(Not a trope, but a genre) I’m tired of medieval fantasy. Not fantasy in general, just medieval fantasy. A lot of medieval fantasy worlds feel too similar to each other tbh
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I may be a little biased because I have a thing for angels, but i absolutely cannot stand media that portrays demons and nothing else, or exists in a world where they’re one of the only supernatural classifications of creatures that exist.
I understand that it makes the world simpler to understand at the expense of my suspension of disbelief, but I’ve always preferred it when mortals/humanity are caught between two opposing forces that they can ultimately influence rather than having to deal with one like a particularly dangerous pest that needs controlling.
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Tired of weapon durability. The weapons always break super fast, faster than realistically possible, so it’s not more realistic, and it rarely adds anything to the game. At least let me keep the unique weapons forever. It’s a huge pain to go through the trouble of getting them only for them to break.
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Characters talking to themselves (verbally) or “the voice in their head” essentially being an actual person. I understand some people do vocalize what they’re doing or thinking, and while I know a few people like this, it’s not something I ever do.
So when it comes to the player character doing it, without it being within the player’s control, it always bothers me. Whether someone talks to themselves or not is a pretty defining character trait, in my opinion.
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Another trope I hate is when the MC is just a damsel in distress/useless in comparison to other characters. I don’t know if it’s an underdog thing and about the MC experiencing growth, but a character can start off competent and still be an underdog (Ex: Daniel Bryan during the Yes! Movement). Plus I feel like it takes away from player agency to just be a sad sack of flesh being carried around by babysitters that you’re supposed to fall in love with.
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I actually do that irl. It’s hard to imagine not doing it for me.
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I don’t know whether or not it has any correlations to personality features, but it’s definitely a memory and information processing tactic. Audibly vocalizing plans causes it to become an external stimulus, which can exist in working memory as an external auditory stimulus instead of just something that you are thinking while performing other internal operations.
Really, just converting any piece of information to a less saturated type of information can help you remember it. If you’re trying to remember where you were in a book, instead of thinking “Ok, what do I last remember reading?” I generally think “Which number did I last read?” Because the page numbers are also visible. You read those. But you read much fewer of those than blocks of text, so it’s a less saturated field of information. And then you can extrapolate that to trying to recall where a specific piece of text was. “Which number did I read while I was reading about this topic?” is the question I ask myself.
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Oh my gosh, I was putting together a response about sort of this very thing.
I’m not sure if it’s a trope but it’s pervasive in a lot of forms of media and has influenced, or been influenced by, real world beliefs. At the very least it’s certainly not helping. But! That a “strong female character” (rather, a good female character) has to be physically strong and have an assertive personality or prefers things considered more traditionally masculine, because a super feminine girl couldn’t possibly be capable or has a negative connotation.
Characters can be strong in their kindness despite everything they’ve faced, can be shy, gentle, quiet or soft spoken and still be respectable, can ask for help because relying on others can be so hard to do without being a damsel in distress. They can like wearing dresses and makeup and bows without lacking depth or without being a mean girl who is going to gossip behind your back the second you walk away. A strong character comes down to the writing really but I’ve often seen it kind of floated that feminine girls are automatically incapable or are inferior somehow, or always rude, antagonistic, and fake.
It just kind of ties into this floating idea that personally affected me as a little girl, and so many friends that I know that share the same experience, that anything girly or very feminine is associated with being vapid, shallow, vain, weak, and such. There’s that I’m not like the other girls that a lot of younger women go through because they have been taught to associate it and/or stemming from this underlying feeling that girly girls are somehow lesser and if they like any of those things then they are too. That’s why in a lot of teen fiction you get the main female character who is sooo different because look, she doesn’t like makeup! She hates wearing skirts! She’s just one of the guys and doesn’t like girls as friends because of the drama! (There’s nothing wrong at all with the mentioned preferences, only that they’re usually used to portray that this character is better because of it)
I think representation of varied preferences, styles, personalities, are so wonderful, just not when they’re pitted against one another to make one seem lesser. (ง’̀-‘́)ง
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I hate how there’s barely ever any proper horror WiPs. I think the whole Mass Mother Muderer situation left a bad taste in writers’ mouths to where it is felt that those types of games can’t be written here…and that’s simply incorrect, at least from what I’ve seen.
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“Mass Mother Murderer.” I’m almost afraid to ask, but my curiosity’s gotten the better of me, here.
