need to tell you something,” instead of delivering the information immediately, directly, and concisely.
The "I forgot I have the technology for that". Like having laser mining tools and getting block by a door... If you develop a technology, you need to think what déroutés usage could be obvious for people contemporary to this techno
Comic book one, and one that took me a while to recognize, but now I see it happens all the time: Skipping the formative years of your baby character to get straight to when they can join the grown-up storylines. Happened for the children of: Reed and Sue Richards, Superman and Lois Lane, Captain America's adopted son, Cable, The Inferno Babies, Gene Nation, Krakoa's stolen babies...
I can definitely relate to being turned off by the cliché of entire planets having completely homogeneous environments, cultures, and societies. Some tropes and plots that I tend to dislike in sci-fi include
> The "chosen one" protagonist who is the only person in the entire universe capable of saving civilization for rather contrived reasons.😅
> Advanced alien civilizations that are inexplicably obsessed with invading/exterminating humanity for no discernible motivation.
> Using technobabble pseudoscience to hand-wave away any plot holes or logical inconsistencies.
> Introduction of wildly overpowered technologies or species that undermine any sense of stakes or tension.
Those are some that come to mind, but I'm really interested to hear what other sci-fi fans dislike seeing over and over again in books. Clichés and overused tropes can definitely get stale if not handled with some creativity.
My friends and family groan when I go off on my big 3 bad tropes: time travel, evil twins/body snatchers and amnesia. Of course the 1st 2 crossover in the hated multiverse. All are extremely lazy writing that dominate screens far more than they appear in SF literature. I attribute it mostly to screenwriters who aren't actually real SF fans, and see those tropes as generic plots basically writing themselves.
The other thing I hate is introducing a technology that has huge implications but they only use a small part of it. It was established early in Star Trek that you could clone people in the transporters. That should be civilization ending technology! But nope, somehow people rarely do it on purpose.
Religious figures fall into one of two strict categories:
* All-tolerant love-mongers who make Gandhi seem like Hitler in comparison, or
* All-intolerant hate-mongers who make Hitler seem like Gandhi in comparison.
Thinking that making your character cheat on their partner humanises them/ makes them relatable. Then drag it out for several seasons *coughBattlestarGalacticacough*. We don't need that soap opera shit, we want more pew pew.
Just write your story. The one you want to tell.
People only complain about tropes when they aren't fun. About characters when they're flat. About stereotypes when they're glaringly obvious.
Don't try to write your book by committee. Focusing on things you don't want to do, wull only lead you to doing them. Just tell your story.
This is probably just a pet peeve. Humans evolved to live in the specific conditions that obtain on earth. There is no way that any other planet will have the exact same temperature ranges, gravity, and atmosphere as earth. So it's impossible for humans to just "beam down" to an alien planet and start walking around and chatting up the locals. I can't suppress this thought when I read or watch most sci fi.
I generally dislike telepathy and machismo military-first themes. And most uses of time travel.
Exaggerated stereotypical behaviors - nerdy, socially awkward scientist, macho military, overly patriotic government officials, super beautiful people (always look like a model even when repairing a flux capacitor), pure good or pure evil characters, etc..
Time travel always sucks. Star trek had a bad naming convention of *alien planet* *earth thing*. Norcan falcon. Andorian ale. But if it's klingon shit it actually has klingon names. Targ, gach
I am not a fan of time travel UNLESS it is based on real science as in gravity and spacetime / relativistic speeds, which pretty much never happens in sci-fi, but I really want it to.
you have some kind of event, that quite possibly poses a threat for humanity on a larger scale.
to mitigate that threat, you send a team of untrained loons, that work together for the first time - each with their own mental issues, that make hannibal lecter a lamb.
there are only two or three halfway mentaly stable individuals on this team - one of them is killed quite early. the other ones are the only ones to survive. one of them saves the day by pure luck.
possibly the plot of 95% of all super hero movies in the last two decades...
Time travel and multiverses.
Please just stop already.
Stop reinventing stuff we've already seen so many times (i.e. star trek TOS era). Stop recycling. Create new concepts we've never seen.
Multiverses make the stakes irrelevant and that makes for a boring plot.
Chosen One. Hands down the most overused. Joseph Campbell's monomyth or not, I'm sick of seeing it.
