Things in entertainment you'd like to see stop

[happyninja42]

The big reveal being, "*GASP* It's a woman!!?" The motorcyclist pulling the helmet off to reveal long hair and such. It's WAY too overdone and assumes sexism on the audience's part.

Also, the big reveal being, "*GASP* They're gay together!!?" So what? It's 2015, they can even marry now. Gay people aren't unicorns or magic. They are relatively commonplace to a reveal that a dude loves another dude also assumes naivety in the audience and has been done so frequently recently as to have been made boring.

It just feels like these are being made for grandparents and maybe our parents rather than the supposedly all important 17-40 age group.

The "it's a girl!?" trope I think can be blamed on lazy writing. That it's easier to establish a woman as being unique and badass, by first displaying her classicaly "masculine" skills, and then having the big reveal. Sort of like visual short hand. "Whoa! That dude's a badass! WHOA, that badass dude's actually a chick!! And since we've already established she's badass, we have to accept her badassness now without further development!" *using Keanue Reeves voice from Bill & Ted while saying that*

I agree however, that it's annoying. I never really saw the problem with accepting that women can be badasses, so never felt there was any need to point it out specifically. I blame early exposure to some good female characters in movies and books, and it sort of set the template in my head from that point on.

capcha: I like humans. Well yes I do, very astute capcha, how did you know I was a Humanist?

 

[rcs619]

Bikini/"Sexy" armor.

I know I can't be the only person here that thinks a badass woman suited up in a practical manner for battle is way more attractive than some poor lady forced to dress up like a bad Halloween costume for the sake of "sexy". I mean, look at Quiet's main costume. She doesn't come off as sexy, she just winds up looking desperate and sad.

That alternate costume she gets where she's in the XOF uniform is really good though. More of that, less of the other

 

[SquidVicious]

This is more for TV shows than movies but I always hate it when someone lives in a really nice apartment in the city while working a service industry job. I think Community is one of the only network TV shows to do apartment living vaguely believable.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

-The strong, bad ass woman character is a lesbian.

Lesbians are great. That's not the issue. The issue is still that people who are strong still want women. You want to be subversive? you want to blow people's minds? Have a strong woman who kicks ass on the regular, who has legions of hardened rebels following her every word... who likes to be submissive to a dude in the bedroom.

How many of you can't even wrap your head around that?

-A group of heroes... but screw you if you don't like the one we want to focus on.

I hate Wolverine. I love Colossus. Ask me how happy I was with the movies.

-The only people who are 'relate-able' or 'real' are assholes.

I don't need to go into this. That's all media is nowadays.

-Trailers ending with a Monster Screaming or Someone hitting the screen.

It's so... so stupid. I don't... what is this supposed to show? Are we supposed to be scared? Are we supposed to think the character is a bad ass because he punched where we're supposed to be? It's not thrilling.

 

[Cycloptomese]

I've got two.

Number one is shaky-cam. When I watch an action movie, I want to see wide shots of explosions and ass-kickery. I don't want to have to decipher some confusing mess.

Number two is when a show is based around the sexual tension of a couple of main characters and then two or three seasons in, they get together. This never used to bother me until I realized that I always lose interest in the show at that point. I might make it another episode or two. I've got a couple of examples, but I don't know how to use the spoiler function and I'm just not going to spoil the shows for anyone who hasn't seen them.

 

[rcs619]

-The strong, bad ass woman character is a lesbian.

Lesbians are great. That's not the issue. The issue is still that people who are strong still want women. You want to be subversive? you want to blow people's minds? Have a strong woman who kicks ass on the regular, who has legions of hardened rebels following her every word... who likes to be submissive to a dude in the bedroom.

How many of you can't even wrap your head around that?

-A group of heroes... but screw you if you don't like the one we want to focus on.

I hate Wolverine. I love Colossus. Ask me how happy I was with the movies.

-The only people who are 'relate-able' or 'real' are assholes.

I don't need to go into this. That's all media is nowadays.

-Trailers ending with a Monster Screaming or Someone hitting the screen.

It's so... so stupid. I don't... what is this supposed to show? Are we supposed to be scared? Are we supposed to think the character is a bad ass because he punched where we're supposed to be? It's not thrilling.

Oh man, that actually reminds me of a fun character from a book series I like.

