In the original book the Martians were fired at Earth in giant capsules, and they built their tripods after landing.hermes200 said:
Common Sci-Fi tropes that annoy you!
- Thread starter wulf3n
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I like to think that they added a function that accomplishes nothing, just because of popular demand, like how the close door button on an elevator really doesn't do anything. Basically, cocking weapons feels good, so even if it accomplishes nothing, we have a reason to build it in anyhow.Reed Spacer said:
Also, I love technobabble, especially if what their saying has nothing to do with what's being discussed. You get to laugh at how stupid it is, and at the fact that somewhere, someone thinks they're being accurate.
Personally, I dislike it when the food of the far future, billions of light years away from earth, looks exactly the same as earth cuisine. Although I find the thought of humans taking cows with them to the stars because delicious to be hilarious.
Alien Communists, Alien Capitalists, Alien Feudal, basically anything that feels the need to create and entire new species that somehow correlate perfectly with human civilizations. Phrases like 'when their planet became industrial' annoy the hell out me. Our planet industrialized so every other culture used the method of industrial production as their means of using machines? Not to mention our planet built industry in chunks and at different speeds, with some areas heavily reducing it. Who says an alien civilization would even need or understand commerce or currency?
I actually love the whole '20 mins into the future' sci fi trope. I can't help it, Captain Scarlet is set in 2068 and the world is essentially our world with giant vehicles, but there is an imagination to them in terms of basic tech which countless stories set in the 24th century could never dream of touching. Robocop and Dredd also stick with the 'everything is the same but bigger' and are much cleverer with their material than 'it's swords and sorcery with spaceships'.
I actually love the whole '20 mins into the future' sci fi trope. I can't help it, Captain Scarlet is set in 2068 and the world is essentially our world with giant vehicles, but there is an imagination to them in terms of basic tech which countless stories set in the 24th century could never dream of touching. Robocop and Dredd also stick with the 'everything is the same but bigger' and are much cleverer with their material than 'it's swords and sorcery with spaceships'.
The worst sci-fi trope for me is dialogue that is intended to be advanced science, but is absolutely meaningless. Usually, it's used to hand-wave away plot concerns.
This is present in GW2, but by far the worst offender is Doctor Who. The following is actual dialogue from the episode "Journey's End". For reference, just before this part, the Daleks are counting down to destroying the universe with their "reality bomb", but then the Dalek machine starts malfunctioning, and they look to Donna...
This is present in GW2, but by far the worst offender is Doctor Who. The following is actual dialogue from the episode "Journey's End". For reference, just before this part, the Daleks are counting down to destroying the universe with their "reality bomb", but then the Dalek machine starts malfunctioning, and they look to Donna...
No, no, no, that's fucking criminal.Journey said:
Melee combat in the future.
I'll be the first to admit I'm a huge Warhammer 40K fan (which has probably the most egregious use of this) but I always found it bizarre that we have these futuristic settings where firearms and weaponry are supposed to be vastly superior and more advanced than modern day firearms, yet melee is used MORE often in combat than it is now. Riddick, StarCraft, WH40K are all pretty bad abusers of this.
I wouldn't mind it so much if they provided a reason for why, but the only one that really gave a good explanation was the "Dune" books, in which pretty much everyone had personal shielding that stops fast-moving objects (ie. bullets, arrows, etc.) but doesn't stop slower moving objects, so Soldiers are forced to fight with swords and knives.
I'll be the first to admit I'm a huge Warhammer 40K fan (which has probably the most egregious use of this) but I always found it bizarre that we have these futuristic settings where firearms and weaponry are supposed to be vastly superior and more advanced than modern day firearms, yet melee is used MORE often in combat than it is now. Riddick, StarCraft, WH40K are all pretty bad abusers of this.
I wouldn't mind it so much if they provided a reason for why, but the only one that really gave a good explanation was the "Dune" books, in which pretty much everyone had personal shielding that stops fast-moving objects (ie. bullets, arrows, etc.) but doesn't stop slower moving objects, so Soldiers are forced to fight with swords and knives.
