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Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

strangehorizons.com

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Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#91

Post by aksss »

jandrese wrote: post #68
koboll wrote: post #58

>30. Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a story that's ostensibly about violence against women being bad. Finally, a perfectly succinct explanation for why I can't stand watching The Handmaid's Tale.

I still say there is very little daylight between The Handmaid's Tale and any random Gor novel. The only difference is in the Gor universe the guys are actually enjoying it.

SO many tv shows are just gore porn. It's horrible when you think how much murder and sexual assault we all witness on a near daily basis via the tv shows we watch. That baggage is being carried around in our head somewhere.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#92

Post by syndacks »

Animats wrote: post #55

Most of these are all plots of successful movies or TV shows. * Creative person is having trouble creating. Creative person meets a muse... Xanadu, the movie. * Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real. About half of Twilight Zone episodes. * An AI gets loose on the Net, but the author doesn't have a clear concept of what it means for software to be "loose on the Net." Terminator * Technology and/or mod…

Terminator was obviously culminating in Judgement Day, but Kyle Reese had something to say about that.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#93

Post by m463 »

Animats wrote: post #60

Of course, all this is because everything has been done. Read Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales". Read one story half way, and ask yourself how it will end. You'll be right. In 1483, there was so little published entertainment that plot twists were unnecessary.

> In 1483, there was so little published entertainment that plot twists were unnecessary.

Well, history repeats itself with the self-published kindle stuff.

Some of the reviews even have a vocabulary, like OP MC (over-powered main character) etc

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#94

Post by olyjohn »

sdwr wrote: post #38
ivraatiems wrote: post #22

If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much. Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror…

The list seems to cover 90% of all sci-fi, and, if you squint a little, 80% of all stories ever written.

I also think you could cover 90% of these just by watching Star Trek.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#95

Post by pallas_athena »

gregmac wrote: post #30

Something that stuck out to me was a side-note: > Note that we do like endings that we didn't expect, as long as they derive naturally from character action. This, to me, is probably the biggest thing that makes me hate a story: The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only t…

>The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we'd expect them to act based on what we've seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.

Bone (the comic) is a masterpiece, but then, in the last pages, we see the main characters make a decision that goes against the last 1000 pages of their development.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#96

Post by tetromino_ »

malfist wrote: post #14

A crazy number of these items seem like incel fan fics. I wonder how many crazy people send in stories about their fantasies?

> A crazy number

I found only two (#27 and #42a). There are several other unpleasant tropes about women in the list, but none of them sound particularly aligned with incel-dom.

For example, #18a seems like a fan fic for a viciously angry man going through a failed marriage or a divorce; and while such a man is a deeply unpleasant person, he by definition - having been married - is not an incel.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#97

Post by iainmerrick »

bsder wrote: post #66
slg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common. A good plot shouldn't be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency. This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen. That was fine a decade or two ag…

> When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled. I disagree wholeheartedly. The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to stick the ending . I'm really trying very hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I'm being generous…

I like slg's reply (most likely somewhere above mine!)

I just want to add: what's an example of something you think is a really good ending, from any book or show or movie from any time?

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#98

Post by rcme »

koboll wrote: post #58

>30. Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a story that's ostensibly about violence against women being bad. Finally, a perfectly succinct explanation for why I can't stand watching The Handmaid's Tale.

The book is much better than the show, but both examine what living in a Christian-facist state would look like. The graphic depictions serve as a warning: “this won’t be fun.” It’s kind of scary how prescient the book is.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#99

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ivraatiems wrote: post #22

If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much. Once you subtract the ones that are either just straight-up wish fulfillment, or otherwise reliant on racist/sexist/ageist stereotypes, a lot of the ideas listed here are still perfectly good ideas for a story. They'd be more than "original" enough to drive an episode of Black Mirror…

>> If you're reading this and thinking "aw damn, my idea is cliche, I'll never get something published!" or similar, don't worry too much.

I don't. I'm thinking "damn, my stories are too weird and nobody will understand what's going on, or why".

There is something to be said bout a good, old-fashioned, cliché (pronounced "clee-chaeye", not "clitch"). I think the best story I ever wrote was about... dragons.

Dragons.

Cliche me now.

Re: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often

#100

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Animats wrote: post #55

Most of these are all plots of successful movies or TV shows. * Creative person is having trouble creating. Creative person meets a muse... Xanadu, the movie. * Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real. About half of Twilight Zone episodes. * An AI gets loose on the Net, but the author doesn't have a clear concept of what it means for software to be "loose on the Net." Terminator * Technology and/or mod…

Well, that's the whole point of that list, innit. They are pointing out the kind of stories that have been done to death, so that people stop doing them to death, already.
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