What tropes in fantasy and drama movies, or shows annoy you?

[Gingerbread Demon]

We did a long running thread on sci-fi tropes that annoy but what about the fantasy genre? What tropes in fantasy annoy you?
Also for drama series, movies or shows such as procedurals like cop shows or medical shows that kind of thing.

I'll start with one that while valid I do find used a lot and sometimes I feel like it didn't need explaining to everyone outside of main characters but somehow more people find out, and more people find out. People talk.. OK the trope in question is that magical beings look just like us, they live in our suburbs, work jobs just like us, have cars and stuff. But we can't know they exist even though we can see them every day and sometimes might even encounter them and talk to them, some might work as doctors or lawyers. You get what I mean. To me it's annoying.

The other thing is surely if one person found out they'd tell their friends and they would tell their friends, and eventually the cat's out of the bag so much that something drastic has to be done to keep the secret which kills the whole show.

 

[Steve Roby]

What, the urban fantasy novels where half the population is shifters, fae, vampires, magicians, jinn, elves, trolls, and/or psychics (all in the same book) but their presence has made so little difference to history that cities, countries, technology, and mainstream culture are the same in their world as they are in ours? There seems to be a lot of those. I liked a little of the early urban fantasy that was more subtle and less kitchen sink, like Charles de Lint's early Ottawa-set urban fantasies, but burned out on it fairly quickly, probably due in part to stuff like the "punk elf" Bordertown books.

I'd like to see a ten-year ban on fantasies based on The Hero's Journey or The Chosen One.

Maybe a five-year ban on fantasy novels more than 200 pages long, and a ban on series of novels. HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard wrote mainly short stories and novellas, not novels, but they changed fantasy, horror, and science fiction and they're still read today. They didn't need ten volumes of a thousand pages each to create a world and tell a story.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

What, the urban fantasy novels where half the population is shifters, fae, vampires, magicians, jinn, elves, trolls, and/or psychics (all in the same book) but their presence has made so little difference to history that cities, countries, technology, and mainstream culture are the same in their world as they are in ours? There seems to be a lot of those. I liked a little of the early urban fantasy that was more subtle and less kitchen sink, like Charles de Lint's early Ottawa-set urban fantasies, but burned out on it fairly quickly, probably due in part to stuff like the "punk elf" Bordertown books.

I'd like to see a ten-year ban on fantasies based on The Hero's Journey or The Chosen One.

Maybe a five-year ban on fantasy novels more than 200 pages long, and a ban on series of novels. HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard wrote mainly short stories and novellas, not novels, but they changed fantasy, horror, and science fiction and they're still read today. They didn't need ten volumes of a thousand pages each to create a world and tell a story.

I'm watching Lost Girl and that's kind of why I wrote my post. But it's like what you wrote. Also shows like The Magicians where magic is real but you must be hush hush about the magic and not do it in public.

Yeah I get that point of how another whole race lives alongside us yet everything around us is the same.

 

[Steve Roby]

I liked The Magicians because it wasn't doing the kitchen sink thing with everybody everywhere turning out to be a mythical creature and because it subverted Harry Potter and other stuff. And it didn't overstay its welcome, with just the three books and five short seasons on TV. Haven't read the graphic novels, though.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

The apparent lack of any females over the age of 32 in virtually all the interchangeable police procedurals.
If Frances Sternhagen were still alive, how the heck could she find steady TV work?

 

[Nerys Myk]

The apparent lack of any females over the age of 32 in virtually all the interchangeable police procedurals.
If Frances Sternhagen were still alive, how the heck could she find steady TV work?

I know some can be farfetched, but are police procedurals fantasy?

Kathy Bates is 76 and headlines "Matlock", so maybe on Sternhagen?

 

[Daddy Todd]

I'd like to see a ten-year ban on fantasies based on The Hero's Journey or The Chosen One.

Maybe a five-year ban on fantasy novels more than 200 pages long, and a ban on series of novels. HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard wrote mainly short stories and novellas, not novels, but they changed fantasy, horror, and science fiction and they're still read today. They didn't need ten volumes of a thousand pages each to create a world and tell a story.

If I never read another Chosen One story again, I'd be perfectly fine with that.

And the doorstop bloat of fantasy novels has stopped me reading them. I may be the only ASOIAF reader who bogged down halfway through the third book (in 2002) and couldn't care less if GRRM ever finishes the series or not.

 

[Steve Roby]

And the doorstop bloat of fantasy novels has stopped me reading them. I may be the only ASOIAF reader who bogged down halfway through the third book (in 2002) and couldn't care less if GRRM ever finishes the series or not.

