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Just For Fun
Better Than It Sounds
Mole King: Why live up here on the crust when you can be with me in the soily filling of the sweet Earth pie?
Larry: Better than it sounds!
— The Tick

So you love a series. You own all the volumes, have various merchandise, can quote characters off the top of your head, and know every plot twist by heart.

However, one day someone asks the dreaded question "What's this about?" And suddenly it hits you — trying to sum it up in only a few sentences makes it sound really really ridiculous, and though the show itself may take itself entirely seriously, suddenly all the random parts, nonsensical aspects and just plain weirdness are laid bare before you.

But, really it's Better Than It Sounds once you actually see it in action.

This is the place to record those descriptions — the random, the understated, and the WTF.  * This isn't "Sum up your favorite movie in one sentence!", rather it is for the summaries that would make a person say "This would never sell!". This is not They Fight Crime, since those shows have an inherently ridiculous concept as part of the catch — these are only made ridiculous by us mentioning things out of context.

To keep it interesting, put the name of the series in spoiler tags and try keep this from becoming Complaining About Shows You Dont Like; it's actually Making Fun Of Things You Do Like. And most of all, have fun.

See also Paint The Hero Black.

This Trope Contains Spoilers By Necessity. Read At Your Own Risk.

World Wide Web

  • TV Tropes Wiki: A bunch of self-admitted geeks and nerds talk about various recurring things in all forms of media.
  • Wikipedia: Giant website that seeks to be the repository for all the world's knowledge. Spends much of its time hosting arguments about what qualifies as "knowledge".
    • Didn't we get these two the wrong way round?
      • Nah, seriously, who the hell needs "all the world's knowledge"? The former site is much more useful.
    • Alternatively: The website where people who know nothing try to figure out if they know something.
  • Zero Punctuation: A snarky British guy reviews video games accompanied by off-beat animation.
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd: An alcoholic nerd rages about shitty games.
  • The Internet: People all around the world are brought together by the things they love best, which appear to be pornography, repetition of various phrases, arguing, and cats.
    • Specifically, pictures of cats with text captions added.
    • 4chan: Place where most of the aforementioned repetiotions of various phrases are born in. Also called the asshole of the aforementioned place.
  • Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog A forty-five-minute-long low budget romantic comedy supervillian musical tragedy in the form of a video blog.
  • Shinji and Warhammer 40K: A young boy finds a box full of wargame miniatures and starts talking to them. They start talking back. Then he gets a giant robot. And Psychic Powers. Then the weird stuff starts.
    • Thousand Shinji: A different version of that young boy converts his friends to his cult in a plot against his father.
  • Broken Saints: Four ethnically diverse outcasts travel to California to take on an Big Bad Corporation with an Evil Plan.
  • X the "Abridged Series": A guy takes a Merchandise Driven anime and redubs it using the same five jokes over and over. Everyone copies him.
    • Sailor Moon Abridged: The universe plays a gigantic cosmic joke on a British cat and an Australian cat who have had sex twice.
  • Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?: Twee pop star loses his mind on vinyl.
    • Skeletal Lamping: Said twee pop star now believes he is a black man who has had multiple sex changes(a man, a woman, then back to a man), was in a funk rock band in the 70s called Arousal, and has gone through multiple phases.
  • There She Is!: Interracial dating is Serious Business.
  • Survival Of The Fittest: Hockey players get slaughtered, teenage girls get raped with vases, killers angst about their actions, and only a few make it out alive from the whole mess.
  • Tim Curry: An actor whose most famous roles are that of a clown, talking smoke, and a transvestite.
  • Fobbies Are Borange: An angry, chain-smoking 13-year-old girl, an emotionless pyromaniac, an aspiring broadway star, and a child suffering heavily from ADD save the world from evil yet incredibly stupid orange blob aliens. The ending makes people cry.
