What tropes in science fiction annoy you?

You want to talk EWWW...have you ever seen Chances Are? In that film, RDJr. plays a character who hooks up with a woman who actually IS his own daughter.

Yes, reincarnation IS involved: Alex (RDJr.) is the boyfriend of Miranda - but Alex is the reincarnated form of HER FATHER (Louie, played by Christopher McDonald). True, at the end of the film, Alex forgets that he ever was Louie, but it doesn't change the facts: he's his own daughter's boyfriend.

Now if that's not EWWW, then what is?

 

Gross

 

When the hero could end everything by just shooting the bad guy but he doesn't and the movie continues for half-an-hour... at what point he shoots the bad guy!!!

 

When the heroes are being chased or escaping and the woman in the party, and sometimes a man falls and hurts their ankle holding everyone up for ages.

 

StarTrek trope:

When a phaser/disrupter/what have you set on kill, only kills the redshirts and wounds the recurring guys. Oh, come on! It's set on kill, it hit you in the stomach but you're still alive!!!

 

Cartoon shows where the cast never ever change their clothes, shoes or anything else. Must get really stinky after a while.


Here's another one "magic exists but we have to hide it." I got the whole series of the show The Magicians and I'm struggling to finish the first season. I want to watch this and like it but I just can't seem to warm to it. I'll explain. It is described on the back of the DVD as "Harry Potter on drugs"

The trope they use is kind of like Harry Potter but more twisted. There is a university that teaches magic and how to use / control it but it's hidden away in another dimension inside what looks like a city like New York. But they have cellphone reception and internet go figure. In the very first episode the dean of the uni says "we're just here to teach you, we don't care what you do with your magic when you leave" when asked by a student "what if you want to take over the world." That was his response.

So yeah the whole "magic is real but the magic school must be hidden away from the rest of the world" It's a STUPID TROPE. Why can't they just like you know keep it all in the real world?

Another one not sure if it's a trope but planets lurking close together.

When a ship is in orbit or near a planet and in the same picture you can see two or three other planets as if they're a stones throw away from the planet they are hovering around. Not only that in some cases there's light but the sun of that system is nowhere to be seen, or hinted that there is even a sun its sometimes like they find these planets just any old where and they are in clusters.

 

Bottomless abysses with a single, somehow-dangerous span across it. Could be a mossy tree, a rotted rope bridge, an cracking ice bridge, etc.

 

Women who are just in the story to be rescued or won or whatever, with no agency of their own.

 

I generally can't stand stories in which the characters are stuck in a time loop.

Kor

 

Star Trek has done that a lot

 

Only two examples spring to mind...

 

I think they did it more then that in TNG, Voyager's done it, even DS9 I think too and Enterprise

 

Narrow corridors or bridges built high over open spaces--but the bridges don't have handrails. Star Wars does that a lot.

 

Star Wars also does the bottomless pit thing on ships and structures, no OHSS at all.

 

Which episodes? I can only think of Cause and Effect and Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad for proper repetitive time loops.

 

Small universe syndrome ( especially with Star Wars)

Blasting door controls on the side of the door ( mounted on the wall) to unlock the door

Convenient equipment malfunction so the story works at all ( very lazy writing)

Interspecies Sex ( as if alien races are always compatible with human anatomy or would have the same reaction to it like Humans)

 

That last point should not make sense at all. ST 6 tried to steer away from that but it was for a joke gag that kind of failed to make me laugh, the guy Kirk hit in the knee, his dick parts were in his knees.

Here's a selection of time loop episodes

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Temporal_causality_loop

 

I haven't seen it in forever, but I thought Coda was supposed to be largely in Janeways head, and Q2 is hardly a time loop episode just because it's a brief bit.

 

Antagonists who know they are evil and get their kicks by doing bad things are quite tiresome. IMO people who do morally questionable things because they believe they are the good guys make better vilains and are more true to life.

 

I suppose this one will annoy me to the end of my life because the showrunners / filmmakers do not research their due diligence or else assume the audience is not smart enough to recognise it. Sol, Earth's sun, does not look yellow from space (though to be fair, one should not look at it with naked eyes at 1 AU).