Follow TV Tropes

Following

Archived Discussion Main / RealityISUnrealistic

Go To

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.


Hops Splurt: This entry has become quite large, and has many subtropes. I suggest it is converted into a Category. Unfortunately I have no idea how to do this myself. Anyone?


From You Know That Thing Where:
Tulling: A possible trope, related to The Coconut Effect: when something realistic is perceived as being false or unrealistic by audiences. Examples of this include (as mentioned under Dawson Casting) actors being labeled "too young" when they are the same age as their characters, a group of actresses wearing latex caps to appear bald and the one extra that actually is bald being labelled "fake-looking", Jean Seberg in "A bout de souffle" being labeled "a french actress that attempts an unconvincing american accent", the perception of historical events being coloured by Hollywood interpretations, with the deliberately distorted view being perceived as the truth by the masses, and so on. Reality Is Unrealistic perhaps?

Andyroid: Definitely a trope. I'm also reminded of a Terry Pratchett quote: "Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things."


Tulling: It occured to that this is not so much a specific trope as a more general phenomenon that results in several tropes being created and used. If Meta-Concepts is an inappropriate category, feel free to edit it.

He is universally known as Alexander Pushkin - common name should be used. The Editor

You have a strange definition of universal - consider that the english wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin) uses the spelling "Aleksandr Pushkin", which is more or less equivalent to the scientific spelling. "Alexander" is in this context an anglification of the russian spelling which tranliterates to "Aleksandr". Compare the various spellings in the wikipedia articles for other languages, and you will realise that the spelling you prefer in no way is universal. You are right in calling it "common", in the sense that it is the most common spelling in english-language sources. I prefer the scientific transliteration due to having studied the russian language and it being the more accurate one, but it is a small point and the current form might as well stand.


Looney Toons: Removed the CSI example:

  • CSI's success has led to real-life American court cases becoming harder to prosecute, because juries expect that every police force has the Magical Database and other perks that Grissom and company have, and have come to believe that only extensive forensic evidence is worth considering.

...because it just points to The CSI Effect, and we now have an explicit xref to that page in the main text.

Ununnilium: The same for this:

  • Commonly referred to as "The CSI Effect" among lawyers and legal experts, modern juries have increasingly demanded DNA evidence, fingerprinting, and other techniques commonly shown (and exaggerated) on CSI, even though such evidence is far less common than television might make one think.


Darmok: Would the fact that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest, and lost, count?

Ununnilium: Yes, definitely.


Richard: The word we're looking for might be "Inauthentic". I've heard someone comment that they were going for "authenticity" rather than "accuracy"; a possible example could be gladiator movies disregarding the fact that 97% of gladiator battles did not end in a fatality (trained gladiators were expensive, after all). This could make for some slightly boring movies. ;)


Nezumi: Cosmetor, 32_Steps... I really have to criticize you both. From my experience, it's generally considered polite to add a discussion post saying why you're removing the entry and what you're doing with it, so there can be discussion. 32_Steps... the Aeris thing really isn't even vaguely an example of this trope, so there was no good reason to reinstate it. I'm sure it's an example of some trope, though, so I'm going to leave the handling of it to someone who might know which it is.

Wanders Nowhere: I agree with Nezumi on that one, especially since the info is also off - the City of the Ancients where she was killed is nowhere near to being the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, (it's not even really a dungeon at all) and it was Sephiroth that followed Aerith there, not vice versa. Not to mention she had a good reason to go there and the hero was being dangerously posession-prone at the time. Permission to clean that up?

Cosmetor: I deleted it because, as you said, it wasn't an example of this trope. From what I can tell, the only thing it's an example of is someone insulting Final Fantasy VII and its fans. Thank you for being polite in criticizing me, however.


Gentlemens Dame 883: I've a friend looking into his own Serious Business study of this Trope, and he wants to ask how the name came about so he can give credit?

Tulling: There is no special story behind it, it just seemed like a pithy way to express the concept.


