Safety Freak

"All the arcades now close at three! The trampolines are bouncy-free! And there's a pad on every knee! Everything's fine, far as I see!"

— Flappy Bob, School's Out! The Musical

A character who has an obsession with safety and security as a character trait. It may be a sign of their extreme status as The Paranoiac, obsessiveness as one of the Moral Guardians, or misguided Control Freak tendencies. Generally, they'll be one of the characters to go off the deep end as a Well-Intentioned Extremist whose prerogative to keep others and themselves safe and following the rules end up ruining or harming the lives of the very people they wished to secure.

Often times these characters are the first to declare Think of the Children! when espousing against morals, lifestyles, behaviors or beliefs they deem unsafe or harmful to minors or the common good and, if they end up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, are always presented as a dangerously repressive Straight Edge Evil at worst or an overbearing Knight Templar. Any example of the trope is likely to strongly contrast No OSHA Compliance and possibly go headlong into the other side of the adherence spectrum. They only allow their kids to watch shows where the heroes always put on safety helmets and wear their seat belts, even when they're in a rush.

They are almost always on the "Prosperity" stance of the Liberty Over Prosperity debate, as long as prosperity equals safety and security. If they are parents, expect them to be parents who go too far in protecting their children. If focused on their OWN safety, expect them to be an incredibly unscrupulous Dirty Coward with an It's All About Me mentality to maintain their self-preservation above all else.

This is stereotypical behavior for any character with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), extreme social phobias, or a particularly strong Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) born from a desire to Never Be Hurt Again. The character's obsession with safety may also render them a Neat Freak due to being Terrified of Germs because of the many dangers they can inflict. In many settings, an obsession with safety only breeds further danger since an obsession with safety fosters a climate of anxiety that makes people feel more insecure, not less.

Often an example of the trope veers headfirst into Order Is Not Good and they can expect a Safety Worst rebuke for their obsession with keeping their environment safe and sober over risks that their protectorates are desperate to take under that Misery Builds Character/a pretense that possible dangers make life worthwhile.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Enforced in Claude the Cat, since they're safety PSA's. Claude is very safety-conscious, telling humans to "look out for the only life you've got" by doing things such as checking electric blankets, avoiding loose connections, etc.

Anime & Manga

• In HuGtto! Pretty Cure, Emiru Aisaki is introduced as one of these, obsessed with protecting people from ever more improbable potential accidents whether they want it or not. She mostly grows out of this after gaining her Precure powers, as becoming a Magical Girl Warrior allows her to be a hero in more productive ways.

Asian Animation

• In the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf season Flying Island: The Sky Adventure, since the balloon people are very fragile and could pop at the slightest provocation, General Balloon has very strict safety standards for them, from removing metal objects from certain locations to forbidding the balloons from playing soccer. When he tries to enforce these standards on Wolffy in his Sirius train, it proves to be more Safety Worst than actually helpful since, well, Wolffy isn't a balloon and isn't remotely as fragile as one.

Comic Books

• Superman in Superman: Red Son after he took control of Soviet Russia, having witnessed the horrors of Russia under Stalin's regime and seeing many of its people starving. He turned it into a benevolent dictatorship where he controlled nearly if not all facets of life within it and made sure everyone was safe, fed, employed, and abided by a strict curfew. All of his goals were based on keeping people healthy and safe from harm, but this desire gets turned on its head when he tries to dominate the entire planet and invade the United States and eventually getting called out by Luthor for his similarity to Brainiac in keeping lives contained out of his need for control.

Films — Animation

• Richard Tyler from The Pagemaster at the beginning of the film. He is a very neurotic and safety-obsessed geek who refuses to do anything a regular person (let alone a kid) considers fun while quoting facts about the dangerous ways said fun acts can go wrong. He grows out of it by the end of the film.
• Marlin is a tragic case of this trope in Finding Nemo. Because his son Nemo narrowly escaped being eaten by a barracuda like his mother and the rest of his siblings as an egg, Marlin is obsessively protective of him, having him check four times for danger before leaving the house, worrying that he's broken a bone, and apparently once freaking out at a petting zoo because "that snail was about to charge".
• In Inside Out, this is Fear's main job. As the Anthropomorphic Personification of the emotion of fear, he views everything as potentially deadly and is constantly dreaming up worst-case scenarios regarding Riley, the girl he and his fellow emotions "drive." Unlike most examples, though, it's implied that Fear's safety obsession is directly tied to Riley's young age— the end of the film reveals that emotions can work together to pilot her, suggesting that Fear will gradually come to represent a healthy level of risk management and concern instead of all-consuming cautiousness.