That’s why games like Destiny (space sci-fi/fantasy) and the latter Final Fantasy games (tend to fluctuate between modern and futuristic fantasy) tend to rate highly on my list, even if they wind up not being my favorite games to play. (Look, I tried, really tried, to like Final Fantasy 13, give it a fair swing, but that game just sucks so much shit, I can’t keep making excuses for it.) The fact that they choose to bring fantasy into an age where modern military tactics, societal norms, and weaponry all exist, and - to an extent - make it work really just draws me in. I mean, I like myself some medieval fantasy, don’t get me wrong, but I have the same opinion: There’s only so many ways you can style a medieval world before you invariably start rubbing shoulders with other writers who have done it so much better, and because of that, now your work has to suffer the burden of being compared to those other writers, because, well, they’re kinda the metric for that specific part of the genre, you can’t not, really.
Say what you will of Fire Emblem: Fates (and hey, it’s not exactly my favorite entry in the series, either), but I got spoiled by the weapons having no durability in that game. Did it take away some of the strategic gameplay? Maybe, I don’t know. But being able to just toss a single sword at my sword dudes and let them get to work was so much stress off my chest, especially since they made higher-grade weapons inexplicably crappier than lower-grade weapons in exchange for the removal of durability. Getting slapped with a Strength debuff every time I swing a Silver weapon in combat really hurts my feelings, man.
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From what I’ve looked at and heard, it was a horror game about a serial killer than got moved to the adult readers section of the forums. The author got pissed off about this. Later on, they wrote a scene featuring forced sex that was criticized by their beta testers and the public. The author got pissed off about the feedback and began arguing with people, mods got invovled and then they deleted their account.
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You know, I think I’m okay not being able to read that story, something tells me it would’ve been, uh, not great.
Back on the topic of horror WIPs, though, I think it’s less that MMM turned people off the genre and more that horror is kinda tricky to write. How does one quantify fear to the written word? It tends to be much more a visual media, at least in my experience. I tried to toy around with the idea of writing horror, but three paragraphs in, I realized that it just read… corny. It seemed freaky in my mind, but then I wrote it down, and suddenly I was very not-scared.
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Pretty sure MMM was by Sam Young? (Same author as NNN.) They were suspended for sockpuppetting, not for arguing about adult content. (Though they may have done that too, I dunno)
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I don’t want to start up a huge thing about a matter which happened three years ago, but the short version appears to be that, while he’s currently suspended for sockpuppeting, back then, he deleted his own (presumably old) account after a bout of strong disagreement over peer feedback led to moderator intervention, which, in spite of their efforts, was exacerbated rather than deescalated, and apparently even spread far beyond the forums entirely.
(If you’re still wondering, search Mass Mother Murderer and you should be taken to an official mod post about it that explains as such.)
But again, that matter was three years ago, from what I can tell it’s been resolved, and now that my curiosity’s been sated, I see no reason to start picking at an old scab (and annoying the mods who were involved in it, since I’m sure they’ve been trying to move on from the situation themselves), so we should probably just call it good on this topic and let it be now.
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Oh, sounds like you know more than I do then.
Aaanyway, here’s a trope I hate: MC’s personality suddenly drastically changes and can’t be modified by choices anymore, making previous personality choices completely irrelevant.
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I often find it fun when it’s changed around so there’s a short muscular character and a tall lanky one 
I think sometimes people just use this a shorthand for eye colors that are hard to define? 
Especially paler colors or eyes that have lots of flecks or rims that look different from the rest of the iris can be hard to pigeonhole, or eyes that look different depending on the lighting.
There might be clearer ways to describe those situations, even just something like “grayish green” or “dark-rimmed green,” as long as you don’t go and spend a whole paragraph on it, which is rarely appropriate 
Though I’d also note that it’s a pretty small number of people whose eye colors I can notice on first glance. Certainly some, like if someone’s got really deep brown eyes or shockingly blue eyes or if they’ve just got particularly large eyes, so the irises stand out more. But for most people, I’d only really notice it after getting into closer conversation and, well, seeing their face up close more. I feel like eye colors are one of those things that usually stands out more in fiction than in life (like blushing).
Technically a thing. Just extremely rare, and usually associated with albinism—sometimes just ocular albinism, which is when only the eyes are affected—which will generally lead to a lot of sensitivity to light. Otherwise, it’s one of those one-in-a-million type rarities, but like, Elizabeth Taylor is supposed to have had them.
I’m not disagreeing, mind you. They definitely occur in fiction far more than in reality (though certainly are justifiable if the character is albino or belongs to a fictional ethnicity or science fiction genetic engineering or is Elizabeth Taylor or whatever ) I’m just nitpicky 
Between Leonidas and Xerxes, Leonidas is far more deserving of a punch than Xerxes. We get this really distorted picture of the Greco-Persian wars from… well, all the way from Herodotus to the 300, really. But, well, if you’re getting impressions from the 300, that got basically everything wrong (post also has follow ups if anyone gets interested in this) 
Which definitely counts as “Tropes and stories you hate”… anything that lionizes the Spartans and demonizes the Achaemenid Persians.
