Posted on: 11/29/24 06:18PM
SlamJam35 said:
And finally, time travel and multiverse when introduced in stories that were specifically about them to begin with. They break the thread of logic and raise too many questions. Time travel always turns into a headache to follow, and the multiverse effectively canonises any all fanfiction, which may leave the main universe feeling pointless.
Yeah, I'm pretty sick of alternate timelines/universes being so prevalent in pop culture, too. It was fun back when it was something only comic books were doing (and they were running it into the ground by the 2010s themselves) and stories featuring them usually only had one alternate universe alongside the main one, but now everyone is using the premise, and they always use several different universes at once. After the final Spider-Verse movie comes out, I won't mind never seeing alternate universe plotlines ever again, or at least for a few decades.
This is a very minor trope I dislike, but I've never been a fan of pig orcs (porcs?) that are common in Japanese fantasy. Now, most orcs do have some pig-like characteristics like having piggish noses and being omnivorous, but the moment an orc has a pig's head, you've lost me a little. But, I don't dislike this trope nowhere near as much as the first ones I mentioned hating; it's just a minor pet peeve of mine.
For a trope I like, I really like ACTUAL Conan-Inspired barbarians characters. One annoying problem is that while there are a lot of barbarian-style, wander-lusted characters in fiction, they usually are dumb as a sack of hammers and only get by through their immense strength and luck. Conan, while quite strong and mostly focused on the simple things in life, could get quite philosophical, speculative, and thought-provoking if he wanted to, and he defeated most of his enemies with a combination of brains, brawn, and luck. Great examples of well-done barbarians after Conan are Spear from the Primal Cartoon and maybe Guts from Berserk, depending on if you consider him a barbarian.
The "Sword and Sorcery" genre as a whole is pretty fun (though not my favorite cup of tea), but people often just reduce it to "Big strong warrior man save pretty, skimpy-dressed girl from scrawny evil sorcerer" when the original Conan stories were usually much more than that.