# Tired fictional tropes you hate **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 16, 2020, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937 "2020-05-16T19:07:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2020, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/181 "2020-05-19T19:02:26Z")
> [@solost](#): > > Speaking of sci-fi planet tropes, planets that each have only one climate is a common one, is it not? Star Wars is certainly guilty of this, with the ice planet Hoth and the desert planet Tatooine. Planets with life-bearing ecosystems don’t work that way. There’s a trope for that: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet) ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2020, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/182 "2020-05-19T19:05:00Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > There were a few offhand remarks, but that’s about it. “I think I’m gonna barf.” ---
**Author:** ![Akaj](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/akaj/32/145_2.png) [@Akaj](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Akaj)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2020, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/183 "2020-05-19T21:13:51Z")
I’m really tired of this lazy exposition technique: Our hero – a young, upcoming cop, agent, reporter, investigator or lawyer – is summoned to a meeting with a superior way above their paygrade. The superior greets them, and then proceeds to _read their CV to them_: “Jane Smith; Phi Beta Kappa at UCLA; Law Review at Princeton; first in your class at Annapolis; special ops, two tours, Afghanistan. Very impressive.” Just in case we didn’t know our hero was awesome. ---
**Author:** ![wanderer2575](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/2acd7d/32.png) [@wanderer2575](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wanderer2575)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/184 "2020-05-20T01:53:46Z")
How is it that nobody has yet mentioned the worst trope of all (unless I missed it)? A hundred bad guys shooting repeatedly at the hero and they \*all \*miss. But the hero picks them off cleanly, one by one, never missing his shot. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/185 "2020-05-20T12:10:08Z")
I’ve been watching a lot of “classic” TV shows on old nostalgia on-air channels like ME TV lately, and here’s one I’ve noticed that that was VERY common, but thankfully seems to have been retired in recent years: the exact double to one of the main characters who suddenly appears on the scene. It’s usually a sitcom trope, but it occasionally appeared on a cheesy drama (I’m thinking ‘Charlie’s Angels’ probably did a double episode). The double, who not only looked but sounded \*\*\*exactly \*\*\*like the original, was usually a bad guy who took advantage of the situation to impersonate the original for nefarious purposes. This led to a climactic scene where the double and the original both appeared before the other main characters and would say “I"M Joe Original!” “No, I"M Joe Original!”. ---
**Author:** ![BeagleJesus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/5daacb/32.png) [@BeagleJesus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BeagleJesus)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/186 "2020-05-20T12:11:47Z")
Sorry poster above me who’s name I don’t remember, but the very worst trope of all is _The Power of Love Fixes Everything!_ [insert your least liked luv emoji here] Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/187 "2020-05-20T12:24:38Z")
A character has a traumatic experience or really bad day and just wallows under a running shower, fully clothed. A chase on the roof of a fast moving train (“Why do people do this? You’re still just on the train.” - Lana from Archer) ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/188 "2020-05-20T12:33:04Z")
Just thought of another old, typically sitcom trope that used to be incredibly common but for obvious reasons has been abandoned: the character who suffers a blow to the head which causes them to have total amnesia, and they don’t get their memory back until they suffer another blow to the head. Yeah, that is \*\*\*not \*\*\*how serious brain trauma works. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/189 "2020-05-20T16:31:34Z")
Four pages and nobody has mentioned the _actual_ worst trope ever? The “It was all a dream/hallucination!” trope. Why did I watch this entire episode/film when nothing in the plot actually happened and in the end nothing changes? Oh, Dorothy took a nap during a tornado and finally realized how special her uncle’s hired farm hands were to her? How precious! The movie that shows the entire life of a man in the 1980s and 90s turns out to be the hallucination of a kid dying on the operating table in Vietnam? Mind: blown! I mean, I still love The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Robot and Jacob’s Ladder, but I still hate the trope. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/190 "2020-05-20T16:36:39Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Four pages and nobody has mentioned the _actual_ worst trope ever? > > The “It was all a dream/hallucination!” trope. Why did I watch this entire episode/film when nothing in the plot actually happened and in the end nothing changes? Oh, Dorothy took a nap during a tornado and finally realized how special her uncle’s hired farm hands were to her? How precious! The movie that shows the entire life of a man in the 1980s and 90s turns out to be the hallucination of a kid dying on the operating table in Vietnam? Mind: blown! > > I mean, I still love The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Robot and Jacob’s Ladder, but I still hate the trope. The corollary to that, however, is when they wake up and later find they still have some object they acquired in the dream. My favorite subversion of that trope is an “extra” video they did for _Breaking Bad_ in which Bryan Cranston wakes up in bed with Jane Kaczmarek, his wife from _Malcolm in the Middle_, and tells her about the horrible nightmare he had where he was drug kingpin. