Story Cliches

Post » Wed Sep 03, 2014 5:07 pm

Sorry for this rant, but... While reading a book, a cliche happened that really torques me off :smile:

The "Evil" dude has captured our good hero of the story. Our hero is bound hand and foot, wearing nothing but a robe. No weapons. She wears a collar that keeps her from harming her captors or uttering her deity's name. Evil bad dude enters her small cell and starts monologue-ing about how weak and craven she is. How scared she is. How great and powerful his deity is. Our hero just takes it.

Why can't a hero ever state the obvious? Her captors are so obviously SCARED of her that she is bound, unable to fight back. He has 3 attendants with him, outnumbering her. He mocks her easy capture, even though her party was outnumbered about 5 to 1.

Where are her rebuttals?

"Seems YOU are quite scared of this weak, craven, and cowed captive. Why not unbind me and see just how craven I am? Let's see whose deity has the power here."

No. She stays silent.

What cliches get you rankled? Books, Movies, any story telling will do :smile:

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Ana Torrecilla Cabeza
 
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Post » Thu Sep 04, 2014 12:57 am

This thread is screaming for http://orias.berkeley.edu/hero/journeystages.pdf. That being said, it might not a cliché but hero-centric universes really bugging me, especially in video games. If it's paired with spoonfeeding game mechanisms, I'm out.

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Kara Payne
 
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Post » Wed Sep 03, 2014 12:40 pm

Actually this is an episode of Stargate i love quoting because they deliberately made fun of that sort of situation, SG1 gets captured and put in a cell, so Jack O Neill gets up and walks over to the bars and talks to the guard. Ok your the bad guys they put you on guard knowing full well you will die, guard makes threats O Neill goes yeah yeah same old story heard it before, now we'll kill you break out then go on to kill your master after he's told us his boring story of universal conquest, we'll be bored but listen til he finishes kill him and leave same as always, so lets make life easy, you open the door, walk away take the other guards with you so they dont get killed, and well kill your lord and be off.

Guard threatens them a few more times, O Neill say really how old is this getting, could they hire new original guards with better threats, so they kill the guard break out kill the other guards kill the lord after he explain his plan for universal conquest which O Neill says i told you so, and they kill him and leave, when Him who's name shall not be spoken took over the show, he wrote alot of that into the series because the loved making fun of those situations.

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x_JeNnY_x
 
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