this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
114 points (94.5% liked)

Movies and TV Shows

2114 readers
62 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]
114
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]
207 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] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Villains who vocally support some unconventional ideology but whose evil acts are actually not related to that ideology. For example, I like Bioshock but the moral lesson which the game tried to teach about libertarianism is undermined by the fact that any place where the entire population used drugs that turned them into homicidal maniacs would have problems.

(One could say "Everyone used the drugs because of libertarianism." I don't find that convincing. I think the drugs could have been incorporated equally plausibly into a story about any ideology.)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's been a minute, but I thought the audio logs showed that it was just people fucking each other over and doing morally shitty things WAY before everyone went crazy.

Also, the lack of regulation allowed the drugs to be created and allowed it to be distributed to the level that it was. You could come up with different methods for the same disaster, but that doesn't undermine it. It still caused this disaster and was seemingly preventable.

Also, you could argue that absolutism is the real evil. I think in the second one they tackle socialism. I didn't play much of it and the timeline in comparison to the original confuses me. Buy it kinda implies that going to the extreme with no safeguards is problematic.

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

The second one was even worse, IMO. It was so heavy-handed with its moral lessons. I suppose it's not entirely unrealistic since many IRL socialist movements ended up horrible to the point of absurdity, but I was still rolling my eyes often when I played that game.

I agree that a good lesson would be that absolute certainty in any ideology is what leads to disaster but my impression is that that lesson is more sophisticated than what the developers had in mind.