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The fact that it's a haphazardly constructed world based mostly on computer puns and whatever seemed cool at the time?

Edited 2013-12-20 12:34 (UTC)

Kirkman likes playing with tropes and dropping the subplot completely without following up. As an example, during an alien invasion that Invincible and the Guardians are fighting off, a humanoid figure is seen, flying at great speed and altitude, just before the aliens retreat and leave the planet. It seems to imply that whoever this might have been responsible for convincing the aliens to leave. But it's NEVER talked about again. I have a feeling that it's a crossover with another book that I haven't read, but there's no mention anywhere. And he does this sort of thing all the time, dropping little hints of something that could be an interesting subplot, and then never following up. Frustrating.

Time travel

Warehouse 13 Frakking timelines, man. THEY DO NOT WORK. So, they tried to retcon Claudia's age, without retconning anything at all about Joshua or his accident. Also, in Reset, Christina's grave says she died in '99. And then in 3 2 1, Helena says in '93, she'd been dead for a couple years. ... whut? (And that's not even including my issues with Helena's stages of grief with the 321 timeline.) Also also, if you go by the retconned Claudia timeline, four seasons of the show have happened in two years... when there have actually been bits of three Christmasses mentioned. (Claudia actually appeared around Christmas, in my theory of canon. Merry Christmas, Warehouse!)

And if your entire plot revolves around the entire cast holding the idiot ball there's something wrong. This is me eying you, Evil Giles.

Ender's Game Card has said in the introduction to one of his books that he can't timeline or age up characters. Yeah. There are some fairly blatent structural inconsistancies surrounding Valentine and her age. Argh.

Rent and Les Mis are musicals. They're hampered by the fact that you can only get so much backstory into a two-to-three hour musical. However, I don't really have many complaints about either of them. I've pulled shit out of throw-away lines in Rent for ages.

RADIATION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

Sunshine: The internal narrative tangents might get on some peoples' nerves, though I personally enjoy them because it gives a better idea of how the world works as well as fleshing out Sunshine's own character. While the world-building is great, specifically having a better idea of how the threat of vampires affected earth's history would be nice. There's one case of a minor character's name being changed between the two mentions of her in the book (Mrs. Yanovsky / Mrs. Yablonsky), that is just something an editor wouldn't know to fix.

Yrael: MORE WORLDBUILDING PLEASE. And in more coherent stretches, rather than pieces strewn about and hidden in dialog all across the three novels. The Old Kingdom doesn't follow the same rules as the rest of the planet it's on, but there is very little explanation as to why. Six other worlds are mentioned as having been created by the Bright Shiners and then destroyed by Orannis, leaving the Old Kingdom as the lone holdout of the Charter, but the wording when this is explained makes it sound like the world the Old Kingdom is in was already populated before the Charter got there. But who knows?

CharlieQuestion: Endless reboots?

Gibbs: A stubborn unwillingness to pin the year of the films down. And a willful ignorance of geography (aka "just how did everyone get from point A to point B so fast?").

Cyborg: A failure to address just how five teens can afford their own hi-tech island tower headquarters. Yes, the show never claimed to be realistic. Still, it never made a lot of sense. (Who knows? Maybe one of the reasons that the current cartoon is cracky was a choice to tip over completely into the silly so people like me stopped asking such questions.)

Howard Stark: Is having characters make stupid decisions so that the story is more exciting a major flaw? It's one of my nitpicks with a lot of the MCU, but it's a nitpick with the vast majority of superhero films and TV shows.

Knox: The stories in the two Burton Batman films really don't make much sense. I would call that a flaw.

Kirk: Funny you should ask, because last night I rewatched Wrath of Khan, probably my favorite film of all time, but one that points to all the things that are wrong with even great action films and with Trek. There are four minute countdowns that last eight minutes. There is character misunderstanding leading to a fight. There is that thing that Spock does to save the ship that doesn't make one whit of sense. (Seriously, if all it took to fix the ship was opening the doohickey and fiddling with it, couldn't someone put on a radiation suit and do it sooner?) It's all a lot of handwaving and smoke and mirrors to create a mood. Like a lot of Trek. Like a lot of action films. And when it works, when the acting is spot on and the tension is real and the stakes are high, you don't care.

Golden Sun... let's just say it does not have robust characterization.

MLP... I absolutely love worldbuilding, and this show doesn't prioritize it. I'll just leave it there.