This is a common one that annoys me as well, but even in ones where they try to explain it there is usually no real reason for it (in 40k they try to explain it away as the armor just being that good. Yeah, the same armor that animals bit off with their teeth).Ihateregistering1 said:
You think that's bad don't watch Doctor Who.canadamus_prime said:
OT: Boring monster design. If you're going to design crazy alien species, don't make them boring. Bad examples include Doctor Who, XCOM, Mass Effect etc. Good examples include Pacific Rim and Cloverfields.
And when the hero is fighting against the sci-fi part like the new Robocop or Deus Ex, when it's basically conservative fighting the change.
And expanding from OP's second point, when nouns are invented for other nouns in general. Like 'Blaster', it's a bloody gun. 'Synthetic' it's a goddamn robot. And let's face it, the lightsabre is just a sword in disguise.
Or the "Armor" that the Orks wear, which is usually just scraps of leather and tin cans.Zontar said:
That being said, in WH40K's instance, I completely get why they do it, as it creates a wider variety of army and unit types that players can put together and use, so I give it a big pass. Plus WH40K is already so bat-shit crazy that trying to apply too much logic to it just takes away half of what makes it fun.
I don't know if it's been said yet, because I got bored half way through the thread, but alien races that are human, but technicolor... I'm glaring at you, Mass Effect... Not only are the Asari humanoid but blue (plus the cartilaginous head fins and the 'can have children with any race) but the Quarians, who were humans but weak through their immune system, and when we finally get to see one without a mask, she's purple...? Whereas that one picture of Tali suggests they're meant to be kind of aqua green...
Everyone panicking over a reactor hitting 'critical mass.' Yes, they do it outside of sci-fi too, but sci-fi uses the term enough that it's worth mentioning.
A reactor hitting 'critical mass' is a good thing because that basically means that it's been warmed up, for lack of a better term, enough to function, but every mention of it is met with terror and panic because that means the whole place is about to explode or something.
A reactor hitting 'critical mass' is a good thing because that basically means that it's been warmed up, for lack of a better term, enough to function, but every mention of it is met with terror and panic because that means the whole place is about to explode or something.
Yeah, I watch Doctor Who fairly regularly, and yeah they're pretty bad for that too. Stargate was just the first one that came to mind. For one thing they seemed to do a lot of time travel in Stargate considering time travel with the Stargate was supposed to be like a 1 in a million chance thing. Then there's the fact that the first episode to feature time travel they did the whole wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing with Hammond giving Carter a note intended for his younger self. Then in the next episode that features time travel the whole episode takes place in the "future" of 2010 after SG-1 encountered these guys that were seemingly going to provide Earth with everything they could ever need, but whoops there was a catch, they were going to conquer us very slowly and methodically. Now the only thing we can do is send a note back in time to ourselves. ...wait a minute. And then there was that episode where they find the Ancient's time machine and decide to go back to ancient Egypt with it. That was a mess.Tom_green_day said:
Well personally I see those two time episodes (1969 and 2010) where both showing different time travel effects. One was just a stable time-loop, while the other was creating a parallel timeline/universe due to backwards time travel which wasn't part of a stable loop. In my mind the universe where 2010 took place still exists. Really, though, they didn't go into to much detail for either, and given when 1969 was shot we can just shalk it up to being part of the "fluid" period of the lore (where Thor controlled thunder in a planet's sky and 2 zats kill, 3 vaporizes).canadamus_prime said:
For the Egypt 2 parter though... that never happened, and there are no fish in Jack's pond.
