I guess I alluded to these things earlier.
I hate when the adults in a book are the incompetent ones and the kids are left to solve the problems. That’s illogical to me. I hate when the main character has some amazing skill (like being able to adjust the gravity in a small area) and never uses it in a fight. That’s also illogical.
Having a character that is always makes illogical decisions (and is not crazy) is frustrating. Worse is having an entire world where everyone makes illogical decisions.
I’m not talking about a single decision or a mistake. Humans make mistakes, sure. Nobody is perfect, fine. But repeatedly making unrealistic and illogical decisions is mostly lazy writing.
If you are in a life and death battle every few days, you are not saving all your “unassigned attribute points” to the far future when you hope someone will come along and explain to you how this all works.
After battling hundreds of monsters, finding yourself with 50 unassigned points that meaningfully improves how powerful you are after the fight meant you nearly died during the middle of the battle for no reason. You could have taken 1 second during the battle to assign a few more points to dexterity and strength instead of waiting to do it all at once.
I get it from the author’s standpoint. It’s difficult to write that a character “added two points to dexterity” after killing that last monster just as the next one was about to attack. It breaks the intense action. But that’s what would really happen in such a battle. You need every advantage to survive.
OR, if you are granted two amazing superpowers (teleportation AND time travel), you are not just doing those things one time and never doing them again. You will not find yourself weeks later (or months) having done no further testing and experimentation on how it works.
I guess I’m not talking about one (or even a few) mistakes along the way. I’m talking about an entire book led by a careless person who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. Once caught not having an “emergency teleport” button on your phone the first time when cops go to arrest you, you should immediately add one. There’s no excuse, a month later, being caught by bullies with your phone but no “emergency teleport” button. OK, but then you add one, right? No, not even then. What about the next time, when the evil wizard removes everybody’s powers except yours? He doesn’t have a single useful button on his phone to get him out of that jam. He never adds one.
Being able to teleport away yourself, or teleport away anyone within a meter of you to get them away from you, is such a fundamental defense tactic. It’s just lazy story writing because it lets a future attacker get to our MC for the drama of it.