Thandi Palane is character in the Honorverse (the various side-stories and spin-offs from the original Honor Harrington book series). She lives in the year... I think it's like 4018 or something like that, and she's from a planet with such high gravity and such harsh conditions that humans from there are basically superhuman just to survive. Thandi is a hair over seven feet tall, and she's actually quite a bit stronger than she looks because her homeworld has like 40% higher gravity than Earth's. Physically, she's one of the most lethal characters in the series.

But yeah, she winds up falling in love with Victor Cachat (basically an elite covert operative for another nation in the series) who is described as, well, supremely average and unassuming... and it turns out that she's a total submissive in bed. Honestly, they're just a cute couple. Almost total opposites physically, but they're just super into each other. Watching a woman that could rip off a car door with her bare hands being gentle, or even goofy, with her significant other is cute as heck.

Honestly the Honor Harrington series is just chock-full of amazingly capable female characters, for that matter.

 

[Recusant]

A longstanding gripe of mine: I'd say that shaky-cam needs to die, but I think death may be too good for it. When I attempted to watch the new Battlestar Galactica (having thoroughly enjoyed the original), I was very surprised to see it appeared to have been filmed by epileptics during an earthquake. I had to watch it in ten-minute increments because I got too motion sick otherwise, and about an hour in I threw up anyway. When this is happening to someone who played through all three Descents with no problem- someone who, in games of Alien Vs Predator, was usually the one alien on a server full of predators and marines, it'd be a good idea to stop and ask why this is going on. I wondered why none of the camera crew ever said "Hey, why are we shooting this on roller skates in a field of marbles? Won't it be hard to watch without chugging Dramamine?", only to find out it wasn't; it was filmed normally and the crazy shaking was added in later. Utterly baffling.

Also utterly stupid. The idea is that it's "more realistic", and thus adds immersion. Do a quick experiment for me. Bind a camera to the side of your head and walk down a hallway. Then walk faster. Then walk while carrying something heavy. Then run. Now look at the footage. Notice how much your head bounces? Notice how you don't notice that, since your brain (which has had millions of years to adapt to solve just this problem) compensates so that you can actually see clearly while you run? Cameras don't do that. Bouncing the camera around doesn't add to realism; it detracts from it. It's a bigger immersion-killer than having Mike and the bots down at the bottom of the screen mocking the show/movie/game would be.

Some problems, however, are not technical, and at first glance seem to be so deeply petty they're barely worth mentioning- but if you're going to be trusted with a project that can cost tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, you want to put the best image forward that you can. To that end, two things:
1. Trailers trail. They follow. They come after. If the movie hasn't come out yet, you cannot release a "trailer"; there's nothing to follow yet. The movie has not yet been seen; the snippet you put out is for watching prior to watching the movie. That's why we have the word "preview". That's what you mean. Use it. You do not earn confidence by saying "we don't understand how time works".
2. "Reveal" is a verb. It is not a noun. The noun is "revelation", or "revealing" in some cases. You do not earn confidence by saying "we don't understand the difference between nouns and verbs".

Every 'genius' being 25 years old. No buddy, that's not how the world works. There's a reason that all the experts, veterans, Nobel laureates, and Turing laureates are old and experienced.

Actually, that's not how the world works- the whole point of being a genius is that you learn (and thus develop skills) incredibly quickly. "Genius" isn't something that you learn, it's something that you are. It's entirely reasonable to assume that a person who got the background and knowledge very quickly would be a go-to person for outside agencies- especially since a lack of work experience would likely make them relatively cheap to employ. That'd they'd be young and attractive also means they'd be a likely pick for a public face of the group/organization/what have you.

That said individual is almost always young and attractive is a different matter, of course; if that's all you meant, I have no objection.

 

[Fallow]

Out of curiosity, is the show any good? I haven't really heard anyone talk about it, and it looked not particularly good from the ads I've seen, coupled with the show being a poster-child for "in-name-only adaptations".

It's fair.

The basic military stuff is better than most that I've seen - with proper rifle management, correct formation movement at times, and basic tactics accurate in many places. So off the bat it's better than most shows that involve a heavy armed forces element. So it's a big plus if you like military porn. The 'smart' stuff could be smarter, and the science is pretty much as I ranted about earlier[footnote]Rhona Mitra, nuff said[/footnote]. It's pretty easy to watch though, and you're rarely in the dark about who the good guys are.
On the other hand, there's a lot of "nationalism"[footnote]I added quotes because nationalism is sometimes associated with bad things, and there's nothing evil or negative about it here[/footnote] involved. It's not as bad as '4th of July', but expect flag waving and patriotic salutes.

