As I age a few tropes have increasingly become pet peeves. Sometimes when they’re employed it’s difficult or impossible for me to enjoy a fictional book, TV show, or movie.
Some of mine:
Conscious victim can’t move but can still breathe
Selective retrograde amnesia
Dead wife motivates man
I’ll elaborate in a comment.
What are your pet peeve literary devices?
1) Conscious victim can’t move but can still breathe: This is my worst offender. The diaphragm is a skeletal muscle, like all the other ones you move voluntarily. There is no drug you can give someone to paralyze them while alert but still allow them to breathe without a ventilator. Paralytics are in fact often given so patients don’t fight the ventilator. As an alternate mechanism, if you have a spinal cord injury that is high enough to paralyze from the arms down, you’ve usually also affected the diaphragm neurons and are at high risk of respiratory arrest. There’s no plausible mechanism by which the diaphragm is still working great while the rest of the body is paralyzed.
2) Selective retrograde amnesia: The way it’s often written — selective memory loss just for certain things in the past — is just not how it works in reality (with some exceptions for dissociative trauma). I’m willing to do some suspension of disbelief, but I stopped watching a series when it was a persistent plot device.
3) Dead or kidnapped wife (aka women in refrigerator): the male protagonist’s wife (or sometimes daughter or mom) dies or is abducted just to give him motivation and/or justification. We usually don’t learn much about her, but she’s beautiful and there’s typically slo-mo sunlit smiles and sheets involved. In one recent movie, the wife dies early with almost no development. Each time she popped up after that my spouse and I kept asking “are we going to learn more about her NOW”? Nope, she just did helpful things like put her imaginary hand on his shoulder and say “you need to sleep”. If she’s a well-developed character that is given agency, I don’t mind so much.
Dead mother to elicit sympathy for child characters. Starting with kids movies - Bambi, Nemo, etc…
Car crashes that result in huge explosions (when the car is not depicted as being loaded with explosives).
Car crashes that result in cars jumping as if they went up a ramp. The original CHiPs was particularly egregious for this.
Car license plates that have impossible combinations of letters, numbers, and base plate design (including temporal impossibilities).
Noise (from spaceships, weapons, etc.) in space.
Obvious product placement / embedded advertising.
The protagonist who can beat up 10 people at the same time.
The open unmetered parking space right in front of the building in a major metro area.
The man pretends to be poor, lies to woman, woman falls in love with him, he reveals he is one of the richest men in the world.
And she’s angry at him for lying instead of rejoicing with happiness.
See, I get more pissed off when she isn’t mad that he’s been such a great liar that she believed everything he said while he was manipulating her and obviously didn’t trust her motives.
Or the villains who get into fights but are completely inept.
Descriptions of such villains that exaggerate their capabilities (“only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise”).
They have to be well trained assassins. It would look terrible if the hero beat up Marty from Queens.
In all fairness, if it’s Reacher, it’s believable.
“Based on a true story.”
I’m sick to death of everything ending up being part of a government conspiracy.
As a software engineer, I want to yell at the screen every time a bright young hacker is shown cracking a password and breaking into a highly secure system within minutes. That is not how it works in real life!
We call this the NCIS Effect—someone zooms into an image and it gets clearer and less pixelated—IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!!! If a license plate is blurry in wide view, it’s not going to get sharper if you zoom in! Annoying.
Victimizing children to create high drama.
Police cars hitting their siren and turning their light bar on upon arrival at a crime scene. (ok, the light bar part is ok for traffic or crowd control type situations)
Police officers reading people their Miranda rights immediately upon arrest or detention.
I have a problem with some Disney movies. A certain “cold” movie, and one of my granddaughter’s favorites, had parents lying to daughters to keep them apart and then one runs off with a total stranger, believing she is in love.
Though to be fair, that movie did express skepticism at the idea of love at first sight (“ Wait. You got engaged to someone you just met that day ?”), which was an improvement over earlier Disney films (other than beauty and the beast, where time, a library and character play important roles).