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Dream Sequences - Can’t stand them, never could. Never saw any point in them. It’s like, if none of this is actually happening and none of it will have any purpose, then why are you showing me it at all?
When reading them in books, I tend to skip them and typically I am not even the slightest bit behind. -
Incompetent Protagonists - In order to root for a character, I need to believe they deserve to be rooted for. That being, they need to prove to me they have the skills necessary to be a protagonist in the first place. Someone being tossed around by fate is not a compelling character to me.
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Insecurity Plot - When a character lets their insecurity lead them to make stupid decisions.
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Symbolism over actual plot - Look Mr. English Teacher, just because a character is a stand-in for a political/social issue that was going on at the time, it does not make them an interesting character!
no worries bro xD same with me actually im starting off with a dream sequence too but er… i think from most that ive read is that people dislike it because it doesnt have any connection to the game or just there for filler… So what i plan to do with mine and hopefully i can pull it of is…
make it drop hints of major plot points of my story without revealing too much and let it affect present time without people finding out much. that way people will be invested in what happens in the dream and also help you shape the protagonist.
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Bland, underdeveloped romantic interests that have absolutely zero affect on the story and are just there to be a love interest.
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Male characters that are rude, indefensible jerks that do not treat their romantic interest with any respect but get a free pass to be a jerk because of a “tragic backstory”.
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Ham-fisted moral lessons with the subtlety of a firework display (looking at you, David Cage)
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Eyes being described as “orbs”. Why is this so common?
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Female characters that are clearly written by someone who has never so much as spoken to a woman.
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Female characters that were written to be the opposite of the “damsel in distress” role in such a way that they have no personality other than “not in distress”.
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Alternatively, female characters who are “badasses” but spend 90% of their time being rescued by their love interest.
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Overuse/poor use of forshadowing. Forshadowing is meant to be subtle and a nice little extra for second-time read/playthroughs. If your forshadowing is so blatant that I can work out the plot twist three pages in, it’s not good forshadowing.
So, what we can take from all of this is that whatever you do, someone will dislike it.
I saw some advice on a website dedicated to writing somewhere, can’t remember which one it was now, where they said “Never start a novel with a description of the weather.” They didn’t say why, it was just a “don’t do it” thing. When I saw that, my first instinct was to do exactly that, and I’m hardly your classic rebel!
I didn’t do it, by the way. Weather never features heavily in the things I do 
I always ignore it, except from flying kites in thunderstorms - I’m not as brave as Benjamin Franklin…
Because that’s how the genetically modified superweapon that shares the MC’s mind is communicating with them. 
Avacados?
Tokyo Ghoul made me ok with that, just cause the guy doing it was so fun.
I like the character who stays true to their self unapologetically.
Hedonistic people who are treated like they are evil for having fun.
Charlie and the chocolate factory really annoys me because of the kids being evil for doing mundane things.
Weird character description moments in first person. If you’ve known someone all your life, why would you even think about their eyes or skin color?
Mirror customization.
Love at first sight.
A bunch of thoughts on love and how good it is to be in love.
“Love is what makes us human.”
Note: I might forgive these if it’s a crazy stalker.
“Empathy is what makes us human”
Conflicts from expected apologies or perceived minuscule wrong doings.
- I think the movie that hit me hardest with this involved a wife who thought her husband was cheating on her despite their loving relationship. And so gets her sister and her fiance (the main characters who are to be wed because of a drunken one night stand led to a baby) and so they find out, he was sneaking out to watch football with his friends. And then she’s upset about that and the useless plot point stretches on the movie.
Overly polite people, as in when everyone’s like that.
Mary sues intensify
pretty much just poorly written characters, or characters with no real flaws and only a shopping list of things they can do
Wow…ok…some of the stuff made me laugh ! and I’m with you on some !
for me…
1- yeah this…very much this . I just skip it . I don’t care for the helpless trope . Nope…
2- hahaha oh this one made me laugh XD But its sooo true…
3- I LOVE Romance , but there are 2 things that bother me :
a) the characters . Plz get out of the cliché of ‘One romance is with a naive kind of girl , one is angry for no reason and shutting you down and one is with that guy with an easy smile’ .
b) don’t shove angry butt hurt character at me , I don’t care if they the most gorgeous being in the galaxy . Asshole is asshole and I wouldn’t get near that , ever .