The fact that the story's been paused for six years because the developers can't count to three?

Runescape: you would think that with a multiverse at their disposal and a deep backstory to fill out that there wouldn't be a 'too many cooks in the kitchen' problem. But it is a video game focusing on the story of [Player Character], so it does suffer from that problem. Multiple authors are working on the same story. I don't like this whole Sixth Age conceit they are on lately either. AGES ARE MULTIPLE MILLENIA IN LENGTH, NOT 1.7 CENTURIES LONG. And it does weird things to the timeline, like ASHDALE. I understand it is a way to attract new players to a game that is 12 years old, but my timelines! You are breaking them, guys and gals.

I guess while I complain about time, I should bring up a fellow lore enthusiast's complaint about space. Does realm mean a separate universe, a separate planet, or a separate region of the planet? While I disagree with him that 'realm' has to fall into only one of these categories (guess I am not a prescriptivist), playing fast and loose with realm can bump into that beloved principle of cosmology - "the laws of physics are the same everywhere in an inertial reference frame" and by extension, a universe (with the exclusion of weird things like singularities) but not necessarily the multiverse.

Edited 2013-12-20 21:55 (UTC)

Villains By Necessity: I wish there was a map. It's really hard to try to picture what's where, and they always seem to be crossing water to get to the next place.

Warehouse 13: TIME AND SPACE EXIST, GUYS. Quinn's covered a lot of the time issues, but the show also has a tenuous grasp on geography. (Oddly, if they'd just say what Artifact lets them cover a lot of space very quickly - and why they never seem to use it when time's of the essence - I'd be more okay with that.)
And let's not even talk about the mysteriously appearing family members.

Percyverse: I haven't been keeping up since Lost Hero, but I think Riordan could have laid the groundwork for the Roman shenanigans a little better than 'OH BY THE WAY THIS IS A THING.'

Discworld: I'd like to revisit some of the one-off characters and never hear from Rincewind as a POV character again. Rincewind works best when he's not the only thing going on.

Potterverse: oh good lord. Particular to the House of Black, JKR has no grasp on timelines. If you follow the one she made, Walburga's father was like... 13 when she was born? Really????
Overall, I feel like she tried to make the wizarding world a grittier place without fully processing the implications of that. The political system is so very clearly fucked in Order of the Phoenix... and no one fixes it. What I wanted from an epilogue was some sense of 'what do we do now so this doesn't happen again?'

OUaT: THE CAST IS TOO DAMN BIG. I mean, when a series regular leaves to do another show... ::grumbles::
That aside, from what I've heard about the show's plot since I gave up watching suggests it's come down with Lost Syndrome in a big way.

OUaT: THE CAST IS TOO DAMN BIG

This. I'll have you know when I watched the half season finale and Grammy was the one sniffing out Henry, I was confused as that had always been Ruby.

I think it might be coming down with Lost Syndrome due to, you know. The guys in charge. I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.

Well, yes. That would be why I called it Lost Syndrome.
My other OUaT thing is I want a fucking map of the Enchanted Forest. You can't have a story that's half political by default without knowing whose kingdoms claim overlapping territory, where it makes sense to ally with someone, all that good stuff.

Not to mention the Plot-Advancing Naps last season. How're you going to get from Snow's castle back to Cora's hideout on foot if you have to stop long enough to achieve REM sleep?

Teen Wolf: Your werewolf mythology makes no sense!!! And how hard is it to just right down dates? HOW OLD IS DEREK??? WHERE THE EFF WAS CORA??? WHY DOES A SMALL TOWN HAVE AN ABANDONED SUBWAY STATION?!?! Um, actually let's just put most of the show here?

Marvel Comics: Uhhh, telescoping timelines, man. Not great for RP.

Downtown Abbey: Slow as molasses character development, and an aristocratic family that is only rarely seen in London.

Ahahahaha. Haha. Ha.

I used to play Colossus, and oh man, I remember the telescoping timeline pain.

I hate the sliding timeline thing. It really doesn't work with some characters like the Fantastic Four or Captain America; though he's firmly from WW2).

I also hate figuring out crossover & storyline timing. Like when did Enemy Within occur compared to the second story arc of Hawkeye?

Marvel Cinematic Universe: It's a series of several movies (and now a show), but the fact remains that that's a fairly limited canon -- and I play Thor, whose entire world only has limited screen time, let alone the other worlds they're in contact with. So I have to make up a lot of worldbuilding and culture and magic rules on the fly.