All in all I'd say it's great for when you come home from work and want to unwind a bit while multitasking. If you want a serious 'full focus' kind of show, I think you'll need to look elsewhere (I absolutely loved Hannibal for that).

That's not entirely true, there is 1 exception, though in fairness it's never used in fiction.

Modern military vessels have cameras on them which, at several hundred meters distance, can zoom in on the image taken of another ship close enough to read the small print on the fire extinguishers on the exterior of the other vessel (in case you're wondering, yes, that exact situation happened, and it was fucking cool).

Fair enough.

 

[maninahat]

God, so many to choose from. Here is my top ten in no particular order (though there are far more):

1. "But the Prophecy says" as an excuse to make a protagonist do something. It's a bullshit method of motivation and a built in spoiler.
2. Having a major conflict be the result of two characters who just can't fucking spit it out an important bit of information, even when there is absolutely nothing stopping them from talking at all.
3. This back and forth:
"This ends now."
"No, it is only the beginning!"
4. This one as well:
"We are very much alike, you and I!"
The response "having a thing in common does not make us alike" is never uttered. [https://youtu.be/H2hXLawl-Zc?t=37]
5. A movie in which hordes of enemies are massacred without thought, yet we are supposed to find it tragic when the hero gets killed.
6. Romeo and Juliet plots (lovers thwarted by their corresponding faction alignments).
7. Comic book movies that always feel they have to be about stopping that big blue sky beam from destroying the world somehow. Why can't it be something small scale for once? Netflix's Dare Devil pulled it off.
8. Always casting ugly men opposite sexy women yet refusing to do the reverse.
9 That scene in which a soldier says something blatantly sexist about a main character being "just a girl", only to then get knocked out straight away by a right hook from said girl.
10. Music in modern comedies and rom-coms. They don't have interesting soundtracks ever, just recycled pop music from the 90s for a bunch of montages.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

And to go even further, the proliferation of "shaky-cam" or "handycam" to inject so-called "realism" into an action movie.

I wish I could remember which movie commentary track it was I was listening to, but I remember a director mentioning that the use of "shaky cam" and extreme close-ups in movie combat scenes rarely has anything to do with "injecting realism," and that's an excuse often used within the industry when talking to the public. He admitted that the real reason many directors use "Shaky Cam" is because it actually makes fight and battle scenes significantly easier (and cheaper) to shoot. You can cover up lazy or bad fight choreography with it, you can cover up for poor acting with it (or just straight-up replace the actor with a stunt person without anyone noticing), and it makes it easier to re-shoot something if someone's mistake is visible (since you only have to re-shoot a few seconds instead of an entire sequence). It also makes it more difficult to tell when special effects in the scene, regardless of physical or CGI, are done poorly since the camera never focuses on them.

And hey, speaking of CGI...

I can't stand the over-reliance on CGI in movies these days. It almost always looks like crap, unless the filmmaker is able to throw enough money to match the GDPs of several small countries combined at a studio (and even then, the studios that do the CGI for movies often don't actually make enough of a profit from their work and immediately go under). Physical effects like those done by Stan Winston's team still look great like 30 years later (while also being comparatively dirt cheap), meanwhile CGI from 5 years ago already tends to look laughable - even when it's the particularly expensive sort. And the sad thing is that there are fewer and fewer people in the industry each year who are actually good at doing practical effects like those done by Stan Winston's team because demand is so low.

I don't mind CGI when it's used to enhance a physical effect. I think it was in the commentary track for the 1999 SciFi movie Virus that director John Bruno mentioned that they intentionally mixed practical effects and computer effects to create the movie's main villain so that viewers' eyes would have a difficult time distinguishing what part of the effect was really there and what part was CGI. The movie was, admittedly, pretty forgettable - but I've always liked that particular method of using computer generated effects. It certainly ages better than, say, the Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace method of shooting pretty much everything in front of a green screen.

 

[happyninja42]

Has anyone said the Wilhelm Scream yet? Because it's definitely the Wilhelm Scream.

See, for me, I enjoy the Wilhelm scream. It's an amusing little 4th wall moment for me personally. Whenever I hear it in a show/movie, I always shout out "Wilhelm! NOOO!", in scenery chewing fashion. It makes me chuckle, but I don't expect anyone else to enjoy it like I do. I can understand why some would want it to go away.