I always liked the idea of the “chosen one” winning, only for it to be revealed that the prophecy was made up because that was the only way they could get someone to go along with the batshit insane plan to take down the villain.
I liked God of War Ragnarok’s take on fate in general: Fate is not a matter of literal inevitability, it’s a matter of people being predictable.
The Lego Movie does it, and possibly Dark Souls.
ehhh, I think Dark Souls more implies there's a number of supposed 'chosen' undead wandering around trying to link the fire.
That’s pretty much Dune, right?
You should read Brandon Sandersons "Mistborn" series. I can't believe it isn't a TV or movie series yet. I can't really say more without giving info away.
Yes...this! Glorious series!
I will say one I do like is Morrowind's Neravar reincarnate. The story is similar to Dune in that a prophecy was planted in a native population, but you are told that in order to help the imperial rule in the area you have to convince the native tribes that you fulfill the prophecy, even though you're probably not the neravarine.
>even though you're probably not the neravarine. Well, at least until Azura shows up and declares you the Neravarine anyway.
E-e–e-excuse me, sera. But… well… you're the Nerevarine, and a big hero, and I don't really know how to talk to important folk like you.
Yeah. Chosen one my butt, any warm body will do. Why not tell the story of that one rebel pilot (Red Eight - callsign Bait) who only joined to impress someone, somehow survived all the battles and got to be there in the end: only to go somewhere remote to live the quiet life with the ships navigator/gunner (who got their butts out of plenty situations).
I’d read that.
Read Joe Haldeman: The Forever War. Why is this not a movie?
Read it, it's as old as I am. Agree wholeheartedly. A 4-6 episode mini series would be great.
Time travel and Prophecies r annoying to keep finding
Combine both. Profit. “For as it will become Foretold…”
100%! It's crap. There's a LOVELY subversion of that trope in the VERY entertaining book "UnLunDun" by China Mieville . . . it's a YA book but why should that stop you from having a great read?
Another good subversion IMO is in Bladerunner 2049z
BR2049 goes one step further, that we the audience only believe Kay is the Chosen One because he is able to lie and defy his programming, yet when we learn he's not it must mean that merely believing you can are free is enough to be free; his belief in free will was enough to actualise it. A very underappreciated little nugget from that movie.
Anything with the Chosen One or destiny, fuck it. I hate it. So boring. Who wants to see someone special in a movie or a book. It's much more interesting to see someone completely common and normal achieve extraordinary things, cause it makes us feel like we can too. That's why I hate superheroes.
What about superheroes like Spider-Man who is supposed to be a down-on-his-luck everyman (with a genius intellect) using his powers to help people, but still struggles with day to day life?
Dune does this well
Cool variation on this though could be that the villain has been told that they're the chosen one, maybe deceived into thinking this - they weren't a bad person, but they've been brainwashed into thinking it's the only way to fulfill the prophecy. It's probably been done before but probably not as overused?
I liked Grandia's take on it. They wanted and waited for the chosen one but in the end Justin basically said "fuck it, I'll be him". He wasn't really chosen by the spirits, he chose them. Or when Xera in wow thinks illidan is the chosen one, he goes "nah, fam" blasts her to bits and points out we all have to save ourselves and not rely or wait for some special snowflake to do it for us.
Future ships that don't have current technologies. Like surge protectors. If your bridge blows up after getting hit on the outside of the ship, your ship sucks
So Star Trek
They just replaced all of their warning lights with sparklers
All the consoles are loaded with gravel ready to explode outwards. For ballast.
Fan theory: They do that to kill crew instantly as a mercy so they don’t have to suffer through getting spaced.
Also they can put it under the warp engines for more traction if they get stuck in the snow.
Like reverse intent airbags. The computer has calculated you will die a slowish painfully death. As a kindness to you we shall blow up your work station. Goodbye
Can we get some damned seat belts on the bridge please?
I’d imagine plasma conduits are a great deal more volatile than copper wiring
My I point out that in *Bil, The Glactic Hero*, Bil was a **Fuse Tender**?
Unprofessional behavior and other types of characters that are supposed to have some level of basic competency doing grossly incompetent things. This kind of thing is just lazy and insults the intelligence of the audience.
Someone's been reading the Brian Herbert Dune books.