Except in the episode 1969 SG-1 was also sent to the far future in their attempt to get back to their own time and old lady Cassandra had to help them. Yet despite the fact that we only got a brief view of the future in 1969, namely the gate room of the apparently shut down Stargate Command, it bore no resemblance to the future in 2010 which had the SG-C become a museum. Yeah I know in 1969 they probably ended up in something like the 2060's or something as opposed to 2010, but still...Zontar said:
And then there was weirding. Imagine a martial art in which you could strike any point of an opponents body simply because you firmly believe you can and have.Ihateregistering1 said:
Now imagine that strike hitting with all the force of a shotgun blast. A simple kick would shatter an opponent's ribcage.
Also because he proves from time to time to be the dumbest of the crew. But everyone has their moments in Futurama.Genocidicles said:
I call it The 'straight man' becomes the sore thumb in the cast. Lotsa of notable characters undergo these funnier evolutions in TV comedies. When they have the potential, it has to be exploited. like Homer went to being dumber, Peter Griffin became more oblivious, Cartman became horrendously more oblivious and so narcissistic that even Kanye couldn't match up.
Something that more bugs me than anything else. Halo and Mass Effect had a nice interesting setting with Humans and other aliens, enough of a conflict between everyone in the setting to tell a good story, enough good characters to carry it. So how come in those stories with well built universes they have to throw in an ancient evil that's going to kill everyone and everyone has to put aside their differences to stop it. Why? Why can't we have conflicts between aliens that aren't super powered ancient robots or parasites that are going to wipe out everything that isn't them? Why couldn't we see how the Batarians would've reacted to Humanity, their more or less enemy, getting a Council seat and expanding even further into their territory? Something like that.
To be honest there aren't many tropes that annoy me except the overplayed "reluctant hero who just wants to be normal" thing which applies to all generes when you get down to it. It's not usually the tropes that are bad, but the way they are done. Mostly when I wind up rolling my eyes is when they use a trope ham handedly and I've seen the same basic thing handled much better in other productions.. or worse yet it just generally does not fit.
I'll also say that don't confuse a bad trope with audience projection. I notice people talking about things like "a lack of female scientists" and the like. To be honest unless your dealing with insane levels of political correctness not all groups are going to be evenly divided right down the middle. In most shows just because you don't see any female scientists in a particular group, or on a particular project, doesn't mean that this is indicative of the society as a whole. What's more I'd say that I've found the case to be the opposite if you want to really go for the PC aspects of things, where it's usually the female characters that are given the more cereberal roles, while the guys tend to do the hands on action. Being the scientist, hacker, engineer, etc... is the quintessential way they work female characters into shows. For example in Star Trek you'll notice Janeway and Dax were both science officers, the only time we really saw a straightforward "action girl" (although Terry Farrel stepped up for it a bit as Dax) in Trek was when we had Tasha Yar in security, but she was removed from the show pretty early on. While you DO see action girls in science fiction, more than enough where I don't think it's a problem (Gina Torres and Summer Glau in Firefly come to mind for example, as does Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica... to say nothing of Number Six, as Tricia Helfer seemed to kick people's butt quite a few times even if she was a bad guy... then of course we've got Beka and Rommy in Andromeda, and others). Overall it seems like there is a lot of parity overall here within this genere, but if anything you'd probably make a better case by saying there are too many girls in support roles while the guys do all the cool fighting stuff. The point here is pretty much that you need to be careful not to project issues onto things that aren't really there.
It's also important to note that when it comes to TV and movies backstory isn't always spelled out implicitly when it's not entirely needed. In most science fiction, though not all of it, there is usually some kind of huge apocalypse that took place in the past that caused humanity to unite. Typically the surviving group or the one that pulls everyone together is whatever nation or culture the writer happens to be from, usually the US or Europe, though given the power of the western world a lot of other countries ALSO tend to set the biggest surviving group here. As a result the majority of people being white makes a degree of sense in a lot of these concepts. In some visions of the future where civilization never faced an apocalypse things might be different, as they would be if another part of the world was where humanity rebuild from. That said the odds of seeing a perfectly politically correct representation in any given group of people are minimal. What's more if your dealing with a future that is hardly utopian and there is still a lot of crime, gangs, or even more than one nation/culture surviving, your still going to see people ganging up with people a lot like them, as a result if your doing a show for a western audience, your largely going to be focusing on a ship
with westerners and that morality, even if others technically exist.