 

[Kajin]

The one biggest thing I'm sick of in entertainment has less to do with the entertainment itself as opposed to the people watching it.

I'm absolutely sick of people who ***** and moan about works being aimed at The Lowest Common Denominator. It's basically a right of passage for people to complain about the LCD whenever they see media that isn't aimed specifically at their particular niche. People really need to get over themselves and stick to enjoying the media they enjoy, rather than giving other people a hard time for consuming something they don't like personally.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Why does the female elf exist? Why did they feel the need to create her? To show the world "Look how progressive we are, there's a GIRL DOING COOL THINGS in this movie, give us all of your money, feminists!" or something?

I'm not saying its not dumb. I'm just saying that I think the whole female character thing came before the romance idea. As a prediction it went something along the lines of:
"Hey, Philippa, you know there's no female characters in this book?"
"What? That can't be right..."
"Seriously. What are we going to do?"
"Well we'll just stick one in. Can't hurt. Since we're sticking Legolas in lets just put the two in side-by-side."
"But what are we going to have her DO?"
"Um...well...she can fall in love with...ah...this random dwarf guy! That'll work! It'll be like Legolas and Gimli again!"
"BRILLIANT!"

Every 'genius' being 25 years old. No buddy, that's not how the world works. There's a reason that all the experts, veterans, Nobel laureates, and Turing laureates are old and experienced.

Maybe it's demographic pandering, maybe they're looking at the usual productive range for geniuses in STEM fields. 25 is prime time for productive genius in most cases, petering off by the mid to late 30's.

This is probably the case really. I'm 27 and just recently finished my PhD. Thus technically I'm officially the world expert in my very specific field. Because there are like...four other people globally that are at all involved in my specific field (all in my lab, one of them being my supervisor) and I know more about my specific part of it than any of they do. That's just how science works.

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

God, so many to choose from. Here is my top ten in no particular order

6. Romeo and Juliet plots (lovers thwarted by their corresponding faction alignments).

see, I love that. It makes for good conflict. I hate that the couple gets their happy ending, therefore invalidating the entire homage.

As for me, I want the "interview segments" in tv to stop. It's just padding to get a 45-minute runtime. Stop it. I don't care.

 

[Halla Burrica]

Every 'genius' being 25 years old. No buddy, that's not how the world works. There's a reason that all the experts, veterans, Nobel laureates, and Turing laureates are old and experienced.

Every super-programmer of late being 25, female, chatty/hypersocial, and dressed up like a retard/alternative combo. I have met over 3,000 programmers and not a single one of them matched anything even close to that profile. The awesome programmers are old, experienced, and calm, rational people.
.

I can see what you mean, but I'm fairly against fiction being required to adhere to the rules of the real world. Not just because that would mean we couldn't have crazy future tech or conveniences, but because if we were to REALLy adhere to the real world, dialogue would also change. There would be a ton of "uuhm" between sentences, awkward pauses, stuttering, irrational or short-sighted quips going back and forth without anything really happening etc, something I don't think needs to be taken done in fiction, just because it would be more "realistic".

Also to hell with calm and rational characters, I say! What good story has ever been told were the characters were just perfect little things that never had any flaws, never messed up and never had did something wrong? Very few I gather. I'll always take characters with some spunk in them, who trip over chords and start civil wars out of petty grievances, who yell at the mailman for delivering the letters too early. That's what good drama is made out of.

That's also how I prefer to look at people in the real world. I prefer the ones with clear flaws and that make mistakes, because these are people that are imperfect and are willing to show the world just that, and don't try to cover it up or look like they're made of stone.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

I'd like to see them stop always using artificial intelligence as the badguy. Seriously, every fucking movie that has it in it, they're trying to kill humanity. If they don't do the Ultron "I've done the math, and Humanity must die" angle, then they're an AI that started out as a war machine, and everyone is afraid of them because of that, just like SHort Circuit and Chappie. The only AI movie that didn't do this angle, was A.I. And it still had the "humans hate the robots" shit.

I also get fucking sick of the "he messed in God's domain" bullshit, for movies like Transcendence, or Lawnmower man, and other similar movies. Yes, please, let's further misrepresent technological advancement, and ALWAYS color it in the paint of fear and ignorance, planting the seeds in the common person brain that scientific discovery is evil, and we'd all be better if we just lived on a fucking farm. That good old "down to earth" lifestyle bullshit.

