In fact, she’s not. My being related to the people who have wronged her does not give her the right to vilify me by association, as my character has done nothing to be targeted, and the only reason she is targeting me is because of the misdeeds of my mother, which probably happened before I was even born. It’s asinine, and as I said, conniving.
And as for Richard, he may not have chosen to be the favorite child, but he certainly didn’t shy away from it either. He could’ve just, you now, not bragged about being the favorite, and I would never have had a bad word to say about him. And beyond that, he’s also pointlessly jealous of me even though I have expressed zero interest, ever, in his girlfriend, to the point where even my telling him, TWICE, that there was nothing between us, and then never interacting with Clara again except in passing to make sure she wasn’t mistreating my horse, was still not enough to get him off my ass about this girl he liked that I had no interest in. It was ridiculous.
Every contemporary teen YA dystopia/fantasy where the regular, average protagonist manages to upend their country’s entire government.
Red queen and throne of glass are the first two that come to my mind and they both have the most insufferable protagonists. And you know the authors tried to make them these feisty lovable rouges, but they come across as arrogant condescending cunts.
yeah that was weird. I didn’t even interact with her and got that one. wonder if it’s a bug.
True. But the real person to blame here is the King. He is at heart of all this bullshit. Be it your mother killing ya know who, to his 1st wife wanting to take it on you to get to your mother, to your older sister acting out, to your other sister doing what she is planning…to Richard…to the squirrel going starvy! it’s ALL the KING Sword fault!
Well, there is a reason why my character really didn’t like her dad that much, it wouldn’t surprise me if future installments reveal that he was even shadier than he already came across as.
I personally wondered why did we even get to ask him so many questions when you see him last, since you get the same reply from him in a sense. I hate your mother more than love you hurr durr woe is me. Fucker didn’t even have the gut to look at my mc when he said that! Coward! Turn around and say it to me!
Eh, I did like the Hunger Games well enough and I do like the XoR WIP on this website quite a lot.
Sometimes a system is so horrible it is simply so much beyond reform that radicalism is the only way a mc can live with themselves.
And in most of these it doesn’t help that the government is very much out to kill the mc too.
In any case, much like with the real world Arab spring, that sadly hasn’t lead anywhere…the protagonist is often just the catalyst for those who already hated the regime and plotted its downfall to really start to act and put their plans in motion. And how much the mc’s get out of it tends to vary quite a bit Katniss just gets a nice house out of all of it…while other, more ambitious and savvy protagonists can manage to seize significant power, wealth or sometimes even the top job for themselves. Though often the latter category will tend to be either villain protagonists or at the very least anti-heroes themselves due to another pernicious trope I often dislike: ambition is evil.
That and many people can and do genuinely surprise themselves and everybody else with either sheer determination or the hidden talents a crisis can draw out. Quite often a mix of both.
I think their issue is just that the protags have insane accomplishments despite supposedly being “average” so they can be relatable. Personally, I don’t have as much of an issue with it unless their skill progression is especially dumb. There’ve been average people who became heroes plenty of times throughout history.
Probably my favorite example of an average dude being wildly kickass is Audie Murphy, a perfectly average dude who went full Rambo against a German assault (with tank!) during WWII and won (And even destroyed the tank!) - that, and several other noteworthy events of him being ungodly powerful on the battlefield, if the sheer number of medals for valor in combat he received are any indicator.
Yeah, I don’t know why “ambition” is always synonymous with “evil,” but people could stand to dial it back a bit on that. A little bit of ambition is good for you, it gives you the drive to reach for your goals. Those goals don’t HAVE to always be world domination or some shit, you could be ambitious about having a pay raise. I, myself, hold ambitions of one day actually beating Bitterblack Isle in Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, instead of meeting Death for the first time and running away sobbing in terror as he murders all my Pawns.
I see this trope as straight up propaganda sometimes No hero, long for a normal life, don’t think about changing the world around you! Deal with threat and try to settle down (with your heterosexual love interest)!
No surprise villain and antihero protagonists became more popular lately.
Similarly, Admiral Yi Sun-sin of then-Korea (just Korea, no North or South, just one unified thing) taking out an entire Japanese naval force with only thirteen ships during the Imjin War - there was a movie about that, but the movie makers thought that nobody would buy that it was possible, because Yi was just that good a naval strategist.
Although, in Yi’s case, I’m not sure “just some guy” really applies.
I don’t consider Hunger Games contemporary YA. It was one of the forerunners in the genre and Katniss was not unlikable as a protagonist.
I don’t have a problem with overthrowing the government either but at least make it make sense which again contemporary YA tends not to do well. Mostly they’re lazy imitations riding the coattails of their more successful counterparts.
My issue is that the protagonist’s averageness is constantly stressed but all of sudden they’re the master of 17 styles of martial arts when the plot calls for it.
I’ll agree with you there, especially since their dystopian societies make no sense and they’re clearly just trying to come up with a gimmick. Divergent for example, made a society based around basically, high school cliques. The protagonist doesn’t fit in with those and so she overthrows the government. Being in band and on the football team makes you persecuted and a threat to society.
People say that this sort of thing makes sense in high school since cliques seem more important then, and it’s easy to assume society at large values them, but honestly, even IN high school, most people don’t give a shit. I was a choir kid and like, a fourth of those kids were also athletes. I had football players in a computer graphics class, and I, the nerd, was worse at it than them. Nobody thought cliques mattered in high school. I certainly didn’t think which clubs I liked would make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. I was naïve, extremely so, we all were, but not in that sense. I’ve never met someone who was that specific brand of naïve. I honestly don’t see how this series sold.
