What grinds my gears!

[Danvzare]

It grinds my gears whenever people making games/comics/movies promoting a "strong female character"

You could stop right there if you wanted, because it shouldn't be exceptional to have one.

Ugh, I couldn't agree more. That grinds my gears as well.

If you want to make a "strong female character", then you've already failed. If you want to make a female character but have no idea how to do it without making a boring cookie cutter character, just write a male character and swap the genders at the last minute. It worked for Ripley on Alien.

[Blondbraid]

Something that bothers me with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy stories is when they try to use magical beings as a metaphor for real-life oppressed minorities... ... and the oppressed ones in the story have superpowers.

The whole message of "they are harmless people who are just like us and don't deserve to be shunned and feared" falls apart when the large masses have a legitimate reason to fear them.

Case in point:

The mages in Dragon age, people with magic powers who are either locked up in towers away from the locals or hunted down by knights because they either risk becoming mad with power and practice blood magic, or possessed by demons and turned into monsters (and even kind and well-meaning mages risk being possessed against their will). The game treats this as a cruel injustice against the mages.

X-men, and several other Marvel superhero movies, where the government wants to register people with various super-powers, such as shooting laser-beams from their eyes, mind-controlling people and kill them just by touching them. According to the X-men movies, requiring people to register mutants with the ability to kill countless people with a mere thought is considered literally just as bad as Hitler.

And let's not forget almost every single movie about witches, where Salem and the witch hunts are mentioned, but in the movie, witches are real and can do magic. All the people who were executed in the witch trials were innocent, because you can't kill people with magic spells in the real world, so it kind of grinds my gears when people make up stories about witch hunters hunting real and dangerous witches, and are totally justified in doing so.

[Mandle]

Fair points, but also to be fair to X-Men, Magneto is not as concerned with the registration law itself as he is with where he believes it will eventually lead, because of what he has experienced with the Nazis. And also: he is the "bad guy".

Totally agree with the witches point though. I was quite shocked at the incredible bad-taste of that Nicholas Cage movie. I expected the whole way through that he would find the witch and discover that she was an innocent victim. But nope, she was actually a powerful and evil witch. Horrible!

[Danvzare]

And let's not forget almost every single movie about witches, where Salem and the witch hunts are mentioned, but in the movie, witches are real and can do magic. All the people who were executed in the witch trials were innocent, because you can't kill people with magic spells in the real world, so it kind of grinds my gears when people make up stories about witch hunters hunting real and dangerous witches, and are totally justified in doing so.

Someone should see about making a witch movie where all of the witch trials killed innocent non-witches because the real witches were too smart to get themselves caught.

But I digress. I fully agree with your point. Funnily enough, that type of thing has always annoyed me, yet I've never been able to pinpoint what it was about those groups that annoyed me. Now I know why.

Totally agree with the witches point though. I was quite shocked at the incredible bad-taste of that Nicholas Cage movie. I expected the whole way through that he would find the witch and discover that she was an innocent victim. But nope, she was actually a powerful and evil witch. Horrible!

Hey, I remember that film. I was thinking the exact same thing throughout it. That was the film with Robert Sheehan in it right?

[Blondbraid]

I just saw the new Wonder Woman movie, and while I liked most of the movie,
the costumes they went with for the amazons really grinds my gears.

This is an promotional image from the Wonder Woman movie:

And these are images for Game of War, a free to play strategy game mostly known for using B-list actresses in gaudy costumes to trick people into spending money on micro-transactions.


Why on earth do the the costumes on commercials for a free phone game look less tacky and better made than those in a 150 millon dollar blockbuster?!
Now don't get me wrong, I liked the story, acting and action in Wonder Woman, but the silly costumes made it really hard to feel immersed in the movie whenever the amazons were on screen.
I think costuming in movies in general is criminally underrated, and especially in sci-fi and fantasy. I think it makes up a larger part of world-building than people give it credit for,
and it always bugs me when movies that do everything else well fails in that department.

[Gilbert]

Never watched it (and any movies recently), but Wonder Woman is a super hero(ine) movie, right?
Isn't it a requirement that costumes in super hero movies have to be ridiculous and silly, whether worn by the titular super heros or some fantastic/supernatural/whatever-not-supposed-to-be-portraited-realistically tribes?
If it's just pure fantasy/"historical" like LOTR or 300 (or say game set in a straight forward fantasy world like the one you mentioned) it would be different IMO.
After all. It is Winder Woman, a friend(?) to another lunatic who loves to wear a pair of red panties outside a tight suit.

You know, no one would be stupid enough to make say a Punisher movie to have the hero wear a shirt without the iconic large skull on it... wait... nevermind...

[Blondbraid]

You make a good point, Gillbert, but my complaint isn't about realism as much as aesthetics,
and I think that the costumes look boring and cheap for being in a movie with a multimillion dollar budget.
If you aren't constrained by realism, why not go all out and do something interesting and dramatic rather
than just use leftover pieces of leather stapled together?