  • Tree From My Youth: An emotionally broken boy and his dog try to stop a fat old man who uses television and lightning to control an island, with the help of weird people (and their pets), but in audio form!
  • Loids Are Not Christmas: A retarded child, a boy living in a trash can, a religious girl, and a dead person save the world from an evil alien by singing Umbrella.
  • Bum Reviews: A hyperactive homeless man reviews movies and asks for change.
    • The Nostalgia Critic: Guy rages over old TV shows and movies, does countdowns, and dies often.
    • The Nostalgia Chick: Girl rages over old TV shows and movies, does countdowns, and becomes a sex symbol for it.
    • Ask That Guy With The Glasses: Bespectacled man is asked unusual questions to which he gives comedic, highly disturbing and somewhat sociopathic answers.
    • Atop the Fourth Wall: An annoyed comic book nerd in a hat.
  • Protectors Of The Plot Continuum: Borderline psychos go into other peoples' works and off the main characters in creative ways. The organization is run by telepathic plants.
    • The Reorganisation: The above organization is found to be run by The Mole.
    • The Original Series: Tolkien's world is really, really messed up.
    • Crashing Down: A Star Wars Expy and an evil saprophytic fungus are back for revenge.
    • There Will Be Glitter: When a plague ends, a legion of squeeing idiots nearly takes over the organization. An up-and-coming technician throws his life away avenging the man who put a lot of time and effort into training him.
    • The Key to Canon: A berserker cyborg and a Mega Neko try to keep a Cosmic Keystone away from the Beast. Along the way, they recruit a Starfleet officer and turn her into a Time Lady. In the end, it is Jesus who saves the day.
    • The Ypur Invasion: A bunch of robots dump wild animals in HQ. They are rounded up. When they escape a month later, a Dalek has trouble with orders and an Innocent Fanservice Girl learns why you do not wear transparent clothing in the presence of Really Gets Around characters.
    • Official Fanfiction Universities: Fans are put through hell by the characters they love.
      • The Official Fanfiction University of Middle-Earth: An Eldritch Abomination is rebuilt as a wall and the ultimate evils teach about evil.
      • The Official Fanfiction University of Cats: Furries run a school in a junkyard.
      • The Official Fanfiction University of Redwall: Furries run a school in a monastery.
      • The Official Fanfiction University of MREDURE: Students learn how to tell a story with the help of the multiverse's best programmers, a lot of kings, some villains, and more. Four psychos help keep order.
      • The Hogwarts Fanfiction Academy: Students teach how to write well.
  • You Tube: People slap together video footage and sounds (usually taken from their favorite TV shows) seemingly at random.
  • Stray: a young Soviet soldier gives a new meaning to Stalking Is Love as he irreparably violates his universe's space-time continuum to get together with an anime geek who lives several decades in his future. Metaphor-laden gay sex ensues.
  • SCP Foundation: Morally ambiguous top-secret world-spanning organization works to secure, contain, and protect various artifacts, locations, and individuals that threaten "normalcy." Included among their employees are a Body Surfing baboon, an expy of Indiana Jones, and Satan, who likes shotguns.
  • Undocumented Features: A bunch of bored college students create a Mega Crossover with over 100 different works. One of the main problems in the work is solved by Breaking The Fourth Wall and having the authors make a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Tasakeru: On an alternate Earth without humans, society's rejects band together to survive. Features samurai squirrels, big spiders, explosions, and frequent innuendo courtesy of a barely-dressed vixen.
  • Super Mario Bros Z: Two plumbers, two rodents, and a reptile team up to prevent a robot and a different reptile (with the help from a mysterious fat man) from acquiring colored rocks. A lot of problems encountered involve violence.
  • There Will Be Brawl: A small-time drug dealer has to deal with a serial killer who kills mob bosses and another who eats his victims, a corrupt police force, and a brother who has NEVER been a plumber.

