commercial narrator voice
If you have an isekai story, it must include a Villain or Villainess (I freaking HATE when “ess” gets added to a title to make it feminine, especially if it wasn’t even gendered in the worst place like with villain) in the title. If villains/villainesses are in low stock, it can be substituted with a duke/duchess (but it must have a sinister adjective infront of it
I thought of another one. Paranormal romances.
For me, there is one thing if you have a solid story premise and along the way Character A falling for Character B, who is INSERT SUPERNATURAL CREATURE. There are series that make this premise work. But then there is what we commonly see, human girl being forced into a relationship with a supernatural guy. She probably doesn't have any friends or family of her own and if she does, they are either killed off or absorbed in the MMC"s "pack" as a love interest to a side character.
I'm applying to the solar punk world aswell
As much as I like some good old dystopian mad Max- like worlds, the green future is just much more realistic and super interesting. As soon as humans are gone, Booom! Nature is back baby! Tschernobyl is the best example for it.
And yes... Please stop with the copy paste vilainess stories :,D
Like all the historical stuff.
By which I mean the historical stuff you know rather than all the other interesting stories. So many Henry VIII and his wives and tudors in general told over and over in slightly different ways but nothing new because it's history so just a little bit more sexy or gritty or funny. We get it.
Also, King Arthur. Has there been a decent King Arthur story recently? Was the last good King Arthur story the Sonic game? Almost every story that has to resort to King Arthur just falls flat. Which is a shame because there's loads of fun stuff in the mythology that's like completely ignored in favour of the Arthur Guinevere Lancelot love triangle or the big dramatic battle post LoTR (because everything needs epic fantasy battles post LoTR) or both because gritty and sexy.
Funny enough, I know of a lady writing a "sexy twist" on Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. (cue eyeroll)
Idk if you are a Scooby Doo fan but they recently did a cool take on King Arthur in "A Sword and a Scoob". Daphne single-handled takes on all of the Knights of the Round Table with Fred cheering for her as "His Knight in Shining Armor" and Shaggy totally calls King Arthur out on his misogny. It's a pretty cool movie.
Stories like
Any Marvel Movie. Might be a controversial opinion but I've fallen out of love with Superhero films in general, they are waaaaayy too predictable and all follow the same formula. Even their humor gets old quick, especially Marvel.
Also, generic zombie apocalypse and chosen one stories.
(The easiest way to fix the zombie apocalypse and chosen one narratives is to play around with stakes and tricking the audience!)
(in b4 this becomes another trope-hating topic)
This is more in the context of video games, but I'm kind of tired of always being thrown into a 'world on the brink of collapse', a 'dying world', 'a world in decay', etc. Basically 'post-apocalyptic but not quite, because we still want NPCs around and stuff.'
I know it's easy set up for showing the player why the big evil "darkness" has to be defeated, and for having monsters around as a fact of life, but it's just been done to death and beyond and I want to see other stuff.
I think one easy fix would just be to let the player watch the world die, so they actually have a chance to get invested in its fate instead of simply being told to care 'bcuz video game said so'. A good example would be Mother 3, and I guess maybe Half-Life, sorta (the exponential acceleration of 'world death' between 1 and 2 kinda obscures the effect, but I feel like it's still there).
...Although when I say 'easy' I mean with minimal alteration to the original concept (you'd basically just tack on a prologue), not necessarily easy to do. ^^; I mean, in terms of gamedev that'd be a whole extra sprite set at the very least...
Okay, I know I said something earlier but all this retelling.
Why? @cherrystark and I have done theatre, she still does it, I switched to just writing. All this retelling, it's like reimagining Oklahoma in Mongolia.
We used to have a guy in my city who would "retell" Shakespeare. No, he would do the play, but put it in a different setting. Sometimes it can work. Sometimes it fails miserably. (MacBeth as a western) Well, actually it fails quite miserably a lot of times.
But, WHY retell it? I personally, would love to see Hamlet live and not die, but I'm not going to retell the story the way I want to do it. Why? Because I have so many characters in my brain screaming for attention I'm fairly sure they'll mutiny and I'll end up in an asylum some place. And frankly, Hamlet is pretty darn perfect the way it is.
I suppose I can say that I might be able to see retelling something if, say, it's been 50 years since someone told the story of.... whatever. Okay, bring it up to date if you want to, I suppose that could work. But, how many Great Gatsby's is humanity going to be inundated with?.
Why? Why do this?
We're all authors here. Do you really want your story retold by someone who thinks they can do it better, or the fact that you killed off a character, they'll make them live? I sure don't. I've spent months creating a character and a situation and an ending and some dufus comes along and says, "I can do this better."
I don't mind fanfiction if it's a new story but if the person writing it thinks they're way better than the person who came up with the story in the first place I have a phrase I like to say to people like that. "Long walk, short pier. Please do it."
When someone says they're doing a retelling of something my first thought is: lack of originality and talent. (which was proven in the latest Henry VIII/Anne Boleyn piece of strangeness I burned my retinas on.)
But, my objection is a lonely little weed in an acre sized, over cared for American lawn.
sigh.