As ancient empires go, Persians were pretty much the cream of the crop (acknowledging that empires in themselves are not really a good thing). They left their subject peoples largely autonomous, including freedom of religion; they’re particularly notable for ending the Jews’ Babylonian exile and allowing them to return home. There were Greek city states who sided with them, including ones already under their rule, including democratic ones. Persian victory would not have been a great civilization-shattering blow.
Meanwhile, Spartans are the worst. Like, I don’t think going into details would even be appropriate on this forum, but let’s just start with the fact that the vast majority of the Spartan population were “helots,” a form of slavery in which they were owned by the state; a far higher proportion of the population than in the rest of Greece. (Which was also very bad, but this is extreme.) Spartan men who were citizens, except the kings (Sparta had two kings at a time)—a very narrow class, encompassing a minority of non-helots—went through a system of initiation which was a series of extreme child abuse. There is no other way to describe this. And to cap it off, they had to murder a helot to reach full citizen status. Plus, periodically, there would be a span of time when helots would just be hunted, literally. This… is not good?
If people are interested in (a lot) more information, there’s an extensive series covering them starting here.
Sparta’s institutions put it among the top most horrific of historical villains. We really need to stop glorifying them. It makes no sense.
There’s a whole wealth of time travel literature exploring different versions of time travel logic Suffice to say, there are plenty of systems that don’t result in paradoxes. Simplest is to just assume that you cause a new timeline to branch off: The cause of killing Hitler exists in the timeline you left, while the effect—dead Hitler—exists in the new timeline.
I thought people were talking about internal monologue, not talking to yourself out loud.
I was surprised several years ago when I first learned that people quite literally think differently from each other, and this is one of the most striking differences. Some people (I’m one of them) have a running internal monologue, sort of like narration in a book, and this is how we process information, think, make decisions, notice stuff, reflect about stuff, etc. Other people don’t.
I’m not really sure how you’d reflect this variation in interactive fiction, though
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Oh, that may be what they were talking about. I’m not really sure if I do or not. I definitely don’t talk to myself in the second or third person, as internal monologues are often written in fiction, but I will often make internal commentary on whatever I’m doing at the time. And I also silently read back everything I write, always, as I’m writing it.
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Well, for me it’s something like “Oh hey, a notification. Must be a response to that comment I just made… oh yeah, geldar, that was the person I responded to about internal monologues… ah, yeah, interesting to think about this, do I want to respond? Oh! I could demonstrate what my internal monologue is like…”
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Isn’t that how our world work though? for the record, I come from the Game Odyssey, I never watched that 300 Movie. Hell, some stuff in the game pissed me off…so I did enjoy kicking them off cliff.
Like there was this Lady at a coliseum (How you write that? Like a stadium), and she was accusing this wife of being a perv…and she quoted how women weren’t allowed in there, and she should be punished for looking at the men’s in there. (Think her son was participating or something)…and I did the Quest and you can save the lady (been a while), but I didn’t feel satisfied, so once the Quest was over…I kicked that Harpie off the fucking cliff…
Can we say the same about the Vikings or were they Saint?
Also, before the ‘Orange Box’ come chasing me off, I’m not sure if these are tropes but you tell me:
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Telling the Author (This happen to me) that X character is so Deux Ex and that is it. You know, no explanation, nothing. Just ‘Oh that’s so Deux Ex’ then radio Silence…for God’s Sake, if you gonna say something at least Expand so I know tha fuck you aiming here.
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When a game (Not COG or HOG) start off with this amazing plot but then half way through, like near the ending, you find out it was just a Tool to get you to the juicy part which had nothing to do with what you were chasing. Exemple: in Shadowrun 1, the story has you chasing a serial killer then BAM! Toward the end, the story goes off to some Bug Queen and it was so boring. The same with Fallout NV, as soon as that robot started explaining, game never saw a Girl deinstall that fast…I was so bored, I couldn’t be assed to continue. Hell even Naruto did that, start off good then we have all these Otsutsuki assholes from Space trying to eat us…
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The trope of the Farm Boy who is a Gentlman and doesn’t know how to take a no for an Answer. If you love this trope, then I beg thee to give me a kill button at least
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If the character didn’t just come out of nowhere and save the plot, I’d be curious but ultimately shrug it off if no explanation comes, because then… it wouldn’t be a deus ex machina? (And if it did, then it’s obvious.)
Oh, right. You said Deus Ex, not deus ex machina. In that case… the character maybe resembles Adam Jensen? (Or JC Denton, but I’d wager the newer games are more popular.)
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