Music

Misc.
  • Hydrogen hydroxide a.k.a. Water: A chemical that is the largest contributor to acid rain and fatal when inhaled in large amounts. Despite this, it can be found in almost any home and certainly any chemistry lab. No organized movement to make it illegal has ever gathered enough support to be successful.
  • Organized religion: People around the world argue and kill each other about various books, most of which are driving at the same point, which is not to kill people.
    • Protest atheism: People decide to throw out the baby with the bathwater and say that the books themselves are wrong and bad.
    • Agnosticism:: People who claim that it is completely impossible to know whether the books are true or not, and are often disliked by the more militant members of both of the above groups.
    • Deism: People who believe that the protagonist of the various books exists, but didn't do most of the things that the books say (s)he did.
  • Pornography: People get naked and are filmed doing things which, sometimes, come waaaaaay out of left field.
  • Braces: A painful, years-long method of skeletal readjustment and sometimes bone removal, resulting in permanent disfiguration, to which children are subject against their will. This is, for some, necessary to be considered attractive.
  • Life: A state of being in which those who experience it go through years of slow deterioration of bodily parts and have nothing better to do than talk about random things in places like this, release excess fecal matter, and participate in the world's slowest and least impressive MMO.
    • I don't know, the graphics are really good, the dialogue (usually) better than others and the full immersion something else. The quests are bit vague, though.
    • Also, it's far too expensive.
    • Death: The (mostly) Downer Ending to the above, with little known about what happens after. Depending on the personal views of the participant, what comes afterwards is either good, bad, or ambiguous.
  • Pregnancy / Childbirth: A parasite (or sometimes more than one) lodges itself within a woman and slowly grows over most of a year, affecting the woman physically and psychologically. Eventually the parasite(s) is ejected painfully from the body; however, it typically stays with the woman for years, and the woman may even be imprisoned if she abandons the creature. Despite the intense physical and emotional discomfort the woman is put through during this time, the growth and arrival of the creature is widely considered a beautiful and life-affirming affair.
    • Adoption: After its ejection from the body, the parasite is passed off to a surrogate host, who continues the process as normal.
  • Sex: An exhausting and at times messy and uncomfortable (physically and emotionally) activity that can cause disease and in some extreme cases even death but which is nevertheless is widely enjoyed, greatly sought after by many (especially those who have not yet done it) and is in fact considered healthy and essential for survival. Despite it's widespread popularity, undertaking it in front of other people is widely disapproved of and can be embarrassing. Is the leading cause of the aforementioned parasites.
  • Employment: People engage in a series of tasks, usually of a routine and often repetitive nature. Although the routine in which these tasks are undertaken varies from person to person, for many people this involves getting up very early in the morning and undertaking them for several hours at a time, usually until the day is well and truly over. Despite the fact that few people (unless they're lucky) can truly claim to enjoy this routine, those who do not undertake it are often looked down upon and are widely disadvantaged in society.
  • Breathing The constant repetition of an act that intakes a deadly and addictive poison on principle, can cause internal bleeding and hemmhorage if done improperly, and significantly increases the carbon footprint of every person who does it. Any attempt to stop results in painful and invariably fatal withdrawal.
  • Fiction: People make stuff up; it's sometimes based on truth, but it's often complete make-believe. This results in the formation of multi-million dollar industries, varying degrees of fame and fortune for those doing the making-up, and numerous and often intense discussions about it on the Internet.
  • Music: A series of sounds which need to be heard in the right order and by the right person to be appreciated; otherwise, it's noise.
  • Philosophy: Endless debates between self-proclaimed geniuses that have been going on since the beginning of civilization.
  • Warfare: An event in which two nations fight against each other. Sometimes several other nations join in, supporting which side that they feel will help their interests more.
    • "Civil" Warfare: Same as above, but this time it's one nation fighting against itself.
    • These are, in fact, only better than it sounds when compared to the usual alternative. They have, in fact, been famously described as "hell".
  • Sports: The distillation of war into various forms for fun and profit. More fun than war, because the rules are easier to follow and far fewer people get killed. You are not considered to be a real man if you do not enjoy it and are often accused of homosexuality, despite the fact that most of these activities involve sweaty, muscular men wearing spandex and grabbing balls.
    • Wrestling: a form of the above, with two half-naked men grabbing at each other.
    • Baseball: Hit a dude's ball with your rod and run home before his goons catch you.
