What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
I can't understand how anyone remotely progressive actually liked Kingsman for the reasons you listed. It also just reeks of traditionalist masculinity, especially with the princess at the end 🤢. The only redeeming quality is the villain's silliness and Samuel Jackson's performance in that role.