Especially after the hero kills dozens or possibly over a hundred of the bad guys henchmen, then he lets the bad guy go so he can assemble a new team who the hero has to kill all over again.
One trope I don’t like (but I understand why it exists in cinema) is the idea that in the future we will have highly advanced spaceships that are controlled by human beings. I don’t buy it, by that point the spaceships will be fully automated I’m sure. Putting some fragile meatbag with an IQ of 114 and neurons that fire at 200mph in charge isn’t going to make any sense.
Another thing that really bothers me is the trope where the dangerous criminal who is obviously guilty gets off ‘on a technicality’. Those technicalities are designed to protect our rights from a tyrannical government.
In the real world people still break morale if enough bad shit happens to their colleagues. When’s the last time you saw, in a non-war movie (or even in one of those), the side losing a battle breaking ranks & attempting to run away? [A good war production aversion was Band of Brothers when the Americans were attacked by some German tanks, but it seemed so odd precisely because of how rare it is.]
Perhaps, but I find it tired and trite. I want originality.
I say this admitting my favorite novel uses it for comic effect and also ignores “show don’t tell” with long chapters of someone telling the hero a story, and the hero spending the whole time interjecting an occasional comment.
But too often it’s a by-the-numbers formula. I dislike formulas.
I’m also bored to death with the trope that resolves things in a fight scene. If you’re going to have a confrontation at the climax, left the characters resolve it with brains, not weapons/fists.
Five or six bad guys attack Our Hero. Hero takes them one by one while the rest of the bad guys obligingly stand there and watch, apparently.
Also, beloved person dies in a violent way–falling down an elevator shaft, say. Person who loved him screams, “NOOOOOOO!” Cut to 30 minutes later, and Person Who Loved Him has apparently forgotten all about elevator guy. Elevator guy is never mentioned again.
You probably shouldn’t watch the old Route 66 TV series. Tod and Buz probably ended up with permanent neurological damage from all the fistfights they got into.
I read a lot of whodunnits, and I have a couple of tired things I’d like to see the back of.
The least likely suspect. This is just lazy plotting. When you get one of these, all you have to do is watch for the one person who is always around but not a central character and who is never a suspect until the last 30 pages, and that’s your culprit. I just finished a book, A Bitter Feast by Deborah Crombie that really suffered from this scourge. Perry Mason was really bad with this trope. And Agatha Christie smashed it with her very first published book.
The detective’s family is at risk from the killer. I guess this must happen once in a while in real life, but I won’t read one, and if it comes up in the middle of a book I will just stop reading it.
Serial killers, and now the serial killer is after the detective or the detective’s family. Give it a rest already, there must be 100 times as many serial killers in books and on TV dramas than there are in real life. One show that lasted for several seasons, that’s all it was about.
Food, or cats, or probably both. I won’t read any mystery that centers around food or cats. Dogs don’t seem to be much of a problem, probably because they’re not annoying.
Not a trope, but I’m gonna mention it anyway: book series where the author is just phoning it in. Case in point: the latest Richard Jury mystery by Martha Grimes. Completely disjointed plot, characters with neither character nor purpose, just a waste of time to read. I hate that.
Thank you for allowing me to get my digs in on those two books. With those digs or without them, my main four points are what I wanted to cover.
When all is forgiven for the villain at the end just because they had a moment of regret. Doesn’t matter if they tortured kittens, experimented on infants, and caused the genocide of billions of people. The protagonist with a strong connection to the villain made a moving speech, and now the villain is one of the good guys again. Often the villain will get to do a heroic sacrifice at the cost of their life, so they never have to deal with the consequences of their atrocities.
Another trope I hate is the hero who will do anything to faceless mooks without blinking an eye, but using violence against the main bad guy would make the hero “just like them.”
Ghosts that experience or are bound by gravity and can’t interact with the physical world until they learn, but are able to stand and walk like normal, as if the walls aren’t there, but the floors are.
Bad guy plans that require EVERYTHING to go right to even remotely work, even worse if his plan involves knowing exactly what the heroes will do to the very second so he can plan elaborate subterfuge/escapes days in advance. Bonus points if his plan requires him to be captured in the first place to even get the plan started.
I’d always wanted to see a movie where a bad guy has an elaborate plan that immediately falls apart the moment it starts, you see it all the time from the heroes perspective (the Scooby-Doo Plan I think it’s called) but you never see the bad guy plan to be captured to get into the heroes lair, only to find out that instead of the heroes guarding himself it’s somebody else entirely whom he has no real counter for.
Crotchety-but-lovable (and just about to retire) old police inspector is teamed-up with young hotshot who’s skeptical of his partner’s old-school methods. They grudgingly begin to respect each other and go on to solve crime after crime, all the while sniping at each other’s ways of doing things. Extra points if the old guy has a hot granddaughter the young hotshot is attracted to.
This is the basis of 90% of the shows on Acorn, BBC America, and any PBS outlet that shows British imports on Saturday night.