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/191 "2020-05-20T17:31:01Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Four pages and nobody has mentioned the _actual_ worst trope ever? > > The “It was all a dream/hallucination!” trope. Why did I watch this entire episode/film when nothing in the plot actually happened and in the end nothing changes? Oh, Dorothy took a nap during a tornado and finally realized how special her uncle’s hired farm hands were to her? How precious! The movie that shows the entire life of a man in the 1980s and 90s turns out to be the hallucination of a kid dying on the operating table in Vietnam? Mind: blown! > > I mean, I still love The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Robot and Jacob’s Ladder, but I still hate the trope. Ooh, tropes keep reminding me of other tropes… this one reminds me of a very similar one, a horror movie standard, where something horrible and shocking happens to a character but then they wake up-- “thank God, it was only a nightmare!”. Of course the nightmare was just foreshadowing to the real mayhem about to happen. This is so common that there are a bunch of meta “nightmare within a nightmare” examples where the person wakes up from the bad thing, is relieved, has something horrible happen again, then wakes up again for real- I think “American Werewolf in London” was the first time I saw that meta version. ---
**Author:** ![MrAtoz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/192 "2020-05-20T17:46:39Z")
> [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](#): > > There’s a trope for that: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet) It’s not limited to biomes, though. That’s something I used to say about _Star Trek_, back in the days when I talked about _Star Trek_ a lot: every planet has exactly one climate, one language, one culture, one religious belief, and one fashion style. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/193 "2020-05-20T17:50:39Z")
> [@MrAtoz](#): > > It’s not limited to biomes, though. That’s something I used to say about _Star Trek_, back in the days when I talked about _Star Trek_ a lot: every planet has exactly one climate, one language, one culture, one religious belief, and one fashion style. There’s a trope for that, too: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats) ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/194 "2020-05-20T17:58:00Z")
> [@MrAtoz](#): > > It’s not limited to biomes, though. That’s something I used to say about _Star Trek_, back in the days when I talked about _Star Trek_ a lot: every planet has exactly one climate, one language, one culture, one religious belief, and one fashion style. The same geology too, based on paper mache. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![TreacherousCretin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treacherouscretin/32/476_2.png) [@TreacherousCretin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TreacherousCretin)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/195 "2020-05-20T18:05:54Z")
Apologies if this has been mentioned already. Double sorry if it was by me. Skilled but non-super hero is singlehandedly fighting 30 bad guys. One (or maybe two) BG’s attack, Hero dispatches both of them. ALL of the remaining 28 guys politely wait their turn to charge the hero, one (or two) after the other. In real life they would swamp the hero like ants on a fish head. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/196 "2020-05-20T18:09:12Z")
> [@TreacherousCretin](#): > > In real life they would swamp the hero like ants on a fish head. Yes, that trope has been mentioned already, but your post is worth it for this visual alone :eek: ---
**Author:** ![half-elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ac91a4/32.png) [@half-elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/half-elf)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/197 "2020-05-20T19:23:48Z")
Mostly seen in police/ detective procedural but not only: Persons A & B (and possibly others) are discussing something pertaining to the case at hand. Often one of the people is just now telling them something new/ something that some of the people don’t know yet. Often there is a noisy room beyond the space the discussion is taking place in. Person H comes through the doorway and even though they would only have been able to hear the last few words spoken at best, deliver some entirely new pertinent information, in other words they seamlessly continue a conversation they haven’t been part of. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/198 "2020-05-20T19:32:46Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Four pages and nobody has mentioned the _actual_ worst trope ever? > > The “It was all a dream/hallucination!” trope. Why did I watch this entire episode/film when nothing in the plot actually happened and in the end nothing changes? Oh, Dorothy took a nap during a tornado and finally realized how special her uncle’s hired farm hands were to her? How precious! The movie that shows the entire life of a man in the 1980s and 90s turns out to be the hallucination of a kid dying on the operating table in Vietnam? Mind: blown! > > I mean, I still love The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Robot and Jacob’s Ladder, but I still hate the trope. I agree. And Dishonorable Mention to the **Da Vinci Code** variation: it wasn’t “all a dream” but when we get to the end we discover that it all means… absolutely nothing. Nothing changes. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/199 "2020-05-20T20:02:21Z")
> [@half-elf](#): > > Person H comes through the doorway and even though they would only have been able to hear the last few words spoken at best, deliver some entirely new pertinent information, in other words they seamlessly continue a conversation they haven’t been part of. This reminds me of another “phony continuity” example-- maybe not so much a trope even, as lazy writing: someone gets a call saying “Quick-- turn on your TV to channel X News!” the person turns on channel X in time to see pretty much the entire newscast on the topic the caller wanted them to see-- not just the tail end of it. ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2020, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937/200 "2020-05-20T20:43:31Z")
> [@solost](#): > > This reminds me of another “phony continuity” example-- maybe not so much a trope even, as lazy writing: someone gets a call saying “Quick-- turn on your TV to channel X News!” the person turns on channel X in time to see pretty much the entire newscast on the topic the caller wanted them to see-- not just the tail end of it. Sometimes they don’t even have to tell you what channel to turn it to. The pertinent information is apparently being broadcast on every channel. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tired-fictional-tropes-you-hate/853937.md?page=11)