Small things that really annoy you in media

[Big Miss Steak]

I read those books and assumed the author was satirizing the typical YA stalker love interest, but then I read an interview by her and she's actually a hybristophile. I didn't watch the show because I found it so disappointing.

Thread tax: exactly that. When you consume a piece of media thinking it's satire and you find out the author was being serious.

Yeah the book is shit for a lot of reasons, one of them being that it's clearly meant to be erotic when Joe spies on Beck masturbating or banging another guy. But I did think that the author did a good job of portraying Joe's murders in a believable light.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

1) Helicopter scenes where the pilot is flying left seat.

2) Anyone who uses "....and I" incorrectly. This one is particularly grating because those people think they're being very formal and proper and classy, when in fact they're showing that they do not understand grammar.

 

[skykiii]

Indexing firearms in period pieces.

Hell On Wheels, an otherwise great show, did this constantly, and you just can't unsee it.

Indexing? As in the Government has a database of who owns what gun? Or do you mean something else?

Pointing out the obvious but kid shit in anime. Normal women get introduced in the show and it's just the same as anyone else. A 5 year old girl is introduced and suddenly the fucker is in every scene, always wearing skimpy clothes, there are 500 different figurines of her, 90% the fans of the show have her as their avatar, there are painstakingly hand animated scenes showing off the girl's ass, etc.

Like I'm not retarded dude. It's the exact same as when they put a random gay nigger couple or whatever in western media to try and make people accept that. It is not normal and never will be normal. Actually, maybe it is normal for them and I just don't understand the true and honest jap culture of wanting to fuck little kids. Honestly just nuke the disgusting bughive a 3rd time.

There's so many things that bug me about kids in media (not just anime).

Like, the hell of it is I actually think kids are adorable and a lot of these characters could easily reflect that... but then they... don't.

Some issues I keep running into:

Kids being more sexually active/aware than any realistically would be at that age. Like I remember the movie Kindergarten Cop (an otherwise good movie) having this bit where one of the kindergarten boys was looking up girls' skirts. Keep in mind the title of the movie... this is explicitly a kindergartener.

(Although, there is an aspect of this that might be Kiwi-approved: later on in the movie, the kid's mom talks to the main character because she's worried her boy is going to be gay, as it eventually turned out his father was. Arnie says no he's definitely not because of the looking-up-skirts thing... sooo... a kid who has a gay dad, is showing signs of being a sex pest...)

Another issue I run into--this time often with anime specifically--is what I call the "Nothing But a Cute Smile" syndrome. That's where the cute kid (usually a girl) is there but otherwise doesn't have much of a personality, if any. Literally all she has going for her is being a little kid and thus cute by default.

My "favorite" example of this is Sasami from Tenchi Muyo. In the OVA version at least, she begins actually kind of adorable and implied to be a mischevious little imp.... that's dropped in the third episode (and is never a thing in the TV series) and suddenly she's just always a dutiful little houseworker who never does anything anymore.

Say what you will about Lucky Star's Konata, but she at least had a personality. 90% of anime kids could be replaced with an inanimate object and achieve the same effect.

And this is sort of an extension of the above, but when the kid is too perfect. Sometimes this is fine, but I feel to really stand out as "cute" or "adorable" you have to be a little bit of a goober. I'll remember someone like Clannad's Fuko Ibuki long after Generic Girl 9000 has slipped my mind.

This has been Skykiii's ramble on how to make kids actually cute.

 

[Not an Hero]

Nah, indexing as in keeping the trigger finger on the frame of the weapon as opposed to inside the trigger guard when not actively firing the weapon. Great for on-set safety, but not so great for suspension of disbelief.

 

[Jhonson the Two]

A stupid thing but when the writters put their face on the book. I want to know about the story not you.

 

[AnsemSoD1]

A stupid thing but when the writters put their face on the book. I want to know about the story not you.

Shel Silverstein looks like a soyjak

 

[Oh Sugar]

I hate when writers attempt to replicate early modern English but get the declension wrong for pronouns, like using “thee” when they should have used “thou,” or "thy" when they should have used "thine". Or worse, they just add “-eth” to the end of every few words, regardless of conjugation or part of speech, because they have no idea how early modern English worked and they’re just trying to make it sound archaic. Worse yet is when they throw a present-day slang word into old-fashioned dialogue in a pitiful attempt at humor.

