What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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Giving nobles magic powers. Especially when people born as commoners get elevated in class due to having magic ability or something. Endorsing the ruling class as being better than everyone else inherently and therefore having a right to rule over them sucks and reinforces meritocratic ideas in the reader.
Possible exception is, when the magic isn't inherent but the nobles hoard the recources neccessary to perfofm it.
I mean, if there was a group of people who were superhuman, they'd probably become the ruling class. If the wizardgoisie could just conjure food from thin air, what's the need for a peasantry? If they can create magical automata and golems to do their manual labor, what's the need for a proletariat? Essentially, an upper class with magic could do atlas shrugged and have it actually work instead of instantly fail because there's no one there to do labor.