Common Sci-Fi tropes that annoy you!

[Cerebrawl]

1) Make up new curse words. I understand this is a ratings thing, but it still comes off as incredibly lame. In Defiance the word is "shtako" as the alien version of shit. Now if it was only used when the character in question is speaking the alien language I wouldn't really have a problem, but not when the character is speaking english.

So my fellow Escapists, what sci-fi Tropes annoy you?

I don't really mind made up curse words, they even make some sense, language evolves, so the future will have new curse words. My two favorites are Frak(Battlestar Galactica, though it's perhaps a bit too obvious that it's just a disguised f*ck) and Smeg(Red Dwarf, and it's damn near perfect).

What really annoys me is how humanoid most of the aliens are, especially when they do the "sexy aliens" thing, and especially when interbreeding is possible and you get half-alien-half-human crossbreeds(Star Trek I'm looking at you).

 

[Vykrel]

ive recently been watching The Next Generation on tv and it kind of bugs me every time the doctor uses her "futuremajiggy" healing device. it kind of saps the danger out of the show when any injury can be healed just from her waving her magic wand over the site of the damage.

 

[Cerebrawl]

Likewise, replicators need that much energy to make one kilogram.

Pretty sure those are supposed to be molecular assemblers, using transporter technology to move subatomic particles it takes from surrounding space into place.

 

[Genocidicles]

I don't really mind made up curse words, they even make some sense, language evolves, so the future will have new curse words. My two favorites are Frak(Battlestar Galactica, though it's perhaps a bit too obvious that it's just a disguised f*ck) and Smeg(Red Dwarf, and it's damn near perfect).

New curse words are fine, but it becomes silly when they completely replace old ones. We've had curse words like 'shit', 'fuck' and '****' for centuries, I don't see them suddenly disappearing.

And smeg is a real word. It's short for smegma, which is something gross that builds up on dirty genitals.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Time travel.

Just... hate it. It never does anything but fuck with the structure and half the time it just ends up doing the ol' paradox rigmarole.

This irritates me too. Esp. what the franchise can't stay consistent with what time travel rules are in play. Stargate, I'm looking at you.

 

[WindKnight]

'Explosive decompression', or more explicitly when its used as 'being exposed to vacuum makes you literally explode'. Its bad science, seems to be an excuse to throw unnecessary gore in there, and got so prevalent that an internet reviewer who's whole schtick is 'he reviews sci-fi stuff' criticized a movie for painting the scenario realistically and having characters survive brief exposure to vacuum.

 

[Thaluikhain]

'Explosive decompression', or more explicitly when its used as 'being exposed to vacuum makes you literally explode'. Its bad science, seems to be an excuse to throw unnecessary gore in there, and got so prevalent that an internet reviewer who's whole schtick is 'he reviews sci-fi stuff' criticized a movie for painting the scenario realistically and having characters survive brief exposure to vacuum.

Especially annoying in that it could easily be done that way. I mean, simply being exposed to vacuum won't do that, but if whatever put the holes in the spaceship also put lots of holes in the people, then it's possible.

...

Another thing, when people report the aliens, and their superiors don't take them seriously. So common that a movie gets serious points if the military/police/whoever just try doing their job when people point out a problem. OTOH, Doctor Who would get away with this, because an awful lot of people in authority pretended not to believe them, when they'd really turn out to be in with the aliens.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

2)Everyone speaking english, because Universal Translator - However, my big issue with this isn't that they're all speaking english, it's more along the lines that there would be a rather noticeable lag AND lip synching issues. I understand why it's not a thing in Sci-Fi shows, but to then have characters speak alien swear words while under the Universal Translator is just ignoring your own rules and breaking consistency.

This gets really bad when they're speaking english when there's no non-aliens around. Why would they be speaking english amongst themselves? Also if they're speaking english and not though some sort of Universal Translator, wouldn't they have some sort of accent?

 

[Cerebrawl]

'Explosive decompression', or more explicitly when its used as 'being exposed to vacuum makes you literally explode'. Its bad science, seems to be an excuse to throw unnecessary gore in there, and got so prevalent that an internet reviewer who's whole schtick is 'he reviews sci-fi stuff' criticized a movie for painting the scenario realistically and having characters survive brief exposure to vacuum.