“I verily thinketh that thee are uncool. Thy eye is verily glaringeth at me.”

Any one of those things kills the immersion for me instantly.

 

[skykiii]

I hate when writers attempt to replicate early modern English but get the declension wrong for pronouns, like using “thee” when they should have used “thou,” or "thy" when they should have used "thine". Or worse, they just add “-eth” to the end of every few words, regardless of conjugation or part of speech, because they have no idea how early modern English worked and they’re just trying to make it sound archaic. Worse yet is when they throw a present-day slang word into old-fashioned dialogue in a pitiful attempt at humor.

“I verily thinketh that thee are uncool. Thy eye is verily glaringeth at me.”

Any one of those things kills the immersion for me instantly.

I remember reading somewhere that speaking in "thee" and "thou" and other things we think of as olde English were never really a thing to begin with, but rather we think of it that way because of early typesetting not having all the characters and so sometimes replacing a character like thorn with a letter that looked close enough.

 

[Oh Sugar]

I remember reading somewhere that speaking in "thee" and "thou" and other things we think of as olde English were never really a thing to begin with, but rather we think of it that way because of early typesetting not having all the characters and so sometimes replacing a character like thorn with a letter that looked close enough.

My understanding is the opposite. The Old English letters thorn Þ and eth Ð were pronounced like the "th" sound. When typesetting came around, thorn Þ was frequently replaced with the letter Y because it looked close enough. Thus, "Ye Olde" was never pronounced "Yee" it was always pronounced "The". The modern pronoun "You" and its former alternate form "Ye" were originally pronounced "Thou" and "Thee," but the spelling with the letter Y influenced the shift in pronunciation shift over time. Eventually, the TH letter combination became more popular for rendering the thorn sound.

 

[Not A Bunny]

Anyway, the one that bugs me is when you have a distant sequel and the hero of the original film is now some total loser schmuck and the happy ending was all for nothing.

It's worse than that. The hero of the original film is faced with more or less the same problem, but they're entirely befuddled by it and must rely on the new (and diverse) hero to solve it with minimal to no help from the original hero.

 

[The greater a'tuin]

End credits are too long these days. Older movies would have credits last 3 minutes at most, but in every modern film it takes up 10.

 

[Frankly my dear]

Adding token minority characters to period pieces that are set in in a majorly white country does not look like "natural diversity", it just looks like it was made after early 2010s.

Also just watched a movie and remembered a thing that annos me greatly, which is horses in movies and TV-shows that constantly neigh. Real horses don't do that and we can see the animal is there, it doesn't have to make noise all the time to make it's presense known.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Gunpowder is invented as a hard counter to armor

I assume I was preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to clarify this thing I said. Gunpowder itself isn't invented for armor-piercing. What you actually see with artillery and small arms is a pattern in technology in general that the thing has to be miniaturized over time. You don't go from making small things to big things, you go from big things to small things (which, I kind of feel a lot of fiction misses, bigger is more impressive on a screen). So it's gunpowder to batter down walls in the form of siege artillery, which when you miniaturize a bombard becomes a handgonne or arquebus. Later, you see the same thing with stuff like breech loading where it is practical for artillery before it is practical on the same scale for small arms.

At least in Japan it was a really powerful tool, due to how much absolutely shit their armor quality was. A good shot into a samurai does a lot more damage than any bow. I'd imagine for countries with class based warfare, guns can be absolutely devastating.

Reason Tokugawa confiscated firearms after Sengoku ended. Ashigaru were too big of a threat. Ikko-Ikki (Buddhist peasant republic) was especially frightening (though it was crushed by Nobunaga).

 

[Turquoise]

Media personalities applying their high school French or Spanish to all the other languages. For example, if there's an Asian guy in the news called Jong Jin, they'll call him "Yong Jin" and the J will be pronounced like the French J'adore.

Either pronounce it in American or learn kung fu.

 

[M3xus]

When you consume a piece of media thinking it's satire and you find out the author was being serious.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is guilty of this. People saw the trailers where Jack is ranting about "killing Chaos" and walking away from something while Slipknot or whatever plays and assumed it was a satire of "edgy" protags. Then the interviews came out and the writers were confused because they expected us to take him seriously. Still a really fun game, but the fact we're supposed to take him seriously ironically makes the story harder to take seriously.

