What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?

• cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.

• any kind of bioconservative/biotrad reactionary anti-transhumanism. Radical bodily autonomy is based and cool and that holds whether you want to be a fish, grow boobs, live forever, or encode your conscious mind in to the magnetic flux of Jupiter's orbital system. I don't care that you lack the imagination and joy for life to live forever. I don't care that you think inhabiting a giant metal deathrobot would be self-alienating. I don't care that you think merging your flesh with six billion other people to form a new gestalt god mind is icky. Work out your own issues, we're going to be over here disfugirng The face of man and woman and having a great time

• basically all military sci fi. If i never read another book that is just some fascist freak masturbating about murdering immigrants or being the victim of the imperialism they gleefully inflict on others it will be too soon.

• also if you try to give me a book/show/game where the ai's are evil and want to destroy and enslave all humans but they're only like that because that's literally the only relationship you can imagine between people with any kind of power disparity i will scream until i pass out. A single, high pitched wail. Dogs will bark and a wine glass will shatter in close up to emphasize how loud it is. I will literally turn purple and fall over.

My least favorite trope is more of a universal one

It's the "If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we're no better than them" trope and it's been pissing me off since I was five years old

Like, it's one thing to have a character who is extremely optimistic about rehabilitation and redemption, it's another one entirely to just pull the old "We'll figure out a better way" and the better way is an absolute pulled-it-out-of-my-ass thing that only happened because otherwise the hero is fucked

Killing hundreds of grunts but leaving the big bad alive because the heroes are better than this. Pure propagandistic brain rot that I'm sure most creators don't even know why they do it.

restoring the "right" monarchy

Any representation of feudal ruling classes. Maybe I'm overdoing it with the class hatred a bit, but I can't watch nobles cavorting around and not feel an instinctive revulsion. It's even worse when, in fantasy, we're required to care about the machinations of court intrigues as if that's a real form of politics. One thing I do like about many standard fantasy settings, like that of Pathfinder, therefore is that they usually have a modern conception of class and an abundance of republics; especially the whole idea of adventurers as individuals outside of society but still integral to it has a lot of potential I feel. Basically, I just don't want any more fantasy stories about good kings and evil kings.

The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there's intrigue like "oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!" it's just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.

Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that's either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.

• Unnecessarily horny and/or going into detail about SA.

Yes, I'm looking at you Ann McCafferey and whoever the fuck wrote The Reality Dysfunction series.

Runner up.

• Shoehorning in a romantic relationship where it feels incredibly out of place for the narrative and the established character interactions.

It's five hundred years in the future and everything is the same.

Our intrepid hero has joined the plucky rebellion! The rebels are a ragtag group of the downtrodden and the oppressed, fighting against the tyranny of the current leadership (but don't you dare give them any actual political ideology as a basis, they need to be generally "Rebels"). They don't seem to have concrete plans, but they talk a lot about change and fighting for the people

Uh oh! Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader's soldiers. They're shocked! How could they do this? Don't they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would've done the same to them

Oh no! Our intrepid hero was there for the deposing of the tyrant. The tyrant was executed by the rebel leader and assumes control, then immediately turns into the McCarthyist nightmare of Stalin. Now our hero has to save the kingdom from the rebels, who have turned evil by their taste of power!

Basically fucking hate how rebellion and rebels are portrayed in media. It's almost like a psy op how often rebellions are thinly veiled anticommunist propaganda, and how rebels are often portrayed as being as bad or worse as the current tyrant, they just hide it better

Just off the dome I can think of the Avatar series multiple times, Bioshock Infinite, and the Hunger Games series but I know it's basically ubiquitous

The ludicrous notion that machine and biological intelligences are doomed to be locked in a mutual extermination war while also having no needs in common. They have lots of needs in common. Space, energy, tolerable temperature ranges, many of the same raw materials such as water and minerals and metals. They'd also have a lot of the same senses and require similar rationales for understanding how to navigate reality, and would even require an intuitive and abstract stimulus analysis, which we usually feel as emotions to guide our actions.

The "us or them" shit just smacks of manifest destiny horseshit

• Other lifeforms in the universe being basically humans with a bright shade of paint thrown on them.

• Monogender lifeforms clearly made for fan-service and little more.