This always made noise in head. Why the fucking hell would a perfectly logical intelligence try to destroy humanity? Wouldn't it be easier to leave? The only fiction that has really dealt with this properly is Mass Effect, since the Geth stopped chasing the Quarians when they weren't a threat anymore. Don't even get me started on the "technology being bad" thing.

Anyway, I have a pretty petty niggle but it's one I'd like people to stop. Stop using the fucking BWOOOOOOM sound from inception! It's gotten tiring and clichéd! Inception had a fucking reason to do it, not you! You just want to look cool, fucking assholes!

Also, jumpscares. Fucking stop them. It's not horror, it's not clever, and most of the time it's telegraphed as fuck!

 

[Ravinoff]

Hm...okay, I've got a few.

1: fucking constant jump-cuts. Related to the shaky cam thing that's been mentioned, I'm talking about the trend of never doing anything in one shot, and jumping from perspective to perspective like crazy. It's massively disorienting, and very obviously a lazy shortcut instead of competent cinematography.

2: complete lack of understanding of guns. Yes, working the action of a pump shotgun looks and sounds badass. It also dumps unfired rounds from the magazine, so stop doing it. Glocks do not have hammers, so stop making that noise whenever someone draws one. And for chrissakes, stop chicken-winging every long gun you pick up.

3: your designs should make sense (with some exceptions, like kaiju in Pacific Rim because they're artificial). I was going to apply that specifically to monsters, but come to think of it, this is a massive problem in just about anything. The ship with a crew of half a dozen people has miles of barely-lit corridors, reactor systems that explode at the press of a button, the list goes on and on. And don't try to technobabble it away, either.

 

[Burgers2013]

Laugh tracks. I don't care if it's real. Sit-coms with laugh tracks are extremely annoying now. I couldn't even finish How I Met Your Mother even though I liked it. I read a comic that had laugh tracks in it (American Born Chinese), and it drew my attention to how annoying/unnecessary they are. It's like when someone asks you if you can hear a ringing sound. You didn't notice it before, but now that you draw your attention to it, it's extremely distracting, and you can't stop hearing it. All I can think is: STOP LAUGHING FOR ME. I CAN DO IT BY MYSELF HAHAHA! SEE?? It also seems like they laugh way too often and totally break the rhythm of conversation. "Would you like" BWAHAHAH "to go to the park" BWAHAHAHA "next Saturday?" BWAHAHAHA. I cannot listen to it anymore.

The "chosen one" narrative is annoying. I've actually come to enjoy anti-heroes just because it's a bit different than the excruciatingly irritating optimism of those who know they will succeed. Sure there's always a period of "uncertainty" of the protagonist, but he always seems to come around in the end and fulfill the prophecy--yay, that was exciting. Turning this trope on its head is something I love to see. It's nice when it's not used at all, but I'll take what I can get.

Poorly written antagonists. I saw it a lot in books/anime aimed at teens where the antagonist was an intolerable 1000% asshole for no reason whose only purpose to make use feel sorry for/relate to the protagonist. I never found this very compelling, and it seems to make character development/decision-making "easy" for the protagonist--Like the antagonist is an obstacle to be overcome rather than another human being. Developing all of the relevant characters well makes for a much better story than only focusing on the protagonist's development. This goes for side/minor characters whose only purpose is to give the protagonist a chance to show how awesome he/she is to the audience. It makes the story feel very flat or almost like it exists in a vacuum at times.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Not so much My Little Pony as its fans' attempts at selling it as the BEST THING EVER.

 

[Marik2]

God, so many to choose from. Here is my top ten in no particular order

6. Romeo and Juliet plots (lovers thwarted by their corresponding faction alignments).

see, I love that. It makes for good conflict. I hate that the couple gets their happy ending, therefore invalidating the entire homage.

As for me, I want the "interview segments" in tv to stop. It's just padding to get a 45-minute runtime. Stop it. I don't care.

Interview segments?

OT: The whole YOU ARE JUST LIKE THE BAD GUY IF YOU KILL

Would like to see someone who kills not out hatred or revengeance, but out of conscious.

"This person is highly delusional and a danger to himself and everyone around them. He needs to be stopped, period."