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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!
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.
This Trope Contains Spoilers By Necessity. Read At Your Own Risk.
Misc.
- TV Tropes Wiki: A bunch of self-admitted geeks and nerds talk about various recurring things in all forms of media.
- Just For Fun: Said geeks take a break from talking about media in order to talk about talking about 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.
- 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.
- They Might Be Giants: A rock band consisting entirely of nerds named either John or Daniel, except for the one guy named Marty. And there's an accordion.
- Gorillaz: A band consisting of a blue haired childish Casanova and both eyes pressed into his head, a Satanist who owns Satan's own bass (El Diablo), a 15 year old Japanese Super Soldier and a drummer who has been possessed by multiple spirits.
- The Beatles: Four musicians from Northern England. Before the split, one recorded some incomprehensible and awful albums. After the split, another one married a one-legged woman, the third produced a Monty Python film and nobody cared about the fourth (he even had drinking problems).
- Daft Punk: Two French guys who cut bits out of good songs, add a beat, and then appear onstage to perform them standing in a pyramid made of indandescent tubes. Oh, and they pretend to be robots.
- Elvis Presley: A guy who knew how to sing and dance. That in his first appearance was shown only from waist up.
- U2: Four musicians from Ireland that promote awareness for the Environment.
- The Rolling Stones: Four British musicians tough to kill and/or retire.
- The Who:
Four Three Two British musicians. Tough to retire, but easy to kill.
- Aerosmith: Five musicians from Boston. They have a Roller Coaster featuring their songs, spent the equivalent of an airplane in drugs, and their first #1 was a Disaster Movie theme song.
- David Bowie: British man famous for unusual songs, androgyny, and appearing in movies.
- 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.
- 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:: Taking possibly the most important question ever asked and answering with a resounding "how the fuck should I know"?
- 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.
- How is that supposed to be better than it sounds?
- Breathing The constant repetition of an act that intakes a deadly poison on principle, can cause internal bleeding and hemmhorage if done improperly, and significantly increases the carbon footprint of every person who does it.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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 bees 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Nascar: White guys in cars driving in a circle for three and a half hours.
- They've got a black guy now.
- 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
- 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.
- The Residents: Four guys from Louisiana wear eyeball masks and make bizarre music.
- Queen: A guy with a PHD in astrophysics joins forces with a flamboyantly gay singer to write mini-rock operas about riding a bicycle.
- 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.
- Guiness Book of Records: A massive list of who/what is best at something.
- Bum Reviews: A hyperactive homeless man reviews movies and asks for change.
- Atop the Fourth Wall: An annoyed comic book nerd in a hat.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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