So THAT’s why my cows kept getting over the fence!!!
If they showed signs of the injuries, they’d have to talk about them. If somebody around here shows up with his arm in a sling, two black eyes, a broken nose, 45 stitches, and bruises all over his body, everybody wants to know the story.
Didn’t Firefly deal with that idea. For a few seconds 
You’ll like this clip from Robot chicken.
You’d be surprised how much in documentaries are staged. For example, a lot of animal close ups are filmed at zoos.
hehe
Tanbarkie said:
But
Mal cheated. He was “missing a nerve cluster” that the Operative was relying on for the incapacitation, and was quick enough on the uptake to realize that was what the Operative was counting on, so he played it as if he were incapacitated to get the drop on the Operative. So it was a deception ploy, not an actual come back from complete defeat. By taking the Operative by surprise, he was able to get the upper hand and incapacitate the Operative instead.
Yeah, Mal had [del]inhuman[/del] heroic endurance, but that’s not the same meme/trope/cliche/gimmick/plot device.
The one (you all decide what it is one of) I can’t stand is something I call the golf clap: hero of film finally makes poignant speech about some moral or character virtue and the crowd around him or her starts to slowly clap. The bad guy slinks away or they cut to the next scene where bad guy is safely in jail or girlfriendless or whatever and they all live happily ever after etc.
I know no circumstance in life where people casually standing around start clapping because someone (finally) confronted their nemesis. :rolleyes:
I loathe the word “trope”. Just to get that off my chest.
Here’s one that bugs me, though: Person from the future finds scientist and presents him with an equation, usually while explaining, “This is the equation/formula/recipe for Super Marvelous Future Stuff that we need by this afternoon.” Scientist stares at it like it’s a revelation from God himself, and suddenly It’s All Clear! Sure enough, he’s able to get the stuff made by that afternoon. Science doesn’t work that way. An equation/formula/whatever is only meaningful in the right context. Bah.
Not really true though.
To pick an obvious example from the real world, I could show the formula for producing Nylon to any competent biochemist form 1900 and they could produce nylon for me by this afternoon. I could show it and the reactions for producing the reagents to a chemist from 1800 and probably get it in a week. And nylon was an impressive breakthrough in the late 20th century, 200 years ago it would have truly been magic future stuff.
Similarly I’ve shown kids how to extract relatively pure DNA using the contents of an average kitchen in one afternoon. There is absolutely no reason why I couldn’t teach an alchemist from 1600 how to do it in the same time.
The same would go for gunpowder or iron smelting or any number of technological breakthroughs.
In many instances “formulas” for major breakthroughs are perfectly comprehensible to any person skilled in that field. They are actually quite simple instructions. In most cases the difficult part was working out which of the billions of possible options had t be reacted in what proportions and what to do with the stuff once you’ve got it. Once that was worked out anybody with basic facilities could repeat the procedure.
So I have no problem with the idea that “transparent aluminium” Star Trekky stuff could often be produced by a competent scientist in one afternoon.
Burn the witch!
That depends on the variety. Zombies are especially prone to be treated as tougher than they should be. At least some werewolves are capable of withstanding serious firepower. And some vampires are effectively invulnerable to anything but sunlight or holy/wooden/silver/whatever weapons. Saberhagen vampires aren’t even marked by bullets, they just pass on through, for example. For an extreme example, I recall a sci-fi story where aliens killed all life on Earth, and were shocked to find a few human survivors and took them on board for investigation. That proved to be a mistake . . .
*“Nothing human could have survived what you did to the Earth. Nothing human *did.”
The Dresden File story Fool Moon did a good job of explaining this. There are werewolves and there are werewolves; the worst of the lot is the loup-garou, essentially a magical wolf-monster or wolf-demon, with utterly supernatural invulnerability.
Yes, I have most of the series.
I was also thinking of the werewolf in Hawk & Fisher, who stood up to a succubus who was nasty enough to tear apart a small army of human thugs. She could rip right through him, but it was like trying to tear apart a liquid metal style Terminator. He just healed instantly from everything.
Sounds interesting - is this a film or a novel?
Isn’t that vampires in space or something?
A short story whose title I don’t recall, it was in the vampire/scifi themed anthology Tomorrow Sucks as I recall.
I can’t recall the title either. It’s an old story though. I’m pretty sure it also appears in Rod Serling’s Triple W (Werewolves, Warlocks, and Witches).
That’s “And Not Quite Human” by Joe L. Hensley.
Ah, that’s it. Thanks.
I always think these threads need to have a rule of providing atleast three cites where the trope or cliche is used.
Sometimes people list scenarios that I am hard pressed to think of two examples of it… let alone enough to make it a “thing”.
Well, the first occurance was in The Prisoner (1967), the second occurance was in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1972), and the third was in The Paris Hilton Chronicles (2014).