this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
115 points (94.6% liked)

Movies and TV Shows

2119 readers
220 users here now

A community for entertainment industry news and general discussion about movies and TV shows.

Rules:

  1. Be civil.
  2. Please do not link to pirated content.
  3. No spoilers in the title of submissions. And please use spoiler MarkDown in the body of discussions. This is a courtesy to other users.
  4. Comments solely criticizing headlines and/or journalism will be removed for being off-topic.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Djinn@lemm.ee
115
What's your pet peeve when it comes to tropes? What bothers you when you see it in a show or a movie? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/moviesandtv@lemm.ee
208 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter's intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there's the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Better yet, don't use an explanation at all!

If you establish something as just being part of your setting that is accepted by the characters in it like it's no big deal, you can just move on with the actual plot. If it's not actually going to be relevant to anything plot wise, don't waste time with useless technobabble!

Slap a "Zephyr FTL Communications" logo on the side of the terminal and call it a day. The audience doesn't always need to know how, just what. And show, don't tell.

You can have a character exposition dump about a piece of tech that should be as normal to the other characters as a telephone (so why would anyone talk about it existing casually outside of very specific circumstances), or just... have the character use the damn thing and add a little splash screen on the device "Thank you for using Cisco Intergalactic FTL calls".