The.thing that gets me is in movies or books or whatever. When they do the thing that makes no sense but holds the plot together my brain screams. Not “hold in that’s too stupid to exist” my brain says, “Oh, thia is a movie about stupid people doing stupid things” For example in my head in the movie Avatar was about some incompotent division of a mineing corp useing mickeymoused old bootleg clones to try to mine a terrible little planted off in some desolate corner of nowhere before I they get shut down on safety violations
The idiot plot, in which every character needs to be an idiot for the plot to work. See also the “second-order idiot plot”, in which not merely the characters but everyone in the society needs to be an idiot for the plot to work.
Out of curiosity: are you actually grateful, or just saying that as a joke? (I’m asking this because so far I’d presumed such comments were jokes and while TVTropes was addictive, surely it wasn’t that bad and you could always close it if you really had to—but I’ve seen enough of them to start to suspect that they might not all be jokes, and that for some people TVTropes really is that bad.)
Somewhat grateful. It isn’t absolutely awful since I can often avoid clicking on the initial TVTropes page, but if I do click on a single TVTropes page I’m likely to get stuck there for a while. In this case, I clicked on the link once without thinking about it and then was happy to see a Wikipedia page.
The TVTropes page (which I am not linking to) notes Idiocracy as an example of a plot where everyone in the society is an idiot and the premise works. If that’s the actual point of the story, that’s different to doing it just to give yourself a plot at all.
The.thing that gets me is in movies or books or whatever. When they do the thing that makes no sense but holds the plot together my brain screams. Not “hold in that’s too stupid to exist” my brain says, “Oh, thia is a movie about stupid people doing stupid things” For example in my head in the movie Avatar was about some incompotent division of a mineing corp useing mickeymoused old bootleg clones to try to mine a terrible little planted off in some desolate corner of nowhere before I they get shut down on safety violations
The idiot plot, in which every character needs to be an idiot for the plot to work. See also the “second-order idiot plot”, in which not merely the characters but everyone in the society needs to be an idiot for the plot to work.
Thank you for linking to Wikipedia and not TVTropes.
Out of curiosity: are you actually grateful, or just saying that as a joke? (I’m asking this because so far I’d presumed such comments were jokes and while TVTropes was addictive, surely it wasn’t that bad and you could always close it if you really had to—but I’ve seen enough of them to start to suspect that they might not all be jokes, and that for some people TVTropes really is that bad.)
Somewhat grateful. It isn’t absolutely awful since I can often avoid clicking on the initial TVTropes page, but if I do click on a single TVTropes page I’m likely to get stuck there for a while. In this case, I clicked on the link once without thinking about it and then was happy to see a Wikipedia page.
This is essentially the premise of “Burn after Reading”.
Yes, but it has a clever subtext, which makes all the difference. Cf. Jack and Jill.
(I have often have a reaction similar to cloudlicker’s when confronted with bad storytelling in books/movies.)
The TVTropes page (which I am not linking to) notes Idiocracy as an example of a plot where everyone in the society is an idiot and the premise works. If that’s the actual point of the story, that’s different to doing it just to give yourself a plot at all.