Your pet peeve tropes

I hate how published media portrays fanfiction.

It's always written by a girl or a young woman who's portrayed as creepy and ships and harasses in-universe real people, it's almost always gay porn, always bad or ridiculous, always about in-universe real people (because that's totally the same thing as writing normal fanfiction), and the published media's writers usually also use it to ridicule the idea that anybody in the cast could be gay. Nothing like a misogyny and homophobia combo.

Edited by Nukeli on May 10th 2024 at 2:39:02 PM

~ * Bleh * ~ (Looking for a russian-speaker to consult about names and words for a thing)

In other words, Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls?

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I got one. I hate when world hunger is depicted as a resources problem. Prime examples include Avengers: Infinity War and Unknown (2011). It's been proven for years now to be a logistics problem. The former is especially aggravating, as Thanos wiping out half of all life included plants and animals commonly used as food, meaning there was literally no upside to his plan.

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Thanos irritates me so much and I have no idea why people liked him so much, lol. His plan was completely nonsensical.

Granted it falls in line with my preference for less gray-shaded villains. I would have preferred a comic-accurate version where he was in love with Death.

But yeah, the trope of solving world hunger by simply killing people is kinda wacky, unless it goes along with some sorta Soylent Green stuff (since at leas then the deaths are contributing to the food stock)

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Well, sort of. In the original book, Soylent Green was so called because its name is a reference to its two main ingredients: soybeans and lentils. It’s only the movie version where the ingredients are sinister.

I smell magic in the air. Or maybe barbecue.

Lol, I know. I just couldn't remember the name of the proper trope for the scenario.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I wasn't even referring to that, specifically. In Unknown, world hunger gets solved because some genius invented a new species of corn that can survive in harsh climates. Again, this treats world hunger as a resource concern, not a logisticts concern.

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x4

People who liked Thanos were propably ecofascists who thought overpopulation is a real thing. There's no other way one could think that genocide is a good idea.

Edited by Nukeli on May 10th 2024 at 9:28:20 PM

~ * Bleh * ~ (Looking for a russian-speaker to consult about names and words for a thing)

I find it ironic that the comic Thanos, who wiped out half of all life in order to try and impress Death, actually made more sense.

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Probably not to the filmmakers. Or they thought it was too "goofy".

Do you have to keep going to extremes, dude? No, I don't think the majority of MCU fans at the time were "ecofacists".

My main reason for disliking him anyway isn't even his goal. It's that he just falls into tropes I dislike for villains; his motive was just a bit of it. I was mainly just relieved that someone else called it out.

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I suppose this does bring up a point about general Adaptation Deviation. I'm no big comic fan, nor am I necessarily a purist when it comes to adaptations. But I do get aggravated about changes that I don't feel make the story better. Too many changes right now feel more due to misunderstanding the source material or trying to make things safer/ more palatable. That is the sort of deviation I don't like.

Dunno if I'd say the Thanos thing fits here tho. It isn't a change I'm happy about but they did make a lot of effort when it came to this change in his character, and it might have made more sense for the MCU as it didn't force them to introduce a new villain.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

[1] Not trying to derail it too much from the thanos stuff but I just wanted to add that this kind of stuff is actually what made me take so long to get into reading fanfics and I'm kinda annoyed now that the stereotypes of it made me overlook it for so long.

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Honestly I never thought too deeply about thanos and never realized the implication of it killing food supplies until now if I'm honest but now that I've thought about it more I don't honestly think a Well-Intentioned Extremist having a plan that fundamentally wouldn't work like that is unrealistic enough to not still work as a story. That being said, it would have been nice if they could have at least lampshaded somehow that his plan was not going to work though.

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Additional edit: Oh and also just to try and bring something new here as well, for me personally all the characters that are depressed about having no memories of their parent(s) usually feel pretty wangsty to me since I have no memories at all of my biological father (he died of a fentanyl OD while across the country from me before I met him) and I personally feel like thats because since I never really met him I don't really have anything to miss. HOWEVER,I completely get people and characters who did know their parents before losing them being broken up about it and thats completely justified in my eyes. It's just that for me characters who didn't know them having that be a big trauma for me just feels unrealistic to me.