I think that's about as far as my wife got. I didn't start them because with my aging memory I generally wait for a book series to be complete before I start reading it. I often wait to binge TV shows for similar reasons.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I know some can be farfetched, but are police procedurals fantasy?

Kathy Bates is 76 and headlines "Matlock", so maybe on Sternhagen?

Well it's not scifi so why not? Police procedurals may as well be fantasy because somehow at the end most of the time the baddies go right to jail without trial, or that part is never even mentioned so yeah fantasy /s Although technically they are drama. I might change my thread title to include this since someone brought them up.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Well it's not scifi so why not? Police procedurals may as well be fantasy because somehow at the end most of the time the baddies go right to jail without trial, or that part is never even mentioned so yeah fantasy /s Although technically they are drama. I might change my thread title to include this since someone brought them up.

Pretty much any real word drama would be fantasy by that criteria.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Pretty much any real word drama would be fantasy by that criteria.

I know.... I changed the OP anyway to cover including drama

 

[theenglish]

If I never read another Chosen One story again, I'd be perfectly fine with that.

And the doorstop bloat of fantasy novels has stopped me reading them. I may be the only ASOIAF reader who bogged down halfway through the third book (in 2002) and couldn't care less if GRRM ever finishes the series or not.

By chance, was that the scene when it spent something like three pages describing everyone's banners? For me, it was Feast for Crows--and then I discovered that someone had posted a chronological reading order for Dance with Dragons and Crows together and I found that a much more pleasant experience.

 

[JD]

It's always a bit odd to me when we have gods and mythical beings from cultures that were hundreds of years apart all coexisiting at the same time. I'm only on the second season so far, but I know Xena started incorporating gods and things from later mythologies like the Norse, and they did the same thing with the God of War series when they switched from Greek to Norse mythology for the reboot. It doesn't ruin the story for me or anything, it just feels a little odd. I don't mind when it's a modern story where they all survived to the modern day, it's mainly just if something is set in earlier, like having characters in Ancient Greece suddenly running into Thor or Odin, even though I believe Norse mythology didn't really become a thing until hundreds of years later.

 

[MarcKle1964]

If I never read another Chosen One story again, I'd be perfectly fine with that.

And the doorstop bloat of fantasy novels has stopped me reading them. I may be the only ASOIAF reader who bogged down halfway through the third book (in 2002) and couldn't care less if GRRM ever finishes the series or not.

It was like trying to read all of the Dune saga, wasn't it?. I gave up after the 6th one and didn't read the ones Brian Herbert wrote. A cursory look showed that the complete ASOI&F is 3,500 pages long in PDF format.

 

[MarcKle1964]

It's always a bit odd to me when we have gods and mythical beings from cultures that were hundreds of years apart all coexisiting at the same time. I'm only on the second season so far, but I know Xena started incorporating gods and things from later mythologies like the Norse, and they did the same thing with the God of War series when they switched from Greek to Norse mythology for the reboot. It doesn't ruin the story for me or anything, it just feels a little odd. I don't mind when it's a modern story where they all survived to the modern day, it's mainly just if something is set in earlier, like having characters in Ancient Greece suddenly running into Thor or Odin, even though I believe Norse mythology didn't really become a thing until hundreds of years later.

Are you thinking of the series with Jeff Goldbloom as Zeus?

 

[JD]

That's set in the modern day, so that doesn't bother me, it's just when it's back in the era they originated.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I like how on one of my DVD covers for The Magicians it says "Harry Potter on drugs"

 

[Nerys Myk]

That's set in the modern day, so that doesn't bother me, it's just when it's back in the era they originated.

They're Gods, who can say when they existed? Many have names with the same Proto-Indo-European roots.

 

[MarcKle1964]

It's always a bit odd to me when we have gods and mythical beings from cultures that were hundreds of years apart all coexisiting at the same time. I'm only on the second season so far, but I know Xena started incorporating gods and things from later mythologies like the Norse, and they did the same thing with the God of War series when they switched from Greek to Norse mythology for the reboot. It doesn't ruin the story for me or anything, it just feels a little odd. I don't mind when it's a modern story where they all survived to the modern day, it's mainly just if something is set in earlier, like having characters in Ancient Greece suddenly running into Thor or Odin, even though I believe Norse mythology didn't really become a thing until hundreds of years later.

That would be an interesting history documenting where organized worship of a particular deity began (organized meaning >10,000 adherents? temples? virgin sacrifices?) - where to it spread, what other organized religions were there, and how it died out and what replaced it.

 

[Set Harth]

It was like trying to read all of the Dune saga, wasn't it?. I gave up after the 6th one