The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?

Ah yes, the tropes that must die! I’ve actually written about this one before but it needs updated. I have two and a half that I’d like to talk about.

First there’s the “Character is dead. Surprise character is still alive.” A Few Examples:

Many years ago, I read Jurassic Park before I saw the movie. There’s a mid-point in the story that everyone knows: the T-Rex attacks the jeeps for the first time.

In the book, the narration keeps shifting perspective so that you never see the attack from the person being attacked, but from the eyes of someone else present. Because of this slight of hand, Crichton appears to have killed off four or five people, including the children.

At that point in the book, I thought, “wow, what a brave writer, killing the kids!”

Of course they weren’t dead.

He spent the next fifty or so pages revisiting the scene to explain how just about everyone you thought he’d killed actually lived (except the lawyer).

I was so disappointed.

And…

Fast forward to 2019 and what would turn out to be a very disappointing end to the Skywalker saga. The Rise of Skywalker contained a scene at around the forty minute mark where we believe that Rey has accidentally killed Chewie.

Hey it was the last episode in the series, and Chewie had been killed once in Star Wars canon already (now “legend” and no longer canon) so why not be bold and do that? I was thrilled to see that moment with all its emotional impact on both the audience and Rey. Not two minutes later we learn that was on a different ship. Yep, he was dead, not dead.

I love Chewie, and feel that The Force Awakens was the best presentation of him as a character, but killing him in The Rise of Skywalker would have given so much more weight to the fact that this was truly the end of the journey, that everything was on the line (Esquire agrees).

Worse yet than just not killing a character is if that character turns out to have been the villain in disguise.

That takes us to GoldenEye, the 1995 Jame Bond movie. Sean Bean (You know, Ned Stark) plays 006, working with 007 on a mission. 006 dies. No, he’s not dead. He’s the secret villain.

I know there are many mre examples of this trope, but i’m drawing a blank right now.

One other trope that I wish would die is the “Smartest Character in the Room.” Obviously this can trace itself back to Sherlock Holmes, or probably further.

This has become a staple of American TV crime procedurals. Monk and The Mentalist seemed to pull it off well. Done well, it can be entertaining. I don’t know if Bones fits this category, I wasn’t watching. Castle sometimes fit the description, but was more a clash of cultures.

The one that ruined this trope for me was High Potential. The risk with this type of show is that if the character is going to be smarter than everyone else, the writers need to be also. And the writers failed.

The smart character, Morgan Gillroy, solved a crime at a beach by noting that high tide occurs at the same time every day, and voila, the crime was solved. But that’s so wrong. High tide occurs twice a day, when the moon is at its highest point in the sky, and when it is at the opposite side of the Earth, not quite twelve hours apart. That means that high tide times change about 2-4 minutes every day.

This isn’t obscure science. Any boater, fisher, surfer, or person who lives near a coast, knows this. But the writers didn’t. So the ‘smart’ character didn’t. And no one in the production, set in Malibu, California, probably the most famous surfing location on the west coast, flagged the error.

If they’re making that egregious an error about a field I do know, how many errors have they made where I didn’t know better? Just kill the trope already, and come up with something new, or at least a different trope to exploit.