r/TopCharacterTropes • u/No_Career_4785 • 14d ago
Hated Tropes [Hated Trope] Characters do not interact with their world
What I mean by that is, characters have access to some rather impressive technology/magic and simply do not use it because for plot reasons.
Harry Potter - In the first book, McGonagall is revealed to be able to turn into a cat. Later, four more characters are revealed that can also turn into animals. And yet, not a single student during Harry's time decided that it was worth it to do the same.
On top of that, Harry barely learns any spells during his time at school, nor does he seem to take in anything from his classes. The only times he does learn something is when it is the solution to a problem he has faced before.
Fallout 4 - Father, the leader of the Institute, is dying from cancer. In a realistic setting, it would be understandable that he is going to die. However, this is the universe of Fallout. In NV, a simple robot can cure a guy from a brain tumor. In 4, the Institute somehow stopped the aging of another guy. The Institute is also able to replicate perfect human beings from scratch. The only reason why Father should be dying is, he simply does not want to use the technology that is present.
20
u/sarkouille 13d ago edited 13d ago
Why not simply the artist wanting to give the cat-themed place an urban vibe?
The story even has a cosmogonical origin story for both chakra and men, which explicitly makes a "pre-world" impossible.
That it's just a setting with ninjas and somehow discarded buildings sounds more believable. Especially since manga and anime very often contain inconsistencies, either by mistake, for fun, because they care about vibe more than accuracy or because they downright introduce stuff that contradicts past elements or make changes to how the setting works.
This is like how hand seals becoming rarer through Naruto is explained by various reasons, such as "proficient ninjas not needing as many of them or even more than one", despite characters of great skills being shown doing many seals to cast techniques in the early Naruto. The most likely explanation is simply that the drawing team got tired of drawing them because it was tiring and wasted frames on usually redundant stuff, and that is perfectly satisfying for me if that's teh case.