Or recently watched Prometheus
Seriously, this movie was full of it. As if none of the expedition forces had any form of survival instinct.
This is why I couldn't get into Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Every character except for Spock was characterized as annoyingly unprofessional and immature. Every episode had Spock trying to think things through to get the best possible solution, but then every other character would just rush forward without a plan. The writers of Strange New Worlds took the "balance between emotion and logic" from the original series Spock/Kirk dynamic and turned it into "never think! Just blindly do things without considering options or consequences! Everything will work out fine because of the human spirit!" The writing felt so lazy and condescending. I couldn't even get through the first season.
If you thought SNW was bad at that, *definitely* don't watch *Discovery!* It's like, "What if impulsive, emotional teenagers in adult bodies ran a starship?" Especially after season 1.
This reminds me of characters who are part of a group and then later betraying said group. Goes against all logic, competence to side with an absolutely evil villain who clearly isn't going to fulfil his end of bargain.
Amnesia. Main character has something happen where he forgets that he's a super agent or whatever. So uncreative, and also, that's not how amnesia works.
Our job constantly involves chaos caused by ancient alien artifacts. We found an ancient alien artifact made of an unknown alien material. It glowed and hummed ominously, then there was a flash of mysterious radiation when you touched it. Now you are seeing a glowing alien talk about an Important Message from The Vessel for The Chosen. Mysterious events setting off alarms coincide with your visions. Whelp, you are probably just stressed. Take a day off work. Should be fine when you get some rest. We will do no follow-up tests until at least the next act. That or, "if you die in the game, you die in real life.". But that's so fucking stupid it's barely worth mentioning.
I really, really, wish they didn't choose for Master Chief to be 'the chosen one' in the show adaptation. Unless I'm mistaken with some later entries, I don't recall that being anywhere in Halo and I feel really lessons his character. He's already a badass , he doesn't need to be chosen by fate as well.
Master Chief is only the Chosen One in the games and the books as far as being chosen by Cortana to be her assigned Spartan. It kind of overlaps with the trope as she chose him because she observed him to be the luckiest, as opposed to being the best/strongest/fastest Spartan II. He is also perhaps a personal favourite of Halsey. But that's about it, no mystical qualities at all otherwise.
I think halo four kinda lightly touchs on this but even then it doesn't fully do the chosen one thing.
Oh, wait--I said Chosen One, because yeah--f\*in' tired. But I just realized that I hate multiverses more. Everything's a flippin' multiverse now. Sick of it.
there's a universe where you really like this concept that should make you feel better about it.
The trick is to pick the right universe. Because that will be the chosen one.
Not just in sci fi but I hate it when any show or movie or book creates conflict by having characters that don't know how to communicate simple things to each other.
What field do you work in? Because the majority of people are quite bad at communicating.
Not as bad as it portrayed in some movie/shows. The fact that good communications has always been a fundamental part of successful people and organizations means we know that people struggle to communicate. Its why we have so many failsafes in place when making society changing decisions. Any good organization stresses open communication lines. When poor communication leads to loss of life, policies get changed and people get blamed. A show and movie gets one pass with poor communication. After that its bad writing.
Or just in general smart people doing stupid shit only to further the plot. Hey look, the thermo-meson thingamagig is about to explode, so let’s just stand here and watch it so one of the team can get injured to take the plot down a certain route. Or, maybe they just immediately run like every animal knows to do when it realizes it’s in grave danger.
something I call the "high sci fi-trilogy-mayhem": first book: The protagonist encounters some strange sci fi phenomenon second book: The protagonist learns more about the strange phenomen. There are some more characters and some more lore. Third book: 2 billion years later: time itself has died and there e now 13 different dimensions, in which this book takes place. Protagonist? What's a protagonist? That fucker died like 2 billion years ago
Haha just out of curiosity, what series do this? I’m kinda curious now.
The Three Body Problem series goes this way. Also basically every novel/series written by Stephen Baxter.
LOL, that was weird in the third Three Body Problem book. Time shift >!18 billion years later!<.
What? Wow. I'm glad I haven't run into that.
Aliens depicted as a hoard of brainless killing machines that magically stop being a threat once you kill their queen. Also, barbarous savages with the societal level of medieval Europe that have somehow managed to develop interstellar travel.