Fly: Cutting:

  • Why hasn't anyone mentioned that the Romans did not, in fact, speak with (upperclass) British accents?
    • Presumably because we know they didn't speak English.
      • Reality Is Unrealistic would only occur if someone made a production in which Romans actually speak Latin appropriate to their era and viewers complained that they do not speak like posh Britons, like "they did historically".

Because, as stated, this isn't an example of this trope.


Big T: I removed the following because it seemed a bit too ConversationOnTheMainPage-y.
  • According to Murphy's Laws of Combat all five-second fuses (which are usually used in grenades) will burn down in three seconds. Count to two and throw.
  • Counting is actually one of the worst things you can do since the timer on a grenade is not consistent and has a large range of delays. To say nothing about anything subjective as a mental count. This troper was taught in the Marine Corps that at close range you actually want to throw it so bounces as much as possible inside of the target. At longer ranges, its pretty much impossible to throw it back in time if you use the right arc.
  • Yes, if a grenade lands next to you, you don't really try to throw it back, as much as throw it (or kick it) away from you.


Blork: Removed the following example, since it just shows that Laurie's accent was convincing - Unreality Is Realistic. If he had switched back to his normal voice and people had criticised the obviously fake British accent, then it would be an example of this trope.

  • According to legend, when the casting director for House, M.D. received Hugh Laurie's audition tape for the title role, he praised Laurie as "exactly what we need here, a good American actor" (paraphrased). Laurie is British, and affected a New England accent for the tape.
    • Let's not forget that not too long ago Laurie played Bertie Wooster, and it's impossible to get more British than that!


Erica MZDM: Removed:

  • On this note, rats, contrary to popular perception, aren't just big mice. They're completely incompatible genetically. In fact, rats and mice are more genetically dissimilar than humans and chimpanzees are, having split paths from each other about 11 million years ago, as opposed to 5 to 8 million years for the lines that produced humans and chimps.
    • Which, of course, makes all those languages that have only one word for the both of them awkward, to say the least.

While genetically distinct, rats are "just big mice" in the sense of being fast breeding, disease-carrying rodents with a frustrating ability to get into food stores despite all reasonable precautions - in other words, all the parameters most people are really going to care about. This is also why a lot of rodents are called "something" rat/mouse; it's a biological niche, not a genetics issue.

Also, I don't think I've ever seen the issue come up in media...


Tk3997 I removed this entry

  • Players of the Tabletop Games D20 Modern often complain that, if you're lucky, you can disable an Abrams tank with small arms fire in the game. This is actually reflective of reality - disable just means "cause to stop functioning", and modern tanks, despite their heavily armored bodies, have comparatively vulnerable equipment that's necessary for them to operate effectively. If you know what you're doing and have a bit of luck, you can disable a tank with small arms fire.
  • In fact more modern tanks are lost to death of the operators than damage to the actual tank.

On the following grounds: It's bullshit.

It's stretching the term "disable" WAY past the breaking point while maybe you could damage the high tech optics and such small arms fire will never actually STOP a tank, everand while losing said high tech doodads would be an annoyance it wouldn't acutally stop the tank from moving and firing it's main and back up weapon, and That's hardly what I'd call "disabled". Even so "crippled" it would still be quite able to either cut down the offender in a hail of machine gun fire or place an HE round within 50 feet of him. Even firing thousands of rounds into the treads and wheels (A commonly exposed "weak point")would in reality merely result in a storm of ricochets and no ill effect on the vehicle. The fact is that in real life if you don’t have actual anti-tank weapons firing on an MBT with small arms is nothing but a highly efficient way to commit suicide. Just ask this bright spark...

Nezumi: Can someone actually check this person? He talks like he knows what he's talking about, but that doesn't mean he actually does. A good example of this principle in action. And the fact that his "proof" is seemingly an untrained yahoo with a hunting rifle taking a potshot at a tank from well outside any sort of cover doesn't really fill me with confidence.