Edited by Informer on May 11th 2024 at 9:34:36 AM

"What does freedom really mean when demanded of you by a god?"

Believing that genocide is justified if it saves the environment is literally what ecofascism is. How am i "going to extremes" by saying that?

Edited by Nukeli on May 12th 2024 at 9:46:10 PM

~ * Bleh * ~ (Looking for a russian-speaker to consult about names and words for a thing)

Perhaps due to your statement sounded like you lumped everyone liking Thanos (for one reason or another) into that category of "ecofascism" and ignoring all the other possible reasons?

That might have been the extreme part.

"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."

I think people here have different definitions of "liking a character".

I'm not into the Marvel universe, cinematic or otherwise, so I don't really get to have an opinion on Thanos. But because the MCU is A Thing (tm) in pop culture, even I remember people going "Thanos is such an interesting villain because, well, he has a point" and "XYZ said that Thanos was an interesting villain because he had a point, that is wrong for p, q, r reasons" on Twitter and such. And sometimes the people in the first group were not just fans, but part of the cast or otherwise involved with the making of the film(s). So, yeah. This exists.

But there's also "liking a character in spite of thinking they are wrong" and "liking a character because they are Entertainingly Wrong". I like Gollum from the original The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books because he is the most prominent morally grey character in a world that is otherwise very close to Black-and-White Morality (yes, there are flawed heroes, but Gollum is different, he's more a Tragic Villain than anything else). I'm way more critical of the Harry Potter books than when I was a child, but I would probably still say that my favorite character from those is Severus Snape, in part because he is such a horrible teacher (not that this is the only problem with the character or the story arc, but that one is very memorable). I probably wouldn't enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire half as much if I didn't like following characters who think that their plans are infallible to then be proven wrong, sometimes, but not always, fatally. When I look in my Reddit comments, I have literally said things like, "The problem with [Jorah Mormont] is that he thinks of himself as The Smart Guy, always lecturing other people on how the world works, and then he turns around and makes very bad decisions concerning his own life. He is good at fulfilling the role in the narrative of the person giving information, and I like him as a character, but that doesn't mean that whatever he thinks his plan is will work." Thinking about it, this is not the only problem with the character, nor is he the only ASoIaF character that I like despite acknowledging that yes, this character is Problematic For Reasons (tm).

And these are just the most mainstream examples. If there are enough characters in a work to pick a personal Blorbo, I tend to go for the socially outcast broken nerds of mysterious morality, and these characters are often not the type of person one would want to spend time with in real life. Liking a character in a "Blorbo from my shows" way is different.

Edited by prinzessinnen-und-raben on May 14th 2024 at 10:10:17 AM

"He betrayed the Staaarks" is not the only problem here.

I'm not sure if this is a trope, but I swear there's this trend I see sometimes where the most competent antagonist that a hero fights is the one who's also the most morally grey or sympathetic. It creates this effect where like, a villain is stupider the more overtly evil they are.

Which, as a fan of blackly evil villains, annoys me sometimes.

Edited by GNinja on May 15th 2024 at 10:50:53 AM

Kaze ni Nare!

You mean one of those villains whose brain is stuck on WEVL: All Evil, All The Time?

You have just enough energy to climb this hill, but not enough energy to go on or look for someplace else to camp.

Do you mean stuff like Stupid Evil? I don't particularly have a preference for morally gray or black villains but obviously I do dislike stupid villains as well.

Edited by Informer on May 15th 2024 at 8:00:23 AM

"What does freedom really mean when demanded of you by a god?"

It's specifically when Stupid Evil is used to contrast a more competent, dignified, morally grey character who goes on to be a bigger threat.

Kaze ni Nare!

I was asking if the stupidity you're thinking of was that kind of stupid behavior or just being dumber in general, thanks for the clarification though

"What does freedom really mean when demanded of you by a god?"

