Kick The Dog Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

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deserves to be added

My favoriate example is from the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves:

"Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings... And call off Christmas!"

Paul A: In the Family Guy example about the villain showing his meanness by shooting a dog, I removed the link to Shoot The Dog, because that's actually about something different.

Seth: Don't they say that most serial killers hurt small animals as children. I think for a Truth In Television markup we should mention that.

Lale: True, but IMO, the trope is not just "characters who are evil hurt animals." It's a storytelling technique indicating someone's truly evil by portraying them doing something truly despicable, same as indicating someone's... evil by having them wear black.

Seth: That is being so inverted after Matrix (Also i think you win an award for strangest use of ellipses ever) But your right, no need to put it in.

Lale: I think someone mixed up Morality and Mortality in that link.

Scrounge: The Transformers wiki has a page on Cobra Comander due to crossovers, and it includes a picture of him actually dropkicking a puppy.

◊ This has to be thrown in. Let's steal whichever size works. :) LATER: Done. How's the size work for you party people in the place to be?

Ununnilium: Works well for me.

Scrounge: All right, that picture seems to have found a place here, hotlinked though it may be... If someone can mirror it on this Wiki, or tell me how to, that'd probably go a long way to smothing things over with Seth for me.

Ununnilium: Go to the Categories menu, Tools, Media Uploader.

Adam850: Wow, Cobra Commander is a bastard.

Eric Der Konig: That picture cracks me up. Does that make me a horrible person?

High Five: Oh, thank God I'm not alone in thinking that picture's funny.

Kilyle: I might be thinking of the wrong trope... do we have a different one that handles the hierarchy of rising audience empathy related to who is threatened or killed? I read somewhere that the audience feels a little bad if a man is threatened or killed, a bit worse if it's a woman, a lot worse if it's a child, and OH NO NOT THE DOG! (roughly) So if you want to shamelessly pull the audience into the story, have them on the edge of their seats, stick in a dog who is in danger. (See Independence Day in the tunnel... although that one was, I think, really well done.)

Anyway, whichever trope covers that, audience involvement based on a hierarchy of which characters "really shouldn't die," well, I know we're not putting Harry Potter spoilers up yet (and I won't be spoiler-y here on the talk page either), but when they do go up, I'd like to see an entry for the non-human casualty that had practically everyone, including the author, bawling. Not a dog, no, but the principle is sound.

AKK: I saw on World's Wildest Commercials an old Diesel ad where there's 2 guys heading for a shootout in the Wild West. The "villain" fellow not only kicks the dog, but also steals candy from a little girl. Sadly, my Tube-Fu is not so good, so I couldn't find said ad, but if someone could verify it, they have my thanks. :)

Document N: Pulling for lack of context (the quote mentioned isn't there):

Interesting aversion: The quote at the top of the page is a reference to the making of one of the Friday The Thirteenth films, in which the script called for Jason Voorhees to (literally) Kick a Dog. Jason's actor Kane Hodder objected to this, stating his belief that while Jason was very violent, he was not evil enough to kick a dog.

Marikina: Does the actions of the eponymous protagonist of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance count? She buys a puppy and then shoots it in the head to test out her gun, and probably to exercise a fantasy of her shooting the villain like a dog.

Fast Eddie: Restorations here will have to be hand, as there is too much difference between the last back up and this bowlderized version. The bowlderizer has been blocked.

—- Lightice: I don't understand why in the Pans Labyrinth entry does having a couple of rabbits cooked for food supposedly cross the Moral Event Horizon, when the man just has had two innocents brutally killed for wasting his time. It's not like he killed them to get the rabbits, or anything - that was purely coincedental.

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