• White guys that sound like Nolan North somehow still being the focus of the entire fucking galaxy.

Basically, if Mass Effect did it, I'm fucking sick of it.

The amount of SA that just gets shoehorned into SF and Fantasy is ridiculous.

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.

The monarchy being good.

He’s secretly the last descendant of Eldinglad which is why he is so good at fighting and morally upstanding.

This group of evil human bandits speak with a working class accent.

The main important city is basically just a giant castle. I guess the workers sleep in tents. Who knows, they don’t feature in the story anyway except as brothel wenches.

I've grown more and more to hate "mass mind control" type story beats, especially when the main character(s) are immune to it because they're 'special'.

Like, whenever there's some kind of special frequency sound or TV image or whatever, that being exposed to turns people completely into automatons... basically the notion that human will can be completely stripped away, that 'the plebs' have no real autonomy and can be easily hypnotized, by special scifi contrivance in fiction or by '''charismatic leaders''' IRL, which is a cornerstone of the liberal non-understanding of the history of both fascism and socialism. Hitler was just an extremely charismatic speaker who made everyone turn evil for no reason and definitely not for the financial benefit of the capitalist class, and the people who lived under communism didn't rebel because they were just brainwashed into accepting their (what must have been) obviously miserable conditions.

The main example I'm thinking of is the first Kingsman film, which has a lot of other reactionary brainworms too, but the idea of a sound that turns everyone into uncontrolled rage zombies that attack anyone they see for no reason, and the villain is a billionaire who wants to reduce the human population so only his fellow billionaires and 'elites' will repopulate the Earth - and the only person who can stop him is an avatar of the most ludicrous 'British gentleman' lifestyle, as if the Tory peers that would undoubtedly make up this organization, not to mention the fucking royal family, wouldn't be the first people into the billionaire bunker.

Thinking more about it, it's pure projection - only the US ever engaged in MK Ultra 'mind controlled supersoldier' stuff, and in fact real mind control would be able to create the greatest possible capitalist dream: workers that work to their absolute limit and never complain or fight back. Capitalist media's projection of it onto their enemies is the most like, Freudian-libidinal morbid fascination type shit.

It's not limited to sci-fi/fantasy, but anything around monogamy, love triangles, heteronormativity.

If humans on earth today can form a wide variety of relationships other than a man + woman nuclear family, so can aliens and such living in completely different cultures.

"I love Alex and Bryan how can I choose just one??" You don't have to. Stop it.

In sci-fi no one ever acknowledges that strapping a faster-than-light engine to an asteroid would be a very simple and effective weapon for destroying planets. I guess this is an anti-trope since it's never used, but that seems like the logical use for warp drives in sci-fi. It's an easy analogy for mutually assured destruction

I really hate "immortality is bad".

Maybe this says something about me, but I think it would be sick as hell to live forever, or to an arbitrarily large number of years. There's the one Heinlein novel I think about when this topic comes up, where the guy has lived for hundreds of years and done basically everything he can imagine doing, and he's getting ready to end his life just because he's out of new experiences - and I think it might be nice to be that guy, without the "being a libertarian" part. This is why in my in progress sci fi novel it's canon that the oldest humans are just turning two hundred, and nobody knows how old they'll live to be thanks to cutting edge gene therapy and cybernetics.

"Secret cabal that controls the world from the shadows" is just The Protocols of the Elders of Zion horseshit.

Monarchies that don't get dismantled

RIP. UlyssesT, you would've loved this thread

The mentor/parent figure has to die for the protag to prove that they're self-actualized or whatever. Sometimes I can point out who's going to bite it as soon as the first few scenes of the book/movie/game and it makes me want to stop reading/watching/playing, and then if I keep going anyway I regret it when it turns out I was right.

Honestly the worst has to be the way moral goodness and genetics are the same thing.

Touching on the monarchism worship, I gotta gripe about a game I was playing that does exactly this in a setting that I think could use a lot more exploring since it's quite literally right up our ideological alley.

In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel you're set into a world that's blurring the line between the very end of the high middle ages and the industrial revolution / era of imperialism where the old feudal world's just beginning to transition into an industrial society.