Dystopias should generally be based on issues we can recognize, or aspects of history or stuff like that. Not everything needs to be super deep, but it should at least make sense what the society is supposed to be or how it got that way. Even over the top satire has something recognizable to make fun of. It shouldn’t be something like “society is a caste system divided by three random things we pulled out of a hat.”
Not everything needs to try to be Nineteen Eighty-Four, there’s all sorts of possibilities for Dystopian Fiction like with any genre, but so many have shit like “there’s an ongoing civil war over whether you like pineapple on pizza”.
Hey now. There’s a very classic story about the war between people who crack their eggs at the big end or the little end. Gulliver’s Travels.
The thing is, a trope in itself isn’t bad. But when Suzanne Collins made it big, everyone else saw that and said “hey, I can write the next Hunger Games!” and the hacks moved in. And it’ll probably continue until the YA version of Vampire Academy shows that the genre is oversaturated to the point of dead and people move on to the Next Big Thing. (At least it isn’t something like harems in Japanese media, where cheap, formulaic writing and sex appeal will probably carry the trope for decades more…)
The power of friendship as an ass pull when the writer has written themselves into a corner. If you are not gonna sit and think about your power system and how it works to some degree for both hard and soft systems then a) don’t include it or b) don’t take your story to seriously ala Jojo
Fights that just devolve into who can punch harder or whose energy beam is bigger.
I hate HATE over powered anime and manga. Minus one punch man and mob psycho.
I hate isekai genre like it just needs to die guys move on. They are all so samey these days
Chosen one stories where the chosen one is a reluctant hero like buddy you’ll be fine you have the power it plot on your side (Avatar is an exception cause it was done really well in my opinion)
Whiny characters especially if they are the protagonist
Realism like there is a point where realism is necessary to ground the story and there is a point where it’s not entertaining like if I needed realism so bad I’ll go outside and touch grass
Live action remakes, it’s going to be inferior from the original 9/10 times but people get excited cause animation is for kids apparently.
Please note that these are just my opinions and my trash tastes
Also another side note this is a personal pet peeve of mine but you don’t have to redeem every villain or give justification for them being evil. Like some shows are like they are evil because of trauma or something along those lines and I’m like this has not had any effect on me what so ever with how I see the villain.
Yeah, I honestly didn’t bother with any clique or club at all and just spent my entire school career hanging out with my three friends (one of whom would eventually become my current roommate), and apart from the fact that the kids at my school were enormous shit-for-brains, I honestly can’t say my school life was any more or less exciting than it would be for other people.
Honestly, same. Sometimes I just want the bad guy to be someone I can hate without being guilt tripped for it.
Example: In my mind, Saren being indoctrinated by the Reapers in ME1 was fine, but Bioware half-assedly trying to make him sympathetic at the tail end of the game when everything about his character, from his backstory (hero of the Turian people, which is about the only good thing that can be said about him; hates humans to hell and back; purposely screwed over Anderson’s chance at becoming a Spectre; has zero qualms about committing war crimes to get what he wants) to the shady crap he spent the whole game doing, screamed “this guy would’ve been a sociopath without the Reapers’ help,” I can’t see how that added anything of value to him.
Sometimes the Yakuza series can turn into this, but most times, if there’s gonna be a massive knock-down drag-out, the game will do something to make sure you can’t just chump your opponent right when the bell rings - mid combat cutscenes where you and the boss are ripping each other up, which naturally transition to you fighting in a new area full of stuff you can pick up and slam into each other’s skulls, for example!
Oh yeah the who can punch harder can be done really well ala Franky vs hard boiled from one piece and I think games can get away with it far better but like I think it’s one of the ones that are harder to do because if the technical aspect of the fight is dead then it’s up to the emotional aspect and stakes of the fight which need to be built up
I’ve noticed that a lot of shows that are really good at writing redemption arcs also tend to have ones that are kind of awful and tacked on. Like, we redeemed one villain, I guess we have to redeem ALL of them. We have ten minutes to make their evil boss sympathetic despite multiple atrocities.
Sure knows how to make hot guys out of pixels…so I find it quite delightful.
An initial period of reluctance can often be warranted however and the more severe and bewildering the transition from the mc’s old normal to the new is the longer I can tolerate it…afterwards it depends on motivation really.
In Harry Potter circumstances where it is pretty clear my mc’s not going to get much more out of it than a dubious education and has to go back to people who’ve kept him an undernourished waif in Dickensian circumstances it does get kinda hard to see why he should risk everything for the mansion dwellers with generations of hoarded wealth when he’s not getting very much out of it. So sometimes it is, imho, warranted for the mc to stay quite reluctant till the end as that is, in addition to power, also a question of motivation.
Kiryu is hot, pretty sad they dropped the male host club from the remake of the second game though that was a real bummer, particularly since my Japanese friend had raised my anticipation for it, only for them to cut it and replace it with a rehash of Majima’s club management mini game from Zero.
Speaking of which while Kiryu is indeed quite hot Majima will probably always remain my favourite from that series.
Now the last one would actually be out of the ordinary as that would be a trans or non-binary mc. Probably a non-binary but mostly female presenting mc but with a biologically male body. In any case that would make them an unusual protagonist.