When it comes to cybernetics, genetic enhancements, and similar things there is the very real cost of special FX, especially if you want it to look good, and your doing it with a main character that is going to be there all the time. Every time someone fired off a phaser in say "Star Trek" cost a bundle of money to make it look right apparently, so as a result you didn't see gunfights in every episode, and even in the more action-oriented "original series" it tend to ultimately come down to fisticuffs because at the end of the day that was cheap. Needless to say with concerns like this, having some dude run around as an overt cyborg in every episode is going to be a pain. With genetic enhancements things get even more complicated, because for one you want the audience to empathize with the characters and the world, and really if you follow that through to the point where everyone is superhuman... well things get wonky really quick since to make any plots at all you have to start working on a level so far above the audience that a lot of them won't "get it". Not to mention issues like in a show where everyone now has night vision genetically built into their eyes, why would anyone carry a flashlight, or why would they even bother to light rooms... other than for the convenience of the audience watching things. Not to mention the whole ethical debate in genetics, where as technology advances your rapidly going to wind up with a lot of people that are simply better than other people around at the same time. Technology not always being backwards compatible. As a result let's say you make "Humanity 2.0" that's great, let's say you deal with the whole issue of upgrading everyone or otherwise keeping society working until all the regular humans peacefully pass on and the genetically enhanced are now the standard, what happens when Humanity 2.1 comes along, and it's not backwards compatible with 2.0? Worse yet what happens when we get to humanity 3.0 but it's very resource intensive so of course only the richest people can afford to become 3.0 or have their children enhanced that way? Forget regular racism... in this case it would become a scientifically undisputable fact, people are only as good as the technology intergrated into them on a fundamental cellular level. The higher the generation of technology the faster, stronger, and more mentally apt the person gets. Sure regular "Human 2.0" might be superior to the norm now, but when he's compared to say a human 5.0 he's little more than a retarded child in comparison. Not to mention ongoing dynasties where of course those who adopt higher genetic technology first thus exploit it to ensure they always have the best enhancements to they and their children stay on top... one could always say "well, at a certain point you could stop technological development here" but really once you let this cat out of the bag, it's never going to stop, it just means your going to wind up with people becoming more advanced on the black market... and of course inevitably start some kind of eugenics war.
Trek didn't go into the whole "genetics" thing in detail, rather it not only had an apocalypse which humanity rose out of by the US using facit military units controlled by drugs (Encounter At Farpoint) which pretty much conquered the remnants of humanity into an empire. The empire which was then threatened by the creation of genetic supermen like Khan who being better than everyone else started to take over and needed to be stopped. The implication being that there were some glitches in the original technology that made the supermen go insane (to an extent), but some extended information on the subject made Khan a little more sympathetic, as a big part of it was also human paranoia and fear over the future. This issue came up again later in "Deep Space 9" where Julian is revealed to be genetically enhanced and it's shown that there is huge bigotry against those who have been enhanced, they are not allowed to do anything of worth as a general rule, largely BECAUSE they are so much better at it than normal people. He winds up managing to wrangle an exception and stay in Star Fleet (and being allowed to practice medicine) but it more or less covered exactly why you don't see all the humans running around with enhancements in Star Trek. Something which incidently also makes them kind of stupid when you then look at the beating humanity winds up taking at the hands of genetic super soldiers in the hands of the Dominion (but that train of thought is never fairly brought up). The point is Trek covered this.