You get to see a proverbial Holy Roman Empire / German Empire (here's another one that grinds my gears, why is it always the fucking krauts) with its political and economic structures coming under the stresses of change that occurs as the bourgeoisie begins to grow in economic power, education becomes more normalized, technological developments leads to automation and increases in productivity, etc. Its essentially a story of "what if we made a fantasy version of the emergence of the Victorian Era".

It's a very interesting story with very enjoyable worldbuilding that really makes you think about how rapidly shit began to change. Of course the actual game itself is tropy as hell and back again with plenty of annoying shit that's common for weeb shit, but what really tilted me was how there was a fucking revolutionary movement in the game and you think "oh shit are we gonna see conflict between the developing bourgeois and the entrenched feudal powers?" And boy did it fucking subvert my expectations for the worse.

It turns out it was a fucking counter-revolutionary movement of the feudal aristocracy hell-bent on rolling back the reforms granted on behalf of the "lower classes" and to decentralize the government to restore power to the regional lords aka themselves so they could restore dignity and honor to the empire and put the uppity peasants in their place.

I was so fucking tilted by that and it didn't stop there, if it wasn't for the outright over-the-top anime fantasy plot making me go "wtf kind of campy shit are they gonna come up with next" keeping me somewhat interested in following the story, I might have dropped it by like game 3.

For fantasy, most of the central, important characters come from royalty or aristocrats in high positions. Or, they’re peasants who manage to climb up to self made royalty to rule benevolently. This isn’t even just because it’s my politics. I just find it annoying

I'd like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren't medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.

Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there's plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.

I'll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there's an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)

It feels like any sort of "how do we run an information-age society on magic" is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.

i also hate the 'chosen one' stuff, especially if its related to aristocracy or feudalism. its possible to do it well, if characters are aware that the 'choosing' is more or less arbitrary. i thought Dune handled this well by making the destiny/fate a mere generational feudal conspiracy

also:

-i don't like when gods or deities exist in a literal physical sense, like as a Strong Person with Powerful Body. imo anything like a god should be inhuman and impersonal, normally discorporate unless 'presenting' to humans, difficult to fully comprehend, and more or less uninterested in individual mortal affairs and concerns except in aggregate. Obad-Hai shouldn't just be an old man wandering the woods who can cast powerful spells, the woods ARE obad-hai, the trees and earth are his literal instantiated presence. Fharlanghn isn't just some human wizard walking around on roads doing tricks, the roads ARE fharlanghn, the street lights are his eyes, the pavement his body and prison and definition of form, the movement and flow of traffic his consciousness and thoughts.

-i don't like when magic in fantasy requires overly specific material components, like DnD's insect legs and feathers etc. this kind of thing almost works for slower paced rituals or magical crafting, but a mage during combat whipping out a spider leg to break while they chant and dance just to summon a fireball seems all around less convenient and efficient than making a primitive grenade/petard or rifle/cannon. magic in fantasy or sci fi should upend one's understanding of reality, it shouldn't just be a cheat code activated by arranging garbage and trinkets. a wizard casting a fireball is old hat, passe, boring, a true master of metaphysical arts should make the need to cast fireball irrelevant, locking the enemy in warped spacetime architecture or turning them inside out with a glance and a gesture or instantly transmuting their brain into gold. i want less of the simplistic 'its a weapon attack that uses unique ammo' style of magic attack and more 'my sword has become an incomprehensible fractal of steel and folded spacetime as i try to stab the wizard' or 'the master of secret arts has plucked a beam of sunlight from the sky to use as a blade'. I hate the videogamey trope of 'elemental damage types' and mages-as-bombardiers. the wizard should consider using a sword or bow if they want to just kill people, it doesn't seem worth the violation of causality to do a mere 1d6 damage with a fireball at a mere 50 meters one time when you can likely throw a powder charge farther and for more damage and without manipulating the fabric of reality. instead the wizard should like, teleport in the midst of the opposing army and kill their general with a knife, or less overpoweredly might set his sword to fight on its own accord as if it were held by an invisible man, or illuminate hidden enemies for his allies, or manipulate weather to his advantage. A wizard should be a force-multiplier more than just a better-version-of-a-guy-that-kills-things, a horde of angry drunks clad in steel should always be the best option for 'just killing a bunch of people', a wizard should be doing things that can't be done efficiently with mundane physical means.

