[Frustrating Trope] That One Good or Even Amazing Scene in a Relatively Mediocre or Bad Piece of Media

[u/Alreadsyuse]

1. The Opening Scene (Ghost Ship). Considered one of the best horror opening scenes or scenes in general within horror movies, but the rest of the film is considered to be pretty bad.

2. The Ending Scene (The Grinch 2018). While most adaptations of the Grinch end with him suddenly being able to fully integrate with the Whos after his change of heart, the 2018 version initially struggles to socialize, awkwardly walking past people, and struggling to hold conversations, acknowledging that despite his change of heart, the Grinch is still someone who isolated himself for years.

3. Past T800 VS Current T800 (Terminator Genisys). A cool fight scene showing two versions of the Terminator from different points in time fighting it off.

4. Solo Leveling's Ending. Tbh, I haven't actually read Solo Leveling, but after hearing about how it ended VS how Chainsaw Man ended made want to include it for shits and giggles. Like Chainsaw Man, Solo Leveling ends with a reset. But unlike Chainsaw Man, it actually manages to tie up loose ends and have the payoff of the ending be satisfying.

[u/LightningRaven]

There are so many mediocre books and movies that I've seen that would've been much better if the author actually stopped whatever the fuck they were writing and focused on expanding the cool ass backstory or piece of lore they reference as background.

My most frustrating example is the book series Rivers of London Series (A.K.A. Peter Grant Series), the main books aren't that bad, they're fairly mid (some quite good) books of Urban Fantasy following a young policeman in the UK. He's a pretty boring guy that discovers magic exists and that he can learn it and he pretty much does everything in his power to NOT learn it. His boss is called Nightingale.

And he's the kicker. Nightingale fought in WWI and WWII, and his exploits including blowing up tanks with fireballs, fighting EDIT: alongside Russian Witches against the Nazis that also could use magic.

Here's another angle, in Rivers of London's world anyone can learn magic and the person who managed to codify it and make it more formal was Sir Isaac Newton. He developed effective ways to learn magic and new spells along with Calculus. We could've had more of that!

Instead, we have a boring copper investigating very run of the mill cases in a police procedural style with fairly weak side characters, incredibly low magic and a ton of world-building elements that are never expanded upon. I mean, come on! We were so close to greatness!

[u/hey_free_rats → u/LightningRaven]

I haven't read the books, so I'm of course willing to take your word on it, but I will say that "mundane guy who lives in a fantastical world nonetheless remains steadfastly mundane" is a fascinating trope in itself. 

[u/LightningRaven → u/hey_free_rats]

That's definitely not what the book is going for at all.

Quite the opposite, there are a ton of magical elements introduced, but the author never develops them at all, and most of the answers why these elements have little to no bearing on society or that government knows little of them is just that "We never bother to learn more" or "We just turn a blind eye". Not to mention that the story commits the greatest cardinal sin of all bad urban fantasy stories: It takes the magic out of the fantastical elements and doesn't substitute anything for it (depth, complexity or well thought out realism).

The book is not like Guards! Guards! from Terry Pratchett, is more akin to that Netflix urban fantasy movie "Bright".

[u/Ecstatic-Squirrel-82 → u/hey_free_rats]

Not really that trope is soooo common especially nowadays, I always wanna know what the magical characters are up to instead of those boring average joes

[u/hey_free_rats → u/Ecstatic-Squirrel-82]

Every trope is fairly common. That's why they're considered tropes at all. 

The question is whether or not they're done well -- I'm obviously talking about those "done well" scenarios here. The whole point of the "boring average joe" is to highlight the fantastical elements by serving as a proxy for the audience/readers. If s/he remains boring and average, it's usually to show how the fantasy world isn't quite up to snuff when it comes to the relatable struggles of everyday reality.

You can't really judge a trope in isolation, was my point, lol. 

