Annoying Plot Devices
 

I posted a thread a while back asking for some naming help on some characters. After a while, the discussion changed topic (not a bad thing, as my original questions was answered far before the topic change) to a discussion about a possible plot device/event to be used in the story.

And I didn't see any other thread about this, so here is the Annoying/Predictable/Overused/otherwise Dissatisfying Plot Device Thread.

Complain about how otherwise great stories were shattered when X character fell in love with Y character (genetics joke, get it?) or events just take a bland or annoying turn.

To start off, one of these for me was much of what happened in Eldest. I mean, wow. You mean Eregon's dad was a bad guy? AND he has an evil twin brother? AND he fell in love with the generic elf chick? Don't get me wrong, the series is great (haven't gotten my hands on Brinsingr yet) but I still feel some things could have been done differently than they were.

When Bella set eyes on Edward, that was when I knew Twilight had jumped the shark. XD

I hate it when two enemy forces have to turn to fight a third, mostly one-shot but somehow eviller enemy force. I mean, done well it's all fine and dandy, but I'm outright effin' sick of it. The third superforce is usually something that came out of nowhere, sometimes literally unknown space JUST for the sake of making the two sides that have fought forever co-exist.

Spiderman and Venom team up to fight Carnage.
Heroes and villains team up to fight Skrull Invasion.
AJ Styles and Christopher Daniels team up to fight Samoa Joe.
GDI and Nod team up to fight the Scrin.
The Yuuzhan Vong war.
Halo 3.
Etc.

Again, sometimes done well. Usually just seems like they ran out of ideas, though, and decided to make something MORE EVIL THAN THE BAD GUYS, YEAH!

When someone is losing a fight or something, and they become a billion times stronger by going berserk. Casshern has managed to do this in a not annoying way by not making him dependent on it.

EDIT: Here's another annoying one. The main character's village being burned down. More of an RPG plot device than novel plot device, but still.

*rewrites first chapter of book in progress*

Damn you Noncon!

In the book I am writing, I am thinking of doing something experimental I think I should run by some people before I just slap it in there. What if the book starts from the perspective of a character who is the friend of the soon-to-be main character, but after a while he is converted to team evil and the main character changes to being one of the other friends. Later, team evil stabs said character in the back and so he ends up back with the good guys, but don't want him to simply flip-flop without reason, as that would be a weak story and would contradict this character's personality in many ways.
What do you guys think? Yay? Nay?

EDIT: To expand on the change of main character, the second main character was originally intended to be the main character from the beginning, but I wanted the betrayal to mean something even though it takes place early in the story, and this gives the readers a chance to grow attached to that character before his betrayal. That way, even when he betrays and the book occasionally shows his perspective, readers will be more willing to see him as a Yagami Light kind of character more than as a character they should hate for betraying.

EDIT AGAIN: Fortune Zero, I think Halo 3 should be removed from that list. After all, the elites were never necessarily evil to begin with. They fought for honor in their crazy space religion. After they had their crazy space religion disproven to them by the Arbiter, combined with the Covenant deciding to eradicate them, they followed the only simple course of action: aid the humans against the remaining Covenant. If there had been bad blood between the humans and elites to begin with, I would see a problem. However, the only thing the humans had against the elites is that the elites hungered for their brains, and the elites only fought the humans because of their crazy space religion. Although it has always bothered me that they are always called the Elites. It works as the name of a class of soldier within a race, but as the name of a race it just seems silly.

I'm going to back up MMFTW on Halo 3. In Halo 3 it made sense because the Elites were smart, and when their stupd hocus-pocus religion was revealed to be a giant sham they decided to wage a civil war right in the middle of the Human-Covenant War, which inevitably led to a cooperative gathering of forces.

Given the fact that the Flood never factored into that it could have been done much much worse.

And I would like to add in making every damn woman hook up with every damn guy. This is normally fine because hey I'm all on board for a good romantic sub-plot, especially if it's well done. But when you have Salvatore who pairs up Cattibrie and Wulfgar, then Wulfgar dies after their relationship is rocky, Drizzt and Cattibrie start to have interest in each other, Wulfgar's back, nobody's sure what to do, Wulfgar leaves and figures himself out, just...ugh.

maybe I get too nitpicky; I am one of the few Halo fans here.
 

I don't recall anything claiming that the Sangheili craved human brains. Also the name "elites" is the human name for their race, and we do suck at naming things from time to time -- though it arose in the midst of fighting them, actually making some sense in that context (as do grunts and hunters, for example), and filled the void the humans had from a lack of any knowledge or information about the Covenant aliens.

The Sangheili even respected the humans after having met them in battle, and many wondered why they hadn't been offered membership in the Covenant itself. In fact the war with the humans opened up many questions about their religion, and the Arbiter indeed sealed the deal.

The last I'll add to that line of conversation for now: If you thought the elites becoming allies was a crappy use of evil-to-good, you must hate Blizzard's RTS games, where there are several lines drawn and redrawn throughout each races' campaigns.

That's actually one thing I thought was rather cool about reading the Halo books - when it switched to the Covenant's perspective, they're suddenly using all of the terminology for the Elites and Brutes and Grunts that you had grown used to calling them. It was a huge perspective switch and it was pretty slick.

It didn't really come off as any less obvious and inevitable, though.

...And then proceeding to join with the fucking Flood was just spamming it, even if it was for all of thirty seconds.

Dante Must Die, you would be well advised to find out how to use spoiler tags before my ninja assassins find out where you live.

synchronized, you seemed to slightly misinterperet my post about the elites. I wasn't saying at all that it was a poor switch from evil to good, but was a perfectly performed switch from neutral to other neutral. They never really changed as a race, they just had their perspective changed in light of the revelation that their space religion was a load of cow-poopoo. As for joining with the flood, I would almost say that it makes no sense. I would go and say that it is way out of character for the flood overmind to permit chief to survive because they had a common enemy if not for the fact that he did something similar in Halo 2. And I know that the elites didn't literally crave human brains, it was just an expression.

Aside from that, the name Sangheli is very new to me. This must mean that it was used only in the Halo books, which I never read. On the other hand, having played the halo games, the in-game dialogue never uses any name for the elites except for "The Elites", even when used by members of that race.