That’s anti-military to me, which I’ve always considered very different from anti-war.
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They are generally one and the same.
Huh. Weird, because I’m very opposed to the way my country’s military system operates, but absolutely would not oppose armed resistance to an invasion. Not sure what that would be called.
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That could be a moderate position. I myself am not even for neutrality. If there’s a war, and one side is in the right (sure, war is complicated, but there IS often a right side, none of that “there is no good and bad in war” bs), those who can intervene should lend a hand.
Moderate, hm… I thought my position was rather far to the left. But maybe that’s just in comparison to the US standard, which is far to the right.
I mean, a lot of people over here are pretty left wing, we’re just pretty fond of our military, culturally speaking. Opposition to the military has been big on the internet, but irl it’s pretty common to find people who are downright socialists (or communists like me) who don’t hate the army. How sensible hating the military is also depends on how the military operates.
I like stories about war that are honest. Stories that don’t shy away from the ugliness and atrocity, but also explore feats of heroism and courage, the deep bonds that develop among brothers-in-arms, and the times that war accomplishes something worthy, like taking down a murderous tyrant or liberating a concentration camp. To some extent, an honest war story is probably always going to feel more anti- than pro-war, because (except for a few special souls like General George Patton) no one who has been affected by war actually likes it. But that doesn’t mean every story has to beat us over the head constantly with the anti-war message either. The thing speaks for itself well enough without melodramatic excess.
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That’s a great summary on my feelings on the war is hell trope as well.
One… I’m not sure if it’s a trope, per se, but one trend I’ve seen with some stories that I’m kind of over is when you play an MC who is either:
A.) A nigh-useless piece of meat
or
B.) Perfectly competent on their own
And typically the only real unique detail you have to your name is the big, plot-centric McGuffin that everybody is after and only you have any control over for (reasons x, y, z)…
…But the instant the ROs get introduced, all of a sudden you’re the most inept person in the room, and the ROs could all flawlessly do your job without you, and you have to struggle for the rest of the story to prove that you even have a point being involved in the first place.
It’s pretty obvious that the intent is to try and entice readers into hooking up with the ROs - obviously, right? These stories are almost always billed as something like, “romance intended” or “romance mandatory,” so it makes sense to want to catch the reader’s attention. I get that. How do you draw the eye to these cool characters you want readers to hook up with? Make them come in like a hurricane with their badass selves, that’ll do the trick, damn skippy. But it comes off, to me, in a very smug sort of light - “Look how infinitely cooler the ROs are than you, these guys are the main talent that everybody comes to see, you’re just some background secondary who might get an honorable mention in the end credits. Actually, who are you, again?”
Even worse is when the ROs are given complete shithead personalities. Again, I know it’s to try and entice different types of crowds, having at least one nice guy, one asshole, one clown and one stoic RO, but in practice, it makes the already smug tone of the narrative feel downright contemptuous, like the author, themselves, is looking down their nose at me, the reader, for even bothering to be a part of their story, even though all I’m doing is controlling one of their characters. This is absolutely not true, and I know this, but that’s how it feels, sometimes. It’s particularly damning when I’m playing a first person perspective, and so my character is constantly narrating how they’re such a screw-up and an idiot all the time and they can hardly even feel comfortable in the same room as the ROs and they’re in such awe at how easily they get along with each other and yadda yadda yadda.
And in some cases, it feels like no choice I make is the right choice, and all I’m doing is opening myself up to further contempt - the part of Wayhaven 2 where I have to tell the vampires how to use their vampire powers because they somehow don’t know how to do it already, only for them to look at me like I’m a moron for even opening my mouth, comes immediately to mind. In other cases, I’ll have one dialogue option that basically amount to me floundering, which gets me mocked by at least one of the ROs, if not all of them; one that makes me throw a tantrum like a brat, which gets me snapped back at and talked down to by the ROs, near-universally; one where I act like a snide asshole, and all but the, like, two ROs who can take a joke act like I just turned into a living, breathing pile of dog crap; and one that’s just, “Whatever. Fine. Okay, I guess.” And the ROs nod their heads and act like that was the expected response and if I had said otherwise, they’d have had to put me in time-out or something.
