When someone’s falling hundreds of feet and when they’re inches from the ground a super hero swoops in from the side to grab them.

Sure, they didn’t hit the ground but not only did you catching them slow down their vertical velocity just as fast as the ground would have, now you’ve accelerated them horizontally so fast that they’re now twice as dead as they would’ve been otherwise

Hacker shit. Some lone genius passing through systems intended to be secure for militaries and governments. It’s not about details being stupid, that’s to be expected. It’s about the very fact of power imbalance.

Random characters challenging militaries and governments and just “quickly finding” some qualified assistance in doing that. And winning. You don’t. You are an amateur and they are professionals. And if you want to do that, you are likely already under personalized surveillance.

That last thing is a trope from a free society where some people on the top are bad. And fighting them you can find help and learn, because in some sense you are protected, and guaranteed privacy and safety. There are no such free societies on our planet right now. The closest you can get is probably to join Hezbollah or some mafia, that is, well-established powerful organizations.

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station’s stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic. Similarly to the Empire (at that moment with kinda democratic Senate and all) being fine with anyone on the way being murdered trying to contain such high-value corpus of information.

Again, I love Star Wars so much. A lot of the materials written in AotC and RotS time describe very well, in my modest opinion, how the real world oppression really works and how you can’t really escape evil or defeat it. The best you can do is survive till that evil dies on its own, but the realistic best is planting the seeds for that time.

In general everything showing fighting your enemy as something easy, impressing upon audience that if it didn’t work out in a month, then you just give up and do something more pleasant, deceiving yourself.

At the same time the sheer extent to which personal brilliance and hard work and persistence can change the world is often downplayed in movies. Drastic changes made by characters are attributed to magic or being in some unlikely situation. But the whole reason for previously described power imbalance is that professionals perpetuate their knowledge and understanding every day, and if one’s persistent, one can beat them.

Yes, I like fiction about justice and fighting evil.

Basically any time someone playing a chef or cook on TV picks up a knife I fly into a rage.

One that annoys me is “Oh, you can’t pay for your food, you work for the restaurant now till you’re paid off!”

Getting past the absurd number of Labor Laws and Sanitation Regulations we’re violating with that set-up, in addition to how badly this is pissing off of the union if the restaurant happens to be unionized…

Most modern restaurants have dish washing machines minimizing the need for bus boys.

Additionally, there’s a little thing called job training that typically has to be done. You don’t just throw a mop at a guy and tell them to get to work, even if they’re experienced each place has their own way of doing things. It’s why it’s actually really hard to get fired in real life, laid off sure, but actually fired? Unless you’re just THAT incompetent… Cause these things take time and money.

And because you didn’t do any training, all your deadbeat patron has to do is cut his hand trying to dry off a knife and he’s not only paid off, but he’s gonna own the fucking joint when his lawyer hears about this shit.

So what DOES the establishment do? Well it depends, but the most common scenario I’ve heard is that they take some form of collateral until you come back another day to pay them, and that’s usually for a fancy restaurant. For most places though you’d pay before you even got your food making this a non-issue.

That’s the most common one, there are some that are less common but still get on my nerves.

It could make sense if it’s a long time ago when the population is much lower, there aren’t as many labor laws, but I think even by the 60’s this scenario would be bizarre if it actually happened. I could see it happening in modern day, but it’d have to be a very specific set of circumstances

1. Easy Sex Change - Now the name for this might be somewhat dated because no one refers to it as a “Sex Change Operation” anymore, but I can’t think of a better name for it. Basically there’s this idea in fiction that you can just go into any hospital looking like Fred Flintstone, and come out the same day looking like Pamela Anderson in her prime.

Medical Science does not work that way

The Transgender Healthcare standards wouldn’t let it happen that quickly as you need doctor’s notes (Hell I’m Post-Op for the better half of a decade and I’m still trying to get a note for a purely cosmetic boob job)

Doctors actually trained to do Genital Reconstruction Surgery are extremely rare, nearest one to me is three states away, and I’m not even sure he’s still alive because that was 8 years ago and he was older than dirt.

Genital Reconstruction only changes what you’ve got going on down there, and until very recently wasn’t covered by most insurance. All the other changes? You have to do estrogen for years and hope for the best.

The body can’t recover that quickly (I literally had to spend the better part of a morning learning how to walk again after being bedridden for two to three after that… till then my body was still healing and I was basically immobilized… also having to learn to pee was weird. Trust me you don’t wanna be in a situation where you really have to pee but literally don’t know how because the functionality of your genitals has been reversed.)

Admittedly I’m seeing it less and less as the idea of transpeople existing is mainstream now, but from the perspective of a transwoman like myself it’s the trans equivalent of someone asking a homosexual male how they know which man’s penis will open up to accept the other’s.

2. Ordering food at a doctor’s office - I’ve not seen this too often, but I have seen it more than once, which is enough to baffle me.

3. The Death Card - I just want a script writer to do a scene where someone draws Death, gets super scared, has it explained to them that the card isn’t that bad. As it refers to death in a spiritual sense, meaning not the cessation of existence, but rather the continuous cycle of rebirth… So it’s actually referring to change… And then immediately they draw the Inverted Tower (Which actually does mean that you’re in for a bad time). I’m just surprised I haven’t seen this joke done before…

Wait a second…

Simpsons did it - https://youtu.be/M-dButYcv14

Though to be fair, I think this is one everyone who isn’t in Hollywood knows at this point. But as someone who actually practices Tarot it is annoyed.

