I’m tired of the suspect inadvertently letting out a detail that only the criminal would know.
Cop: A girl was shot in the park. Know anything about it?
Suspect: No, I’ve never even heard of Ms. Andrea Sullivan of 23 W. 3rd Street, and I don’t own a Glock 42, .380 Auto.
Cop: Aha, got you!
Suspect: Oh, curses and/or drat!
Mine: Eeevil scientist who wants to Rule The World!! Nope - real scientists want to rule their granting agency and get back to the lab.
That’s because mad scientists are actually just mad engineers.
Engineers want to be in the lab or at the bench also. “Ruling the world” sounds like a committee meeting that never ends. Eff that!
I actually like how Rowling deals with reactions about it, though; I don’t remember if it gets spelled out in any of the books, but it’s clear that being “the One” doesn’t mean you get either the gal, more candy, or anything else you want, and also that having been labeled “the One” means that people’s reactions to it will cause Things to happen, both bad and good ones.
Sort of how some dudes who wouldn’t have been considered “perfume ad” material if they hadn’t had a big hit movie are on perfume ads. Having had a big hit gives them a “super attttractive” label that their face didn’t.
I hate the “Dad is an idiot in his own home” trope you see in sitcoms.
Done badly, yes. Do this well and you really show off the chops of the cop/detective.
This is mainly a sci-fi trope, but I hate the concept of “logic.” More specifically, I hate the idea that there is a single, universal standard of logic which can determine the correct course of action in any situation. Yes, I’m looking directly at Star Trek’s Vulcans, but there are many other examples.
Really, anyone who’s taken even a casual notice of politics knows that the “logical” action in a situation is often highly debatable. Even people from the same culture & nation often can’t agree on what is logical, so the idea that you could apply a single thought process to an entire planet (or worse, an interplanetary Federation) is absurd. Like much of Star Trek, if you think about this too much, it starts to look rather dystopian (in this case, it starts to resemble Maoist China, where any thought processes that differed from the Beloved Leader’s were by definition incorrect).
My least favourite plot device: Some mysterious, powerful entity shows up, and makes some threat against the hero. If the hero does not perform some quest, then the villain will kill the hero’s best friend/not let him pass/some other horrible thing. Often, once they complete the first quest, the villain sets more (Rule of Three often comes into play here). Alternatively, the villain offers some kind of sadistic choice. Usually it’s something like “I will give you the McGuffin (or tell you where to find it), but in return you must leave your best friend as my servant/abandon your love interest/etc”.
At the end of the episode, the villain all of a sudden turns nice and goodnatured and reveals that this was all a test! In the quest variant, the hero has learned something (allegedly*) critical about their powers. The “villain” made the threat to make the hero desperate enough to use their powers to their fullest capacity. In the sadistic choice variant, the hero inevitably chooses love or friendship over advancing their quest. In this case, the “villain” declares that the hero has demonstrated that they understand the Power of Friendship/Love and thus has passed the test, and the hero is given the McGuffin anyway.
This generally is a lame way for the writer to inject some tension and conflict in the episode without making the “villain” actually be a bad guy.
China Mieville’s book Un Lun Dun is probably my least favorite book by him. However, it does a fantastic job with The Chosen One. There are two main characters: the Chosen One, and the Plucky Sidekick, mentioned in prophecy as the ones who will save the kingdom. They start their quest–and in like the fourth chapter, the Chosen One is knocked into a long-term coma. The Plucky Sidekick shrugs, says, “Okay, guess I’ll save the kingdom,” and starts upending every prophecy she encounters, much to the prophet’s chagrin. It’s the best part of the book.
The basic problem is this: logic usually can’t tell us what’s best, or what we should want.
Logic is VERY good at helping us figure out the best way to get the things we want for wholly irrational reasons.
I agree…but I also hate its counterpart, “I’m just making it up as I go.” The hero who just throws a grenade, or shoots out the lights, or does something else random and chaotic, with cocky confidence in his ability to wing it when things are uncontrolled.
Each are fun…within limits. Each gets noisome when depended upon too much.
