I'll be honest, this doesn't really need much of an introduction. Everyone has the tired old plots, character templates, etc. that they're either tired of, or that they've never really liked. Here is a list of mine, ready for the impending new year. This list goes from minor pet-peeves to full-on rage-triggers, so expect many rants. I'll see you on the other side.
10. One Word Too Many
Okay, so this isn't an intentional device, so much as something I consider to be bad practice in writing, but this is when a line of dialogue has just one or two words too many, turning an ambiguous implication into an unambiguous statement, making it weaker for it. One example of what I'm talking about is in the Hellboy film (a good film, mind, it's just this line that bothered me), in which this line is spoken to the hero: 'This whole thing is a farce, because in the end, after you've killed and captured every freak out there, there's still one left: you.' That would have been a great line if it had ended one word sooner. Especially since the character speaking was staring right at Hellboy when he said it, that final 'you' just made it obvious. It's a minor thing, but it's generally good form to keep dialogue tight, and although it's only taking away one word in this case, short, concise dialogue makes all the difference between a good line of dialogue, and a great, pithy line of dialogue that people will quote for years to come. Case in point: 'To be, or not to be'.
9. Informed Characteristics
This is when we're told that a character has a certain characteristic, when we never see any kind of evidence to support this claim. This is your basic 'show, don't tell' rule; it's usually better to show us a characteristic than to just tell us about it. It's fairly obvious why this one rubs me up the wrong way, it's just basic bad character writing. Don't tell me that the character is a badass with a heart of gold, show me that he is by his actions, his reactions, how he acts when no one's looking, or if you are going to tell me, you'd better make sure you back up your claim later on. Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean I have to trust you. Why yes, I am a bit of a bitch, thanks for noticing.
8. The Pointless Backstory
A character's backstory can be really interesting; in fact, fans of a work can become obsessed with knowing about their favourite character's backstory, and I would argue that giving it to them is risky business. As you've seen from my post about Origin Stories, I'm not a big fan of telling the reader/audience everything about a character, because it often takes away while it informs. Now, I do think that an interesting and fleshed-out backstory is no bad thing; in fact, I would advise thinking through a character's backstory even if it won't be revealed, just so you'll know your character well enough to write them convincingly. It's when a backstory is either poorly put together, lifted from the standard list of clichés, or if it simply adds nothing to the plot or character that it becomes a problem. If a plot opens doors for the story, or reveals something new and exciting about the character, or causes dramatic conflict among characters (or internal conflict for just the one character), then it has been done well. Unfortunately, this sometimes just comes across as the writer badly wanting to share the traumatic backstory to try and excuse their character's bad attitude, to use but one example, and that doesn't really add anything.
7. Childhood Friends = Marriage
This relates to my love of the portrayal of friendship and platonic love, which tends not to be explored so much between men and women, I find. It seems the only way a man and woman who knew each other when they were children are safe from eventually getting married is for one of them to be gay. Apparently people are just so full of lust they will leap on anything with corresponding erogenous zones. Never mind the fact that a lot of the time two people who have known each other since childhood often see one another as siblings and may even find the idea of viewing them in a sexual way as wrong, or even disgusting (known as the Westermarck Effect); they have a close connection, and close connections are apparently always romantic and never platonic. Yeah, I don't care if it does happen in real life, it's been done to death in the media and now it does nothing but annoy me.
6. Stupid Americans
Yes, as an English person, I don't think that all Americans are stupid; it's just a stereotype. I think that they have been poorly represented over time because some of the less intelligent Americans also seem to be the loudest, from what I've seen. I tend to get irked by racial or national stereotypes anyway (although I do have a soft spot for the English stereotype, but that's just an odd little fancy of mine), but there's something about the over-the-top, uneducated, air-headed, burger-chowing, obnoxious American stereotype that just grates on me. Now, I'm usually okay with the endearingly simple character; the one who might not be all there, but is still a likeable character because they're pretty much harmless (hell, I've written characters like that myself); it's when the character is both stupid and obnoxious that it really starts to grate on me. I'm not sure if it's because I get indignant at such a negative stereotype, or the fact that most of the time the 'stupid' character does nothing but slow the plot down and provide 'comedy', or the fact that characters being portrayed as that stupid make me weep for humankind, but this trope just doesn't sit well with me.
5. No Straight Man
This definitely needs an explanation, because on its own, it must sound strange. First and foremost, I mean 'straight' in the context of comedy: the straight man is the 'normal' guy. He represents logic, reason, sensible rationalisation; he's boring, really. But he acts as a foil to the 'crazy' guy. It's a basic comic device: the zany guy and the straight man; they compliment each other. Now that I've explained a little, I'll move on to what I'm really talking about here. I'm talking about a comedy set in a crazy world with crazy people, but there's just one problem. There's no straight man. The straight man is required in a mad comedy to draw attention to just how insane everything (and everyone) around him is. He doesn't even need to talk about it, you only need to see the look on his face to realise just how mad everything is. Without him, it's just a group of crazies running around and it gets a bit all over the place. Now, some comedies manage without the straight man, and that's fine, but it's actually very difficult to pull off. Plus, I like the straight man. He's the one who sits there trying to work it all out, slapping his forehead as more and more insanity is thrown his way. He is what Marge is to Homer, what Squidward is to Spongebob, and what Brian is to the entire cast of Family Guy. The straight man is the boring, sensible glue that holds the funny, zany cast together.
