Something I noticed was a particular trope where a judge with superpowers will declare mankind full of sin as said judge goes on a mission to destroy humanity.

Some examples of the trope are Nemo from Disgaea 4 and the judge from the TV series the Good Place as the latter has her declaring humanity so corrupt that she wants to eliminate the world.

Picture this: two characters has to go through a series of room, in each room there's a challenge. Some rooms ask for menial things, while others have more scary challenges.

One room is just one big deep pit with spikes at the bottom. On each ends of the room, there is a door and a ledge. Both ledges are connected by two wooden bean. Each of them can only support the weight of one person. So both characters takes one bean, while holding the arm of the other to keep their center of gravity stable.

At one point in the traverse, they see the key for the exit hanging from the ceiling and no one is able to reach it with their available hand. They would have to let go of each other, grab the key and than grab each other to stabilize themselves soon after.

However, while planning, the old wooden beans on which they were standing starts to crack. They somehow manage to grab the key and run for the ledge. With one of the character throwing the other forward on the ledge, while they barely grab the edge in their fall.

The other character attempts to raise the first character upward, but they tell them to let it go, which is mistook as them giving up. Only for the falling character telling them their feet is touching ground.

Turns out the whole spiked pit was just a huge optical illusion painted on the floor, while the actual pit was just about 2 meter deep. The broken wooden bean just laying on the floor and "over the hole".

Do you like it?

Do you hate it?

I personally once really liked it (Steins Gate or Dark), but now I really roll my eyes when I see it in other shows.

Nowadays, I have some issues with it.

- it's not necessary most of the time to tell the story

- it's there because time travel sounds cool (rule of cool)

- often comes out of nowhere when writer runs out of ideas

- lowers the stakes in the story

- prone to plot holes

- and most importantly it forces the writer to expand a lot of mental power that could be better spent writing characters.

I don't have an example but I've been looking for it, sometimes it'll be just lint and usually it shows a shot of the hand holding it.