What things in fiction are turnoffs to you?

[Buster's Uncle]

Starfleet has ridiculously bad mainframe security, too - you can take over piloting the ship from -presumably any console in any room you can barricade, and for sure- engineering. Not sure why any station but the helm should ever need access to that, and it's been a problem more than once. That's not just a didn't-know-anything-about-computers-then problem; that's a poorly-designed quasi-military ship.

 

[Plotinus]

Things I hate, then:

(1) Inconsistent ages and times. It's an odd thing, but novelists are normally very clear on what their characters look like and don't commit inconsistencies (Flaubert on Madam Bovary's eye colour is a famous possible exception), but not on their ages and exactly when things happened to them in the past. It gets even worse when it's film and you have actors who are clearly the wrong age for any of the backstory to make sense - e.g. Alan Rickman as Snape (who should have been in his early 30s at the start). Interstellar was also an offender, expecting us to believe that Matthew McConaughey's character was the same age at the start as Jessica Chastain's later on.

(2) Myths that are real. I really hate this trope. In all fantasy, if there's some ancient legend or story murmured in hushed tones, it's true. If there's some monster that sensible people say doesn't exist, it does. If there's some prophecy, it comes true. The same thing happens in conspiracy thrillers, especially religious ones. If there's a persecuted heretical sect, they're actually right. If the church is opposed to some idea or theory, it's true. If there's a mysterious ancient object of incredible power, it's real. All of which is basically stupid. (Daniel Abraham parodies this, to some extent, in The Dagger and the Coin.)

(3) Dream sequences. I can't think of a single book I've ever read, containing a dream sequence, that wouldn't have been improved by removing the dream sequence. The same thing often goes for films. Chaplin's The Kid is a classic example.

(4) Books that drop you in media res without explaining anything about the world and expect you to just work it out as you go on. This was a common feature of sci-fi in the 60s and 70s and it really annoys me. Dune is a good example.

 

[Mouthwash]

(2) Myths that are real. I really hate this trope. In all fantasy, if there's some ancient legend or story murmured in hushed tones, it's true. If there's some monster that sensible people say doesn't exist, it does. If there's some prophecy, it comes true. The same thing happens in conspiracy thrillers, especially religious ones. If there's a persecuted heretical sect, they're actually right. If the church is opposed to some idea or theory, it's true. If there's a mysterious ancient object of incredible power, it's real. All of which is basically stupid. (Daniel Abraham parodies this, to some extent, in The Dagger and the Coin.)

Agree. Just once I'd like the secret to end up being a poem or whatever, to subvert expectations.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Something that starts to annoy me more and more is how common it is for the main characters to be the least interesting people in the story

(2) Myths that are real. I really hate this trope. In all fantasy, if there's some ancient legend or story murmured in hushed tones, it's true. If there's some monster that sensible people say doesn't exist, it does. If there's some prophecy, it comes true. The same thing happens in conspiracy thrillers, especially religious ones. If there's a persecuted heretical sect, they're actually right. If the church is opposed to some idea or theory, it's true. If there's a mysterious ancient object of incredible power, it's real. All of which is basically stupid. (Daniel Abraham parodies this, to some extent, in The Dagger and the Coin.)

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm kinda annoyed by it as well, but I've been wondering if it'd be interesting if they like dialed it up instead. Like for example say a world where fire doesn't exist, but then some god or something invents it, and have this be like the main thing going on in the story (why it'd happen, its consequences and so on)

 

[Mouthwash]

Speaking as one who's done a fair bit of worldbuilding, creating a setting without fire would get complicated fast (even prehistoric ones).

 

[Cutlass]

(3) Dream sequences. I can't think of a single book I've ever read, containing a dream sequence, that wouldn't have been improved by removing the dream sequence. The same thing often goes for films. Chaplin's The Kid is a classic example.

Similarly, almost all of Star Trek would be improved without time travel or holodecks.

 

[Plotinus]

And parallel dimensions where all the familiar characters are in unfamiliar roles. The moment any programme does that, it needs to be cancelled immediately.