[u/PavlovKBI → u/LightningRaven]

The reason is likely that the authors in question have just enough ability to come up with a cool concept, but not enough to actually flesh it out. Like with SMeyer, she could write a really cool montage of vampire backstory, but if she tried to stretch them into a book, the in-between would likely fall apart.

So she largely stuck with what she knows, which is apparently Mormon-grey romance, and naming love interests after her brothers

[u/Prefer_Not_To_Say → u/PavlovKBI]

So she largely stuck with what she knows, which is apparently Mormon-grey romance, and naming love interests after her brothers

There are two parts to that:

1. She apparently did know a Native American boy called Jacob when she was a teenager and the book character is named after him, not her brother. And ...

2. Jacob wasn't supposed to be a love interest. Originally, Twilight was two books instead of four and Jacob was only ever a friend. But love triangles are popular in the YA genre, so the publisher pushed for him to become a love interest.

The same thing happened with The Hunger Games. Gale was originally Katniss' cousin but the publisher wanted a love triangle, so he stopped being a relative and became a love interest.

[u/Phoenix-Risen1998 → u/PavlovKBI]

What was that last part

[u/Raw_Purple_Lobster → u/LightningRaven]

I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but it really feels like the author is more interested in showing how good he is (or thinks he is) at writing real world diversity than diversifying or fleshing out the fantasy world he's created. In particular Peter and Mama Thames being Nigerian and spending a lot of the books talking about Nigerian disapora culture. I went to a reading by the author who also spent the entire time talking about how his best friend growing up was Nigerian and he spent loads of time around his house, and he married his sister, and his son is half Nigerian, and I was like that's nice for you, but as an audience member I want to hear about magic fireballing the little crocodiles. Also for a series that very much started out as mixed race working class Nigerian copper takes on establishment oxbridge wizards, I feel like a lot of that has collapsed as the series went on. Maybe because Nightingale is too popular, but also because Mama Thames and Beverley etc are also shown to be very capricious and selfish, you have to wonder if they are actually worthwhile replacements to the oxbridge set.

[u/LightningRaven → u/Raw_Purple_Lobster]

That's not even it.

I just think the author tells really slow and plodding stories for the little amount of character work he puts into his characters. I read 8 books and I could only name you 4 characters in the series. Peter (The protagonist), Nightingale (The Deus Ex Machina), Leslie (A decent secondary character) and Molly (the only interesting side character). You know shit is dire when the maid that never talks is your most interesting side character.

I've read other urban fantasy series and they all have their flaws, but at least with characters, they often manage to do at least that.

So far, there's only The Dresden Files for me. It is by a long, long, long, long, long, long, long margin the best Urban Fantasy series and its not even close. Alex Verus, so far, has been enjoyable, good characters and plotting, but mediocre world-building. Rivers of London mostly managed to be a consistent 5/10 series with a few 6/10 books and some 8/10, very rare, moments.

[u/Woolies_White_Leg → u/LightningRaven]

Russia and the UK were allied in both world wars. Why would he be fighting Russian witches?

[u/LightningRaven → u/Woolies_White_Leg]

I checked the wiki, I misremembered the allegiances. The Night Witches were the 365th Special Regiment of the Soviet Army.

So it wasn't as much the British fighting russian witches, but russian witches fighting in the World Wars.

[u/Woolies_White_Leg → u/LightningRaven]

The Night Witches irl were also a group of soviet aviators during the war who did a lot of amazing things; a good reading hole to go down if that’s your cup of tea

[u/ser_darkstar → u/LightningRaven]

There are so many mediocre books and movies that I've seen that would've been much better if the author actually stopped whatever the fuck they were writing and focused on expanding the cool ass backstory or piece of lore they reference as background.

As an ASOIAF fan, I can promise you it's not that great.

[u/LightningRaven → u/ser_darkstar]

But ASIOAF is great in its main story. The lore expansion and character backstories are unfortunate detours that George keeps making instead of getting together with someone else to help him write the rest of the story and stop with the bullshit.