-i hate spaceships that have artificial gravity, especially in settings where this technology is mostly unused for any other application (dead space at least gives you a 'stasis module' and 'telekinesis module' that work similarly, whereas Halo simply never explains ship gravity and the humans still use wheels on their vehicles and 5.56 bullets in their guns despite seeming to have better tech available) additionally, i hate spaceships that are overly spacious on the interior, they should be cramped like submarines and it should be impossible to be far enough away from a wall to be stuck free-floating in zero G. The command bridge should never have people standing in it like at a podium like in mass effect, the crew must be strapped into their stations in zero G or maneuvering with safety handles and harness to prevent flying away.

-hover tanks should have to land temporarily to fire accurately, even more stable modern tracked tanks cannot accurately shoot on the move. hovercraft should have helicopter-style landing skids or something similar.

-the taller a mecha is, the longer it's range of combat should be. Mobile Suits should not be sword fighting except when the tactical situation has gone very awry, they have the height to act as a watch-tower and the weaponry size to engage at extreme range, large mecha should basically be using the horizon as cover and making extreme range artillery strike attacks during terrestrial combat. It's ridiculous in the mechwarrior videogames for example to be piloting a 50 or so foot high robot whose gigantic weaponry have less range than a modern infantry assault rifle. the 'long range missiles', the longest range weapon except maybe an ER PPC or ER L Laser, max out at like 900 meters in MW5, while many current day infantry assault rifles have effective ranges of 1500 or more meters. This is a general gripe with all fictitious combat, real warfare in the modern age often means you literally never get a good look at the enemy, mostly shooting at distant silhouettes and movement, whereas in fiction, whether movies or games, the scene must be easily 'readable' and all characters must have an explicit up close presence for the audience.

-additionally mecha should NEVER have their entrance/exit hatch on the front of the torso. In an emergency this will open directly into enemy fire, or worst case you fall on your mech's belly and are stuck. putting the hatch on the top, side, or even the back is a better call, ideally with at least one backup exit.

-most sci fi vehicles should have more than a single crew member. I realize that technology improves over time, but even modern jets often have a separate crewman just for operating the radar equipment while the other flies and controls weapons. for example something the size and resource cost of the Gundam should absolutely never be put in the hands of a single person, AT LEAST put another guy in there as a spotter/support systems operator. it should probably have a direct line to an off-site support staff consisting of military and legal advisors as well.

-Laser weapons should have difficulty with penetration of armor or cover, they heat and explode/melt the surface instead of immediately piercing through. even foliage and leaves should offer temporary cover to lasers until they can burn through.

-i hate when sci-fi appears to grapple with big philosophical topics without really engaging with any specific issues. for example, in the movie The Creator, the message is that the robots are analogous to oppressed people, minorities, and victims of imperialism, but doesn't really engage with any of the actual debates about artificial intelligence. They show robots performing religion as if to say that this makes them more genuinely human, when to me it just says that they accurately mimic our behavior. they could have easily established some kind of specific sci-fi technology to justify this attitude (like Isaac Asimov's positronic brian) but instead they simply do not engage with the ideas at issue in any way and focus on the immediate story and characters with their presuppositions of robot-personhood in mind.

Feel like I should post a link to the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Byzantine Wars, which defies all or nearly all of these annoying tropes. You can read the whole thing there for free, although that website is kind of not my favorite. I can also just send an epub to those who message me. All I ask is that if you like it, please share it with other people who might be interested. The story is basically Jumanji in Byzantium, plus slave revolt, with a magic system mostly inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The tropes I countered were:

