Name Sci-fi Tropes/cliches that you HATE

[OttoGruenwald]

Great choice.

Alien: Entire crew sleeps at one time, leaving the Nostromo to be piloted by an Atari 2600. They're lucky they didn't all die before reaching the planet.

Space Odyssey: Crew sleeps in shifts, which comes in handy when HAL has a fit as he's only able easily kill the ones asleep at the time and has to work to get the others.

[DiegoPalacios]

"Oh no!, aliens are invading earth, quick, get the nerdy kid to hack their airship and activate the unnecesary self destruct button this superior species has for some impractical and arbitrary reason!"

[djwaglmuffin]

The cliche where everyone is an idiot.

You know; these are supposed to be scientists and explorers but they make all the dumbest decisions. Prometheus was so bad...

[DiegoPalacios]

If the idiocy is unintentional, that is just terrible writing.

[DiegoPalacios]

Robots are awesome and have a lot of potential to explore.

[skicoak]

"Oh no!, aliens are invading earth, quick, get the nerdy kid to hack their airship and activate the unnecesary self destruct button this superior species has for some impractical and arbitrary reason!"

My car has a self destruct button because I too am a superior species!

[Darth_Biomech]

The trope I hate the most is the "cybernetics eat your soul". The notion that if you replace a part of you with non-organic analog, you are now less than human. It INFURIATES me how luddistic it is. People advocating "YES you would totally turn into a heartless psychopath!" for some reason always abruptly go quiet when I mention people with advanced prosthetics, or people that have actual artificial hearts. Why did you stop saying how they traded their humanity away? Guess those don't count because they exist in real life, yeah?! Get out of here before I punch you in your technophobic face.
Another trope that I hate with passion, for very similar reasons, is the "AI's will ALWAYS try to destroy their creators and\or be hating all organic life and\or will lack any sort of empathy or emotion, because they're just naturally evil that way and We Should Not Play Gods™"

.

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Oh my god ok boobs on reptile people. Or bug people. Like I get it you wanna make a sexy alien but they ARE NOT MAMMALS.

I kinda burned out on this one after I saw plants with boobs. Used to annoy me but now I just sigh and unzi

When the entire crew of a spaceship sleeps at the same time.

This is NOT how crews on a vessel work.

Absolute majority of the spacecrafts in our history were completely fine flying without any human crew whatsoever (and Buran spacecraft was able to take off, make it to orbit, and then land completely without any human involvement. That was achieved in the 80s. By the soviets). Space is a LUDICROUSLY large and empty place. Sleeping during the flight is actually the realistic option IMO. Or else what are you gonna do on a flight that takes eight months to reach the destination, except to spit into the ceiling and slowly going mad from boredom?

In the real world, we have cultures struggling to give a damn about other human races when depicted in media.

Yeah, but give 'em a puppy seal, and they ALL just melt away. It's easier to empathize with non-human things precisely because they're non-human. We don't have centuries long bad history, stereotypes and prejudices about roombas. So we give them names, dress them in maid outfits and pretend that we feeding them by brushing the crumbs off the table.
I always found this reasoning nonsensical, people are perfectly capable of empathizing with all sorts of things and nonhuman characters like Wally, R2D2, Garrus or Christopher Johnson from District 9 - hell, one game makes you empathize with a colored cube! "Then they won't be able to care about the character" is an excuse for lazyness, and an extremely weak one at that.

[skicoak]

Absolute majority of the spacecrafts in our history were completely fine flying without any human crew whatsoever (and Buran spacecraft was able to take off, make it to orbit, and then land completely without any human involvement. That was achieved in the 80s. By the soviets). Space is a LUDICROUSLY large and empty place. Sleeping during the flight is actually the realistic option IMO. Or else what are you gonna do on a flight that takes eight months to reach the destination, except to spit into the ceiling and slowly going mad from boredom?

Automation is not perfect. That's why humans are always the system of last resort....and the party most responsible for mechanical upkeep. This is done in shifts...even on Space stations and arctic labs.

Even if stasis pods were a factor, there'd be awake shifts...it's just simple logistics.