4- Too many stats . 'Put point in Trap making ’ now you have 20 points to use . Buy potions for 200 , now you have 1300 gold coins . That’s fine in a normal game , cose the game do all the nerdy stuff for me (counting) . In a story , it just become a chore .
5- Too many puzzle . Insert here the word that will unlock the door . Restart cose you got it wrong and now you are stuck forever in 'Type something here ’ .
6- writing about something you don’t understand . Or you do , but didn’t do enough research . Or you did your research but instead of saying this is the experience of ONE person you decided to say ‘This is how everyone live it’ .
7- realistic stuff .
Prose that tastes like soylent is the main thing. I like for stories to have a sense of place, at the very least. It makes them more vivid and real.
In one of J T Edson’s books about the wild west, we learned that cowboys used to refer to woman’s breasts as apples. That was so outlandish that he felt he had to add a special note to explain the reference 
It’s all so weird…
Well, I think I usually try to go with an open mind because it’s happened to me before that I don’t find a particular concept appealing at first, but then I’m surprised by its execution.
That said:
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I kinda like love triangles. But the thing is that there are thousand of ways of making love triangles, and thousand of ways in which they can be resolved. However there seem to be some trends in which most fiction tend to focus and become just repetitive and annoying. Usually the worst kind is the male/female protagonist that has a crush on the hot girl/guy who is currently dating a bully asshole/alpha bitch. I also don’t like the uninteresting girl that spends the whole book doubting between the bad boy and the nice guy, especially when it gets pretty obvious who she’s going to end up with.
- Also there’s a type of love triangle thing that usually pops out in queer romance. It’s usually a guy that has a girlfriend or wife, but then meets another guy, and then he cheats on his partner with him, and ends up alienating both the partner and the other guy (who is usually more insisting in keeping the relationship), there’s usually a scene of emotional or even physical abuse, and it will end up in some kind of unhappy ending. I guess this became popular with Brokeback Mountain, and it probably made sense then but I have lost the count of how often I’ve seen or read this type of stories, it is always repetitive and frustrating to watch. And I get that it’s a commentary about how society ends up hurting people by making repress who they really are and all that… but it sometimes can end up having its own problematic elements; namely the abusive behaviour, bury your gays, bisexual erasure…
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Bitter exes. Ok, I admit I’ve seen this work sometimes and it can be fun once in a while. Most of the time it’s annoying, and at least most ex-couples I know tend to remain on friendly terms with each other after a while and don’t constantly hate each other because their relationship didn’t work.
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Teenangers with no parents. I have to deal with my parents all the time, and even more when I was a teenanger, yet sometimes teenangers don’t seem to have any family in books or we barely see them interact. Not counting actual orphans, of course.
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Psycho / depressed goths. Ok this happens more often in dumb high school movies rather than in books or games, but still. There’s is this goth guy or girl who is a loner and a freak and sometimes even follows some kind of weird religious cult that talks about how all the bullies and cheerleaders will end up perishing in the darkness of hell or another nonsense. Jeez, it’s just a subculture of people who likes a certain type of music and have some common interests.
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There’s something that I usually see in fanfiction but once in a while also in published books.Dialogue with already established characters usually goes with “he said” or “Bob said”, but sometimes It goes with some weird expression all of sudden like “said the boy of the raven hair”. Maybe if it’s the first time we’re seeing this character and we don’t know his name yet but other than that… why?
And specifically about CoGs
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Relationship stats that are completely useless. Ok, sometimes you need to get on well with a character to achieve certain goals, but other than that I don’t see the point. Not to mention how frustrating it gets when even the most minor detail makes these things decrease. If you are mean to them, I get it, but sometimes it’s just because you don’t agree on avery unimportant thing or even because you decide to spend time with another Npc for a while.