It makes me feel frustrated to be the MC, because it feels like I’m forever having to prove to everybody else why I deserve to have a leading role in the story. Even stories of this type that I generally like do this - Agents of Lucifer spends a solid chapter introducing your character, and right from the word go, you’re getting your ass beat and only just manage to swing the fight back around in your favor, so you end up going back to work beat all to hell. Yeah, the NPCs all spend a bunch of time talking you up as really good at what you do, and the MC, themselves, offer further insight on that particular point, but then the next chapter rolls around and introduces the ROs and it feels like the temperature in the room drops by a solid twenty degrees. Hell, one RO (E, specifically) doesn’t even offer an introduction if you don’t speak up first, they just stare you down like you’re being tested and you’re one wrong move from failing that test. To make matters worse, the NPCs waste no time letting you know that, while you’re a good agent, these are the best agents.
Gee. Thanks. So I get pulled off of solo work, stuck with the A team, and have it told to me without actually being said that I’m expected to measure up to their standards, when just a couple sentences prior, we were talking about how excited they were to meet me.
And again, I like Agents of Lucifer, so this kinda rubs me raw that I have to put up with the same crap that gets dropped on my poor Detective in Wayhaven Chronicles.
I can’t help but wonder why this is so common a trend in these kinds of stories, since it seems incredibly easy to just… not fall into that pit trap - I would rather read about a character who can pull their own weight just as well as everybody else, who the story allows to flex their own prowess from time to time (and a combat-centric Detective getting to throw some punches in one of a small sprinkling of fight scenes in Wayhaven doesn’t really do it for me, sorry - one small moment to shine, and then I have to put up with playing second fiddle to Unit Bravo for the rest of the story, does not equate to the Detective showing off their chops. Similarly, getting my head handed to me in chapter one of Agents of Lucifer doesn’t work for me, either), who doesn’t get shoved with a team of super awesome badasses as a result of being felt to be incapable of doing their own work or needing protecting, but rather because their talents have marked them as a potential boon to an already powerful team and the merge is happening to strengthen them in the long run. I’d rather meet the ROs on even footing, rather than feeling inadequate by comparison - they can still be super powerful and cool in their own right, but let the MC shine as well, rather than be overshadowed by the infinitely superior ROs.
Oh, these ROs are all vampires with uber powerful vampire powers? Hey man, that’s neat. Remind me to tell you about the time I punched out a demigod by using my supernatural-nullifying powers to turn off his godhood sometime.
Dude, that sounds like a trip, let’s go buy a round and chat.
And on that note, I’d rather not have dialogue choices that make it seem like my character is scrambling to impress and failing every step of the way. Like, I get the initial feeling-out process between new teammates, and I get that there’s some expectation of tension when you first team up, but damn, all but one option that either makes me look like the secret Fourth Stooge, a whiny little kid, an insufferable smartass, or emotionally destitute? And the one option that isn’t any of those is blind acceptance or flirting of either the bold or shy (and no other) varieties? Come on, now.
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I noticed with Freshman Magic they did a much better job than usual for an HC of making it not 100% about the ROs, but I still very much noticed a lot of things you’re saying here. Everyone thinks you’re great, but you’re really not. You struggle every step of the way, even with things you’re supposedly great at – until you miraculously turn it around at the end. They tried to make it so that you eventually succeed regardless of your actual skills, but it just ends up as meaning your skills don’t actually matter. At least in this case the ROs’ skills are completely irrelevant. But I’m not sure that’s even better.
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Speaking of Yakuza I will remain forever disappointed that they cut the male host club for Kiryu out of the Kiwami 2 version and replaced it with a knock off of Majima’s club management game from 0. 
Shittiest part is where it forcibly transforms a male character into a girl, most often permanently as a “fun” side effect. But then I tend to hate the irreversible male to female gender bender trope with a passion especially since it is most often played for laughs and cheap thrills. 
I’d still have much preferred the host club to rehashing Majima’s club game from 0. Now imagine how much cooler, sexier and funnier it had been if Majima showed up as either a host or a customer at the host club. 
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It does have one of my favorite lines in the game though:
“And for some reason, Majima showed up.”
Ikr. Pretty sure suddenly having your sex changed forever would be deeply traumatic unless the person being transformed happened to be transgender. Otherwise you have to deal with the sudden gender incongruence and possible dysphoria. Admittedly that’d be an interesting twist. The entity that grants powers is setting this up as a ‘hilarious’ prank and it turns out they picked the worst possible victim.
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So in this game Destiny, there’s a group of robot people called Exos (short for Exomind), and they’re all former humans who underwent a procedure to have their consciousness uploaded into a mechanical chassis, originally to obtain “synthetic immortality” back during humanity’s Golden Age (read: hyper advanced period of extreme enlightenment and galactic colonial expansion), but later for the purpose of waging war with aliens.
