What tropes in science fiction annoy you?

The Villains that seem too smart for our heroes. So much so that they fool them completely and then end up doing incredibly stupid things so that our heroes can win without breaking a sweat. I've seen that trope many many times and find it really annoying.

 

Oh yeah. Getting their arm or leg caught on some loose cables that drag them to their doom

 

I was thinking along the lines of Shinzon who spends most of the movie farting around when he has a planet to destroy.

 

When TV show or movies put their female characters in stupid situations where they unnecessarily lose articles of clothing. The one example of this that gets a massive eye roll from me is an Enterprise episode where Hoshi is crawling around in the ceiling of the ship and as she drops down into a room her shirt catches on a pipe or something and gets pulled off.
I don't mind nudity if it is appropriate to the situation, but stuff like this is just feels juvenile. At least shows like Game of Thrones, True Blood, and Altered Carbon have their nudity in situations where it feels appropriate.

 

Except that by no stretch of the imagination do we see Hoshi naked in that episode.

 

I’ve been looking out for these in my recent viewing for this thread.

A trope that annoys me is when the heroes hastily put a plan together that requires perfect choreography and timing and then pull it off, unrehearsed, without a hitch.

An example is the fight on Titan with Thanos in Infinity War. Far too well choreographed and planned for the time they had, until of course it goes horribly wrong. But the point stands.

Another one is where the heroe escapes a precarious situation in an unreasonable amount of time to add dramatic tension. An example, again form the MCU, is when Nick Fury escapes from the Winter Soldier by cutting through a car roof and several metres of street AND wiggles out in literally a handful of seconds.

As with all these tropes, most are used to enhance the drama. In reality, I suspect our viewing would be much more bland without many of them.

 

I don't know if someone already said this but one thing that I find particularly annoying is the villain that needs to tell his life story when he has the hero at gunpoint and only needs to pull the trigger to get rid of him, once and for all. Haven't we all seen that at least a thousand times, literally?

 

A form of monologing, famously called out by none other than Mr Incredible himself.

 

Also Bond villains. They do this a lot and give Bond plenty of time to look bored and escape.

 

When a character who is a member of a crew/team has something happen to them that greatly impacts their ability to perform their duty but doesn’t tell anyone about it and then the things rears its head at a critical moment. Just f*cking communicate, people.

 

In "The Right Stuff" when Chuck Yeager doesn't tell the brass about his broken ribs because he's afraid that they might let someone else attempt to break the sound barrier before him...

Wait! That really happened, didn't it?

 

When a character has ample opportunity to kill the bad guy but doesn't.

Bond in Diamonds Are Forever could have killed Blofeld easy but doesn't

 

The time travel paradox.

Basically: When someone travels back in time to try to prevent an event and it's his very attempt that causes the event to happen. The first time I ever saw that (ages ago) it seemed new and clever, now it's just annoying, especially when no new twist is added to the concept.

 

Of course not, it was on a network, but the intent behind the scene that is still annoyingly juvenile and unnecessary.

This drives me crazy.

 

Fair point

 

Such as the flamboyant villains in 1966-68 BATMAN, always tying up Batman & Robin in some weird diabolical trap to kill them, and then just leave without making sure it actually works.

 

The secret lab that is completely unguarded and empty of people in the middle of the day!

We see that in the latest "Jurassic World"
... it's not like they've invested millions of dollars into the thing!!!

 

Access codes that are cracked one digit at a time like in War Games, takes the computer trying to break it endless time even though it's only checking one digit at a time, and then just 0-9.