Tax: watching period pieces set during a specific time period and you spot clothes that wouldn't have been invented for another few decades (or a century in one egregious case I can't remember the name of). We have all this information at our fingertips for what got worn and when and the costuming department can't even bother to keep things straight?

 

[gay porn is the best porn]

When a story tries to represent fascism but the writer doesn't understand politics so the best thing they can do is make them very authoritarian and racist. I also don't like when writers don't consider the existence of educational dictatorships and so any time a character expresses authoritarian tendencies the writer as to emphasize that they're "literally hitler". There are also different types of fascism such as client state fascism; basically all of these issues are things that I pointed out within the Korra thread.
I'm also not fond of how modern writers are either too focused on the main character (see, steven universe) or lose themselves in the plot so badly that the main character and their relationships become almost irrelevant (see, hazbin hotel).

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I hate when writers attempt to replicate early modern English but get the declension wrong for pronouns, like using “thee” when they should have used “thou,” or "thy" when they should have used "thine". Or worse, they just add “-eth” to the end of every few words, regardless of conjugation or part of speech, because they have no idea how early modern English worked and they’re just trying to make it sound archaic. Worse yet is when they throw a present-day slang word into old-fashioned dialogue in a pitiful attempt at humor.

“I verily thinketh that thee are uncool. Thy eye is verily glaringeth at me.”

Any one of those things kills the immersion for me instantly.

I can never keep straight in mind which word is which, but for those that don't know, the whole thee/thou/you/whatever thing is a case of English having once had (like most languages still do) the informal and formal you. In Spanish, for example, you learn in formal classes that you use "tu" in the presence of people like friends, family and social inferiors, but "usted" in the presence of strangers, social superiors, etc.

So if people are doing this nonsense in fiction, and I'd recommend it, it's quite interesting, it should be done very deliberately around class. Same as how it was super subversive when the Quakers came along that they wouldn't doff their caps to social superiors.

Another bit of nonsense of a similar stripe is polite address like sir and ma'am. We take it for granted, but I mean, we all know there was, at one point, a time when these were actual titles with actual meaning. As that social world faded a sort of politeness inflation cheapened it to apply to everybody. But you get other interesting stuff around it. Sirrah, for example, was once the polite inversion of sir: how do you address a social inferior like a young man/boy? Sirrah. But again, politeness inflation: because it explicitly calls up a socially inferior status, it ends up taking on this sort of pompous/insulting tone even when it's not intended that way, and the word falls out of usage.

Or, in the Old South, the habit in Ye Olde Racism Days of calling Blacks uncle and aunt is a direct consequence of people wanting to be polite within the limits of a social system designed to degrade others. Most people are not - shock of shocks - evil assholes, but it was not permissible for Whites to call slaves "sir and ma'am." So they take up a West African practice of calling them "aunt" and "uncle." Pretended familiarity. This is polite in its own time, but see where it gets you now.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Indexing firearms in period pieces.

Hell On Wheels, an otherwise great show, did this constantly, and you just can't unsee it.

Reminded me of gun safety not being kept, which both annoys me in a professional way, and how hypocritical it is when the same producers criticize gun culture and then shoot a staff member.

Helicopter scenes where the pilot is flying left seat.

Any time a modern weapon goes against some big monster and needs to engage from point blank as if we still have ww2 tech.

Kids being more sexually active/aware than any realistically would be at that age. Like I remember the movie Kindergarten Cop (an otherwise good movie) having this bit where one of the kindergarten boys was looking up girls' skirts. Keep in mind the title of the movie... this is explicitly a kindergartener.

I don't know if it was really sexual in that case. It can be chalked to curiosity and repeating something that annoys adults.

Kindergarten Cop was a surprisingly based film.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Indexing firearms

What does this mean?

 

[Rapesputin]

I remember reading somewhere that speaking in "thee" and "thou" and other things we think of as olde English were never really a thing to begin with, but rather we think of it that way because of early typesetting not having all the characters and so sometimes replacing a character like thorn with a letter that looked close enough.

I thought that "thou" was the T-form second-person plural, while "you" was the V-form