Editorial 16/02/15- Overdone Spec-Fic Concepts

A few weeks ago, I made a list of ideas that haven't been used too much or even correctly in fantasy and science fiction. While I still hold that those can be expanded, there are others that... well... have been far too much. These are the tropes that have been taken to the edge of storytelling without any real development. Now, many of these have been used well and do have potential. However, lately, there's been a gap that few have really seen in those and desperately need to be seen through a new mindset. With all of that out of the way, here are a few of the most overblown, overrated, and underwhelming concepts that can easily turn your fantasy or science-fiction story into a drag.

Black-And-White Morality

Thankfully, this one is falling out into disuse, but it still raises a few questions. Nothing is a solid one-sided argument, so having one side be pure and immovable while the other is obviously evil isn't just unrealistic- it's a bit boring. Why did the villain choose villainy as a profession? What flaws does the hero have that the villain can play off of? Is the full truth something that neither one has? If you answered "it doesn't matter" to any of these, you're not writing a story with any sort of philosophy. You're simply making an excuse to see conflict that you may not end up caring about anyways. (I'm looking at you, "Winter's Tail"!)

Grey Morality

On the other hand, some stories have taken this too far, and it has come to a few points where the audience doesn't know what to root for anymore. For instance, in the film "Transcendence", you have the designated heroes (a band of destructive rebels whose attempted assassination of the main character started the plot) and the designated villain (said main character who is placed in the supercomputer and uses it to heal the environment) face off in a climax that feels like it should matter. In the end, though, there isn't really any character besides the theme that it never fully explores. Thankfully, this isn't as prevalent as other examples, but that may be because one time is overdoing it.

Fantastic Racism

If the hero needs some more conflict to add tension to the story, it's okay to make everyone hate him. What isn't, though, is adding a half-excuse like "because he's an argonian, of course." I'm not saying that racism isn't real or that it doesn't need to be talked about. There are just only a handful of reasons for these races to hate each other (Pride, old feuds, and religious purposes), and the ideas can become a little stretched when you have stories like "Star Trek" where every single race has some disposition against the other for no apparent reason than plot. It's fine once or twice, but not everywhere throughout the mythos.

Fascism

We get it: the Nazis were bad. That doesn't mean that any futuristic, dystopian society is worse just by adding a dictator. Some have even resorted to resurrecting the party for the sake of a bad guy in the story. It has gotten to the point where there's just not that much to say about it anymore. If anything, we need more perspectives of the pros of this type of society: why would people sell themselves willingly to something that shouts 'pure evil' to the heroes of the story? They may not be pure good, but I've seen enough to think that they may not be the 'always-chaotic evil' we set them up to be.

The Prophecy

This may just be the worst offender I've seen on this list. Not only does every fantasy hero use it, but it suddenly makes them less interesting. They no longer have any intentions or wills of their own, and there's no question on whether or not they will make it through to the end. It also makes the audience lose interest in the world around the story; it can't be that big if every aspect is focused on the parts we're seeing from it. Unless you're truly going to explore what it means like the films "the Lego Movie" and "Unbreakable" do very well, the whole idea of predestination is a lousy way to introduce a plot in a story.

The Info-Dump

It could be a prologue, or a school lecture, or a badly-written conversation. Wherever it is, it's the one place where the author decides to put all of the history on the background of the fictional universe. I will give this one a bit of credit- in some ways, it's necessary to fill the audience in on the details that the characters live and breath. However, it's hard to get fully immersed in a story when the action is either postponed or interrupted by something we all should know, can infer, or don't really need. Some have tried to convey these through news clippings before the story proper, but these can be confusing in stories such as 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' where the main characters don't even have power. There should be a few ways to mix this up or make it more accessible, especially if it's so important to the story.

Superhero Origin Story

With the rise of superhero films (which doesn't inherently have any problems), there comes a time when people need to introduce an otherwise unknown character to film. We've reached a point, though, where every one of them seems to have the same plot without much variation or expansion. This one came to mind when watching 2012's "The Amazing Spiderman", basically a retread of Sam Raimi's 2001 "Spiderman" film. The second time around, the story was less memorable since a) we all knew Uncle Ben was going to die, b) it only further enforced the hero's incompetence before his big change, and c) was only glossed over to bring the action back onscreen. It's not that this can't be done anymore- again, 'the Lego Movie' does this with a great twist of originality and tongue-in-cheek humor. There are simply better ways to serve the story than a go-to, paint-by-numbers template such as this one.