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cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
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any kind of bioconservative/biotrad reactionary anti-transhumanism. Radical bodily autonomy is based and cool and that holds whether you want to be a fish, grow boobs, live forever, or encode your conscious mind in to the magnetic flux of Jupiter's orbital system. I don't care that you lack the imagination and joy for life to live forever. I don't care that you think inhabiting a giant metal deathrobot would be self-alienating. I don't care that you think merging your flesh with six billion other people to form a new gestalt god mind is icky. Work out your own issues, we're going to be over here disfugirng The face of man and woman and having a great time
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basically all military sci fi. If i never read another book that is just some fascist freak masturbating about murdering immigrants or being the victim of the imperialism they gleefully inflict on others it will be too soon.
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also if you try to give me a book/show/game where the ai's are evil and want to destroy and enslave all humans but they're only like that because that's literally the only relationship you can imagine between people with any kind of power disparity i will scream until i pass out. A single, high pitched wail. Dogs will bark and a wine glass will shatter in close up to emphasize how loud it is. I will literally turn purple and fall over.
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I think in the OG version of the game, cyberpsychosis was canonically all the fucking ads loaded into your cyberware morphing into malware that drives you insane the more stuff you install
drives you insane the more stuff you install
This is smartphones basically
That is all just space liberalism. Transhumanism is rad. Liberals can't accept it because it would mean they aren't the best they could be. Same for the other stuff. Admitting AI would make better decisions would be admitting the current ruling class isn't the best.
Counterpoint though. Capitalism is effectively and AI and it is wildly hostile.
Socialism is also effectively an ai and is not wildly hostile. Beep boop! Checkmate meatsack! Boop beep!
cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
now my guy is a flaming 
but he does seem to give that choice to the dm. Within universe there's at least three explanations for cyberpsychosis;
AI takeover (there's also the idea that the AIs beyond the Blackwall are actually demons and that a secret cabal has been upholding the wall since Babylonian times), planned obsolescence by the companies(checks out tbh), and then the one that you referenced, which is loss of humanity and not seeing other people as humans anymore.
overall it's just a balancing mechanic, Shadowrun does it better though 
At the end of the day you have a stat called humanity and you lose it when you get cyberware. He could have dropped it entirely. He could have come up with a different balance point - you've got limited neural thruoughput and too much ware can cause an overload resulting in seizures, or you run an escalating risk of software incompatibility, or just create a totally arbitrary cyberware capacity stat. But he's kept humanity, he's kept cyberware mechanically reducing your empathy, and he's kept cyberpsychosis as something represented in core game mechanics. He's had every chance to stop over many decades and many editions. I've heard his attempts to exuse this, and attempts made on his behalf, and i reject them all. He could have removed humanity. He could have removed cyperpsychosis as a game mechanic. He could have found a different way to balance the mechanical benefits of cyberware. He could, but he has not. "Wheelchairs make you evil" remains one of the most fundamental and recognizable features of the setting.
Fix your shit Mike!
My least favorite trope is more of a universal one
It's the "If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we're no better than them" trope and it's been pissing me off since I was five years old
Like, it's one thing to have a character who is extremely optimistic about rehabilitation and redemption, it's another one entirely to just pull the old "We'll figure out a better way" and the better way is an absolute pulled-it-out-of-my-ass thing that only happened because otherwise the hero is fucked
To piggyback on your first point: when the hero witnesses the evil bad guy do something personal to them and they still refuse to kill them and then the bad guy tries to stab them in the back and dies by mishap.
Example: bad guy just triggered the Innocence Bomb and blew up seventy orphanages of kids with cockney accents. He then stabs the loveable side kick/mentor. Hero screams in slow motion. Cradles their dying friend. Swears vengeance. Hero fights the bad guy. Epic swords and guns. Gains the upper hand. Has a knife to the throat, a gun to the head, and is standing on both of the bad guy's balls. Hero says "this isn't what Comedic Uncle Mentor would have wanted me to do." Hero lets the bad guy live. Hero turns around. Bad guy leaps up with a poisoned Doom Blade of Death, the same one he used to kill the hero's godparents in the flashback or intro! Bad guy slips on a skateboard and falls backwards over a rail into the giant magma-acid pit-reactor.
I hate that shit.
I honestly think that is part of a general psy op to discourage the poors from getting revenge on thr people that have wronged them as capitalism is based on wronging the poors. Pretty much every society had Norms around not harming your social superiors. We just try to hide it so it feels weird.
Honestly I can kinda see it. Even if it's not a psy op it seems that there is a bias against full revolution in a lot of media. Like the authors are afraid they won't get published if they go too far.
That can be expanded to any "the hero nobly denies doing something 'unethical' to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing" situation, I think.
A lot of YA fiction seems to take that route. Then the kids who read it grow up and turn into adults who cry about the unfairness of Marie Antoinette getting owned.
One of the reasons i liked Enders Game as a weird outsider kid was that Ender, the weird outsider kid, just straight up killed his bullies and then they never bullied him again and I thought that was a very sensible way to handle matters compared to the saccharine bullshit in the other kids books i was reading.