To use some examples, the armor of Thor and the other Norse gods in the Marvel movies weren't realistic either,
but they looked like there was thought and effort put into designing them, and I could say the same of the designs
for the characters on planet Krypton in Man of Steel or the characters in Lord of the Rings too.

I had trouble telling most of the amazons apart for much of the time, and nothing about them looked even vaguely Greek.
I also found the amazon costumes jarring in Wonder Woman since all the other costumes from the WW1 era were rather accurate and well done.
I guess this might count as minor spoilers, but:

Spoiler

The armor for Ares looked like a ridiculous knockoff of the guy on the Skyrim cover! Also, why did he have a Victorian-era mustache in Ancient Greece?

[close]

However, this is just my opinion, and taste is subjective. But does anyone think that the amazon costumes looked beautiful or memorable?

[Mandle]

It grinds my gears when reporters write as if for three-year-olds.

This gem from CNN:

"During the celestial event, the moon will pass between the sun and the Earth, appearing to block the sun for almost an hour and a half. You can replicate an eclipse by holding a flashlight and waving your hand slowly across it."

You can replicate being a moron by sitting in front of your computer at CNN and typing slowly on it.

[Danvzare]

What really grinds my gears is this quote from an article about The Escapists 2 "With this gameplay upgrade comes a new graphics style, making the jump from 8-bit NES style graphics to the 16-bit Super Nintendo age."
This quote grinds my gears, because anyone who has seen The Escapists 1 would know for an absolute fact, that it DID NOT HAVE 8-BIT NES GRAPHICS!!! I mean just one look at it, and you can see it uses the same style of sprites as half a dozen SNES games! Not to mention the colour depth!

I'm sorry, but I'm really pulling my hair out over the stupidity in this quote.

[Blondbraid]

It grinds my gears when people try to insist that a rare steak would be objectively better than a well done steak.

Apart from the fact that you could make a list longer than the Star Wars intro crawl on all the diseases you can get from poorly cooked meat, taste is subjective, and just because some prefer their steak a little raw in the middle it doesn't mean that all do.

I'm especially cross with resturants that automatcally serve any meat that I order rare without asking first, and then act as if wanting a well done steak is some act of barbary, just because I find raw meat slightly nauseating.

[Danvzare]

It grinds my gears when someone sings Incy Wincy Spider, and pronounces "Again" as "Ahgen".
It doesn't even rhyme when you pronounce it like that! "Rain" only rhymes with "Again" when you pronounce it properly. If you pronounce it as "Ahgen" then you should be rhyming it with "Ben" or "Then".

[Stupot]

@Dan That used to wind me up too. In general conversation I say "a gen" and anyone who says "a gain" really grinds my gears. But, as you correctly point out. If you're trying to rhyme with "rain" then only a moron would use "a gen"

@Blondbraid I agree with that whole heartedly. I once worked in the kitchen of s pub and chef would've personally offended if anyone asked for a well-done steak or even a medium-rare. He died about 5 years ago. I'm only now just thinking there might have been a connection.

[Danvzare]

@Dan That used to wind me up too. In general conversation I say "a gen" and anyone who says "a gain" really grinds my gears. But, as you correctly point out. If you're trying to rhyme with "rain" then only a moron would use "a gen"

I am so glad I'm not the only one. For a moment there, I thought I was alone in my pettiness.

Just to clarify though, like you I pronounce "again" as "a gen" in general conversation.

[Mandle]

It grinds my gears when someone sings Incy Wincy Spider, and pronounces "Again" as "Ahgen".
It doesn't even rhyme when you pronounce it like that! "Rain" only rhymes with "Again" when you pronounce it properly. If you pronounce it as "Ahgen" then you should be rhyming it with "Ben" or "Then".

+1!!!

This topic would so go viral on FB. It's just exactly trivial and yet triggering enough!

[Mandle]

What grinds my gears are FB posts obviously designed to be exactly trivial and yet triggering enough to go viral.

[Stupot]

It grinds my gears when people pluralise 'LEGO' as 'LEGOs'. I realise that it's an acceptable form as enough people use it (although LEGO themselves don't like it) but I grew up with LEGO as an uncountable noun so the s sounds genuinely weird to me. If I want to count them I use 'pieces' or 'bricks'.

[Cassiebsg]

+1

[dactylopus]

It grinds my gears when people pluralise 'LEGO' as 'LEGOs'. I realise that it's an acceptable form as enough people use it (although LEGO themselves don't like it) but I grew up with LEGO as an uncountable noun so the s sounds genuinely weird to me. If I want to count them I use 'pieces' or 'bricks'.

Absolutely agree!

[Mandle]

Progress bars that race up to 99% and then stay stuck there for 20 minutes while the installation finishes.PLUS you don't know if it's still installing or just frozen up.

I mean seriously WTF?!

(We might have had this one before. I forget. But one of these is pissing me off right now and I had to vent!)

[Mouth for war]

Haha yeah that was the subject I began this thread with. I totally agree with that!!!