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Choosing the gender of an Npc. I don’t know what to choose when this option appears. I usually prefer female characters, but I prefer male ROs so, should i make them male and if then I don’t like him, restart the game and choose female?
-Love triangles
-Being informed I am attracted to someone in a game. Worse, being forced to kiss them. Even worse, being forced to kiss them when romancing someone else. (Don’t know if the later has happened to me during a choice game but there has been at least one game that I up and rage quit once it pulled that crap on me.)
I do…so guilty ! Shrug…most of them are ‘farm boy show up and you flashback to the past’ . But some (rare) do it very well . The only aspect I don’t like…is the guilt trip that come with it .
I mean , romance from childhood spell ‘safe’ (or dangerous depand what kind of romance it was , imagine abusive relationship , nobody wrote those lol) , but yeah…‘hormones acting up cose just saw old childhood romance , yet you are dating someone else’ .
then again…I did watch Melrose Place…
or worse…you have to kiss this dude so you can unlock your gay romance ! Le Gasp …
I’ll just limit my no-no’s for COGs.
I actually don’t mind a lot of things that people have mentioned. I think dream sequences are just fine as long as they have relevance (Don’t worry @ParrotWatcher, I’m sure your story is fine). I also don’t mind love triangles as an option though I rarely go for them myself. I don’t mind Mary Sues (or the male equivalent) as long as every single npc and party member doesn’t swoon and fall over everything they say and do; I think reading and playing games is escapism for most of us, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying that.
Now onto my pet peeves:
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Characters that don’t have any kind of change. That goes for other characters too, not just the main one.
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Games/stories where you can be any gender but the writer wrote it so that it only makes sense for straight males.
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Useless choices and/or stats. I don’t mind if a choice I make doesn’t work, but if I continually feel railroaded and that my choices and stats are meaningless because I didn’t pick the “right” option, then I feel like it’s a big waste of time. There are multiple ways for things to play out, and I appreciate authors who acknowledge that in the story.
Yep. That’s one for me as well. Take the porn somewhere else, 'kay?
@ParrotWatcher To be fair, at least a few of the things mentioned are points that are going to come up in my own WIPs/novels. The novel I’m currently working on is one long, weird shared dream sequence with occasional cuts to reality. It helps that said dream sequence is intentionally being caused for Plot Reasons™. Most tropes are only bad in execution.
Except for the ones that intentionally further negative stereotypes. Those can all die in a fire.
Giving new meaning to the phrase, “How do you like them apples?”
Mine are reasonably simple.
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No logical consistency within the world
When things just do not add up even within that setting’s rules. Especially when the author has to contrive to “forget” certain artifacts, abilities or the like to keep the storyline going. Looking at you time turner. Seriously, how does disaster remain when outright time travel is freely available? -
Uncharismatic protagonist
Even a Mary Sue can be interesting if written well, although admittedly I can only stomach such in small doses. Above all the protagonist must have that hook that makes me sympathize with the character enough that I come to care about their exploits. Emogoth McEdgelord III on the other hand is the kind of character who is entirely unsympathetic and turns me off. It was for this reason that I could not enjoy James Cameron’s Avatar for example. -
Story runs on contrived stupidity
The best characters seem to live and breathe, as if they could step out of the page. Others are just convenient plot devices for the author. And then there are stories with characters like this. The only way the story could even work is if everyone were a Darwin Award winner who are spectacularly incompetent at what they are supposed to be good, at let alone what they actually attempt.
Does it count if they are a super-manipulative character who is doing it simply and solely to sow discord between you and your RO? 
(Although I guess that that’s them kissing you, not the other way around…)
Me too… 
That is, if it’s a character the MC has been shown interacting with since the start. If they just turn up as the “friend you used to know”, it’s less likely (unless the other option is a manipulative jerk, so I guess Lucky was lucky there…)
I would be very happy to unlock the gay romance by kissing the dude. 
truth is…the awful part wasn’t just the kissing…it was the character in whole . The dominant kind…I mean i siad you have to kiss the guy . But really…more like he is forcing the kiss…
And I dont even get the ‘DESTROY HIM’ option…cose apparently…its supposed to be romantic . Gag…never again .