4. The movie Clerks 2 - Look I love Kevin Smith, I think he does great work, I’m even one of the only people who love Clerks 3… but… I can’t just point to one thing in this film. Pretty much everything about Clerks 2 requires a lot of suspension of disbelief as it’s obvious that Kevin Smith is too rich in 2006 to know how fast food joints work at the time.

The part where they close up to a Donkey Show definitely stands out, as chain franchised Fast Food restaurants are not only too busy for that to be plausible unlike a random gas station in the boonies (like in the first movie), but it’s 2006, while it’s not as common of a practice now, most McDonald’s/Taco Bells/Wendy’s of this era would have been 24 hours.

5. Video Games in general - If movies are to be believed, video games now are basically the same as they were in the 70’s. Atari sound effects, high scores, limited lives, games having “levels”… When in reality games have moved on, most games don’t really test the player’s skill so much as tell you a story through in an interactive medium. So your progress isn’t really based in how many points you’re getting, but rather how far in the story you’ve gotten. Lives aren’t really a thing anymore for the simple fact that if your streaming platform gave you an overly tough quiz half-way through the movie about things you saw in previous scenes, and punished you by making you re-watch the whole thing up until you got to the quiz again. No one would watch movies ever again.

Actually it’s become a bit of a problem for the market as too many gamers are becoming annoyed that games are too much like movies funnily enough…

Now Mobile games play more like classic arcade games, sure… but in movies they’re clearly playing consoles. Heck even re-releases of games that did have limited lives and a scoring system (Sonic Origins for example) took them out to modernize the experience. Which is kind of a good thing because older games were artificially difficult to prevent you from beating the game over the weekend as a method to discourage rental services.

In the early 2000’s, sure I guess I can buy that. Gaming was a niche hobby, good to dumb it down I guess. But nowdays it’s considered weirder to not play games than to play them, so I don’t know how this mistake keeps getting made.

I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandmother had a fucking Steam account to play TF2 Themed Solitaire on. Because the oldest guy in my writing group has one to play Civilization and he’s fucking 80.

6. Ditching a cop - In movies if you get in trouble and police are after you, just run away! You’ll ditch them and whatever you did will be forgotten about. In reality: Warrants for arrest exist, the charge for resisting arrest exists, and so do body cams… So, no, not really.

My final one is

The Monitor is the computer! The tower is just decoration! - But, this cliche has vanished thanks to computer use becoming more common.

If a girl doesn’t like you, but you just keep pursuing her, everything will eventually work out and you’ll be happy together.

Anything gun related in most movies is probably wrong

How night and day work above the Arctic Circle.

Movies and TV and stories talk about how there’s 6 months of daylight and 6 months of darkness. That does not fucking happen. This is still part of storytelling to this day (I’m looking at you, Sweet Tooth season 3).

Days get stupidly long in the summer, and there’s a while where the sun really doesn’t go down. in the Winter days get stupidly short, and there’s a while where it doesn’t really come up all that much. But it’s not 6 months of one and 6 months of the other.

(edited for clarity)

In movies when there’s a huge explosion in space, there’s always this ring that comes out from the explosion. No!

In space the blast wave would be spherical: it only looks like a 2d ring when observed from a telescope many many light years away, since the telescope can only pick up the outside edge of the blast.

Edit: fixed auto-incorrect

One of the GIJoe movies ends with an underwater arctic base being crushed by ice that is dislodged from a bomb blast on the ice shelf above. Neat except ice doesn’t sink. I’m sure there are all manner of inaccuracy in those movies but that one really stuck with me.

The Dark Knight trilogy really wanted to be a realistic, grounded take on the Batman mythos, so they dropped the more fantastical elements of some characters’ backstories. Ra’s Al Ghul was no longer immortal, Bane didn’t have super steroids, the Joker wasn’t permanently bleached by chemicals…then there’s Two-Face.

I guess they thought acid burns were too unrealistic, so they gave him regular burns…apparently without knowing that burns that severe would be so painful that he wouldn’t even be able to remain conscious, much less run around the city on a killing spree. I mean, you can see exposed muscle in some places. There’s a line where Gordon says he’s rejecting skin grafts, and I remember thinking, “WTF are you talking about? He should be in a medically induced coma, not making healthcare decisions.” Half of his body was an open wound; I’m amazed he didn’t die of infection 15 minutes after he left the hospital.

I just fired a gun right next to your head, neither of us was wearing ear protection, and now we’re having a conversation at normal volume and we can understand each other just fine.

Bonus points for grenades going off indoors, and nobody having a concussion after.

A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

All of this stuff makes me wonder how hard it would be to make a fully pedantic story.

I’ve seen books where the hero was on the verge of winning but gets randomly concussed by a piece of shrapnel. Disoriented, hospital.

Another where the hero had hearing loss issues from solo pistol badassing too much, sans ear protection. (Forgot the titles of these stories).

But what would it take to meet everything? Imagine Superman. Now he has to mind his acceleration to save people. He also has to mind distribution of force, since he can’t lift a plane without puncturing it. (Maybe he can make a little energy net under the plane somehow to distribute pressure?) And then he has to mind the Law of Conservation of Energy unless he splits apart matter somehow. And then this and that…

Will adherently realistic changes downrank most stories? I for one laugh my ass off when The Rock flexes his broken arm cast off in F&F.

This happens with fire sprinklers a lot, one sprinkler goes off, and triggers the rest of the floor, or sometimes even building.

That’s not how it works. Each sprinkler has it’s own trigger mechanism, the glass bulb, and cannot trigger another sprinkler.

There are systems where this happens, but the sprinkler heads look very different, and you won’t find them in an office building.

Person gets shot and they have to dig the bullet out to save them.