Les Misérables... ahahaha. It's a little under 1500 pages, of which hundreds of pages are digressions about the Battle of Waterloo, Parisian sewers, the author's conflicted feelings about revolution in the abstract, the daily budget of a character who goes offscreen almost as soon as the protagonist (finally) comes onscreen. Several of the characters who get plenty of screentime and plot importance don't get first names, personal backstory, or towns of origin; some throwaway cameo characters, on the other hand, get those things. I love the book enormously, but structurally speaking it has some, uh, let's say eccentricities.

Claymore has a lot of holes in its worldbuilding. Some of them are intentional, but some of them are just plain holes.

Firefly also has worldbuilding holes. (One of them is marked Asian People. *dry*) The emphasis is really on the quippy Western In Spaaaaace aspect, which is fine, except when you try to figure out how things actually work.

Gundam Wing... hahahaha where do I even START. There are many things GW does well, but then there are things like: laws of physics (flamethrowers! in hard vacuum!), logical politics (70-year-old career politicians always listen to earnest idealistic 15-year-olds!), military logic (giant battle robots, OF COURSE, also of course the best way to fight a war is to pour all your money into an expensive machine for a single highly-trained 15-year-old to fight with), etc etc etc.

For Kreyu: Dragon culture in the Mythic Age, or rather how canon gives no idea what it was like. What kind of culture DOES a species that does not reproduce and reincarnates with full memories make?

For Annabelle Newfield: Adventure! does not mesh well with later canon. The transition period between AEon being good guys and bad guys is not really explained at all. (This is what happens when you write things in reverse order and crank out a book during the last gasps of a line's life.)

For Ibani (The Sith Inquisitor) The whole MMO thing makes stuff tricky. In game your character starts off as an adult and goes from 'knows nothing' to apprentice in, like, days at most. Which makes no sense. Character development is erratic and they drop plot lines for no reason. But those are things I can FIX in Milliways. :-)

Bad history. Bad, bad history.

(To name but two, they did not speak Middle English in 1585 and there is no such thing as Druidic runes.)

At least they remembered that guns worked very differently in the 18th century. Even if Ichabod should have asked how you load Abby's handgun in the first place.

And occasional bad science or research. When showing William Blake's "Flight of Moloch," they got the right artist and title - but showed the wrong painting. That's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. And somehow there were random stores of black powder (in tunnels that were open at least until the 20th century, by how that wall was sealed over) that are still viable 250 years later? Nope.

TMNT:

Timelines don't work that way.
Mutation doesn't work that way.
Radiation doesn't work that way.

ORIENTALISM IS GROSS, YO!

Avatar:

SO MANY DYSFUNCTIONAL FATHERS
SO MANY SIBLING RIVALRIES

MENTAL ILLNESS DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!

And I would really just once like a villain that wasn't 100% mustache twirly.

Kate Daniels series: How much of a government is left? Is there a US? Do the states have more power since long distance communication and travel is so difficult? There is a police force and a military force so there is something but it is never clearly spoken of.

Marvel comics: The sliding timeline has already been mentioned so I will say not clearly thought out recons. WIth Jessica, having her father be a bad guy messes with the fact her father's spirit aided her in her first series.

X-Men: First Class: I wish the team had had at least one movie to work together before they split. It would have made it more profound.

Mulan: How about a clearer picture of what is left of FTL? Though I guess we're going to get that with the next half of the season.

Will: There's a new variation for every decade or century, which means nothing is set in stone. This is both a flaw and a bonus for me.

Charles: Oh god, continuity, Marvel has no idea how to do it. I love the Marvel movies, I do but for all their timeline is more compact than the comics, still an utter mess. Also what can Charles do? I know he's absurdly powerful but its never spelled out like the other powers are explained or shown.

Sameth: What Saph said, better worldbuilding, I'm constantly making up what Sam can do and Wallbuilding because Nix didn't find it as interesting as the Abhorsens.

Moist: Sometimes Pratchett adds in romance where it doesn't belong and gets loud about his messages.

William: Actually not that many complaints, I would have appreciated the dates being clearer and details like how many years difference there is between William and Mark. But when you consider the movie was built off of a short story, it works fairly well.

Jane: I don't really have that many, I would have liked some kind of timeline but I can work around that.