(Isn’t the real lesson of this whole thread, “Don’t overdo it?” Many of these tropes are just fine, so long as they aren’t made to be overbearing.)
There are some tropes I find tiresome, but really only if they’re misused. Unfortunately, as mentioned upthread, some of the most common ones like the MacGuffin and Chosen One are popular because they’ve worked well, but are often misused. The thing about both of these is that, yes, they don’t really exist in real life, but they do exist in so much of our mythology. This is exactly why the Chosen One works well in the original Star Wars trilogy, because Lucas was deliberately trying to evoke a lot of the elements from classical mythology to create a modern mythology. If he’d avoided the Chosen One or deliberately subverted it, I think the effect would have been lost.
Similarly, this is also why I think it works so well in the Matrix. Also as mentioned up thread, it is deliberately subverted in the sequels, but there’s a whole ton of hints in the first one that hint at it until they got heavy-handed with it in the sequels. For example, the assistant to the Oracle refers to the kids hanging out in her apartment as the other potentials, and the Oracle herself tells him “you’ve got the gift, but it looks like you’re waiting for something”. That is, all the rest of the people see her as a prophet, because they see her predictions come true and think destiny, meanwhile her, and as we learn later the Architect, are aware that these powers are a mathematical certainty. Hell, she told Morpheus he would find the One, and if he looked long enough, he either would, or he’d die trying. Even when Neo does become the One and he tells Morpheus that the Oracle said he wasn’t, rather than saying she was wrong, she was just telling him what he needed to hear. In short, she couldn’t be wrong, but she wasn’t seeing the future, she was just giving mathematically certain and unfalsifiable predictions. None of this would have worked if the trope didn’t exist.
That said, I do think it’s often misused. When you have the farmboy with the golden heart, then find out at the end that he was actually a prince the whole time, or decended from some powerful God or alien or whatever, I feel like it cheapens his accomplishments, and basically is a big FU, he actually WAS the Chosen One the whole time.
I feel much the same way with the MacGuffin, it works because of our mythology, whether it was just looking for enlightenment or the Holy Grail, it’s what sent our heroes on their quests. I think it works best when we don’t really notice it like, despite someone saying upthread there wasn’t one in Star Wars, there was, the Death Star plans were the MacGuffin. I think that works well precisely because we forget about it, where something like the Infinity Gems in the recent Marvel films seem a lot more heavy handed. However, I think that though are heavyhanded now, assuming the end game is the Infinity Gauntlet story line, I think seeing it develop across half a dozen films and then come to a climax in a future Avengers film will be really cool.
And it works well when it’s subverted too. As mentioned, I think Pulp Fiction toys with it a fair amount, keeping it interesting by not telling the audience what it is, where I’ve heard theories that it’s as plain as just a briefcase of gold, or stuff as bizarre as Wallace’s soul or the Holy Grail.
So, I do find the MacGuffin boring sometimes, particularly if it’s just some magical item to kill a bad guy or some really powerful weapon or whatever. If it’s going to drive a plot, I think it needs to be either something particularly special or at least an interesting twist, or it needs to be well worked into the plot so it’s more subtle.
That all said, the one I’m tired of that immediately makes me angry is the overly complex villain plot. One that really irritated me was the one in Skyfall. The villain is motivated to kill M, but passes up opportunities, gets caught, and then depends on someone letting his virus loose at just the right time to escape and get to the hearing to try to kill her there. Surely, a villain requiring the likes of James Bond to take him down could have come up with a plot to kill her that didn’t require so many unlikely things to line up. Especially since it basically ends with him just going after them hoping that with lots of men and guns he’ll win.
The Dark Knight sort of suffers from this, but at least there I could see it as a contingency, like, if he succeeds, he kills Dent, and if he fails and gets caught, at least he can get Lau. I could see him having the guy with the cell phone bomb in him in there regardless, killing Dent, then blowing that up and using that to get to Lau later or something. Then again, maybe I’m willing to believe it there a lot more because I love the film so much.