Yeah but even a brief trip into vacuum might blind you unless you've got sealed eye protection on. Freeze-dried or boiled eyeballs is no fun. Also if you hold your breath your lungs will probably burst(this is why it's the #1 rule in scuba diving, don't hold your breath, breath hold ascents, ie: to lower pressure, can burst your lungs), and even so if the change is sudden you'll probably get lung damage from explosive decompression(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Explosive_decompression). Similarly you might get the bends, decompression sickness. You might pop your eardrums from the sudden pressure change too.

Oh and the saliva on your tongue can boil!

If the pressure change was much more drastic than 1 atmosphere to none then we might see actual exploding, but we're talking tens or maybe hundreds of atmospheres. If you were pressurised to ambient at the bottom of Mariana's Trench and teleported into orbit(assuming teleportation being possible) then you probably would explode.

Captcha: Outlook not so good (so relevant!)

EDIT: Oh so looking a bit further into the wikipedia article, there's been one recorded case of a diver actually exploding from a sudden pressure drop from 9 to 1 atmospheres. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin#Diving_bell_accident

 

[chstens]

Something that seems to be common, at least in the Star Wars expanded universe, is that people from the same planet have almost the same personality, like how Han Solo doesn't like being told the odds because he's Corellian AND NO CORELLIAN LIKES BEING TOLD WHAT THE ODDS ARE. There's a difference between having similar frames of reference and whatever the hell this is.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

I find it a bit odd when the enviroments aren't... Lived in. When everything works perfectly and everything is clean and well maintained.

This is one of the things that 1970s George Lucas got right in Star Wars--everything looks like it's lived in and used, with all kinds of wear and tear on it. Mos Eisley looks like a grubby run-down outpost settlement, for instance.

Tropes I can't stand, although they're more common in fantasy: prophecies and Chosen Ones. At this point I'd find it refreshing to have a story be about someone who finds a magic sword or saves the galaxy not because he's destined by fate, but because he was just some schmuck who wandered by at the right time.

 

[Alterego-X]

The general concept of "pure energy", "energy beings", "energy shields", etc.

A ridiculously uneducated presentation of "energy", as if it would be just a glowy, blue, very hard type of matter, rather than an entirely unrelated concept, an attribute that matter can have. A "sword made out of energy instead of steel", makes about as much sense as "a sword made out of sharp instead of steel", or "a sword made out of quick instead of steel".

At best you could be talking about objects with very high energy levels, (and then a speccific type of energy; heat, nuclear, chemical, kinetic, etc) but not "pure energy".

 

[Techno Squidgy]

I don't really mind made up curse words, they even make some sense, language evolves, so the future will have new curse words. My two favorites are Frak(Battlestar Galactica, though it's perhaps a bit too obvious that it's just a disguised f*ck) and Smeg(Red Dwarf, and it's damn near perfect).

New curse words are fine, but it becomes silly when they completely replace old ones. We've had curse words like 'shit', 'fuck' and '****' for centuries, I don't see them suddenly disappearing.

And smeg is a real word. It's short for smegma, which is something gross that builds up on dirty genitals.

Apparently the writers were unaware of this at the time. Though at the moment the wikipedia article has a 'citation needed' flag, but I'm sure I've seen in an interview somewhere that they were sure it wasn't an actual word. Regardless, it sounds great, and is a very good litmus test for British geeks.

 

[[REDACTED]]

The lack of linguistic change in the future always gets my goat. Considering how much the English language has changed in 500 years, do you really think that it would remain totally unchanged after 3000? I realize that asking writers to create a modern-language-derived conlang for every futuristic story is unreasonable, but so few even attempt to address it.

On a related note, single-culture species. Look at humans. See how many cultures they have? Yeah. If you can't give multiple species a reasonable degree internal diversity, stick to one species for now. This is especially bad if they're clearly identifiable as actual human cultures. This is part of what makes the Guild Wars 2 setting so much less memorable than the Guild Wars 1 setting. The former used different species where the latter would have used different human civilizations, and was poorer for it.

