This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
I'm not sure how the Nixon quote really applies.
TJ Devil 02: I provided a little more explanation.
Medinoc: There is a problem here. Everywhere else, this topic is supposed to be "irony about people who die just before retirement". Here, it's fulled with Nothing Can Stop Us Now! examples...
Red Shoe: Where's "Everywhere Else"? I googled the term, and the only hits that go beyond just quoting The Simpsons uses the more liberal (and more useful) "Dooming yourself to death by making plans for the future" definition.
Mister Six: I agree with Medinoc. The Retirony joke in The Simpsons was very specficially about the trope whereby a policeman who's only one day away from retirement (or a pilot who's only got to fly one more mission before he can go back to his sweetheart etc etc) will inevitably die horribly, because it's an easy way to humanise a very small character. I'm moving some of the examples over to Nothing Can Stop Us Now!. I've also renamed Negative Retirony to Nothing Can Save Us Now since it actually mirrors Nothing Can Stop Us Now!. I'll redirect the Retirony and Negative Retirony links on other pages later on today, unless someone else wants to help me out...?
Red Shoe: Can we rename this to something else? Back when I origininally wrote this article, I had a very clear and fleshed-out notion of what I wanted it to mean, and it's been shaved down to the tiniest sliver of that meaning. As the world's leading advocate of my definition of "Retirony", it really bugs me to see its meaning thus ensmallened, leaving the world without a proper name for the blanket concept that is like Ray-ee-ain on your wedding day, and is now spread out across "Retirony", "Nothing Can Save Us Now" and "Nothing Can Stop Us Now!".
You can, however, have "Expirony" if you like.
Morgan Wick: This is the general case. The two NCSUN pages are subtropes simply because the vast majority of cases of retirony are them. That there are examples under them that are not here does not mean that they are not cases of retirony; that the examples under them are cases of retirony does not mean that they should be here.
Mister Six: Blame it on the Wiki Magic. To be fair, you didn't do yourself any favours by combining three very different tropes, in both expression, use and effect. Especially when you used a name that was very specficially created to mock just one of those tropes. "Retirony" as used in The Simpsons is obviously about this one specific trope. Renaming this trope so you can use Retirony to describe something else seems like a backwards way of doing things.
Katsuyo: I thought about making this it's own trope, but the YKTTW boards shot it down pretty quickly saying that it's basically Retirony. It's the principle by which if the audience sees a picture of a character's family/girlfriend/wife/child, then that character will die almost immediately. There's usually no mention of retirement or even a suggestion that the person will soon be out of danger; they die totally randomly and they have no role outside showing up and dying. I guess it's sort of a shortcut for true Retirony.
The thing is, I still don't think the current Retirony page really covers this. I hope no one minds if I add a paragraph to include it. If I'm off base, feel free to kill it.
I trimmed the Red Dwarf entry — it was an "Actually" situation. Originally it stated that Lister being put in stasis meant that he wasn't around to fix the problem that killed everyone else. Rimmer does say this, but it's very firmly established in "Justice" that Rimmer was WRONG and he and Lister had nothing to do with the accident.
It says that how ironic it is is up for debate. It really isn't. It's much like dramatic irony in that the character says they'll be retiring in three days but the audience knows they won't. So irony. The difference between retirony and dramatic irony is that with dramatic irony the audience has been informed of the truth elsewhere, but with retirony the audience is just Genre Savvy
