Bastard !
I laughed so much I nearly spilled my pint.
But getting back to the plot, I hate books that start at the end.
As in" He stared at the devastation before him, the broken bodies, the used condoms, and then he remembered how it all started …"
And you think, well its all over, anti climax !
And any story that can use time travel, or surrealism to rectify horrendous events so you know that the heroes are never really in danger.
Hitchhikers guide and Star trek I’m looking at you !
I think there’s an actual psychological reason for this. It’s in fairy tales, too - everyone’s mother is dead. I think it’s because it’s a safe way for kids to explore the idea of making their own way through the world, without a parent to do the heavy lifting.
I don’t know that the Hitchhiker’s Guide series is the best example of this, as in the last book time travel is used to cause a horrendous event. At the end of Mostly Harmless
all possible versions of Earth in all possible timelines are destroyed, and the series protagonist dies along with most of the other major characters who weren’t dead already.
[derail]
I know this is about books, but in the usual “teenagers in high school” anime parents are missing more often than not. It’s gotten to a point where I’m actually surprised if the protagonist has even one parent present.
[/derail]
An author with a kid protagonist is kinda stuck with the missing parent problem. What good parent in their right mind would let their child go on exciting and dangerous adventures? If the parents are good and attentive, the kid’s got to get whisked away to a fantasy land or something without the parent knowing, and that gets old too.
Buffy the vampire slayer. Her mother might as well have been a drunk for all she really cared or even paid attention to her daughter. It was one of the biggest reasons I couldn’t watch the show.
Wow… you didn’t get very far in, did you? Buffy’s mom is one of the best moms in TV history. Especially once she finds out about Buffy’s secret life.
Characters in huge stories that get a whole chapter of backstory and development only to be immediately killed.
I’m looking at you George R.R. Martin.:mad:
No. I couldn’t make it past Season 1. That’s not the only reason I hated the show.
To each their own, but I think most Buffy fans will tell you that Season 1 isn’t really indicative of the show. If you ever feel like giving it a second chance, try starting with Season 2. (and if you don’t, no big whoop, but hey, I gotta try.)
JK Rowling did this in the Harry Potter books. At the end of book 6, after Dumbledore has died, Harry hears Dumbledore’s pet phoenix singing outside. As the phoenix flies away, the books says something like, “Somehow, Harry knew he wouldn’t see it again.”
Lazy, lazy, lazy. Especially when there’s an obvious solution: Harry could have learned this in Care of Magical Creatures!
Speaking as a children’s author, this is something we struggle with, which is why frequently the responsible adult is injured or endangered in some way, and that’s why the child has to be the one to save the day.
I know, I was told that. But when I neither liked the central dynamic of the show (killing vampires, who cares) nor the central character (am sick unto death of little girls beating up huge guys) nor the setting (High school, drama, angst, yay) I figured the show just wasn’t for me.
Plenty more shows and I prefer British telly anyway. 
Ugh indeed. On a related note, I once got into a big argument about this with some other amateur writers, because in my opinion they were misusing dialect, mainly by using it too much and in the wrong places. My two simple “rules:”
• Dialect belongs in the dialogue. It almost never belongs in the narration. The only time dialect should be in the narration is when it is established from the beginning that the narration is meant to represent a character telling the story orally. See: Uncle Remus. The whole point in the Uncle Remus stories is that this old, uneducated, ex-slave is orally relating these stories to a group of children, and so we’re supposed to “hear” the stories in his voice. Other than rare scenarios like that, narration should be written in the writer’s best approximation of proper, standard English (assuming an English-speaking author and audience, of course).
• When the character speaks in a pidgin/broken dialect because he is not a native speaker of the “common” language, he/she should only speak in that dialect when communicating with speakers of the “common” language. For example, Antonio is a Mexican national living and working in the USA, and has only a rudimentary command of English, so when he speaks to Americans he does so in his best broken English. But when he speaks to another Mexican in Spanish, his dialogue should be “translated” into grammatically correct English for the reader. Since Antonio is supposed to be speaking in his native language, to a fellow native speaker of that same language, there is absolutely no reason for his dialogue to continue to be represented by broken English.
Heh. I’ve been working my way through some medieval history, and it gets really confusing in the 10th and 11th centuries when it seems that every French king, duke, and count is named Charles and every royal or noble German is named Otto or Henry 
I think that’s easily fixed in most cases: when the two foreign-language speakers are conversing, simply don’t italicize the word. That way, you easily communicate to the reader that there is probably no direct translation:
Captain Picard: “Yes, I would enjoy some fresh gagh.”
Klingon Captain, to his servant: “Bring the bald human a plate of gagh!”
I’ve always interpreted the apostrophes in “alien” or “fantasy” names as being a convenience tool for the reader, essentially indicating how the syllables are divided, since the breaks between syllables come in places that would be unnatural or unintuitive in English, and that such marks don’t actually appear in the character’s own written language. I’m reminded of that recurring character on Saturday Night Live many years back whose last name was “Asswipe”, and he was constantly correcting people’s pronunciation: “It’s ah-SWI-pay!” Had he been a serious character in a fantasy or sci-fi novel, his name could have been written “As’swi’pe”
Not a novel, but I’ve run into exactly this problem while reading The Cambridge Medieval History, which was published around 1910-1920 (there are several volumes). There are a number of passages in Latin, usually quoting some historical figure, and no translation is provided because it was assumed the reader had learned Latin in school.
God, I was looking around, trying to find some examples from Tai-pan to post, and i found some people actually like the pigdin and think it’s funny and clever. Ugh.
Like this:
Suppose one man no catchee cash, he no can play
at game,
Supposey pigeon no hab wing, can no make fly all-
same.
Wang-ti he tly fly-up-can-go, 1 he workee hard for
some,
But all-same one fire-/ocket stick he makee fly-down-
come.
But bat by night may blongey, b/ight-sun, 3 a butterfly.
One tim you catchee angel s’pose you look-see devil
kwei.
Wang-ti no pass he no can do he no can catch
degZee,
You make ear-hear, I talkee how t’his all come good
fo’ he.
One night Wang-ti go walkee he feel like loney
goose ;
How allo study, ‘m-chung-yung 5 he never hit t’he
use.
How some man pass an’ catch degree while he stick
fass’ behind,
Like one big-piecee lock 6 while waves fly pass’ him
on t’he wind.
Only, as I said, it would be pages of this shit, and it would be important dialogue - discussing lives and deaths of some people while I have to read fucking ignorant pigdin. It’s like reading another language, only there’s no beauty in the words.
Maybe that’s it, in the end. Language is beautiful and I respect it greatly and am in awe of it. Pigdin destroys it utterly.
I hate it when an author writing a fictional book will use a celebrity from real life as a character. It just seems to me like the author is writing fanfiction about the celebrity.
(Can’t think of any examples off the top of my head - maybe I just tend to avoid books like that?)
Farmer’s Riverworld series is pretty much nothing BUT this.