Go to 1:48 to miss all the sales stuff. Jenna can have strong language, so if that bothers you, don't watch 
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Worst tropes in sci fi - for any sci fi writers...
- Thread starter RK Wallis
- Start date
- Status
Straight talking and telling it like it is. Her comic timing is excellent too. Is she a writer or a teacher or both?
- Thread starter
- #6
more a self-published writer - I read about 60% of The Saviour's Champion (her latest release), and man there are some funny scenes, but when I realised it was just The Bachelor in a fantasy setting, I just wasn't interested anymore. Despite that, she's full of fun and great advice
Robert M Derry
Basic
Good video. Although I'm not sure that these are tropes. I think they're just 10 hallmarks of bad Sci-fi writing!
Mythobeast
just some guy, you know?
Hey, everyone. I'm in the mood to rant. Ignore at your leisure, but I figured it would make good conversation fodder.
#1 is a variation of Really Was Born Yesterday . Her commentary makes me wonder if statutory rape applies to fresh clones.
#2 is Planet of Hats. It's hard to get around when the characters only interact with a sub-section of the culture. Another problem with avoiding it is what we call Out-group homogenity bias. Simply put, for anything that's less than an entire series, we either see the stark differences, or we see something that is indistinguishable from humans, and therefore dull.
#3 isn't a trope, it's a reading preference. If you over-describe the tech, you marginalize part of your audience. If you under describe your tech, then you aren't writing science fiction. Star Wars is a perfect example where they don't actually describe any tech, so it might as well be magic. It looks like scifi, but really it's space opera. That said, sci-fi in general has the problem where if you tell instead of show, it's too telly. If you show instead of telling, then it's an action sequence, and that turns off another sub-set. There's no winning.
#4 is the inverse of #3. Also not a trope. Bad science ruins more scifi for me than anything else. Compare Armageddon to Deep Impact. Armageddon was a science-free beer commercial, whereas Deep Impact was reasonably accurate, but also comparatively less exciting.
#5 would be Wise Beyond Their Years if it were a single instance, but is a blatant ploy for a younger audience in cases where the entire crew is that way. This was the first clue for me that Another Life was garbage, and then they went overboard on #4.
#6 can be covered by The Bechdel Test. Sometimes I add bits into my writing specifically so that it'll pass the Bechdel Test. Also not a trope.
#7 is just plain lazy writing, also not a trope. We've all seen Middle Earth clones, too.
#8 is like #6 in that it's an artifact of human pathology. We can't figure out why aliens don't show themselves to earthlings, either, because that's what we would do. The true point of the Prime Directive is to get across the idea that being able to traverse space and blow up entire planets doesn't actually make us better than other cultures, and we certainly shouldn't be trying to "fix" them. You can call them colonialists or missionaries, but it all comes down to the same thing.
#9 is apparently her personal pet peeve. It's an archetype, which I suppose is a form of trope, or maybe trope cluster. Trope cluster archetypes are sets of characteristics that can be mixed and matched. The classic hero, the anti-hero, the reluctant hero, the sympathetic villian, etc. She just feels that this form of anti-hero is overused.
#10 is another fun observation on human psychology. Personally, I call it the lizard-tit syndrome. I'm not going to argue about whether an audience can find a non-human sexy if it doesn't have secondary sexual characteristics, but here's the problem. You have two aliens, one male, one female. If you don't put female characteristics on one of them, then human audiences will think that they're both male. Complaining about human nature when you're trying to produce entertainment is about as useful as complaining about the weather when you're trying to fly a plane.
#1 is a variation of Really Was Born Yesterday . Her commentary makes me wonder if statutory rape applies to fresh clones.
#2 is Planet of Hats. It's hard to get around when the characters only interact with a sub-section of the culture. Another problem with avoiding it is what we call Out-group homogenity bias. Simply put, for anything that's less than an entire series, we either see the stark differences, or we see something that is indistinguishable from humans, and therefore dull.
#3 isn't a trope, it's a reading preference. If you over-describe the tech, you marginalize part of your audience. If you under describe your tech, then you aren't writing science fiction. Star Wars is a perfect example where they don't actually describe any tech, so it might as well be magic. It looks like scifi, but really it's space opera. That said, sci-fi in general has the problem where if you tell instead of show, it's too telly. If you show instead of telling, then it's an action sequence, and that turns off another sub-set. There's no winning.
#4 is the inverse of #3. Also not a trope. Bad science ruins more scifi for me than anything else. Compare Armageddon to Deep Impact. Armageddon was a science-free beer commercial, whereas Deep Impact was reasonably accurate, but also comparatively less exciting.
#5 would be Wise Beyond Their Years if it were a single instance, but is a blatant ploy for a younger audience in cases where the entire crew is that way. This was the first clue for me that Another Life was garbage, and then they went overboard on #4.
#6 can be covered by The Bechdel Test. Sometimes I add bits into my writing specifically so that it'll pass the Bechdel Test. Also not a trope.
#7 is just plain lazy writing, also not a trope. We've all seen Middle Earth clones, too.
#8 is like #6 in that it's an artifact of human pathology. We can't figure out why aliens don't show themselves to earthlings, either, because that's what we would do. The true point of the Prime Directive is to get across the idea that being able to traverse space and blow up entire planets doesn't actually make us better than other cultures, and we certainly shouldn't be trying to "fix" them. You can call them colonialists or missionaries, but it all comes down to the same thing.
#9 is apparently her personal pet peeve. It's an archetype, which I suppose is a form of trope, or maybe trope cluster. Trope cluster archetypes are sets of characteristics that can be mixed and matched. The classic hero, the anti-hero, the reluctant hero, the sympathetic villian, etc. She just feels that this form of anti-hero is overused.
#10 is another fun observation on human psychology. Personally, I call it the lizard-tit syndrome. I'm not going to argue about whether an audience can find a non-human sexy if it doesn't have secondary sexual characteristics, but here's the problem. You have two aliens, one male, one female. If you don't put female characteristics on one of them, then human audiences will think that they're both male. Complaining about human nature when you're trying to produce entertainment is about as useful as complaining about the weather when you're trying to fly a plane.
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