    • Association Football: Men (and sometimes women) kick a ball around a field for 90 minutes. Often for longer.
  • Video Games: That distillation, but with all the physical aspects that may actually result in excercise removed, and a general aura that only men can participate, although women take place in a different distilation, which is in fact a distillation of lock picking put into the form of moving non-physical jewels around a 2-dimensional surface.
  • Love: Staking your happiness on another person, often making you miserable, crazy, or and evil. And it's involuntary.
    • Some forms can be partly described as a weird trick nature plays on humans to help keep the species going.
    • Hopeless Romantics: People who apply this concept to itself.
  • Marriage: Because of the above (and possibly the "exhausting and at times messy and uncomfortable activity"), two people move together. Many things can go wrong (including results of the "parasite generation") and lead to an end where one tries to extort as much from the other as possible. Almost always ends in either heartbreak or death (death is the "good" ending).
  • Sleep: A state of semi-voluntary unconsciousness during which strange and occasionally disturbing visions may be experienced.
  • Dreams: A set of variably bizarre hallucinations happening daily if you're doing it right.
  • Pets: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but are kept around mostly because they're cute.
  • Humans: Creatures which eat voraciously, destroy everything they can get away with, reproduce in spades, and are incredibly difficult to train to do anything, but stick around mostly because they're hard to fully dispose of.
  • Civilization: Giving up hours of one's species' free time, along with 150,000+ years of tradition, and enslaving other species so your own kind won't go hungry.
  • The Game: Ignorance is bliss.
    • Dammit! You just HAD to bring that up, didn't you?
  • Action Movies: A body of work dedicated to the belief that the world's problems can only be solved by doing things that will get you at least life in prison.
  • Eggs: Fowl menstruation used as edible foodstuffs.
    • Fruit: Engorged plant ovaries used as edible foodstuffs.
    • Honey: Plant semen regurgitated by hordes of flying insects and used as edible foodstuffs.
      • Wrong on one point, I'm afraid: it's not made from plant semen, it's made from odorous secretions designed to attract the insects so that they will facilitate plant sex. (You have no idea how difficult it was to type that in accordance with the style of this page; this troper is a total prude.)
    • Forest Honey: Parasite excrements regurgitated by hordes of flying insects and used as edible foodstuffs.
  • Flowers: Genitalia used to show affection, sympathy, or as a major ingredient to make liquids with no other purpose than to make the wearer stinky.
  • Piercings: Foreign pieces of metal painfully forced into parts of the body for the sake of (perceived) attractiveness.
  • Trains: A chain of boxes on wheels travelling along one or two rods.
    • Bicycle: A device that is so unstable it must be travelling at speed to remain upright on its own. People, especially young children, fall off them frequently; as a result, many places have laws requiring specialised safety gear to operate them.
  • Guiness Book of Records: A massive list of who/what is best at something.
  • Lord of the Dance: A shirtless man in tight pants stomps his feet in complicated patterns, accompanied by about 100 Irish people in funny dresses who also stomp their feet in complicated patterns and hardly ever move their upper bodies.
  • Vacuum Cleaner: This sucks.
  • Leaf Blower: This blows.
  • Jesus Christ: Well-known carpenter who was executed by The Roman Empire for supposedly "conspiring" to overthrow the government under pressure of local religious leaders.
  • Nascar: White guys in cars driving in a circle for three and a half hours.
    • They've got a black guy now.
    • And a woman.
    • This is actually exactly how it sounds.
  • Horse Racing: Guys ride animals in circles for hours
  • Formula 1 Racing: People drive around an a figure eight for hours
  • Speech: Moving various parts of your mouth and upper respiratory system in order to make a series of sounds with an arbitrary relation to real things. Can lead to fatal choking, and depending on the real or assumed referents of said arbitrary sounds, other fatal consequences.
  • Drinking: Imbibing the toxic liquid chemical byproducts of decaying plant ovaries in order to impair brain function. Said impairment is caused by the delay between ingestion of said toxic chemicals, and removal of said toxic chemicals by the liver. Come to think of it this is exactly as bad as it sounds, but YMMV...
  • Disney Theme Parks: You pay hundreds of dollars so you and your family can stand around in the hot sun for hours, watch severely abridged versions of a bunch of movies you've probably already seen several times, and get the autographs of professional cosplayers. The more days in a row you do it, the more people will envy you.
  • Mathematics: A dark art through which people attempt to learn more about entities not of this dimension, entities that cannot be directly experienced and yet still control much of this universe. Many practitioners of this art are known to have mental illness, and childhood exposure to this art leaves many people in the world traumatised to the point of doing anything to avoid it.

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