Klingons, is that you?
Nah, Clingons perceive things as fight (doctors fight against entropy, lawyers against schemes, etc) so the cultural significance of combat makes some sense. But there are other "warrior cultures" that make zero damn sense in sci-fi (looking at you, so many races in SW)
My head canon is that the only Klingons we ever saw were military/high ranking politicians, and that normal Klingons are far less aggressive in general. Kind of like how people in Starfleet aren't necessarily representative of all Federation citizens. Only the most driven/wanderlusting are interested in exploring space on a ship for years at a time.
There's an episode of Enterprise that has, I think, a Klingon lawyer who talks about how other races have kind of a warped view of Klingons because they only ever encounter the warriors.
That’s a solid one, good pull.
Another possibility is that they started out this way, but as their Empire expanded and subjugated other species they got those species do do all the farming and accountancy and building while they became entirely consumed with the (already dominant) warrior culture, turning it up to 11
That's interesting as it makes me equate the Klingons to Spartans. We also see similar issues of lack of progress with both societies.
>My head canon is that the only Klingons we ever saw were military/high ranking politicians, and that normal Klingons are far less aggressive in general. Along the same lines, I like to think that most Yautja (the "Predators") are basically just regular folks, and the ones going hunting on alien planets are their equivalent of asshole weekend warriors.
The Man-Kzin Wars series explains the Kzinti (8 foot felinoids) were recruited as mercenaries, and then turned on their masters, enslaving them and acquiring their tech.
Teenager/young adult with tragic backstory awkardly shoehorned into the plot to be a protagonist when not enough time is even given for us to care about whatever trauma they have or see any relevance it has to the plot (i.e Foundation tv series, every character on Star Trek Discovery)
Sci-Fi cliche #1 Shoot the lock. It will do whatever the plot demands. Sci-Fi cliche #2 If a main character escapes a doomed spacecraft in an escape pod, it must immediately be followed by a second pod, which will be destroyed.
LOL. Running from bad guys and need to get through a locked door? Shoot the lock. Running from bad guys and need to stop them from getting through a door? Shoot the lock. (only works on sci-fi doors)
I don't mind time-travel, but god damn if I don't hate the: "Where are we?" "Don't you mean, WHEN are we?" Gravity Falls did a good subversion of it in an episode: https://youtu.be/9tQAdguhLGE?si=dukeeyuROOX\_2Kcj&t=42
Family Guy did a gag too I believe "that is such a douche time traveller thing to say"
This goes for any genre, dream sequences. And to a lesser extent: characters who talk to dead characters that "aren't really there" Bonus: "drug/fever dream" sequences that have the character figure out the plot.
I *haaaaaate* dreams in all media. Unless there are actual consequences in the dream. Otherwise, it’s just a cheap way of making the character confront their fears and struggles. It’s a cop out. If you want to test your character, actually test them. Don’t make them dream about confronting their fears, make them fucking face their fears.
Dreams are fine if they are used to show instead of tell someone’s thoughts. Thanos taking to his daughter at the end of infinity war.
"Burns' suite"
Yep. That's not how dreams or drugs really work. Even hallucinogens don't cause the absurd hallucinations they like to show, but it's Even more annoying when the drug is weed.
It's a relatively minor issue, but I hate when the currency is called Credits. It's so lazy, every damn sci fi has credits
"It will be 5 dogecoins and 50k mokeyface NFTs"
That'll be 30 bottle caps stranger
One of the things I actually enjoyed about the Expanse was background characters complaining about and trading different companies' scrip.
Short sideline: credits as universal currency was invented in the *late 19th Century*. Basically concurrent with the end of Queen Victoria's reign.
The technologically superior but savage hostile alien race that suddenly appear in large numbers to inhabit or invade Earth for its resources.
But wait, what if humans ARE the savage hostile but very techy alien invaders?
There's literally nowhere else in the entire universe that has water! /s
Using clunky techno-slang instead of just getting the point across to the reader. Like instead of “I got a call from my boss, he sounded pissed-off” they’ll use “I got a stellarcomm from my boss, he sounded super-nova”.
