I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
The worst is when a show or movie establishes that X can’t be done, because Y. Then in a later scene X is done without addressing anything about Y. It’s actually pretty common, especially when run time needs to be padded with a side quest.
Coffee/drink cups that have nothing in them. At least put water in them so they don’t look obviously empty. Lol
Is that not how chloroform works?
5 minutes of inhalation
According to Quora it takes 5 minutes, with a willing participant.
Anaesthesia that’s injected right before an operation can knock you out in about 30 seconds (and until then you could still struggle, technically speaking), but that’s a thick-ass tube of drugs they’re pumping inside of you. Some vapours from a rag is going to do jack shit.
When they are kissing right after waking up with that morning breath.
Normalization of the protagonist using violence before any attempt of diplomacy, without the narrative condemning this action
For that matter, when someone gets shot center mass and they collapse like Cypher just pulled them from the matrix
It’s preferable to people getting shot and flying across the room, like in a John Woo film.
People getting shot with a shitty handgun and they’re dead as soon as they hit the ground. Even if its a fatal shot, chances are quite high you’re going to die minutes or hours or days later if you make it to a hospital.
People hiding behind cars from bullets. Bullets being shot at the car and somehow not hitting them. Only the engine block could stop most bullets.
Guns in general are a lost cause at this point. Even shooting a 22 outside is doing hearing damage, but plots rely on people shooting 9s and 45s indoors and having normal conversations immediately afterwards.
A 22 can penetrate all the way through a car and still be dangerous
Anything but a direct hit on the head or heart is going to take at least a minute for someone to die. Conversely, the chance of dying from a non-lethal shot (or having lifelong complications), even to an appendage, is nonzero.
At the same time, getting hit by most calibers isn’t gonna knock someone down or blast them back like they got hit by a car. Human skin is soft, very little energy is transferred into the body’s mass as the bullet travels through.
People shooting guns in a car and then continuing their conversation…
You would be deaf.
You’ve clearly never been affected by an instant knock-out drug!
I have grown to really fucking hate deus ex machina in any form. Luck is always a factor, but c’mon. It usually comes down to lazy writing and they just couldn’t be assed to come up with an explanation.
I can tolerate it, if it was prefaced earlier.
People do tend to come to the aid of others when they’re needed the most - it happens.
But if a truck comes barrelling towards Jason Vorhees and knocks him into a train, allowing our characters to run away, that’s a hard no.
I have two.
When a woman’s child is threatened she goes stupid and hysterical. Like in Lost when she just keeps screaming “my baby!”. Yes parents get highly motivated when their child is in danger but they don’t get stupid and lose agency.
In any setting where rope would be rare and expensive and they just cut the bonds instead of untying them. It’s understandable when time is critical like a prisoner break or the building is on fire. But in a society where someone spent a week making that rope and you just cut it instead of taking 5 min to preserve the rope.
How many shows are you watching which have rope shortening?
Any show where someone gets tired up. 99% chance it’s getting cut.
Talking head montages, especially at the beginning of a movie or TV show. I think directors try to ground some fiction in reality by having a bunch of news reporters comment on some event but as someone who tries to avoid that garbage it just feels like the movie is made for someone else and it’s been used so many times it’s irritating.
Also product placement seeing a soda can or car perfectly framed to see the brand name or logo cheapens any sense of artistic integrity and feels like watching an advertisement.
And if I can indulge in a meta trope of streaming service monetization since it’s become so common these days having a subscription + ad tier. Sub no ads or ads no sub, mixing them is the same greed as cable TV and shouldn’t be supported by subscribing (Disney, HBO Max, prime, Netflix, etc).
Personally I’m super disinterested in plotlines that suddenly shift and have the main female character desperate to reproduce, or happy about falling pregnant unexpectedly, even, perhaps especially, when it’s wildly out of character for her badass self as she’s written, or makes no sense at all given the circumstances.
So obnoxious and overdone. And so very very lazy, because it’s almost never well-written, it’s just pandering nonsense. I straight up stop watching shows that pull that shit.
I think monster should have rules. Zombies aren’t fast, there’s just so many they over take you. Dracula dies from a stake through the heart, and the Wolfman dies from a silver bullet
Interesting that you like the tropes. I like the fact that there’s some variation depending on your preference.
I like zombies that are infected and not reanimated. They’re fast but die from normal damage. 28 Days Later is one of my favorites and it’s a major point of emphasis.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is hard to take seriously sometimes because of the contrivances from slow moving zombies, and the fact that 10 year old zombies are still around bothers me. Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
Zombies in the George Romero tradition are basically just animated through magic. Otherwise it would be a World War Z (book) situation where the zombies would eventually just decompose entirely.
I can get behind fast zombies that are infected, I’m with you there. But I can’t suspend disbelief if a rotting corpse out of the ground can run like Usain bolt. Side note I would like to see monster stories that follow traditional folklore that isn’t well known. Werewolves can revert to human through their true love and vampires can’t be seen in mirrors only because silver was used to make mirrors but not anymore so we should be able to see vampire reflections in some mirrors. I think that would be cool if made plot relevant
Van Helsing did the mirror thing which was cool. I think Dracula Dead and Loving It did too.
Side thought. I loved in From Dusk Til Dawn when they’re trying to think of all the folklore that they could remember. Like whether silver was supposed to hurt vampires too or just werewolves.
Another side thought, I love when they know about the monsters like in Shaun of the Dead. It always bothers me when it’s an alternate universe that’s never heard of Zombies before.
Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
Not a show, but check out the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant, that’s the exact concept the series is based on. Awesome read.
The Walking Dead (tv series at least) is a great example of inconsistency undermining the overall rules for their world. Instead of the danger of the dead overrunning everything from outside, the danger of the recently deceased causing an outbreak in any sizeable community was a far more interesting threat in that setting. But they only did that for a little bit and went back to the overwhelming masses of dead and ‘people are the real monsters’ over and over.
I’m okay with fast zombies as long as they are short-lived.
Like they should tear their own bodies apart and consume their own internal resources to be fast zombies until the point where they physically shut down and cannot operate anymore.
I have seen that in 28 Weeks later?
Funny, I just responded a similar response with 28 Days Later as an example and didn’t notice yours.
The comic relief only character.
No they’re not funny, you can’t write.That’s something I appreciated about the extended version of Lord of the Rings. Gimli was still used as comic relief a lot, but in the extended version he’s a fuller, more rounded out character. Better character development just made the comic relief bits funnier.
The expert who somehow knows all things science and engineering, like they’re all just basically the same. Just once I’d like to hear, “I’m an astrophysicist, not a cybersecurity expert. I don’t have the first clue where to begin hacking any computer, let alone an alien one that I’ve never seen before.”
Bonus points if the characters have to look for a different solution due to their lack of on-hand expertise in a particular area.
I’m a doctor not an astrophysicist!
I just saw that in WandaVision. Darcy is an Astrophysicist but was also hacking through various firewalls to get at some secret data.
My friend’s dad somehow seems to know everything about everything. He’s wicked smart though, and basically spends all of his time learning and doing stuff.