Exos apparently undergo such traumatic dysphoria (along with other unique medical issues) as a result of the change that Clovis Bray I, the guy who made Exos, basically had to redesign the Exo chasses to have functioning and discernable synthetic sexual organs, because first gen Exos were literally dying from their own minds rejecting their new bodies so hard that they effectively rendered themselves braindead or self-inflicted amnesia and wiped out their own memories. (Incidentally, now Exos have to get their minds reset regularly in order to avoid these exact issues.)
So uh, I feel like any form of inflicting dysphoria on a hapless victim “for giggles” is objectively a damnable crime, having seen the Destiny take on it.
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Yep, yet the male to female variant is still often used for shits and giggles, particularly in eastern/japanese media to have its own trope:
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@Zyrios
I agree with this. It’s a common problem with many authors in general, though. So many people who write don’t seem to understand how to show someone as being badass without showing everyone around them to be a complete and utter worthless piece of shit. Want to show a character as smart? Make everyone else stupid! Want them to be shown as a great fighter? Have everyone else trip over their own feet. In the end, it’s bad writing and not understanding how actual people work.
I honestly don’t mind this as much as along as your MC can return their treatment in kind. However, that rarely, if ever, happens. Instead, the MC is forced to tolerate a constant ration of shit without returning fire. It’s frustrating, at best. Infuriating, at worst.
Don’t even get me started on that scene. Firstly, it is utterly ludicrous that the MC has to tell vampires how to use their own freaking powers! The entire scene becomes even stupider if a MC with no people skills suggests them using their abilities and gets stared at like they are a moron. WTF do people skills have to do with telling someone to use their own damned skills? If this had to be a choice for a skill check (and I don’t think it should have been), it really should have been passed as long as the MC had any skill above 30. This isn’t rocket science–it’s common sense.
But, as I stated above, it was a case of having to show the MC as being smart, so the vampires were made to be stupid. The other choices are just as bad (“let’s search the area tactically” was laughable–how many freaking missions has this group been on?). Then, you look at the whole mission–they had to sneak in to have the element of surprise and what do they do with it?? “We, the great Unit Bravo–well, some of us–are here! Surrender, peasants!” And it got more nonsensical from there, between the way the Trappers behaved and the fact that the vampires somehow become incapable of fighting in random situations and are easily overwhelmed because… reasons.
Anyway…
Agree with this as well, and I think part of the problem is because of the way the authors write the MC without regard to the actual personality stats. Example: one of my Wayhaven MCs is not easily startled, has really high combat, and repeatedly makes choices that should make it clear she’s practically fearless. However, any little thing that happens leaves her leaping around like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. And it happens constantly. It’s a romance game, where we’re supposed to be able to choose how to handle the romance, but the MC always has the fluttery, flustered crap going on no matter what. In Soul Stone War, it’s a similar thing–more and more, I find the MC to be annoying.
But then, if the ROs treat the MC like shit, you’d expect your MC to be able to go back at them. And that just can’t be allowed.
Now I’m going to have to check out Agents of Lucifer, though…
tl;dr: I agree with pretty much everything you said.
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Actually, quick correction here, in Book 2 you have to choose between supernatural combat training, or supernatural lore training, and if you choose combat over learning how supernaturals work, then you fail the check. It’s the only check of its kind in the entire game, by the way, which indicates that there will be more like it in future books.
So it literally comes down to, “did the Detective read a book on how vampires work that N should have read cover to cover a hundred times by now?”
Don’t let my criticisms jade you any, Agents of Lucifer is actually pretty good right now, even for my grumpiness about what happens in the first two chapters of the story. Currently, nothing really major has cropped up, plot-wise, yet (that you can do anything about, that is), but interacting with the characters hasn’t felt like pulling teeth yet, and if you’re willing to throw, oh, what, five bucks, I think, at the author’s Patreon, they frequently write little short stories about the ROs and their little side adventures, or potential romantic scenarios, stuff like that.
I just pity my poor MC in SSW, at this point. The WIP for Book 3 has us being introduced to the Resistance and being offered a genuine invitation, where we supposedly have the freedom to back out if we so choose… except nah, you don’t have that choice, if you leave it up to the others or try and set your own feet, you get overruled and dragged into it anyhow. Granted, due to how Book 2 ended, it kinda makes sense that maaaaybe we don’t want to go looking a gift horse in the mouth when we just launched a raid on Manerkol’s stronghold to get one of our allies back and he’s undoubtedly pissed about that happening, especially since Book 2 firmly established that we have zero other allies we could turn to for support at the moment.