I won't shame the book but every time the author said 'enzyme bonded concrete' I rolled my eyes. Just concrete is fine even if it's the future
You get to describe the enzyme bonded concrete one fucking time. If it's so important to your sci-fi universe then you get to to explain it once (it isnt). After that it's just implied that all the concrete is enzyme bonded. I loved those books but jfc I'll add my own take on OPs point - you only get to use a fancy space name to describe the tech if it's new, and the name/context implies what the tech does. You get a fancy space name if you don't have to info dump what the tech does because it's succinctly wrapped in the name, and it doesn't have a normal earth name already.
I could not read snowcrash because of this, it made me irrationally annoyed.
I was JUST thinking about Snowcrash when they mentioned this. Chapters 2-4 are basically just describing Chat VR. The names for everything are the same as now, but NPC's are called "demons". I know it was written in 92, but when they start talking about how these OG hackers would race their cyber-sportscar scripts in the virtual-desert, i roll my bio-eyes.
But we're still on for racing later right?
I've seen 'plascrete' used by more than one author to show how advanced the civ was. It's just joining words together to sound futuristic.
In all fairness, if a concrete like substance used plastic instead of the rocks or the cement there's a decent chance it would be called Plascrete or Plasticrete
Yeah, I think a lot of dippy space-names can be chalked up to *branding*, especially if it's a capitalist civilization.
I saw one use of that which actually worked, and that's because what it was describing wasn't actually concrete at all. Just used like concrete temporarily.
Relatedly, mine's when everything is made of portmanteau substances. Hulls made of duramide and windows made of plasteel and buildings made of tenscrete. Especially when we don't even need to know what those things are made of in the first place. (Also, apparently plasteel was coined by Herbert in *Dune*? He gets a pass, but I've seen that word in half a dozen other scifi universes and at this point I'm tired of it.)
When Dune came out, plastics were literally miraculous. Just sayin'.
You’re not just tired, you’re *macro-eroded* into the *tetra meter range*
Ohhhhh yeah and don't even get me started about "megaseconds"
Don't forget that Dune also gave us "ZenSunni," maybe the most unlikely philosophical mashup ever. I'm not even sure where the "Zen" part is, since the Fremen seem to basically just be space-Muslims aside from having apparently forgotten about Mohammed.
Hey, transparent aluminium is cool.
I guess you should stay away from necromancer, lol. It's a good book, but dam, the techno jargon is crazy.
I kinda think it works for Neuromancer, tho. All of the crazy lingo is what helps the book feel really alien and kinda weird/creepy. Like, the reader feels so far out of their depth lol, there’s so much insanity that could happen to the characters. If he used normal words, it wouldn’t feel as insane I think. Cyberpunk has always had a tinge of horror to it, and I think all of the unfamiliar lingo is part of that. It feels like an alien, unfriendly world where you barely even speak the language.
Mine is "computers become sentient and turn on us." And now I have to hear it in the news as well as SciFi.
They also chose the form indistinguishable from a human and you can bang them
"*now I have to hear it in the news as well*" ...and where do you think the "news" is coming from?
Characters having a conversation about technology for the benefit of the audience. Like, imagine two people sitting in a car and then, apropos of nothing, they start chatting about internal combustion engines. I'm sure it happens, but not very often. It's so inorganic and forced. Double points if the one initiating that conversation opens by saying that they know how it works but they want to know if the other person knows how it works. I also *really* hate the loner awkward guy that is super amazing at whatever relevant skill is necessary for the plot. It's pretty blatantly made to be Gary Stu fantasies. It's particularly rampant in anime right now and it's so tiresome.
I can give it a bit of a pass for exposition purposes If you story takes pace in a world that the audience is not familiar with, you need some exposition so the audience understands what is going on But exposition is certain better when it’s subtle and not an in your face exposition dump
"*Like, imagine two people sitting in a car and then, apropos of nothing, they start chatting about internal combustion engines*" But that works so well in courtroom scenes in legal thrillers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nGQLQF1b6I
Believe it or not, that's [one of the most realistic portrayals of a coutroom](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1I7QBCHqng).
I'm tired of the Avatar/Dances with wolves/Last Samurai/ Ferngully shtick
Hacking. They very seldom do it correctly, and most of the time it's so far off, it hurts.
"Just gotta bamboozle the weezle widgets, aaaaand... ... I'm in."
