Your Most Disliked Tropes

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

I'm not someone who is familiar with trope names so I apologize in advance.

That's not really a problem. Tropes don't necessarily have to be from TV Tropes or referred to using TV Tropes names. To me, the word just refers to an element or literary/plot device that you see in multiple fictional works. Sort of a synonym to cliche, only not necessarily as overused.

[E-122-Psi]

Totally agree with this one. You see it a lot and it's supposed to be funny like "Oh she's a feisty one" but it just looks weird and abusive. 

One thing I find especially off putting is that most of the time, the male won't fight back because they're too chivalrous, and the female knows it. A character who tortures someone they know CAN'T fight back due to being afraid or weak is already a clear case bully, a character who tortures someone they know CAN fight back but is too kind to hurt them is just outright vile.

Even the times the male is just a chicken, it gets kinda monotonous seeing this girl as some terrifying sociopath that no one's willing to defy. I think it's one of the things I found insufferable about Sonic X and Archie Amy after a while, with even her closest friends and even some of the most fearsome villains simpering and intimidated by her cause she'd randomly turn into a nasty mental patient on them at the drop of a pin. 'Oh but it's funny cause it's a little girl'. Yeah, maybe the first couple of times. After a very short while, the characterisation more or less plays like an Invincible Villain.

 

Oh another one, I'm not big on character breaking humour, especially the whole 'even the nice guy's mean to the Butt Monkey' joke. It works if it has some sort of relevance to the plot or their development (eg. a Not So Above It All moment) but just seeing the character randomly change for the sake of a gag makes it hard to endear to their normal characterisation, especially since it usually means they'll also never face repercussions for it. Family Guy set it off in spades (probably a key reason everyone hates Lois' guts now), before more or less just rolling with it and making everyone a genuine asshole, which I could actually argue is more tolerable since it plays into the story. I wasn't big on those 'even Cream and Cosmo bully Knuckles' gags in Sonic X either. They're nice and just and pure....except when that gag happens, then they're a total prick. Riiight.

Edited August 11, 2015 by E-122-Psi

[Dr. Crusher]

We're talking purely within the works and not the responses to said works, right? (Eg: not including examples like Hate Dumb, It's Popular Now It Sucks, etc?)

Well I'll get the obvious ones out of the way. These ones probably speak for themselves.

Double Standards
Abuse Is Okay When It's Female On Male  (Abuse is still abuse, you know.)
Villain Decay
Idiot Ball
Conflict Ball
Jerkass Ball
Good is Dumb
Author Tract
Designated Hero
Designated Villain
Designated Monkey (I'm not usually fond of the one character constantly being mistreated by everybody anyway, but it's even worse when it's a character that doesn't even do anything that bad.)
Victim Blaming
Black and Grey Morality
Black and Black Morality

Now for the rest:

Poor Communication Kills - I don't think a plot's progression should rely solely on the characters refusing to explain things all of a sudden, especially if it's only used to make the villain seem smarter than they actually are.

What Measure is a Non-Badass? - The way I see it, if a character did something cool, they did something cool, and the character having a gentle disposition compared to another character shouldn't somehow invalidate that.

Tsundere - This is rather irritating. Mildly annoying at best, flat out abusive at worst.

Yandere - This is also irritating. Doubly so when you're a Fluttershy fan, and everyone insists that she's an example of this when she really isn't.

Anti-Sue/Jerk Sue/Villain Sue - Out of all the Mary Sue and Gary Stu types, these types annoy me the most. At least the other types will have a good chance of having a civil enough personality. These guys don't even have that going for them. They're just a bunch of smug pillocks who rarely if ever get punished for their behaviour.

Bond Villain Stupidity - Mainly when the villain is really bad about this.

Any type of scenario involving the good guys being ineffective and/or having consistently miserable lives - Even more annoying if this is supposed to make the work "realistic".

Most examples of Good is Not Nice - Nine times out of ten, I'm going to get fed up with this character fast, and I'll be wondering what the other characters see in them.

Ron the Death Eater - Painting the villain's actions in an unquestionably good light can be pretty bad in it's own right, but I think demonizing the hero's actions can be even worse.

Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is For Kids! - Bah.

All Just a Dream - With few exceptions, this conclusion can feel very unsatisfying for a multitude of reasons.

Straw Feminist - That portrayal ain't right.

Straw Nihilist - It's alright sometimes, but usually it feels as though it's only there to make the villain sound more edgy.

Excessive use of Break the Cutie - When it happens to the character all the time, it starts to get depressing, and not even in the way you were hoping for.

Real is Brown - My room is white.

Unprovoked Pervert Payback - I'm not even a real fan of any particular anime, yet somehow it feels as though I've still seen this one too many times already.

Cassandra Truth/The Complainer is Always Wrong - Mostly if it's the same character who gets put on the receiving end of this, even moreso if the other characters have no reason to immediately dismiss their claims since they've been right in the past.

Gross Out Show/Sadist Show - Nothing personal, just not for me most of the time.

But you know what I find to be a major nuisance?

Foe Yay.

Or more accurately, fans seeing way more Foe Yay than what is there, if there even is any to begin with.