Legend of Korra. Killmonger. Idk, doz2ns of others.
Sleeping Beauty is the only good Disney Movie because Maleficent's entire motivation is that she has the power to hurt people and she has fun doing it. There's no tragic history or grievance or any shit like that,s he's n
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there's intrigue like "oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!" it's just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.
Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that's either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.
Any representation of feudal ruling classes. Maybe I'm overdoing it with the class hatred a bit, but I can't watch nobles cavorting around and not feel an instinctive revulsion. It's even worse when, in fantasy, we're required to care about the machinations of court intrigues as if that's a real form of politics. One thing I do like about many standard fantasy settings, like that of Pathfinder, therefore is that they usually have a modern conception of class and an abundance of republics; especially the whole idea of adventurers as individuals outside of society but still integral to it has a lot of potential I feel. Basically, I just don't want any more fantasy stories about good kings and evil kings.
They can't even have gentry-on-aristocracy violence. We have to care about some shitty inbred royal family.
Exactly! I think part of it is a, in my view, mistaken historical realism where authors think fantasy should be based on the middle ages when, in reality, the better part of our modern fantasy genre derives from post-1600 literature. Like, the rise of the bourgeoisie and decline of feudalism is the primary social context for all of this, I think.
I have derailed a few DnD sessions by refusing to save nobility. Like nah, fuckem. I'll trade a prince to an evil god for spider powers too. Where do I sign?
One of the things l like about wuxia is that the good guys are mostly doctors, monks, cops, and random dorks and if there are any nobles they're usually bad guys. And the good guy cop is often an anti-corruption cop going after corrupt government officials or corrupt cops or corrupt nobles.
restoring the "right" monarchy
Giving nobles magic powers. Especially when people born as commoners get elevated in class due to having magic ability or something. Endorsing the ruling class as being better than everyone else inherently and therefore having a right to rule over them sucks and reinforces meritocratic ideas in the reader.
Possible exception is, when the magic isn't inherent but the nobles hoard the recources neccessary to perfofm it.
The ludicrous notion that machine and biological intelligences are doomed to be locked in a mutual extermination war while also having no needs in common. They have lots of needs in common. Space, energy, tolerable temperature ranges, many of the same raw materials such as water and minerals and metals. They'd also have a lot of the same senses and require similar rationales for understanding how to navigate reality, and would even require an intuitive and abstract stimulus analysis, which we usually feel as emotions to guide our actions.
The "us or them" shit just smacks of manifest destiny horseshit
I sincerely think it's because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world. The idea that robots might show up and be like "oh cool! Meat people! We didn't even know people could be meat! That's so cool! What's it like being meat?" Isn't something they can fathom because to them the only reason anyone would go anywhere is to rob abd murder whoever they find when they get there. They're also brainpoisoned to think that their civilization of robbery and murder and genocide exists at the end of history and is the best possible kind of civiliziation, which means that any other civilization would either try to conquer them, or be conquered by them, and those are the only possible relationships that can exist.
This is why Riker is such a great character. Riker gets up and is like "i reject this notion that we ust be conqueruers or victims! There is another way! We can be lovers!". Boldly cumming where no human has come before! (Fuck off volcel pigs riker has diplomatic cummunity!)
He’s secretly the last descendant of Eldinglad which is why he is so good at fighting and morally upstanding.
This group of evil human bandits speak with a working class accent.
The main important city is basically just a giant castle. I guess the workers sleep in tents. Who knows, they don’t feature in the story anyway except as brothel wenches.
Killing hundreds of grunts but leaving the big bad alive because the heroes are better than this. Pure propagandistic brain rot that I'm sure most creators don't even know why they do it.
I’m looking at you, Avatar The Last Airbender
Spend the finale rightfully knocking Fire Nation airships out of the sky, killing everyone onboard, only to let Ozai live.
And that’s after Aang went fishing around for anyone that would tell him it was okay to spare Ozai because literally everyone around him including his past lives were like “No man you really gotta kill this guy”
In sci-fi no one ever acknowledges that strapping a faster-than-light engine to an asteroid would be a very simple and effective weapon for destroying planets. I guess this is an anti-trope since it's never used, but that seems like the logical use for warp drives in sci-fi. It's an easy analogy for mutually assured destruction
Any time it's not super well explained, I just always assume FTL engines are utilizing some method of spacial distortion rather than actually accelerating an object to such speeds. Like I kind of feel like if you plot a course and there's a planet in between you and your target coordinate you'll just most likely go "through" it via kinda going around it through spacial fuckery
The Expanse had the belters launch asteroids to effectively nuke parts of earth
There are stories that use it. The term "relativistic kill vehicle" gets used sometimes. Spin a rock up to a good fraction of c then delete a whole planet. Really depends on what the writer wants to do, though. Three Body Problem is the most recent famous example of "ftl big gun." Thing. Star wars has done it a bunch of times. One of the old comics had a star destroyer that fired planet cracker torpedoes through hyperspace. The ancient Lensman series has had every kind of variation of "strap ftl drive to object" you could imagine.wh40k orks hollow out asteroids, fit them with warp drives, then fire them at the next star system they want to invade. They crash the entire asteroid, or moon, in to the target planet as their invasion ship.
