I hate that one trope where there's an alien or a guy from an isolated tribe that's never been to America, and they come to America and their new American friends show them shopping malls and fast food and the outsider is all "This is amazing! I love America!"
Just once I'd like this trope to be subverted with the alien or whatever spitting out the fast food and saying something like, "Oh god, what is this shit? It's giving me a heart attack!" or they go to a mall and are mortified by the advertising and that they have to slave away to afford any of it.
Are there any tropes you're tired of? They can be as dumb and petty as you want. It's fun to rip on pointless things sometimes.
That movie trope where the parent (usually the dad) is a cold asshole who spends all his time at work but then he learns the true value of family and puts his children first and stops working so much.
If you're a corporate lawyer (everyone in movies seems to be PMC, btw) this could be true but for most parents working so much it takes a toll on family life is not something they do because they're selfish. They do it because that's what they have to do to make ends meet and support the family.
This trope is shaming working class parents for not being rich.
I think that probably comes from the sort of socio-economic background of the writers, who generally come from secure (upper) middle class backgrounds where the idea of "we're already comfortable why do you work 80 hours a week and spend the rest of the time golfing with your boss? you should focus on what's important: me," sort of fits as a naïve complaint that doesn't understand all the toxic, patriarchal brainworms that infest the PMC.
To add onto that point, there's also the way the causes of overwork or workplace stress are also shifted from the realities of an endless grind and toxic environment into the sorts of things that cause writers the most stress: preparing discrete projects on a deadline.
That last point is so true. The most stressful jobs usually don't have strict deadlines. They have a constant sense of urgency and "all hands on deck" to either fix the latest disaster or try to get things back to normal after you fixed it.
And the only solution presented to the problem is an individual one. The protagonist should choose to spend less time at the office, the workers of the enterprise shouldn't stand together to put an end to the toxic grind.
The government collapses, so everyone becomes a violent psychopath who takes what they want from others, rather than working together.
The First Purge is the only movie I've seen that does the opposite. All government services are shut down and laws are suspended on Staten Island for 12 hours as an experiment. Most people just have a big block party and only commit petty crimes like looting and vandalism. It only gets violent when the experiment's organizers send in mercenaries to start shooting everyone to tilt the experiment's results.
Reminds me of that episode of Stranger Things when the Russian scientist guy basically dies saying how much he loves capitalism.
Yeah, it was a huge trope in the 80s' so it makes sense that a show emulating the 80s' would have that.
Stranger things was okay for like the first season, but the third season especially sucks with all it's capitalism deepthroating. Also, the creators of that show are apparently creepy fucks.
Cue the little sister giving glib monologue on why she also love capitalism :cringe:
speaking of stranger things, i never really saw much of the show beyond a few episodes but i absolutely absolutely hate the trope of the main boy meeting a ~girl from out of this world~~ whose feminity becomes apparent when she
Wears a dressand then nerd boy realizes he's liked her the whole time. not entirely sure stranger things played this so on the nose but i saw the scene where eleven wears a dress and the boys are like OMGWOW and i had to dip. suburban boyhood centric shit is so played outafter the 2000s im so tired of watching the seemingly charming idyllic nostalgic setting of teenage boys obsessing over girls with each other and dealing with purberty in suburbia. as a woman from the city ive always been like what do yall want me to do with this. why am i able to know so intimately what the white male suburban experience was like from 1970-the present even though ive never had it
Because all the writers on all the popular shows are white surburbanites lol.
exactly. its so telling too when their nostalgia is specifically 70s/80s/90s focused. like at least linklater gave us early 2000s nostalgic white suburbia. just say ur a boomer and go
People hiding how attractive they are by wearing glasses. I need to wear glasses to see things properly and this one did a number on my self-esteem as a child.
Yeah, glasses are cool as fuck I don't know why they're shat on all the time in old movies
Honestly I have a huge thing for glasses so like....yeah, fuck that trope.
Just once I’d like this trope to be subverted with the alien or whatever spitting out the fast food and saying something like, “Oh god, what is this shit? It’s giving me a heart attack!”
The Masters of the Universe movie did that. He-Man, Teela and Man-at-Arms hop through a dimensional portal and arrive in a small town in America, get fast food and learn, to their horror, that the patty on the hamburger is made from a dead animal. That movie was kinda weird in general, but it's cool that He-Man is canonically vegan. Skeletor's performance was pretty amazing as well in that one.
Just once I’d like this trope to be subverted with
Their culture requires the receiver to share a meal with the person who made the clothes and it becomes a roadtrip through the supply chain. The stranger getting increasingly horrified by the ever more exploitative circumstances.
That's great, I'd love to see the alien in that scenario go like damn bitch, you live like this?
I had european people praise how cheap the bananas are in the US, gee I wonder why they are so cheap.
Troops literally died so that you could enjoy your freedom (to buy cheap bananas), so be grateful you little shit.
"Some people are just inherently superior over other and deserve to have all good things in life. Meanwhile equality is impossible and anyone who fights for it are secretly evil hypocrite who wants to be superior themselves.
Also, equality is just
whitesuperior people genocide, the strong and beautiful would be oppressed while the inferiors and underserving would be in charge".You notice this trope once and you suddenly realizes that like 70-80% of fiction in existence have this trope like some sort of They Live bullshit. Holy shit.
edit: we live in a fascist :society:
Y'all tell me if there's a name for this.
This is usually something that happens in scifi or horror movies. There will be some kind of impending danger, like aliens attacking or zombies or something, but the scientist characters will be utterly unconvinced anything bad will happen. The only person who knows what's going to happen will either be some kind of clearly deranged conspiracy theorist or a cop. No one listens to them until it's too late, then cop and/or conspiracy theorist get to be super heroic and save everyone. Sometimes this person is a scientist too, but they'll be on the fringe and mocked by their colleagues. Bonus points if the cop gets into an argument with a scientist and says something to the effect of "I don't care about your egghead lingo. People's lives are at stake here, goddammit."
In fact, most of the time when a conspiracy theorist is shown on TV or movies, only two things happen: they're correct or they're comic relief.
I haven't seen a specific name for that, but I remember reading an article ranting about that exact trope years ago, though I have no clue where or even when. Maybe it's an old Cracked article, or going even further back maybe something in The Buffalo Beast? I think it may have also gone into how Ghostbusters is an Objectivist anti-regulation screed, unless I'm conflating it with another article.
The Terminal has a great subversion of this trope. All the immigration pigs are just absolutely convinced Hanks' character wants to get in illegally, because he's from a war torn country, and he's like "Bitch I'm here to pay homage to my father and then I'm out."
It's not really a trope I guess, but I hate when a movie/show explains stuff that doesn't actually need to be said. Like a show I watched yesterday felt the need to be like "listen, we both know he's your father!" when it was very clear without being said. If they really needed to say it out loud maybe she could call him dad when she went to see him in the hospital
Lying unnecessarily and making things so much worse. Or the lie is so horribly impossible to fake that the thought of seeing the lair twist for an entire movie makes my stomach hurt.
Also, :maybe-later-kiddo:, what the fuck is up with the word "lie"? All of the variants that I tried to use in the first two sentences too way to long for me to figure out how to spell. I never noticed it until trying to make this comment.