Films — Live-Action

• In Muppet Treasure Island, Mr. Samuel Arrow is this trope as the ship's quartermaster. He is forever concerned with the Hispanola crew's safety (and hygiene). Long John Silver is able to trick him into sailing out on a lifeboat and leaving his keys behind on the pretext of doing a safety test.
• In Paddington (2014), Mr Brown is safety obsessive due to his job in risk management and insurance, causing him to be extremely neurotic and reluctant to engage in any fun, ruining his personal life with his family. Paddington teaches him An Aesop about embracing risk, which also reignites his marriage.
• Scout in Safety Patrol has the mindset of one, but he's so clumsy that he usually causes more safety hazards on accident than he prevents.
• In Rain Man, this proves to be one of the manifestations of Raymond's autism. When his brother Charlie suggests that they fly to Los Angeles, Raymond refuses by rattling off statistics about every single airline's crash-to-success ratio. Later, after the brothers see an accident on the interstate highway, Raymond absolutely refuses to let Charlie drive on it any longer.

Literature

• In the sequel book Scumble of Savvy, Fedora keeps telling everyone to be careful and saying platitudes like "Avoid the worst; put safety first" and "Eyes on safety".

Live-Action TV

• In CSI: NY, an abusive example of the trope manifests as one of the perps-of-the-week in the episode "Child's Play". The man had become so obsessed with safety that he wouldn't let his son leave the house, play with toys, or even read comics because his childhood best friend had fallen for an ad for a "real submarine" in the back of a comic book. The thing turned out to be made of cardboard, but the little girl, who couldn't swim, trusted the ad and drowned trying it out in the neighborhood lake.
• In the first season of Modern Family, Manny has this trait, frequently citing safety concerns regarding home repair or risky activities. It causes him to clash with his new stepfather Jay, who's much more laid back in terms of caution. Manny gradually grows out of this, though he never truly loses his "safety first" mentality.
• On the Waterfront, a British kids' sketch show which aired in the late 1980s, featured a character called Mr Cautious, who's obsessed with safety to the point where he berates people for doing anything he considers to be "dangerous". This includes seemingly innocuous activities like playing Trivial Pursuit because "all that thinking will make your head explode." And, if he sees you with a sharp object, he'll respond by saying something along the lines of:
  Ooooh, you fool! You'll have someone's eye out!

Video Games

• In Ittle Dew 2, Safety Jennies are defined as this trope, residing in a pillow fort and wearing safety gear while showing great reluctance to fight at all.
• Occurs in Poptropica, where Mocktropica Island gets taken over by a set of new developers. One of them is a safety inspector, who is insistent on making sure nobody gets hurt, or else they'll get sued. He doesn't want you to do traditional video game things like climbing and exploring. When you try jumping off a building, he appears and forces you to wear an unwieldy, giant helmet before doing so.
  Safety inspector: No jumping off anything without the proper headgear!

Web Animation

• General James Ironwood from RWBY is a particularly dark version. In a Crapsack World full of murderous Grimm and their monstrous mistress Salem, Ironwood became obsessed with keeping humanity safe from her and militarized shows of force and security, especially after a later run-in with her forces implicitly caused considerable Sanity Slippage. Unfortunately his combination of bullheaded beliefs of Never My Fault, trust issues, and Tautological Templar character flaws only increased as pressures mounted up over the series until he effectively decided to kill off his detractors and leave his protectorates in Mantle to death to have Atlas lifted into the atmosphere. All to protect himself and his own forces from Salem.

