Unsure what to call this. But I hate in fantasy settings where magic is presented as a force of chaos and change. But also every civilization in the setting seems like they entered some kind of technological stasis in the middle ages. And this middle age was reached thousands of years ago.
I’m aware that this is pretty much every fantasy setting lol.
Yeah, I get what you are saying and it’s been bothering me for years - I guess it was bothering many people because DnD and Pathfinder are coming at you now with semi age of exploration aesthetic so at least things are moving.
Deviation from medieval fantasy aren’t new but its a cliche that just took root, much thicker than say conflict between magic and industrialisation like in Arcanum.
That genre exhaustion is also why urban fantasy is more popular these days, I think. I don’t tend to like it personally, most of it has very poor if any worldbuilding - it’s just:
“Vampires exist!”
“Neat! Can you tell us more?”
"No 
"
Movie directors and casting agents really think like that even now? 
And here I was just saying on the other thread that beards, more often than not, are a turn off for me.
Hollywood and comic book villains very often are more interesting than the heroes because they tend to drive the plot and actually make stuff happen. For a long time they were also, of course, the only ones allowed to be gay coded for “extra evil” effect. 
“Heroes” can often be big reactionaries only mobilizing to defend the status-quo they know and literally just reacting to most things the villains do.
To be fair most vampires may just have forgotten or not be very interested in their own history. 
If it was presented that way, that would be worldbuilding. Instead, it’s just never addressed or it’s assumed the reader already knows everything about vampires.
That’s on purpose, it’s a part of the Hero’s Journey structure.
The Hero needs external circumstances to become a hero - like villain’s threat. If Hero would drive the plot they would need a reason, because otherwise they’d be ambitious and only villains can be that. Ambition is evil after all.
It’s popular these days to make the Hero fight against the corrupt government but that also almost always lands them in the Anti-hero category, because it’s subversive and requires less than heroic decisions. To be pure, the Hero needs to be almost passive in their goals, these goals can only exist as long as the threat exists.
That makes them boring because to be driven by any emotion other than the willingness to help is a threat to their incorruptible purity.
Hate the “the magic goes away” trope. It’s dull, it’s boring, it’s sad, and it’s unsatisfactory. I have never seen a story with this kind of ending done right, no matter what themes it represents. It’s a huge story ruiner.
Not sure if this can be considered a trope, but i really hate time skips.
While i can tolerate few brief ones(few days or such), but it really annoys me if its “few days later” then a bit later “few weeks later” and so on.
I want to know what the main character is up to during that time, i want to know the fuck is going on with the world and other characters.
Grey eyes of death and Life of space force captain were really good, but suffered from over use of time skips.
One moment it’s the first days of zombie apocalypse then it’s a week later then few weeks later. Really brought down the experience for me.
Same for LoSFC one moment MC is in college, then internal monologue speaks about effects old age.
Yeah, that was a bit off putting. I gotta finish Grey Eyes. I liked it.
It’s also possible and does happen sometimes where authors go too far in the other direction and insert irrelevant worldbuilding and lore. It’s one thing to create said lore and worldbuilding to use when necessary while writing a story, but not all of it necessarily needs to end up in the final product.
This is another reason why I enjoy FF15 so much, even though the game is relatively not well liked by the Final Fantasy fandom at large (but then, the FF fandom is full of people who think Lightning Farron is the second coming of Christ, so I’ve learned to treat their opinions with a heavy grain of salt anyhow) - in a setting where very fantastical themes are very much at play (the Power of Kings being passed down through the royal bloodline of Lucis, the Oracle having peerless healing powers bestowed by the gods themselves, demons coming out at night and thus requiring all settlements outside of major cities to have some means of constant light to drive them away), there’s also cell phones, cars, skyscrapers alongside ancient palaces, fully mechanized soldiers, Imperial soldiers in full plate armor carrying high-powered rifles and piloting honest-to-God war mechs, citizens of Lucis sporting very stylish, trendy clothing due to the crown city of Insomnia being a major metropolitan hub, Lestallum drawing and processing the heat from an incredibly magically powerful meteor in order to distribute electricity across the kingdom, the list goes on.
Is the story the best ever? Maybe, maybe not, I haven’t played that far into the game yet, but the setting, alone, is great, if you ask me.
I’m creating ten thousand pages of lore per second, and they’re ALL IRRELEVANT! (insert maniacal laughter here)
You will learn about vampire biology, mating and culture, popular substitutes to blood, interspecies relations, and how many hairstyles Dracula made popular and like it. 
Ok but all of these except the last one are probably relevant to a game that heavily involves vampires
dunno, Wigs were a big thing in the renaissance…and Vampires are big on those cause they can never go out of styles and they don’t age! Gotta taste some of that Blonde and Gray! 
Oof, hard agree. And in general, I just don’t want to read anything where it never gets better for a traumatized character. That’s already reality for so many people, I don’t want it in my fiction as well. One of the reasons I’m never gonna read A Little Life.
Here’s a couple I’ve been tossing around in my head for a few days now:
Please don’t tell me that I have the option to go down B route if your intent is that I follow A route without question, because I cannot stress how annoying it is to be told on the game’s advertisement blurb that I can go either way, but then I set about trying to go down B route, only to find that either:
A. The route is barely fleshed out and hardly exists except for a few token choices here and there,
B. Getting on to B route is nigh-impossible if you don’t build an exact set of stats or relationships,
C. Going B route is considered the most horrible evil thing I could do and every single major choice from then on, both relationship and stat check, is monumentally weighted against me, or
D. The story all but holds me at gunpoint to try and force me to stick with A route - most obvious example that comes to mind here is in the 7th Sea CoG, where the game basically spends its entire time trying to coerce you into becoming a pirate. Yeah, pirate game, I know, but if I have the option to be a privateer instead, which the game says that I do, then damn it, stop trying to block me from being a privateer! It resulted in the pirate faction blatantly telling me to sod off when the time came to gather forces for the big confrontation against the bad guys, purely because I refused to become a pirate. Nevermind that the bad guys had been attacking everybody, pirates included, indiscriminately, which meant that they had just as much to lose as I and everybody else did.
So that’s the first one, and also:
I know why “objectively sexy” is a thing that shows up so much in these stories, it’s because the author is trying to convey to readers that someone is an RO and therefore should be focused on, but come on, is there really no better way of telling readers, “hey, maybe in another playthrough, you might think about going after this guy instead of that guy, whatcha think?” than to force their characters to believe something that they would have no good reason to believe? Were I not ace, I could confidently say that I’d be into women, but I’m capable of looking at my fellow man and thinking, “yeah, he’s got good looks” without it being tied to me thinking he’s sexy. And never in my life will I ever say that anybody “objectively” looks good, for crying out loud, my “objectivity” is another person’s “this guy’s talking out of his ass.”
Okay, I’m done being angy now.
I don’t even play games that try to tell me someone is objectively sexy. Even if I think they are sexy (which is very rare). It just immediately tells me that the author has no comprehension of how attraction can differ between individuals.
Is it bad to have some routes with harder requirements to gain? 
I thought that means “this person would be considered sexy in the environment I’m in”, not that the MC specifically considers them sexy. Language barrier from my part, I guess.
Harder yes, “you failed because you didn’t follow exact path author laid had in mind” no.
Would “can be gained only by annoying everyone” be in “hard” or “impossible without following the exact path” box?
Both are bad.
