Riffing off of Stuart's betrayal thread, how about the trope were the characters are nearly killed every other chapter? I have an opening scene in my WIP where the characters are on a space station that gets attacked and they nearly die before narrowly escaping. It's incidental; nobody was trying to kill them specifically, they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few scenes later a few of them go to another planet to talk to a guy who has some information that advances the plot and reveals some information about the bad guys and points the crew to where they go next. Then... wait for it... they nearly get killed again, this time directly by the guy who... wait for it... isn't nearly as helpful as he initially appeared.
It's an action adventure story that does not take itself seriously at all, but I don't know. James Bond nearly dies in every chapter of the Flemming books. A lot of mysteries and thrillers have the detective or the hero getting their ass kicked on every other page. I originally just had the characters talking to the guy to get the information they needed but that seemed kind of vanilla and unnecessary. But I really loved the setting, a wine tasting on an alien silkworm plantation, but it felt like the scene only existed to show the setting, which is a narrative death sentence. But I had throwaway sentence where they were drinking wine at a mountainside villa watching these ten story spider-like combine harvesters stripping trees of leaves for the worms to eat and thought, shit, I need them to take a leisurely walk in the woods and get attacked by one of these things. But then I thought it was too cliche seven pages after another near death experience.
Too much? Do readers care? Am I over-thinking this? We're not looking for realism here.
It's an action adventure story that does not take itself seriously at all, but I don't know. James Bond nearly dies in every chapter of the Flemming books. A lot of mysteries and thrillers have the detective or the hero getting their ass kicked on every other page. I originally just had the characters talking to the guy to get the information they needed but that seemed kind of vanilla and unnecessary. But I really loved the setting, a wine tasting on an alien silkworm plantation, but it felt like the scene only existed to show the setting, which is a narrative death sentence. But I had throwaway sentence where they were drinking wine at a mountainside villa watching these ten story spider-like combine harvesters stripping trees of leaves for the worms to eat and thought, shit, I need them to take a leisurely walk in the woods and get attacked by one of these things. But then I thought it was too cliche seven pages after another near death experience.
Too much? Do readers care? Am I over-thinking this? We're not looking for realism here.