4. Flashbacks
This is a difficult one to explain. It's related to my 'should you reveal backstory' conflict, but it's harder to pin down exactly what I dislike about flashbacks. I think it's mostly the contrived way they're often placed into narrative, like the character gets knocked out and flashes back, or someone will say something vague to them, making them flash back, I don't know. I have seen it done very well, and realistically, like in Ratatouille, when a mouthful of food takes the character back to his childhood, because that is actually something that happens in real life: senses like smell and taste are very closely linked to memory (I'm not sure how or why, they just are). And I think that very short flashbacks that are literally just flashes of memory are good too, for the same reason that they are somewhat realistic. It's when whole scenes, or whole episodes are flashbacks that I start to lose my suspension of disbelief. I start to wonder if the character is relaying everything we're seeing, and every line of dialogue being spoken, or if they just black out for fifteen minutes while this flashback occurs. It makes me think too much about the technicalities of it, and I start remembering that in real life, actual flashbacks are really very rare in people who aren't suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Like I said, it's hard to explain exactly what I dislike about it, I suppose it's just so easy to do badly that I always focus on that and often forget how well it's been done in the past. I think it's so often used as a cheap way to crowbar in a character's backstory that I've become a little sceptical now.
3. 'Wait, It's Not What It Looks Like!' Used for Drama
Seriously. This is a comic device, and I don't know why it's being used in drama so much. I love the comedic misunderstandings when someone walks in on someone (or more than one person) in a compromising position and they get the wrong idea. But I hate it when they are used for drama; a girl flirts with a married man, his wife walks in on them, gets the wrong idea: DRAMA! No, not drama, idiocy. I know that the other character has a right to get upset because they didn't see what we saw, but that doesn't stop it from really annoying me. I suppose what really gets me about this one is that it's so contrived and you often have to make people act out of character for it to actually work, whereas when it's used for comedy, not so much. This is an example of dramatic irony done really badly because instead of creating tension, it makes the audience exasperated. But what's really irritating about it is that almost every time it's used, it's of no real consequence. The two characters will fall out for a while, but eventually one of them will see the error of their ways and they'll get back together anyway, so the whole thing just feels like a massive waste of time. Yeah, we'll get back to the literary and cinematic cancer that is false tension in a bit. In short, this trope needs to stay in the comedy genre, because it's just not working in drama.
2. Tacked-on Love Story
Everyone talks about this one, so I won't go on too much. Basically, people need to realise that not every story needs a love story in it. Sometimes all the character needs is to find himself, or to find love in his friends, or to realise the importance of family, or to quench his thirst for adventure. Not every plot calls for a romantic sub-plot, and it annoys me when an uninspired love story is just thrown in at the last minute. It makes me think that once the adventure is over, and the adrenaline wears off, they'll immediately break up because they have literally no romantic feelings for one another, they just kissed in the excitement of the moment, or because they were staring death in the face, and now they realise that it wasn't much different from a huge drunken mistake. Anyway, long story short: stop this nonsense, it's not necessary, believable, or satisfying, and everybody has worked it out now.
1. The Fake Death
Ooh, where do I start... This one has annoyed me for years, with perhaps the most egregious example being in Pets (the first film I can remember watching that I thought was bad. I saw it when I was maybe ten years old), where the dog gets shot, and everyone is distraught, only for the dog to jump back to life and be absolutely fine. I hate this cliché so much. There is just so much wrong with it; namely, it's an obvious attempt to get tears from the audience without actually killing anybody off. It only serves to create--I told you we'd get back to it--false tension.
This cliché is very common in children's films, which makes it all the more despicable in my opinion, because it essentially teaches children that death is just a temporary inconvenience. No, you do not get to do that. When a person dies, you need to mourn, pay your respects, accept it and then eventually move on. When a fictional character dies, you need to take responsibility for it. Did Bambi's mother come back to life thanks to bullshit plot contrivance? No. Do you know why? Because her death was actually meaningful and that meaning would be totally lost if she was magically fine for no good reason. So don't pretend to kill a character off only to have them sit back up after about a minute or so of that tender, heart-wrenching piano solo and expect us to cheer. It's manipulative, it's overused, and it's insulting.
Now, there are some instances where I will accept this device, and all of them require some semblance of a reasonable explanation as to why the character is not really dead. These include resuscitation, some form of shield, makeshift or otherwise, that we were previously unaware of (or perhaps we were aware of it at one point and since forgot about it), or a previously established device that brings them back to life in some sense (think the eponymous dragonballs that can resurrect the dead in the Dragonball series). Even if these are not realistic, I personally support artistic licence: if something doesn't technically make sense, but it has some artistic merit, I will normally accept it, providing it isn't too contrived. For example, I will accept a Bible taking a bullet and saving someone, even though I'm fairly certain that wouldn't work, because it's symbolic and can be meaningful when handled correctly. As for the established device, if it makes sense in continuity then I can accept it even if it's not realistic; that's just suspension of disbelief. And no, this doesn't mean that a fake-out death is okay as long as you explain it, because it's really the deceit that I hate the most, and in series like Dragonball we are told pretty much off the bat what the rules are when it comes to resurrecting people, so there isn't a lot of trickery when a character dies. The writers don't toy with our emotions; it's sad, yes, but we know that they can come back. No, it's when we are given some hamfisted, shameless cop-out Deus ex Machina just because the writers didn't have the balls to actually kill off a character, but they still want their emotional moment that I start to get really angry. And don't even get me started on that 'power of love' nonsense; the only kiss that can save someone is the 'kiss of life' (not nearly as effective or romantic as movies will have you believe), unless sexual arousal is actually a cure for sudden cases of death. Doubtful. So I'll finally wrap this up by saying that this is a cliché that I really think needs to be killed off for real, so no contrived magical bullshit can save it.
Wow. Okay. So there's my top 10 list of devices that I hate. Look out for New Year's Eve, where I'll be putting up this post's more optimistic little brother. I'll just take a few days to cool off...
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