[Darth_Biomech]

Since space is empty, the only problems that can arise are from within the ship. And they are usually only two varieties - either you have time to fix them, or omae wa mou shindeiru. And if you have time to fix them, you can wake up the crew.

Although I agree that some sort of shift watching would occur, but again probably not for the entire duration of flight, but in cycles "sleep for a month, wake up for a few hours to check on systems to make sure that everything is okay and fix or replace anything that looks suspicious, go back to sleep for a month". Continuous shifts strain both the crew's psyche and resources of the ship. And some sci-fi's have robots or AIs that can do that shift maintenance for you. "Alien" for example had both.

[AceRagz]

The entire crew sleeping at the same time is forgivable. The worst trope was the stupid scientist: aka let me stick my face in everything! plop

Ripley: We have quarantine!

Crew: It's okay! He's our friend! Duuuuuuuuurp!

For Prometheus and Covenant Ridley Scott made them even stupider..... I hope he never makes another Alien film because he made Resurrection look decent in comparison to Covenant. .

[Totes_NOT_a_Stranger]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ3FnbzNwss <---Watch this.

[skicoak]

And some sci-fi's have robots or AIs that can do that shift maintenance for you. "Alien" for example had both.

Ha ha! That's turned out well about 50% of the time for humans in those movies...so far.

[JRHoch]

I was watching "A New Life" on Netflix, and I started to think why is that they always send a bunch of mutinous misfits who couldn't work a compass into space instead of choosing an elite band of warriors/scientists.

[vfinnigan]

That worked for the original Planet of the Apes. I can't think of any other movie or book that used that "twist" so well.

[vfinnigan]

But space isn't empty. See the concerns about debris in our orbit posing challenges to space flight.

[JRHoch]

Don't worry, M Night Shyamalan is going to direct the next "Alien" and have you begging for Ridley's return.

[HGohwell]

The whole sleep stasis/shifts thing, I think you have to commit one way or the other. Like suspension of disbelief, I'll buy your tech is good enough that you can all go to sleep and it'll be fine, if you wanna tell me that as the author but then you should full commit and tech should be doing most things if it's that good. If you wanna got the other way and have people awake, do it properly too. It's always really weird when people go to bed all the same time on a space ship like there's a normal 24 hour clock and literally everyone is a sleep after 10pm.

Although this sorta applies all over the sci-fi landscape: if you're gonna do something, full commit to it. Too many people just sorta pull back. Like artificial gravity. If you're using artificial gravity just for walking on spaceships, that's so boring. Think it through and commit to all the wonderful things people would do if we could create gravity.

[AceRagz]

Never no matter what. After the famous: "If you do the blowing I'll do the fingering..." Scene.... yeah Ridley Scott can stay lost. He wrecked the lore and he had this man crush on Micheal Fasbender to the point he kept shoving David in everyone's face.... I could not stand David.

[nostalgicroxas]

Star Ship Enterprise goes over a cliff and is surely destroyed, only to rise out of the ashes/smoke/debris completely unharmed and with 90% of the crew totally fine. This trope's gone on to other sci-fi movies and shows where "THE SHIP WE TRAVEL ON" cannot be destroyed. Plot armor, at it's finest.

[Trevor]

a lot of that debris came from us. naturally space is actually quite void of large objects, the asteroid belt for instance has only 4% of the moon’s mass and there exists on average roughly a million kilometers between each asteroid. The universe is however full of radiation; light in many frequencies of wavelength as well as half baked hydrogen gas. The thing is, however, it doesn’t take much to destroy a space craft when you are dealing with lots of pieces and flecks of paint from hundreds of space missions and pieces of destroyed satellites traveling at very high speeds all close to each other in roughly the same area. If one was talking about going from earth to mars, the story changes in which it may very well be months before you find anything within 1000 miles of your craft. Your space craft has a higher chance of being destroyed on its own due to an engineering failure long before something from the outside destroys it. This is why we keep all eyes on our space craft at all times, especially when there’s people in it.

@Darth_Biomech Like yeah, sure the soviets had fully automatic spacecraft, but that doesn’t make the craft reliable enough it needs no form of monitoring, and you can’t monitor it when everyone is sleeping and not doing the half and half routine the Americans did during the apollo missions.