But in the case of my character, who never signed up for this shit to begin with and has only found herself hating her so-called “friends”, and especially these bitch-ass dragon gods, and ESPECIALLY the soul stone she’s bound to, more and more with each passing day, this is yet another mark on the list of reasons why she may very well wind up turning rogue at the first opportunity she gets. Sure, Manerkol hasn’t exactly made a good impression on her, but at least their goals semi-align (she hates dragon gods and soul stones, he wants to destroy dragon gods and soul stones; she’s on the run for a crime she didn’t commit, he and his forces are more or less untouchable at present and thus could offer some means of safety from her pursuers; he could almost certainly find a way to get Garnet out of her friggin head please if there is any mercy in this forsaken world GET GARNET OUT OF HER DAMN HEAD), certainly more than the goals of her current comrades have ever lined up with one another. (Y’all want me to throw myself like a meat-filled beanbag at a dude who could snap his fingers and kill me, just for the sake of maybe stopping some nefarious scheme of his? How the hell did I go from being on the hook for murder to running a suicide op?!)
She’s not thinking these thoughts out of selfishness or spite - well, okay, maybe some spite - at this point, it’s more like desperation to get away from this bullshit before it becomes anymore impossible for her to escape.
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The alien non-interference clause. Shit like the prime directive from Star Trek where the super-advanced races can’t so much as touch the less advanced ones or it “violates their rights”. Their rights to die of problems we could help them with. I know it started as a colonialism prevention measure but it just made less and less sense the more the series talked about it.
I swear, I want a story where humanity or some other race makes contact with the galactic civilizations, finds out that the could have helped us with our shit at ANY POINT but didn’t because it “wasn’t their place”, and didn’t because of that shit, and goes in the warpath.
One thing I liked about Star Ship Captain is that they didn’t do this shit. The cave men aliens you meet keep in touch with the DSF and plunder the advanced tech of the aliens who left it on their planet to become a scifi culture skipping everything in between. The one time you do find a planet left to its own problems by aliens, it was for selfish reasons. Helping them is the right decision.
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jerk/annoying character that got treated as if their action is all justify, and the author try so hard to make them likeable / a good guy (Like make a really sad backstory, yet they are still jerk, and annoying and didn’t even go through character developement in present day)
A perfect example might be Chloe Price from life is a strange. 99% All of the problem is came from her. She just annoying, jerk, and manipulative yet somehow the protag want to be with her and we cannot even confront her for it 
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Ooooh BOY stand back as I shake my cane.
Isekais. What started as whimsical love stories or power fantasies became plot hole filled harems.
Shows where children are tortured and mutilated. I saw a scene from Made in Abyss once and was so traumatized that my mind wiped it from my memory.
The Power of FRIENDSHIP™️ as a literally power/energy source (I’m looking at YOU Natsu).
Random power ups at juust the right moment. At least explain if the character got the power up from an outside force or if they were practicing it in their off time.
OP protagonists that NEVER lose.
When a villain has legitimate reason to do what they do and makes VALID points so the writers make them kill a kid to show “SEE they’re BAD and you HAVE TO HATE THEM DESPITE THEIR VALID POINTS.” Like I get she just punted that poor baby into the stratosphere but she’s STILL RIGHT that our magical nation of peace and prosperity maintains itself by raiding and destroying other nations.
Shows that focus on action and beautiful scenes but can care less about cohesive plot and storylines (WHY DOTA: DRAGON’S BLOOD?! YOU COULD BE SO AMAZING IF YOU JUST TRIED TO MAKE SENSE!!!).
Fictions that LOVE the “Bury your Gays” trope. Like wooow thank you for telling me this character is queer 2 episodes/chapters before or 1 after they die or are never heard from again. Insert homophobic dog meme
Characters that are CLEARLY self inserts or Gary/Mary Sues that destroy previously established lore/relationships/important decisions etc. Ugh Tales of Xillia 2 would’ve been AMAZING without Ludger and Ludger would’ve been AMAZING in his own Tales of games…
Villains who aren’t allowed to stay villains and MUST have a redemption arc. The Femme Fatale doesn’t NEED to gain a heart, she’s SERVING and I STAN.
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