I’m sure most of us have our individual pet peeves when it comes to our media–things that just get under our skin that most people probably don’t even notice. Or if they do notice, it doesn’t bother them. I have more than my fair share, I think. They can be big and important, like the one highlighted by my recent post on promises. Or they can be relatively insignificant–something that really doesn’t matter in the least, but nevertheless I simply cannot seem to get past.

One of mine that has been especially grating lately?

Broken glass.

Let me explain.

My husband and I have been going through all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies in anticipation of the soon-to-be-released Avengers: Infinity War. It’s been tons of fun to experience them together, catch more than we did the first time around, and have long discussions about them afterwards. But since these are superhero action movies, there’s quite a bit of fighting and destroying and smashing. This, of course, involves a great deal of broken glass. Constantly our heroes and those around them are smashing windows and cars and whole buildings, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.

And yet… nobody ever seems to get cut.

At most one or two people may have a single, photogenically-placed cut above one eye or on the cheek. But that’s it. And the more I see this happen, the more it bothers me. I mean–there’s glass everywhere. They are human beings, smashing through and sometimes rolling around in it. They should be shredded, honestly. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s the truth! Have you ever broken a vase or a glass? Have you tried to sweep it all up only to step on the single sliver that eluded you and then spend twenty minutes with the tweezers and the hydrogen peroxide trying to find and remove it? I mean, I get it if you want to say that the likes of Thor and Captain America have superhuman skin that can’t be penetrated by the likes of tiny pieces of melted sand. Fine. But everyone else…?

My husband is getting tired of hearing me whisper in the heat of so many action-movie battles, “Why isn’t all that glass cutting them?”

But I suppose it’s just another part of that sort of fiction world where, as one author put it, “People have to eat, but they never have to go to the bathroom.” Things are always going to be ever so slightly removed from reality in a story, because no one really wants to read about their life. We all know about having to go to the bathroom and we all know about having to wash dishes after every meal and delete spam emails. We don’t really care to include the humdrumities of life in our entertainment.

Still–I think that when people bust through a window and send glass showers over themselves and others–somebody should suffer the consequences.