It does annoy me a little to get the impression that an antagonist can't just be obsessed with the protagonist's demise and/or ruination without other people reading between the lines and treating it as the former's way of coming to terms with their secret libido for the latter. There are plenty of villains who may genuinely have romantic and/or sexual feelings for who they fight and plot against, blatant or not, but sometimes villains act crazy and unreasonable about the heroes because... they're crazy and unreasonable. They're villains. They act crazy and unreasonable because they're villains. They act crazy and unreasonable about many things in life because they're villains. Such is often the way of being what a villain is. It's why they are almost ubiquitously presented in the role of the antagonist in the story in the first place. Well, there are some exceptions, like many anti-villains, but still.

I'll admit that part of my personal grievance with this trope is because I can tell that my own MLP:FiM fanfic would inevitably be looked at with Foe Yay goggles when it comes to my fancharacter (yeah yeah, I know, simmer down), even though there isn't actually meant to be any at all. Further elaboration is in the spoiler tag below.

So basically, the villain of my story that goes by the fairly simple name of Dr. Razor Dominic is a bit of a Judge Claude Frollo type, in that he thinks he's totally the good guy with a good cause despite clearly being the mastermind behind many horrible crimes. Now the guy himself is actually pretty stoic and softspoken for mad scientist standards, and it's not even that much of a mask since he really is like that inside and out, even when he's all alone. (Think Joh Fredersen from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.)

But it's clear from the way other characters talk about him - and eventually, what we get to see for ourselves - that he's incredibly twisted. For instance, when the Mane Six finally get to infiltrate his nightmarish factory-riddled island (unbeknownest to them however, this isn't the final stop, the actual main hideout that Razor plots within is a lot more deceptively serene-looking), his fixation with them - as well as the rest of Equestria's citizens good or bad - displays itself very prominently. Plushies of the Mane Six being used for target practice, like in Sonic Adventure 1's Final Egg. Robots constantly shooting at targets with the faces of the princesses on them, as well as the faces of characters like Discord and Chrysalis. Rows upon rows of television screens that show scratchy recordings of the ponies' previous adventures, often stopping and looping when a pony says something that Razor considers false. All this and more, you get the idea. It's meant to be an example of showing not only how much Razor knows about them and their adventures, but also how far Razor's hatred for them really goes, in contrast to how unfailingly calm the man himself is at all times (albeit not in the typical affable and overly polite way, but rather in a more indifferent and naturally relaxed way). It also relates to the delusion of his aforementioned cause, but that's another story.

Anyway, the point is, I know that if certain folk were to look at this sort of scene for themselves, they would inevitably come to the conclusion that Razor wants to sleep with the ponies. "I hope Twilight-senpai notices me" would be the chant of the week, I'm sure, and I'd probably run out of fingers to count with after hearing all the comments regarding Razor wanting to keep Rarity all to himself and away from Spike. To be fair though, I wouldn't get legitimately frustrated about such comments or jokes, it would only be a mild Marvin the Martian fist-shaking routine.

Another common one that I often find annoying is the overuse of the Deadpan Snarker archetype. As in, when EVERYONE is an example of such, even when it doesn't make sense for how the character's personality usually works. Perhaps predictably, given what the title character is like, many Sonic fanfics are guilty of this, sometimes to baffling levels. For a hypothetical example, why is Metal Sonic of all people suddenly acting all sassy? I get that he's based on Sonic, but this is still Metal we're talking about. If there's any character in the series who is the most likely to have no sense of humor whatsoever, it's him. In fact, one of the more minor reasons for why I chose to give my MLP villain fancharacter such a no-nonsense personality was for the sake of defying the "why does every character suddenly think they're witty" setup that appears to be so prevalent in fanfics.

And finally: True Art Is Angsty. I can get hit with this pretty easily, so needless to say, official works and fanworks in which everything is cynical, and everything is bleak, and everything is hopeless, do not have a great track record of catching my personal investment other than making me "invested" in the decision to play a Crash Bandicoot game immediately afterwards.

 

[Yoko/葉子]

I'd have to go with, as I like to call it, traumatic death equals sexual complex. I don't see it often, but it still annoys me, we had Humbert lose his love as a kid and magically became a pedophile in Lolita. We had Shinji get like this with his mother in Eva for the sake of Freudian crap that is not true.

I have lost people important to me and I do miss them to the point of writing about them in my work at times, but not once did I feel an attraction of that nature towards them,

I'd also like a break from the use of abusive fathers. While there are some bad dads out there, doing it in media too much promotes a sexist stereotype for the sake of being relateable.

Lastly. I'd say any form of racist, sexist, religion-based insults and sexuality-based prejudicial humor in adult comedies. I know they are aimed at older audiences, but it is done so much that it implies an older people love discrimination as comedy vibe and thus they have long since made their own stereotype. There's dozens of other topics of humor without being a bully, it's not that hard to do.

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

I just thought of another one...device accidentally does something completely different from, and much more impressive and complicated than, what it's actually supposed to do.

(I just watched Equestria Girls: Friendship Games, by the way  )