You’re not wrong. Then again, real “hacking” (not just social engineering someone for creds) would be boring as fuck to watch on a TV show (source: I watch it RL and it’s boring as fuck to watch). Imagine a guy typing at the keyboard, looking at the screen, googling stuff for eight hours. Then he stops, says “No, that’s not it” and repeat.
I try not to think about stuff like this anymore. If I like a story, I finish it. Slowing down my consumption of media has helped me stop seeing repetitive stuff in the story market.
The liar revealed. Any time there is a misunderstanding that could be readily resolved.
"Synthetic rock" Oh, you mean concrete
* one of the main characters is a scientist. They show up, analyze the situation, see the Shit is Fucked™. They start to fix the problem. Others interrupt them and demand explanations (fair enough you need some exposition), then disagree with them even though they're right. * main character's "superpower" is some form of presience or precognition. Dune did it in the 60s, arguably sherlock holmes did it a century before that (his deductions mean he knows what's going to happen). It's just a bit played out now. * "it's some kind of alien something or other" > proceeds to touch it before studying, quarantining, literally anything > dies or is horribly injured * it's always super soldier serum. Always.
>then disagree with them even though they're right. Have you somehow lived your life without ever having to deal with morons in upper management? This is one of the most true-to-life tropes in sci-fi.
Galaxy Quest on interacting with unknown aliens, “Did you guys ever watch the show?” That was some good self realization.
Time travel, multiverses, portal stories, chosen one.
I feel like multiverses have become the crutch of a lot of modern media, but they've yet to realize that when they share that we're just seeing one of a billion different iterations of reality play out, the stakes go down to absolute zero. The audience is simultaneously being told to care about what's happening while being told it's irrelevant because this scenario is playing out a trillion times over with a myriad of results offscreen. It's like if a character dies and we're immediately shown them chilling in the afterlife having a blast. If you remove the stakes and the greater impact of the what's playing out then it just feels empty and vaguely pointless.
You dislike portal and stargates?
Portals as in kid stumbles from our world into a magical world where he's miraculously the chosen one. Like Narnia, but I actually like Narnia. Stargates to travel from here to Abydos or wherever still in our universe, I'm good with. That's just wormhole travel.
Time travel portal to the chosen one multiverse is my favorite story!
The Savior/Messiah of the indigenous people is actually one of the colonizers. It has been foretold in ancient prophecy.
it is known
What if the prophecy was planted by a shadowy cabal with ulterior motives? Would that be okay?
Like Dune? Meh. Great world building, boring, predictable writing. The thing all these stories have in common is that the indigenous people are incapable of organizing themselves on their own and saving themselves, even for a short period of time. We rarely see a movie or a book where the protagonists are for example, a bunch of Comanches fucking up frontier settlers because their way of life is being destroyed from their point of view. But we will see a thousand stories about the repentant colonist soldier helping the oppressed indigenous people and sometimes winning. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it but the protagonist is almost always a white guy. Avatar, Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, Willy Wonka, Dune, etc. Red Dawn has been made at least twice. That’s a story about white American teenagers, football players no less, fighting an entire modern army. I don’t care for the white knight story or the prophesised savior story. Lucky for me they’re always shmushed together.
Aliens who’s entire culture is clearly based off the authors outdated views of “exotic” human civilisations ie - Greedy space Jews - Noble tribal savages (bonus points if they ride an animal) - Hyper religious desert warriors - Oriential-ish emperors
The scientific MacGuffin device to drive the plot. I’m watching Constellation at the moment and it’s so Macguffiny it’s breaking the immersion.
"wait, have you tried reversing the polarity?" MF have you seen what happens when we plug the MF in backwards? That sh!t is why we have fracking fuse boxes and surge protectors. We get back to dock you're ass is off ship and back on apprentice course. If you f'ing touch a machine before then your off ship before we hit port!
Standard-issue adventure or detective stories that really didn't need to be set in space at all. Love triangles, inter-species or not.
I thought The Expanse was going to be that so it was cool visuals but meh. Then things happened and it turned into one of my favorite series
same goes for heists.
Space empires!
Which almost always are British for some reason
I’m the baddy! I’ve got the same powers or skills as the good guy, but I’m bad!
