Name your biggest SF pet peeve, please?

[Actarus]

A lot of the pet peeves I had about Sci-Fi disappeared when I realized that most of sci-fi movies and TV shows were made primarily for entertainement and were barely deeper than the B-movies and serials they derived from. Therefore, I am not asking for a lot of consistency. Yes a minimum of consistency, especially in story telling is important, but I don't expect much. I mean take warp speed. This is one of the most incoherent aspect of Star Trek. How fast exactly is Warp 1? Warp 5? It varies from episode to episode. Like Superman, a starship will be as fast as the plot demands.

Like I said, entertainement is the most important goal of these shows. A space fight without any sound would be more consistant with what we know about space, but it would be boring as Hell without the pew-pew of lasers and the roaring of engines. Also, more often than not, science is treated like magic. Replace "photon torpedoes" with "arcane missiles" and "force field" with "invisible wall", it can have the same effect. The things you can do with a "sonic screwdriver" or a magic wand... A deflector dish will destroy an enemy ship or cure a whole civilization from the common flu if the plot demands it.

Aliens that look totally alien, wholly non-human would be more logical, but it would be almost impossible to relate with these characters. We are humans. We need two eyes and a mouth to read a character's emotion. Something too otherworldly would not work. Most of the time. It works with Alien or Lovecraft because these aliens are a threat and their inhuman appearance is part of it. It works with Kosh in Babylon 5 because the Vorlons are supposed to be a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, in an enigma. It would not work with the duo of frienemies Londo and G'Kar.

About aliens, one of the pet peeves I had was that aliens are mostly homogenous. Humans are very diverse, but all Klingons are warmongers, Vulcans are logical, Asgaard are stoic, Daleks are xenophobic imperialists, and Hutts are criminals. It's illogical, but it works for worldbuilding. And since most aliens are infact really humans with exagerated human traits, they also help to reflect on us, by contrast. In Star Wars, they seem to go an opposite route. Yes, some aliens have very distinctive traits, but most of them do not. If they had made Ahsoka Tano a Twi'lek instead of a Togruta, it wouldn't have changed her character much. Therefore even if Star Wars is visually one of the most diverse universe in Sci-Fi on other aspects it is not. That being said, I really like what they have done with the Romulans by diversifying them in ST: Picard.

In my mind, sci-fi is made to propose us a vision of our society and how it could evolve in order to promote that change or on the contrary to avoid it. Or to show us sword and sorcery in space with pretty explosions and nifty starfighters.

[Beastro]

The one that really bug me in 4X games is that Mankind is usually the default diplomatic focus faction. I assume that's blind aping of Star Trek thematically, but it make me wish for a game where humans are the ones, not so much the warriors, but the most proficient and ruthless at being violent.

Related to that is how human are often viewed at a weaker species, sometimes mentally, almost always physically. That's kinda tied to the Fantasy idea of Man being the middle ground jack of all trades race which annoys me as I think it fails to properly differentiate race as much as could be done rather than gauge them as degrees of specialized human beings (which conceptually they always are).

[SlackerinDeNile]

It's hard for me to say what my biggest SF peeve is, I've got several and just about all of them have been brought up already. Even when a story (in whatever form) has already peeved me I can still suspend my disbelief and enjoy it if it manages to be clever, creative, well acted, well written or in the case of a film or tv show, looks nice and has great artistic direction and production values.

No sense of scale does irk me, especially when that the writer tries to define a scale but keeps breaking it or just forgetting about it altogether.

Lack of diversity in entire alien species really bothers me when the story prominently features that species and its homeworld, if we're only seeing a few members or an army of that species then its not as much of a problem because obviously we're only seeing one culture and particular mindset of them.

Designated hero syndrome or the anvilicious justification of a specific mindset and\or ideology really bothers me, especially if the writer thinks they are 'exploring issues' when really all they're doing is inserting their own views into the story and the mouths of their protagonists or favourite characters.