To preempt anything off-base I might babble on the topic, I'll say outright I'm not much of a Marvel fan would be an understatement (my personal familiarity is basically exclusively through games like Marvel Vs. Capcom or Neversoft's Spiderman), and I've certainly never gotten into the MCU, so forgive me if I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I've at least grasped Infinity War (both the movie and the comic arc it's adapting) through Pop-Cultural Osmosis.

From my admittedly super peripheral perspective, I see Thanos as an example of a character having a point not necessarily meaning they're right. Not just in the Well-Intentioned Extremist way, either; his motivation is inherently flawed, and that's okay, because that's the point.

Competition for resources due to a huge sum of humans (or mortals in general) is a fair point, a fair thing to be concerned about. That doesn't mean it's a justifiable or even empathetic motivation, and it also doesn't have to be. It makes sense to Thanos, and we can at least see why he'd think that way, if only from his own warped perspective. That doesn't make him sympathetic, or even mean that his motivation has any moral ground to stand on, and that's okay.

To bridge the gap to something I'm a little more personally familiar with, a similar misanthropic genocidal villain is Zamasu from modern Dragon Ball. To make a long story short, he believes mortals are inherently destructive and dangerous, and sets a wacky plan in motion involving time travel to wipe them all out and create what is, in his vision, a perfect world.

The animated adaptation in particular puts a lot of emphasis into Zamasu's descent from innocent prodigy into genocidal maniac, and each step is spawned from what he takes as evidence to support his own viewpoint and dig himself deeper into his psychopathic ideology. This process really makes us understand WHY he thinks the way he does.

An important thing to note, though, is that from the very start, it's very clear his perspective is biased, flawed, and contorted by his refusal to reflect on contrasting information. One of the heroes even mutters that Zamasu 'has an answer for everything' at one point, in response to Zamasu doubling down on his own ideology in response to every contradiction he's presented with.

That's the point. He's so far up his own ass that he's convinced this all makes sense. And that's what makes an understandable motivation different from a sympathetic one; the former is very literal. We understand the reasoning in that we understand how the villain, or character in general, came to that conclusion from the story context, NOT that it's something we can relate to in any way.

Granted, your mileage may vary on how well Zamasu or Thanos demonstrate the path to reach their warped ideology, but y'all know what I'm getting at, right? A villain's motivation can just be screwed up and awful, even if there's logical evidence provided that spurs their personal perspective. A different character, in the same situation, could take that information entirely differently, of course.

That's just my perspective. I saw the back and forth on Thanos and thought I'd wax rhetoric/blab incessantly on the matter. If you don't agree, that's entirely fair. As I said, I only have a peripheral perspective on Thanos to begin with.

Forgive my prattling, I word a lot

@G Ninja You know I was thinking about this the other day, I've noticed a villain's ability to do harm seems proportional to the complexity of their plan (particularly more fantastic villains). Villains with plans that just boil down to "kill people" or "make money" tend to be on the lower end of the spectrum, but ones with more ability to just do things of that nature seem more interested in other things or at the least applying a more intricate methods to them. I think that's part of why animalistic characters and machines with relatively basic to no reasoning are often the first villains of a story when heroes are still just getting used to things.

I've got a few ideas as to why. For one thing a villain with such resources at their disposal would likely want to do something more substantial with them, even if they're smaller. It's also harder to giver a more powerful villain such a goal without giving a reason for them to lose in a cheap way or have a boring victory, unless the story is specifically responding to something they've already done. To the audience it also just feels...anticlimactic, for some reason if a grand villain is just doing something basic (which is sometimes intentional).

I think the Thanos stuff is getting a bit off topic, lol. A spin-off discussion about villains could be useful.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I was actually going to respond to it but didn't for that reason.

Humans Are the Real Monsters, especially when used after a story portrayed many atrocities done by monstrous beings, but then declare that the action of a single Human is proof that Humans are more monstrous than monsters...

How?!

Every time someone claims to be realistic is a dour cynic in disguise.