Worldbuilding

i'm pretty much done with any story about restoring the "correct" monarchy. be a bunch of communes with a defense pact or something like damn

One of the most ruinously widespread propaganda messages is "changing society somewhat is hard and the people that try may have a point but go too far therefore trust in the status quo warriors to set things as good as they can be."

It's in capeshit of course, but it's also pretty much everywhere else, including P R E S T I G E T V trash, showing anyone that isn't a cynical murderfucker as a fool, or worse.

I don't ever need to read another story where the protagonist is seemingly of humble origins but is secretly a VERY SPECIAL person, perhaps even the one FORETOLD BY PROPHECY

If it wasn't a compelling basis for a story, it wouldn't be used so much. But after the first thousand stories like that it's enough already

I hate seeing things like, "the royal court: words are sharper than daggers here and you must be more alert than on any battlefield." I like political intrigue, so I get it. But I'm 90% certain most aristocracy was people with seven toes on each foot from decades of inbreeding going to court to decide which son was going to marry their 13 year old first cousin.

I'd like to see it subverted from a left wing perspective.

Just stay the hell away from time travel. It can be neat and thought provoking when done with enough thought put into it as a central conceit, but more often it's just a narrative ass-pull that causes more problems than it solves.

Basing a fantasy culture off of a real-life culture. Or even worse, basing a fantasy race off of a real-life culture - that's just dehumanization. It's very common, it's very problematic, and it's a remnant of racist 20th century fantasy. The Forgotten Realms has to be destroyed, sorry. Genshin Impact as well.

If you're going to be using a real-life culture, you need to seriously know your stuff and have respect for the culture you're writing about (this is why Liyue is good and Sumeru is racist trash, for instance). I'd say to most people that if you want to use someone else's culture cause it's cool, consider worldbuilding something unique instead and save us all a headache.

There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.

The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero's journey. They can seem boring, but it's because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture's mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero's journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.

The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can't perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.

It's like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn't assume it applies across all time and traditions ("man" used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. "to be," "to go," "to come" are relatively very stable.

I'm tired of The Fall. I get it, everything was great until ~~the Fire Nation attacked~~ ~~Melkor can't hold a tune~~ ~~somebody ate some fruit from a tree you put there you dunce~~ a terrible thing happened and now we're trying to regain our ~~mojo~~ ~~life essence~~ ~~kidnapped princess~~ D E S T I N Y. Similarly, I'm tired of Precursors in science fiction. Cool, you found some ruins from ~~Space Romans~~ an ancient civilization! such wow, what old, so mystery, smol feels.

Both cases would do well to get Historically Materialist.

Period pieces from the 1940s-1960s USA made decades later where amongst a group of white people, only one of them is actually racist and the rest are fairly enlightened (see The Help, for one example). If you were a white American in 1955 and you weren’t a commie, there is a high likelihood you were hella racist. Michael Moore told the story on Chapo where they announced that MLK had been shot at his all-white church and the whole congregation started fucking cheering and celebrating. Most white people back then were very racist and this trope really whitewashes it.

That said, I really like the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars for this reason. Shimmerman is the only white character that is explicitly not racist but he’s also implied to be a leftist if not a commie. The others are either a bit racist or at best indifferent to Avery Brooks’ racial struggles. The cops beat him up, too. Pretty accurate. And maybe this was a throwaway line, but I love how Sisko doesn’t want to go to the 1960s Vegas holodeck program because, as he explains, that time and place wasn’t great for black folks. Don’t know if that was the intention of the writers but it’s kinda true, all the white characters are just loving Vic Fontaine and who atmosphere, completely oblivious to the broader society going on around them.

Honestly, classist elements in plot armor isn't out of pocket. That was my experience reading the Gods of Blood and Powder trilogy (the sequel trilogy to the Powder Mage books). I love McClellan's books, but there were a lot of moments of henchmen being casually slaughtered and it's just like, "plot demands we keep chugging."

Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.

I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.

They attempted this in The Boys but it ended up being a liberal CIA jerk off

I'm just thinking about you what you said about the superheroes. It would be very interesting and make for much more no bite multifaceted characters if they had to deal with the deaths of Innocent bystanders and mourn them or be punished for them accordingly.

Marvel does this a little bit with the snap but I would love to see it more.

That lots of urban fantasy goes by "private investigator and/or cop" as a window into fantastical society. I understand that it is very convenient for exporation and exposition, but like cmon invent something new. Incidentally, lots of time cop/investigator runs into not enough power levels, cya.

It's telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn't acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that's normalized in things like Samurai Jack.

Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they'll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who's acting like how we understand humans.

I feel like I should point out that he does kill humans in season 5, and the show more or less says that not only is he still cool and heroic for doing it, he's actually even more awesome now that it can be shown with blood and everything.

"Secret cabal controlling the world from behind the shadows" traffics in anti-Semitism. The trope doesn't predate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It validates the fascist idea of an enemy being both weak and strong. If the cabal actually control the world, they obviously don't need to hide behind the shadows.

Super villian bad guys could program the protagonist to do bad things but couldn't figure out how to get the protagonist to off themself after doing the villian's dirty work... which winds up with the villian(s) getting thwarted by the protagonist... (Lookin at you Bioshock)

Honorable mention... Everybody who matters knows what the control words are but weren't smart enough to say something like, "Would you kindly, stop breathing", and instead hands you a golf club and says, "Would you kindly, beat me to death".

Bonus one... (its got to have been mentioned by now)... Nobody ever learns anything from the last crisis. I really got into The Expanse, but holy did the constant repeat of "nobody learning from the things that happened last week" start to get exhausting.