Andromeda, another thing coming from Roddenberry's writings had a more mixed message. One of the primary bad guy factions are a group of genetically enhanced supermen, who themselves bring down the original interstellar government. Albeit there were other extenuating circumstances (The Vedrans, who were the driving force behind it rather than humanity had disappeared and sacrificed themselves and their system to basically create a giant trap for what amounts to The Devil unknown to everyone else), along with a message about the failures of being too moral, as Dylan had the opportunity to stop the entire thing from happening, but he didn't because he didn't think the government could fall at the time and didn't want to sacrifice civilians. He went back in time early on to that choice and more or less admitted he did the wrong thing if I remember, but ultimately had to live with it. HOWEVER in addition to this group of bad guys you had another group of bad guys who were all about "genetic purity". The main character himself being a human hybrid, one of his parents being a genetically enhanced "heavy worlder" (designed to live on planets with higher than normal gravity) which gave him superhuman strength and was the justification for some of his crazier fighting stunts and why he could handle genetically enhanced opponents and very nasty aliens in hand to hand combat for the most part. It was a lot more balanced on the whole issue overall than Trek was.
I'll also say that don't confuse a bad trope with audience projection. I notice people talking about things like "a lack of female scientists" and the like. To be honest unless your dealing with insane levels of political correctness not all groups are going to be evenly divided right down the middle. In most shows just because you don't see any female scientists in a particular group, or on a particular project, doesn't mean that this is indicative of the society as a whole. What's more I'd say that I've found the case to be the opposite if you want to really go for the PC aspects of things, where it's usually the female characters that are given the more cereberal roles, while the guys tend to do the hands on action. Being the scientist, hacker, engineer, etc... is the quintessential way they work female characters into shows. For example in Star Trek you'll notice Janeway and Dax were both science officers, the only time we really saw a straightforward "action girl" (although Terry Farrel stepped up for it a bit as Dax) in Trek was when we had Tasha Yar in security, but she was removed from the show pretty early on. While you DO see action girls in science fiction, more than enough where I don't think it's a problem (Gina Torres and Summer Glau in Firefly come to mind for example, as does Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica... to say nothing of Number Six, as Tricia Helfer seemed to kick people's butt quite a few times even if she was a bad guy... then of course we've got Beka and Rommy in Andromeda, and others). Overall it seems like there is a lot of parity overall here within this genere, but if anything you'd probably make a better case by saying there are too many girls in support roles while the guys do all the cool fighting stuff. The point here is pretty much that you need to be careful not to project issues onto things that aren't really there.
It's also important to note that when it comes to TV and movies backstory isn't always spelled out implicitly when it's not entirely needed. In most science fiction, though not all of it, there is usually some kind of huge apocalypse that took place in the past that caused humanity to unite. Typically the surviving group or the one that pulls everyone together is whatever nation or culture the writer happens to be from, usually the US or Europe, though given the power of the western world a lot of other countries ALSO tend to set the biggest surviving group here. As a result the majority of people being white makes a degree of sense in a lot of these concepts. In some visions of the future where civilization never faced an apocalypse things might be different, as they would be if another part of the world was where humanity rebuild from. That said the odds of seeing a perfectly politically correct representation in any given group of people are minimal. What's more if your dealing with a future that is hardly utopian and there is still a lot of crime, gangs, or even more than one nation/culture surviving, your still going to see people ganging up with people a lot like them, as a result if your doing a show for a western audience, your largely going to be focusing on a ship
with westerners and that morality, even if others technically exist.