Web Video

• Unwanted Houseguest: Coach Pat from Episode Fourteen of "TRUE Scary Stories" falls unto this category, but he is teaching rock climbing, and suffered fingore in a climbing accident when he was younger, so he comes across as a Reasonable Authority Figure.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • In "The Safety", Darwin sees a school video about common safety procedures and situational awareness that traumatizes him so horribly that he becomes obsessed with safety measures. He almost ends up turning all of Elmore into a safety-focused totalitarian dictatorship.
  • In "The Authority," Richard's mother Granny Jojo comes to visit the family after Richard injures himself in an accident. Granny Jojo tells Nicole that she isn't doing enough to keep everyone safe...trouble is, Jojo's definition of "safe" excludes making sandwiches, being near windows, or even leaving the house, and she uses horrific Scare 'Em Straight tactics to keep the kids suitably paranoid. Eventually, all Richard and the children can do is sit on the couch and eat, as it's the only thing that they aren't terrified of trying. This results in the kids temporarily becoming fat, stupid, and lazy coach potatoes like Richard.
• In the Arthur episode "D.W. Blows the Whistle" D.W. becomes a safety freak after getting an official safety whistle during a safety lesson at school. She later begins blowing the whistle on everybody after she sees them doing things that actually pose no danger: mom for reading a newspaper without wearing gloves, dad for cooking dinner over a hot stove, Arthur for taking a bath without wearing a flotation device, and even Pal for running down the stairs and not holding onto the handrail.
• Flappy Bob and his chain of suffocatingly sterile Learnatoriums in School's Out! The Musical. Bob was raised by HP and Sanderson on the belief that dull and boring was fun from the moment they found him, as an Unwitting Pawn in their 37-year plan to take over Fairy World and install perfect order. At the outset, he just wants kids to be kept safe and to curb their destructive behavior by enforcing the only kind of fun he grew up knowing, at the cost of making children everywhere miserable by creating a completely restricted and sterile world to appease their parents.
• The Safety Bots in Codename: Kids Next Door become so fanatical in their desire to fulfill their programming to protect children that they hunt and seal entire areas of children in protective bubble wrap and eventually target adults as the prime threat to the safety of all children. Eventually, they decide the planet, with its various natural disasters, creates hazards and opt to seal it in bubble wrap to keep it and the children forever safe despite it being implied the plan would end up killing everyone on Earth.
• DuckTales (2017): Bradford Buzzard is this trope taken to its darkest and deconstructed extreme. After being traumatized by being the Tagalong Kid for his grandmother's perilous adventures, he saw the world as dangerous and chaotic and wants to take over the world because he genuinely wants to bring order to it. The catalyst that made him decide to directly oppose Scrooge was out of a genuine concern that Scrooge's antics continually bring about world-endangering threats. However, later events reveal this all to be a crock. He's essentially motivated to maintain his own sense of safety due to his trauma and wants to destroy adventures because of the dangers they might pose to him.
• In Fluffy Gardens, Mavis the Pony is very concerned about her own safety and refuses to do things that can potentially harm her. In contrast, her cousin Max the Zebra loves challenges and tends to be reckless. He tries to make Mavis loosen up, but after he manages to convince her to jump a trampoline together, Max is the one who gets hurt.
• Armageddroid in My Life as a Teenage Robot wishes to fulfill his programming to destroy all of Earth's weapons to keep mankind safe and create peace, but his programming is so extreme he registers even small objects like sporks and children's toys to be weapons and will destroy anyone who gets in his way of making the world "safe". Best exemplified in his quote:
  Armageddroid: I will liberate the Earth, even I must destroy it to do so!
• In The Loud House, Clyde's dads Howard and Harold are very safety conscious over their only son as well as their son's friends. Among other things, they don't allow their son to eat pickles because someone in the 19th century died choking on one, they make him and his visitors wear seat belts at the table, and they wrap their car up in bubble wrap and drive slowly to avoid car crashes.
• In Back at the Barnyard, Duke is generally very strict about safety, showing the same safety film to the barnyard animals every year despite their protests. At one point, he decides to take down a rope in a corner because he is worried someone will trip on it and burst into flames.
• Milo Murphy's Law has Elliot Decker, the self-proclaimed Safety Czar. He's a volunteer school crossing guard who's obsessed with safety due to a Freudian Excuse involving an elephant, leading him to antagonize the eponymous danger magnet protagonist.
• In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Marco Diaz is known around his school as "the safe kid", chiefly due to the time he wore a helmet in the showers. During his and Star's first meeting, he guides her around every little obstacle in her way. He comes out of his safety bubble thanks to his dangerous adventures with Star and takes several levels in badass over the course of the series, but he always prefers the safe route to any danger and encourages his friends to avoid troubles when he can when he's not expressing enjoyment over fighting monsters.
• Rugrats (1991):
  • In "Dil We Meet Again", Howard is the safety monitor for a block party that the parents throw. He gets on everyone's nerves when he shouts safety rules through a megaphone, most especially Lou's. According to Betty, Howard made 23 citizens arrests the last time he was safety monitor. Near the end of the episode, Lou traps Howard in a port-a-potty so everyone can enjoy the watermelon-eating contest in peace, but Howard yells the safety tips he was going to review before the contest begins from inside the port-a-potty when he is unable to get out.
  • "Officer Chuckie" has the babies going to a safety lecture led by Officer Dan. Chuckie, already a Cowardly Lion, takes a shine to his cautious ways and decides to become a safety officer as well, but goes overboard and refuses to let the other babies play with toys or even move because they might get hurt. Chuckie fortunately manages to redeem himself when he saves his friends from Angelica.
• The Simpsons: For as reckless of a guy he is, Homer Simpson has adopted this trait a few times. The third episode, "Homer's Odyssey", has Homer become a public safety advocate after his family were almost hit by a truck. This stint started with urging city hall to install a stop sign, led to so much public signage the newspapers were saying "Enough already!", and ended with him getting his iconic job as safety inspector at the nuclear power plant. In "Fear of Flying", after being kicked out of Moe's, Homer tries some other bars, including a lesbian bar without a fire exit, and Homer was so unnerved about this lack of a fire exit that he left without getting a drink. Later, in "Bye Bye Nerdie", he became a professional babyproofer, and made so many homes safe for babies it resulted in mass unemployment in child injury-related greeting card manufacturers.

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