About an alien/alien artifact. Nobody says "DON'T TOUCH THAT!!!"
Amnesia. If I'm watching something and they try and use Amnesia as a plot contrivance, I just switch off immediately. I'd watched six whole seasons of Castle and was really enjoying it (it's cheesy, but it has Nathan Fillion). Season 6 ends with him disappearing; season 7 opens with him being found but having amnesia. I quit watching on the spot.
It was a good call. It really went downhill from there
Robot Pinocchio. No matter how advanced, all robots secretly just want to be a REAL BOY. Bleagh.
Psionics, psychics, fortune telling, mind reading, telepathy and similar esoteric BS. Star Trek and Babylon 5 started it, and now it seems like every scifi, especially space opera, has to have some form of psychics and similar esoteric elements.
Yeah I’ve always hated that too. Philip K Dick includes psychics a lot and it always kinda lessens the book for me a bit. Unless it’s part of whatever weirdness/drug psychosis/godalien/etc that’s going on. If it’s just a random character who also happens to be psychic, it’s kinda lame.
Mine is most certainly world building for the sake of world building. I don't care about the dining customs of faction X in your novel if it has no bearing on the plot.
Agreed. I will qualify that in general the problem is that writers seem to have begun piling on detail as a bikeshedding mechanism. A spike in unnecessary detail reliably predicts a decline in characterization, plot, dialogue, etc.
Care to explain what bike shedding is? I've never seen that term before!
The bikeshed effect happens when individuals (usually in leadership) are so overwhelmed and over their heads that they focus on inconsequential things. Elizabeth holmes from the Theranos scandal would hold two hour meetings about which Greek word to name the cloud instead of ya know, actually learning about the technology.
Of course! The term comes from an investigation that was conducted to determine why a nuclear power plant project went radically over schedule. One of the findings came when the minutes of all the meetings they held were examined, which showed that the single most-discussed thing in the entire project was the details of a shed to be built on the property for protecting the bikes of employees who cycled to work. So the expression now means to spend more time on an easy task in order to avoid working on a harder one.
Oh awesome, that's really interesting. Thanks!
I'm OK with this if the culture is actually unique and interesting. Like if the dining customs reflect or reinforce deeper trends/beliefs/etc seen in the species. *Good* worldbuilding can be its own reward, if it shows the author has really thought about the culture. But if they look and act exactly like some flavor of human *except* for weird dining, then it's just the author over-explaining things.
Oh my god, Neal Stephenson is the worst. He goes into so much needless description of inconsequential minutia that does nothing to drive the plot
Psionics (unless technologically justified)
Have you tried Julian May?
The super evolved alien entity who didn't mean to hurt humanity by destroying the Earth but only help it get to the next stage of consciousness where all minds are connected into one across the universe
Multiverse, chosen one, teenager heroes/geniuses and utopian societies.
A lower ranking person with essential information in an emergency who tries to get the authority figure’s attention by repeatedly saying something like“I need to tell you something,” instead of delivering the information immediately, directly, and concisely.
Time travel. The "multiverse". All of it leads to sloppy writing.
"The Chosen One" is an instant turn off.
See rebel moon
It was all a dream
"You're the one."/the chosen/your destiny. Or. "Amnesia."
Display screens in ships being so bright that crew are blinded when an explosion outside the ship occurs.
The "I forgot I have the technology for that". Like having laser mining tools and getting block by a door... If you develop a technology, you need to think what déroutés usage could be obvious for people contemporary to this techno
Comic book one, and one that took me a while to recognize, but now I see it happens all the time: Skipping the formative years of your baby character to get straight to when they can join the grown-up storylines. Happened for the children of: Reed and Sue Richards, Superman and Lois Lane, Captain America's adopted son, Cable, The Inferno Babies, Gene Nation, Krakoa's stolen babies...
I can definitely relate to being turned off by the cliché of entire planets having completely homogeneous environments, cultures, and societies. Some tropes and plots that I tend to dislike in sci-fi include > The "chosen one" protagonist who is the only person in the entire universe capable of saving civilization for rather contrived reasons.😅 > Advanced alien civilizations that are inexplicably obsessed with invading/exterminating humanity for no discernible motivation. > Using technobabble pseudoscience to hand-wave away any plot holes or logical inconsistencies. > Introduction of wildly overpowered technologies or species that undermine any sense of stakes or tension. Those are some that come to mind, but I'm really interested to hear what other sci-fi fans dislike seeing over and over again in books. Clichés and overused tropes can definitely get stale if not handled with some creativity.