 

[Mouthwash]

What?! Mirror, Mirror is literally Star Trek's best episode!

 

[Plotinus]

All right - I'll grudgingly allow that the first time it was done is arguably acceptable.

 

[CivCube]

Grimdark for the sake of grimdark, or anti-heroes who do terrible things because Hard Choices, or silly intrigue where people talk about nothing. Within moderation, these are not necessarily bad tropes. In our current Peak TV environment, it's been the same type of storytelling for several years, and it's gotten old.

Plots for the sake of plot or characters for the sake of characters. I've seen this song and dance before. Give me a weird five minute aside into houseplants, a wordless geographical helicopter shot, a "pointless filler" scene where some characters have fun. Something with life in it, something that looks like a human being directed it. Not everything needs to have an arc or a point.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

And parallel dimensions where all the familiar characters are in unfamiliar roles. The moment any programme does that, it needs to be cancelled immediately.

Oh. So Doctor Who should have been cancelled immediately when the Third Doctor story "Inferno" was broadcast.

If you recall, the Doctor ended up in a parallel dimension where the "let's drill to the centre of the Earth" thing was still going on, but the U.N.I.T. characters were all evil, sadistic creeps, and the Brigade Leader had an eye patch to show that he was the evil version of the Brigadier.

 

[Yeekim]

Wizened old men who can unleash the tendrils of the voidspawn to flay the flesh from their enemy's bones, fine. Women beating up a guy, unrealistic that destroys immersion.
Sure, seems legit.

This, but without irony.
Supernatural phenomena do not break immersion when they are explicitly treated as such.
Something that does not make sense but is neither explained nor treated as supernatural either, very much does.

 

[Zkribbler]

When I was in college, for a few days we had fake sword fights in the dorm common room. Having learned my sword fighting technique from movies, I tried the ever-popular spinning around move. Every single time, I got stabbed in the back! Every single time!

Nowadays, when I see a good guy spin around [bad guys never try this move], I yell at the bad guy, "Stab him! Stab him in the back!" But they don't.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

A huge turn off for me in sci fi and fantasy is fictional languages and names with a to'n o'f apost'rophe's. It annoys the crap out of me and I feel it's an overused trope that adds absolutely nothing to the build the characters or world.

 

[Zkribbler]

I lived for a year in Hawai'i and got quite used to seeing apostrophes used to denote a guttural stop.
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Smacking foreheads together. This always seems to hurt the bad guy but never the good guy.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Moderator Action: The discussion of having technology without fire has been made into it's own thread. You can find it here.

 

[Kyriakos]

What I don't like in fiction - in writers, I should say - is that while even with the best intentions very few works really will stick around and play any kind of role, so much work is produced with no good intention in the first place.
Usually either vanity or haphazardness.

It is to be expected of course, in any field which has no (non-trivial) formal prerequisite for participating. It would be in general equally doomed to try to ask for a different stance in expressing one's political views, or posting in some forum.

 

[Zkribbler]

Myths that are real. I really hate this trope. In all fantasy, if there's some ancient legend or story murmured in hushed tones, it's true. If there's some monster that sensible people say doesn't exist, it does. If there's some prophecy, it comes true.

Ah ha! In "Only You," both an Ouija board and a gypsy fortune teller tell Marissa Tormei that her true love will be Damon Bradley. Not if Robert Downey Jr. has anything to say about it.

 

[Zkribbler]

Hollywood can never get airships right. Itty bitty hot air bag; great big load to carry. Those thing would never get off the ground.

Similarly. if one inverts an air-filled rowboat, one cannot use it to walk across the sea floor, The wood of the boat floats; the air in the boat floats. This means said boat would bob to the surface.

When a spaceship in orbit gets destroyed, it does NOT go nose down and tail up and crash back into the atmosphere.

 

[Synobun]

I, too, get upset when Pirates of the Caribbean Episode 1 and Star Wars Episode 3 aren't true to life.