• chosen one(s): peasants and workers are the heroes, people can only change things by working together in the name of universal human liberation (the "bad guys" can only fight them by acting like vampires); it's not good versus evil, it's imperialists versus workers; anyone can learn how to use magic;
• the only people who care about bloodlines are imperialists;
• good characters look like shit, bad characters are beautiful;
• Many different cultures are represented here, with many different characters belonging to one culture or another; there are many good and bad Greeks, Muslims, Jews, etcetera, along with plenty of Kurds, Iranians, Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Roma, Assyrians, Turks, Georgians, and more!
• the story is about the Roman Empire versus a slave republic; the Roman government is generally depicted negatively, but most Romans support it; the slave republic is generally depicted positively, though its leaders and people argue with each other and question one another;
• the slaves aren't afraid to do violence against Romans and rarely hesitate to use their own weapons against them;
• I'm super annoyed at how the most popular fantasy series (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter) just ignore economics almost completely. We see cities that consist of a castle, and that's it. How do these people get their food? Where are their farms? So I definitely paid a lot more attention to this, but worked it into the story. I'm not a fan of writers like KSR interrupting their stories with miniature magazine articles.
• the series mostly takes place in what is now Turkey, Georgia, and the Middle East.
• honestly I like how GRRM includes disabled people in his work (even if he sucks in many other ways) so that was one thing I went for;
• no SA or very little SA;
• the barbarians are more civilized than the Romans;
• women can be horny but are not just objects of lust;
• four main characters: two good ones, one "morally gray" one (sorry), one bad one;
• plenty of trans people (redditors call this "presentism": CW transphobia but

The Amazon, not the rainforest, the warrior woman archetype thing. In ancient history they weren't portrayed any more sexually than warrior men, but then by the 1800's you've got authors writing books about their frenzied lust and whatnot and that became, like, the big thing about them.

Now, if fantasy or sci-fi has an all female group they are guaranteed to be portrayed in a way that's male gaze first and character second.

I can't stand stereotypical "dumb barbarians". "Me want to break things and drink all the ale" yeah great, man. Even Star Wars did this with the big guy in the Bad Batch (I heard it got better later but that debut episode in Clone Wars...ugh).

They can be done well but a lot of times they're written the exact same way with the same carbon copied quips.

We live in the reality where hereditary and luck are the most important factors in success. So the chosen one, secret lineage, noble ancestors isn't a trope. That is just real life.

As far as actual tropes I dislike. Mind powers. Hypnosis, telepathy, whatever else. It has fallen out of favor of late but especially in older works it was everywhere. Granted it was still scientifically feasible in the 70s that taking a drug could get you so high you could read minds. We now know it isn't but it just feels so cheap anymore. Even if it was in the realm of science it doesn't lead to good storytelling I think.

Everything haooens so fucking fast. A cultivator usually becomes increadibly рowerful in under a century, when it should take them at least a thousand times longer. Soaring the heavens does this well. I little over a hundreth years the mc is just starting his cultivation and his hometown is already unrecognizable, after tens of thousands of years he is baerly the match of those old monsters

Foreman is building steamshiрs a few years after being isekaid, when in reality it should be an acomрlishment to just cast and rifle the cannons, lest the darkness fall does it well in that regard; because he ultimatley cant cast them.

Interstellar wars should likewiese take thousands of years, like in forever war.

All these tyрes of stories would be better if they took рlace across generations of normal рeoрle.

I definitely hate the last two points, especially the second last point, and I'm glad that certain satire films like starship troopers make light of how obvious a crutch this is in the Sci-Fi genre

Severe overuse of magic circles. Why not be more sparing about when these are drawn? They don't have to be used around every little itty-bitty minor use of magic --that's just annoying and well.. kinda makes the artwork embarrassing to look at.

Also, aliens that seem too dumb to own spacecraft. They just grunt and roar and crawl around like zombies with laserbeams and have seemingly no plan or motive whatsoever. There needs to be more "OH mY god tHey talk!". My favorite is when they are portrayed as having gentlemanly eloquent speech because I find that more intimidating in a villain.

The chosen one trope hands down all the time. I would love to get through Wheel of Time but I cannot stand chosen

That series I have put down so many times. Having a "hero" protagonist that is essentially unkillable (because they are the title character) I don't mind, Conan for example. We all know Conan won't die because there is always another story about him. But he is not fated for anything, no grand destiny he has to achieve or the cosmos suffers.

Second is also another that has been touched upon - the goodness of divine authority. Especially if it is light flavored. And nobles divine right to rule set as a standard of good etc. Give me stories of folks fecking up the system and creating their own anarchistic communities while continuing to feck up the system.

Why's everything gotta be full of honeycombs and 135°-Angles?

I agree with all of those with the possible exception of the third. I get why it's annoying but in a narrative it's a useful tool to keep good and evil clearly distinct.

I hate stories where the line between good and evil is constantly blurred and the bad guy turns out to be simply "misguided" or where we simply ignore the crimes of the MC 'cause they're the MC so it's ok