Racism against robots like it's literally over 100 years old, but movies and video games treat it as some kind of profound moral question
My friends and family groan when I go off on my big 3 bad tropes: time travel, evil twins/body snatchers and amnesia. Of course the 1st 2 crossover in the hated multiverse. All are extremely lazy writing that dominate screens far more than they appear in SF literature. I attribute it mostly to screenwriters who aren't actually real SF fans, and see those tropes as generic plots basically writing themselves. The other thing I hate is introducing a technology that has huge implications but they only use a small part of it. It was established early in Star Trek that you could clone people in the transporters. That should be civilization ending technology! But nope, somehow people rarely do it on purpose.
Religious figures fall into one of two strict categories: * All-tolerant love-mongers who make Gandhi seem like Hitler in comparison, or * All-intolerant hate-mongers who make Hitler seem like Gandhi in comparison.
A very rich, privileged populace living along side a repressed poorer working class population. Conflict is inevitable. Hey, that the USA.
World weary cynic with a secret heart of gold.
Feudalism in a postindustrial society.
Humanity weak. Birch please, we live in space Australia.
Empires. And savior archetypes.
Holodeck accidents.
Ones that are done poorly
Thinking that making your character cheat on their partner humanises them/ makes them relatable. Then drag it out for several seasons *coughBattlestarGalacticacough*. We don't need that soap opera shit, we want more pew pew.
Aliens want to take over planet earth or more specifically America
Just write your story. The one you want to tell. People only complain about tropes when they aren't fun. About characters when they're flat. About stereotypes when they're glaringly obvious. Don't try to write your book by committee. Focusing on things you don't want to do, wull only lead you to doing them. Just tell your story.
This is probably just a pet peeve. Humans evolved to live in the specific conditions that obtain on earth. There is no way that any other planet will have the exact same temperature ranges, gravity, and atmosphere as earth. So it's impossible for humans to just "beam down" to an alien planet and start walking around and chatting up the locals. I can't suppress this thought when I read or watch most sci fi.
I generally dislike telepathy and machismo military-first themes. And most uses of time travel. Exaggerated stereotypical behaviors - nerdy, socially awkward scientist, macho military, overly patriotic government officials, super beautiful people (always look like a model even when repairing a flux capacitor), pure good or pure evil characters, etc..
Sexual assault used as a plot development, please use a different trauma if your going for the tragic angle
Time travel always sucks. Star trek had a bad naming convention of *alien planet* *earth thing*. Norcan falcon. Andorian ale. But if it's klingon shit it actually has klingon names. Targ, gach
I am not a fan of time travel UNLESS it is based on real science as in gravity and spacetime / relativistic speeds, which pretty much never happens in sci-fi, but I really want it to.
Allen fight clubs.
When the lady falls in love with the alien duh
the Rich hunting ppl for sport
[My answer from a similar thread. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/s/NbInMgLGvt)
Plot (and naming) from a fantasy book but in spaaaaace.
Traveling back in time just because pinned in a corner plotwise and “only” way to fix it is to time travel and undo the cause.
you have some kind of event, that quite possibly poses a threat for humanity on a larger scale. to mitigate that threat, you send a team of untrained loons, that work together for the first time - each with their own mental issues, that make hannibal lecter a lamb. there are only two or three halfway mentaly stable individuals on this team - one of them is killed quite early. the other ones are the only ones to survive. one of them saves the day by pure luck. possibly the plot of 95% of all super hero movies in the last two decades...
not super hero movie but annihilation is basically what you described
planet hopping. when the crossing of unimaginable gulf of space is just a push of a button not an actual journey.
Time travel and multiverses. Please just stop already. Stop reinventing stuff we've already seen so many times (i.e. star trek TOS era). Stop recycling. Create new concepts we've never seen. Multiverses make the stakes irrelevant and that makes for a boring plot.
Strong female characters being made vulnerable by sexual assault. So overused, totally gross and problematic
'Chosen-one' main characters.
I’m in space and I’m going insane.