this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
110 points (95.1% liked)

Movies and TV Shows

2114 readers
33 users here now

A community for entertainment industry news and general discussion about movies and TV shows.

Rules:

  1. Be civil.
  2. Please do not link to pirated content.
  3. No spoilers in the title of submissions. And please use spoiler MarkDown in the body of discussions. This is a courtesy to other users.
  4. Comments solely criticizing headlines and/or journalism will be removed for being off-topic.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
110
What's your pet peeve when it comes to tropes? What bothers you when you see it in a show or a movie? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
198 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter's intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there's the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other's state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like "I'm just going to ignore that second part." I don't even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn't literally impossible and well known why it's impossible for God's sake.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Better yet, don't use an explanation at all!

If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it's no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it's not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don't waste time with useless technobabble!

Slap a "Zephyr FTL Communications" logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn't always need to know how, just what. And show, don't tell.

You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just... have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device "Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As long as they pull a /r/VXJunkies:

Looking for a double-helix transistor to magnify your oblidisk? Want to discuss ballooning algorithms or Dormison's Paradox? Ever wondered about Swedish teutonic logic commands, the Hans-Rodenheim Law of Vectoral Momentum, Fankel readings, Mornington axions, the Armistan Codex, Envels, or the newest breakthroughs in ion insulate module technology?

Or this Technobabble, I'm OK with it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Video is a classic.

The comments going along with it as so good.