Demeter: Again the constantly being reinterpreted is a plus for me, but if you're not Zeus or a child of his, there's just not as much about.

Tumnus: Timelines, how long was Tumnus a statue? Then there's the orientalism/racism and the fact the Lewis didn't really know how to write women.

The Pirate King: It makes no sense in the best possible way.

Final Fantasy XII: How - exactly does magic(k, why do you spell it with a 'k', XII writers) work again? They spend Game of Thrones level detail on politics, history and philosophy, but completely forget to set out how magic works in Ivalice. It's an RPG, so in practice it works as 'you select it from a menu', but other RPGs like Mass Effect and Fable have put more effort into their magic.

Also, all the other structural problems that come with being an RPG: Like instant curatives that you activate by violently lobbing at people's heads.

Kamen Rider Wizard: A chronic fear of telling its own story. The story progresses at an absolute snail's pace, raising questions and then never answering them, until about episode 35 out of 50. Also, terrible under-use or misuse of many of its own characters: They have a police officer on the team and the amount of times she gets to do any police officering is negligible.

Legend of Korra: They could really use twenty episodes per book, like ATLA had. Partly because LoK can feel really rushed at times, but mostly because that would mean that there's time for each character to get story arcs, focus episodes, etc, rather than some (by which I mostly mean Bolin, Asami and Lin) being pushed to the sidelines.

Also, all the other structural problems that come with being an RPG: Like instant curatives that you activate by violently lobbing at people's heads.

Mine has sharks, tuna, lobsters, and swordfish that you can eat whole in one bite! Cake and pizza takes four bites, though. Bandaids have the same curative effect as food in some minigames, but they don't exist elsewhere in the game. Game Mechanics :D

How about stopping time and eating 13 Fancy Lads Snack Cakes in the middle of a fight in Fallout 3? This makes you feel better rather than worse, somehow.

Amazingly, Runescape doesn't stop to let you eat cake. That way you can eat your cake and get stabbed too!

Fallen London: The timeline. The datestamps in your journal and the in-game holidays run in real time (with a 122-year offset but the same month and day), but some storylets describe events that take place over days or even weeks, and if you inhale the game as fast as possible like I've generally done then you end up with your character having a preposterously busy and upwardly mobile year or two. This element of the game might have been designed with casual players in mind, perhaps.

Homestuck: I want to know more about the game mechanics of Sburb. I will probably not get to know a lot more about the game mechanics of Sburb. And that's not really the only thing that gets lost in the shuffle when you have such a huge and convoluted story being published as fast as it's written.

Edited 2013-12-21 03:34 (UTC)

Re Sburb game mechanics, I can hook you up with a shitton of fanon, if that helps? http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606

Well, this couldn't hurt!

OUaT: ...Yeah. Big cast, and some WTF plot. Also, at some point Rumple was in way, way too many stories.

Belgariad/Mallorean: ..........There is nothing but tropes. Also, the whole cultural separation thing is bloody stupid and I wish there was more variety. Oh yeah, and the writing isn't that good, and really repetitive--at least it owns up to that much. Also some of the characters held up to be wonderful are absolutely awful people ~~coughpolgaracough~~.

Smallville: The producers having obsessions with certain actresses. The crappy writing. The wtf are you talking about science. The fact that because of the nature of the show they kept dithering ridiculously and holding Clark back artificially. From what I hear, the fandom. Oh hell with it: Just go here and ask me what is ideal, although casting is one of them.

Codex Alera: Would it kill you to have a reasonable timeline, Butcher? You came so close, and then little inconsistencies pop up. also, please have an editor check to see if you change someone's name three pages later. And maybe have just a few more important names--I'm not demanding The Silmarillion or anything, here, but I'd like to know what Septimus' mother's name was (and it's almost relevant, she's even mentioned in a significant way!). Also, more explicit things about how the Legion actually works? And maybe culture, we know nothing about sports or music or art or literature. Oh, and a map that makes sense, there are a few inconsistencies I believe in the official one versus text from book one. Or a sense of how large Alera is, or how populous. Or-- never mind, Jim Butcher, I'll just make it all up and you go back to finishing Dresden and giving us that new series.

Jason in the DC New52 - Recons. Endless. Fucking. Rectons! You think you have a handle on the canon and suddenly a sub-plot appears that completely changes the past. Poor, poor interpersonal relationships (mostly due to failed writing.)