It’s a divisivr movie , but that exact scene in The Last Jedi fucking rocks
In practical terms there's very little reason to destroy an entire planet. It's complete overkill. You can decimate the population of a planet but things like farmland and living biospheres are in short supply in the cosmos, sublight asteroid drops do the job just fine and you can just wait for the dust to settle and sift through the ruins for valuables
The amount of SA that just gets shoehorned into SF and Fantasy is ridiculous.
- Unnecessarily horny and/or going into detail about SA.
Yes, I'm looking at you Ann McCafferey and whoever the fuck wrote The Reality Dysfunction series.
Runner up.
- Shoehorning in a romantic relationship where it feels incredibly out of place for the narrative and the established character interactions.
"Secret cabal that controls the world from the shadows" is just The Protocols of the Elders of Zion horseshit.
Totally open cabals that control the world from those nice mansions in the ritzy part of town with all the guards has been right there all along!
Our intrepid hero has joined the plucky rebellion! The rebels are a ragtag group of the downtrodden and the oppressed, fighting against the tyranny of the current leadership (but don't you dare give them any actual political ideology as a basis, they need to be generally "Rebels"). They don't seem to have concrete plans, but they talk a lot about change and fighting for the people
Uh oh! Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader's soldiers. They're shocked! How could they do this? Don't they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would've done the same to them
Oh no! Our intrepid hero was there for the deposing of the tyrant. The tyrant was executed by the rebel leader and assumes control, then immediately turns into the McCarthyist nightmare of Stalin. Now our hero has to save the kingdom from the rebels, who have turned evil by their taste of power!
Basically fucking hate how rebellion and rebels are portrayed in media. It's almost like a psy op how often rebellions are thinly veiled anticommunist propaganda, and how rebels are often portrayed as being as bad or worse as the current tyrant, they just hide it better
Just off the dome I can think of the Avatar series multiple times, Bioshock Infinite, and the Hunger Games series but I know it's basically ubiquitous
I've grown more and more to hate "mass mind control" type story beats, especially when the main character(s) are immune to it because they're 'special'.
Like, whenever there's some kind of special frequency sound or TV image or whatever, that being exposed to turns people completely into automatons... basically the notion that human will can be completely stripped away, that 'the plebs' have no real autonomy and can be easily hypnotized, by special scifi contrivance in fiction or by '''charismatic leaders''' IRL, which is a cornerstone of the liberal non-understanding of the history of both fascism and socialism. Hitler was just an extremely charismatic speaker who made everyone turn evil for no reason and definitely not for the financial benefit of the capitalist class, and the people who lived under communism didn't rebel because they were just brainwashed into accepting their (what must have been) obviously miserable conditions.
The main example I'm thinking of is the first Kingsman film, which has a lot of other reactionary brainworms too, but the idea of a sound that turns everyone into uncontrolled rage zombies that attack anyone they see for no reason, and the villain is a billionaire who wants to reduce the human population so only his fellow billionaires and 'elites' will repopulate the Earth - and the only person who can stop him is an avatar of the most ludicrous 'British gentleman' lifestyle, as if the Tory peers that would undoubtedly make up this organization, not to mention the fucking royal family, wouldn't be the first people into the billionaire bunker.
Thinking more about it, it's pure projection - only the US ever engaged in MK Ultra 'mind controlled supersoldier' stuff, and in fact real mind control would be able to create the greatest possible capitalist dream: workers that work to their absolute limit and never complain or fight back. Capitalist media's projection of it onto their enemies is the most like, Freudian-libidinal morbid fascination type shit.
The monarchy being good.
"we must restore the beautiful pure good monarchy that has been replaced by the evil conniving regent" aka the plot of dishonored
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Other lifeforms in the universe being basically humans with a bright shade of paint thrown on them.
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Monogender lifeforms clearly made for fan-service and little more.
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White guys that sound like Nolan North somehow still being the focus of the entire fucking galaxy.
Basically, if Mass Effect did it, I'm fucking sick of it.
The mentor/parent figure has to die for the protag to prove that they're self-actualized or whatever. Sometimes I can point out who's going to bite it as soon as the first few scenes of the book/movie/game and it makes me want to stop reading/watching/playing, and then if I keep going anyway I regret it when it turns out I was right.
Honestly the worst has to be the way moral goodness and genetics are the same thing.
It's not limited to sci-fi/fantasy, but anything around monogamy, love triangles, heteronormativity.
If humans on earth today can form a wide variety of relationships other than a man + woman nuclear family, so can aliens and such living in completely different cultures.
"I love Alex and Bryan how can I choose just one??" You don't have to. Stop it.
I'd like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren't medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.
Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there's plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.
I'll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there's an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)
It feels like any sort of "how do we run an information-age society on magic" is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.