Poke Freak: I have no actual military experience, so I'm gonna try to substitute some common sense instead. Who the hell would build a tank that brittle enough to be stopped by a weapon designed to kill infantry, instead of a weapon meant to destroy armored vehicles? That's why they're called "anti-tank weapons", you know?

Just to point something out, what exactly would you hit with small arms fire to damage the tank? Treads now-a-days are metal, pure metal, and a bullet isn't going to do much to them. The main body is armored to stop a missile, the optics could possibly be shot out (if you were ridiculously lucky) but there's nothing really to hit that will disable a tank that isn't armored against missiles. For some actual evidence we have the Gulf War, 21 abrams disabled or destroyed, not a single one by small arms fire. If it was really that dangerous to a tank then why are there no records of it working?

  • The term is "mission kill." Theoretically a hail-Mary shot could indeed damage the gunner's optics to the extent that the tank couldn't complete it's assigned mission (which is not just "kill the idiot firing an AK at a tank," as a rule), but it's unlikely; the target is tiny, the protective glass is bulletproof, there's usually multiple optic systems for redundancy (optic rangefinder, periscope, etc) so you'f have to get supremely lucky several times, and you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to be trying to make a shot like that to begin with. The idea seems to be based on on knowledge of much larger .50 cals that are sometimes used to mission-kill armoured vehicles by aiming for the turret ring in the hope of jamming the turret.

"The discovery and use of the effect was the subject of the Apollo 13 mission and subsequent movie, as a last-ditch effort to place the wayward crew along timely Earthward trajectory. "

Deleting this line, it's just wrong. Horribly horribly wrong. There was no, “last-ditch” or “discovery” involved. All Apollo spacecraft followed the free return trajectory. If you want to go to the moon and back it’s the safest one to use. Apollo 13 departed from this trajectory in order to arrive at their planed landing site. After the explosion they then needed to get back on it to get home.


Although the QI example is mostly correct, I took the liberty of checking if we really have two moons, and according to The Other Wiki, Cruithneis only called that, because it has about the same orbit-time around the sun as earth (1 year), but it doesn't actually revolve around earth itself, like our big grey tides-inducing... ehrm... moon.


Random832: I removed the example about the chinese gymnastics team controversy - it's political; the IOC took China's word for it; and, most importantly for it NOT being an example of the trope: they were right next to other gymnasts, who no-one thought wasn't 16, so it's not like Dawson Casting shows were the only (or even most convenient) point of comparison viewers had.


Excised:

  • And, indeed, if "roid rage" weren't determined to have been a likely factor in Chris Benoit's murder of his wife and son and his suicide.
    • It wasn't. Multiple concussions was determined to be the likely cause.
    • Caused by roid rage.

He had the brain of a 75-year-old Alzheimer's patient and the body of a professional athlete. 'roid rage is all but a myth. Deal with it.


Adam850:

Cut: In fact, if they eat too much cheese (which is actually a trivial amount), they die. Might want to bait those traps with something else...

  • Yes, you certainly wouldn't want to accidentally poison the rat you're trying to kill...
  • You also most certainly wouldn't want them to not be attracted to the rat trap.
  • My rats eat cheese. All 15 of them, from around 10 different families, nearly bit my finger og quite a few times. Your theory needs work.


Leaper: Is it just me, or a bunch of these examples just "things Hollywood gets wrong" as opposed to "things Hollywood gets wrong deliberately, lest people think they got it wrong" or "things Hollywood gets right that people think are wrong"? (The latter two are what this trope is about, IMO; the first is NOT.)


"Interestingly, kicking the door near the lock does not work well in Europe, where the locks are much heavier and more robust than locks in America. If you were wondering why, it's not for a lack of pride in craftsmanship... it's building codes and safety. Less robust doors are easier for firefighters to kick in during an emergency. All interior doors must be hollow. Firefighters are appreciative. And so are the people they save."

So are the european doors hollow or are the american doors hollow? this is worded a bit confusing and i'm lost.

Top