When it comes to cybernetics, genetic enhancements, and similar things there is the very real cost of special FX, especially if you want it to look good, and your doing it with a main character that is going to be there all the time. Every time someone fired off a phaser in say "Star Trek" cost a bundle of money to make it look right apparently, so as a result you didn't see gunfights in every episode, and even in the more action-oriented "original series" it tend to ultimately come down to fisticuffs because at the end of the day that was cheap. Needless to say with concerns like this, having some dude run around as an overt cyborg in every episode is going to be a pain. With genetic enhancements things get even more complicated, because for one you want the audience to empathize with the characters and the world, and really if you follow that through to the point where everyone is superhuman... well things get wonky really quick since to make any plots at all you have to start working on a level so far above the audience that a lot of them won't "get it". Not to mention issues like in a show where everyone now has night vision genetically built into their eyes, why would anyone carry a flashlight, or why would they even bother to light rooms... other than for the convenience of the audience watching things. Not to mention the whole ethical debate in genetics, where as technology advances your rapidly going to wind up with a lot of people that are simply better than other people around at the same time. Technology not always being backwards compatible. As a result let's say you make "Humanity 2.0" that's great, let's say you deal with the whole issue of upgrading everyone or otherwise keeping society working until all the regular humans peacefully pass on and the genetically enhanced are now the standard, what happens when Humanity 2.1 comes along, and it's not backwards compatible with 2.0? Worse yet what happens when we get to humanity 3.0 but it's very resource intensive so of course only the richest people can afford to become 3.0 or have their children enhanced that way? Forget regular racism... in this case it would become a scientifically undisputable fact, people are only as good as the technology intergrated into them on a fundamental cellular level. The higher the generation of technology the faster, stronger, and more mentally apt the person gets. Sure regular "Human 2.0" might be superior to the norm now, but when he's compared to say a human 5.0 he's little more than a retarded child in comparison. Not to mention ongoing dynasties where of course those who adopt higher genetic technology first thus exploit it to ensure they always have the best enhancements to they and their children stay on top... one could always say "well, at a certain point you could stop technological development here" but really once you let this cat out of the bag, it's never going to stop, it just means your going to wind up with people becoming more advanced on the black market... and of course inevitably start some kind of eugenics war.
Trek didn't go into the whole "genetics" thing in detail, rather it not only had an apocalypse which humanity rose out of by the US using facit military units controlled by drugs (Encounter At Farpoint) which pretty much conquered the remnants of humanity into an empire. The empire which was then threatened by the creation of genetic supermen like Khan who being better than everyone else started to take over and needed to be stopped. The implication being that there were some glitches in the original technology that made the supermen go insane (to an extent), but some extended information on the subject made Khan a little more sympathetic, as a big part of it was also human paranoia and fear over the future. This issue came up again later in "Deep Space 9" where Julian is revealed to be genetically enhanced and it's shown that there is huge bigotry against those who have been enhanced, they are not allowed to do anything of worth as a general rule, largely BECAUSE they are so much better at it than normal people. He winds up managing to wrangle an exception and stay in Star Fleet (and being allowed to practice medicine) but it more or less covered exactly why you don't see all the humans running around with enhancements in Star Trek. Something which incidently also makes them kind of stupid when you then look at the beating humanity winds up taking at the hands of genetic super soldiers in the hands of the Dominion (but that train of thought is never fairly brought up). The point is Trek covered this.
Andromeda, another thing coming from Roddenberry's writings had a more mixed message. One of the primary bad guy factions are a group of genetically enhanced supermen, who themselves bring down the original interstellar government. Albeit there were other extenuating circumstances (The Vedrans, who were the driving force behind it rather than humanity had disappeared and sacrificed themselves and their system to basically create a giant trap for what amounts to The Devil unknown to everyone else), along with a message about the failures of being too moral, as Dylan had the opportunity to stop the entire thing from happening, but he didn't because he didn't think the government could fall at the time and didn't want to sacrifice civilians. He went back in time early on to that choice and more or less admitted he did the wrong thing if I remember, but ultimately had to live with it. HOWEVER in addition to this group of bad guys you had another group of bad guys who were all about "genetic purity". The main character himself being a human hybrid, one of his parents being a genetically enhanced "heavy worlder" (designed to live on planets with higher than normal gravity) which gave him superhuman strength and was the justification for some of his crazier fighting stunts and why he could handle genetically enhanced opponents and very nasty aliens in hand to hand combat for the most part. It was a lot more balanced on the whole issue overall than Trek was.