 

[Cerebrawl]

the fact that we are still very human, no sci fi has ever properly covered or portrayed the fact that in the very near future we will be almost unrecognisable human, do people real think things like sleeping, eating, or even death is going to exist more than 100 years from now? because they wont, we probably will have augmented ourselves so heavily, both technologically and biologically that we wont even appear human

I doubt that. There's too much trepidation about changing who we are, and too many ethical, philosophical and religious cans of worms. Go and see what they think technology would be like in 50 years in the 50s. Or heck, cyberpunk from the 80s about what technology we'd have today.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

It annoys me when aliens are too similar to stuff that exists on Earth. We and everything else are the result of an extraordinarily convoluted and unlikely evolutionary process started millions of years ago. It would be scientifically impossible for something with anything even remotely similar to EYES to exist outside planet Earth.

Now because we can't all be Stanley Kubrick and make 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is a trope I have to tolerate and doesn't have to get in the way of my enjoyment. Star Wars is closer to fantasy after all, not sci-fi (at least originally). But the supposedly "hard" sci-fi flicks that ignore evolution are downright insulting.

 

[rorychief]

It annoys me when aliens are too similar to stuff that exists on Earth. We and everything else are the result of an extraordinarily convoluted and unlikely evolutionary process started millions of years ago. It would be scientifically impossible for something with anything even remotely similar to EYES to exist outside planet Earth.

Eyes could evolve anywhere where there's light. If a sentient cloud evolved on some gas giant as long as there was something worth seeing, a mate, prey, a predator they would likely develope some organs for sensing light and we would call those organs eyes. The eyes would likely be located above a neck and near the mouth also, because that's just a sensible layout natural selection would move towards. Also, eyes have developed independently something like 15 time on earth. It's just always been useful to see, so different lifeforms evolved to see without a shared ancestor that could also see.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Something that seems to be common, at least in the Star Wars expanded universe, is that people from the same planet have almost the same personality, like how Han Solo doesn't like being told the odds because he's Corellian AND NO CORELLIAN LIKES BEING TOLD WHAT THE ODDS ARE. There's a difference between having similar frames of reference and whatever the hell this is.

What about Wedge Antilles? He's Corellian and he's nothing at all like Han. He doesn't even have the same accent in each movie, it keeps changing.

Captcha: reduplicated phrases.

what do you know?

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Pinocchio Robots. Fuck you, I am fucking sick of your "I wanna be a real human!" bullshit. Mass Effect 3, you're one of the biggest culprits of this. The Geth and EDI were perfectly happy living as bits and bytes, why did you have to go and ruin that in favor of this played out junk?

I would expand this to any alien who is either over-complimentary of humanity or who expresses a desire to be human. Granted this isn't as common but it's still annoying.

---

I understand why this has to happen and also why it's so ubiquitous but it really, REALLY annoys me when the sci-fi humans from Earth travel to distant lands only to find that the indigenous species are...humans. It doesn't matter if they're hairless, have green skin or, can wiggle their ear-lobes, I hate it when the galaxy is populated by people who look like they could be my neighbors and co-workers. Humanoids are a bit annoying too...Garrus and Wrex look cool and all but they're still bipedal and have thumbs...I would have loved for an Elcor or Hanar to join up with Shepard.

I can understand why that can't be but it still annoys me.

Another thing...why isn't sci-fantasy more of a thing? Why is it so uncommon (if not shunned outright) to see Space Dragons and Star Cruisers engage in epic combat? Hell, I don't even see robotic dragons very often...On the other end of the spectrum, why can't lords and kings defend against the black knights of Hell using plasma weapons and, force fields?!

Something that seems to be common, at least in the Star Wars expanded universe, is that people from the same planet have almost the same personality, like how Han Solo doesn't like being told the odds because he's Corellian AND NO CORELLIAN LIKES BEING TOLD WHAT THE ODDS ARE. There's a difference between having similar frames of reference and whatever the hell this is.

Another thing that annoyed me about Star Wars, every planet is one specific thing. Tattooine is a Desert. The Moon of Dagoba is a swampy forest. The Moon of Endor is a Forest-Forest. Planets don't work that way dammit! Then again...Star Wars was sci-fantasy more than anything...and I just complained about there not being enough of that...

 

[Silly Hats]

"They're getting through our secondary Firewalls!"

Or:

"It's simple, it all works through our 'Central Kinetic Balance Generator Processor'"


I can handle English speaking Aliens, I love the concepts of AI/VI and Androids and I love Outterspace settings. I don't really care about tropes provided they serve for the Narrative. I'm smart enough to separate nitpicking with creative license.