And, of course, there’s the opposite problem of the paper-thin villain. If all his motivation is that he wants to destroy the planet/universe or take over the planet/universe, particularly if he’s going to do it by getting some ultra-powerful MacGuffin or killing the One before he can stop him… meh. A bad villain can turn an otherwise great movie into a so-so movie. I want to see some decent motivation, and while I hate the overly complex plot, at least something more than than get powerful MacGuffin at all costs and win.
I’ve got another. The little tiny girl who beats up eight men is super wearing on me nw.
Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker had in common their close connection with the bad guys – Luke by blood and Harry by being a horcrux – so that is supposed to be the twist to the story, and really, you are not really interested in the story of Neville or Lando, the story is not about them, so “the chosen one” gets most of the screen time because he is the one that matters. Of course, this paradox idea can get very old very quickly.
Personally, I would like to see some complexity in the main characters. Voldemort and Palpatine are incredibly one-dimensional characters who amount to little more than metaphors for evilness. So, when the good guys finish them off, all is well and no one gives the villains another thought.
Similarly, what about, say, Superman? He rescues Jimmy Olsen from a 60th floor window ledge, or whatever, while just a few miles away, my niece ran her car off the bridge and drowned, and where was Superman, he easily could have saved her, and stopped that truck full of ball-bearing from tipping over on I-95 at rush hour, and rescued that one guy being mauled by a bear and … and … and … These heros are just not that good. Even the universe, hey, it can take care of itself, it does not need saving, it is only ever about us.
I would use my ban power to un-ban damn near everything mentioned in this thread. By everybody. Movies are this century’s (and the last’s) form of oral story-telling. They pass on Ur-ideas. The reason writers tend to go with the same tropes is because they make us what we are. Are some of them “over-used?” Maybe. When you go from people hearing the stories orally from a bard maybe once a year to seeing the stories every damn day and twice on the weekends, yes there is going to be some overlap. So what?
I want my stories to involve Chosen Ones. I want villains who are unstoppable except by Our Hero. Why? Because I get enough of Life by living every day. I want Fantasy. The Wire, Oz and shows like that repel me because they are “so gritty and realistic.” Dammit, I don’t want realistic. I want to be moved by a CGI raccoon crying because his friend is going to die. I want Hulk to SMASH. I want to see River Tam absolutely mop the floor with a room full of Reivers. Hell, I want to see the world’s worst frat take on the Omegas and Dean Wormer and win!
McGuffins for everybody!
My favorite use of this was in the original Airport. Burt Lancaster is in charge of Airport Operations, and his wife calls him because he’s late. They have this split-screen exchange (paraphrasing):
“Where are you!”
“I’ve got an airplane stuck half on a runway.”
“You promised me that you’d be home in time for this important fancy dinner party!”
“Sorry, I might not even be home tonight.”
“You promised me you’d make it to this party six weeks ago!”
“Six weeks ago I didn’t know that Chicago would have its worst blizzard in 20 years.”
(Angry): “You always have some excuse!”
What?! There’s a Natural Disaster, lady! It seemed like a pretty damn good excuse to me.
Have you read the books, or are you just talking about movie Voldemort? The sixth book in particular fleshes out Voldemort’s backstory.
As I said above, yes, certainly…within a kind of moderation. When it becomes a lazy-ass short-cut that moviemakers use to avoid doing any real work, it becomes tedious, and borders upon being offensive. Don’t insult the audience.
Let’s not turn this into Commedia dell’Arte or Japanese Noh theater! Let’s not have the stereotypes and archetypes and tropes take over completely.
Once in a while, violate “Chekov’s Gun.” Once in a while, let the goddamn dog die.
Logic works fine; it isn’t the problem. The problem is that the cultures/nations you mention actually operate on different premises/assumptions/data. When those are incomplete or wrong, so is your logic. That’s why the Vulcans are really a strawman. When Spock declares something humans do is illogical, it’s really the character’s deliberately written failure to take humans’ different motivations and values into account. If Vulcans really were as smart and successful as portrayed, they’d have learned that long ago.