Serious Business - Television Tropes & Idioms

Yami Yugi: "Dude, don't you think you're overreacting a little? I mean, it's just a card game!"
Kaiba: "Card games are serious business!"

Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series

Why so serious?

The Joker's comeback, Batman: The Dark Knight

Serious Business is when a show revolves around an activity where a sizable portion of the in-series population takes it far more seriously than it should. If something's popularity rivals that of Elvis, or if there are mainstream schools devoted to it instead of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; it's Serious Business. Expect many a Cooking Duel to ensue throughout the series. Quite often the protagonist wants To Be A Master, particularly if said protagonist is young.

This trope is named after a Memetic Mutation of the tongue-in-cheek saying "The internet is serious business". Actually Truth In Television, as the Japanese have the saying: "Just because something is fun to do does not mean you shouldn't take it seriously." (And see the many Real Life examples below.)

Oh, a word of Real Life advice. Telling someone that that they shouldn't take their Serious Business so seriously? Never, ever, works. Plus, it ticks them off.

Compare What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome. See also True Art. When taken to extremes, you might have Intellectual Property Religion. This trope easily leads to Stop Having Fun Guys.

Examples:

Video Games

One word: Fallout.
Pokemon combat is so important in its world that people are allowed to wander around, doing nothing but Pokemon matches. It seems there is nothing considered important that does not involve Pokemon in some way. This, however, could be argued as making sense -- how do you think our world would function if there were multiple species of powerful, apparently sentient and intelligent creatures coexisting with us?
- In the most recent games, it is revealed that a Pokemon (Arceus) created the universe. And you can catch it!
- The Pokemon TCG games for Game Boy take this trope to a ridiculous extent, creating an entire civilisation apparently based around trading and duelling Pokemon cards.
Similarly, in the Mega Man Battle Network series, the entire world revolves around the Net Navis and their fighting; there's classes in the public elementary school about fighting viruses with your Navi, and such oddities can be found online as coffee shops and in the sixth a fish stick vendor where you spend "real" ingame money on treats for these Navis--glorified sentient computer programs. The series alternates between treating Navis other than Megaman and Bass as sentient or not.
Averted in the Culdcept games. The cards aren't a game in-universe -- although sometimes Cepter battles are put on for entertainment in some of the worlds composing it -- and given that the ultimate victor gets to create a new world, and the cards let people use magic, summon monsters, and create items out of thin air, they're a legitimately big deal.
In the fan-made RPG Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden[1], basketball is Serious Business. In the dystopian Twenty Minutes Into The Future, basketball has been outlawed after a "Chaos Dunk" destroyed New York, and almost every basketball player in the world was killed in "The Great B-Ball Purge". Hilarious if only because of how serious everyone is about it, and surprisingly fun to boot.
In the more recent Final Fantasy games, some sort of minigame, usually a collectible card game, is played worldwide. In the most blatant cases, it's possible to challenge someone to a match in the middle of a battle or other disaster.
Custom Robo. Who'd think people fighting with robotic dolls would be big enough to have interscholastic and national tournaments and a black market dealing in illegal custom robo parts? Sometimes, you can challenge any old folk on the street with a custom robo cube in their hand, and challenge them repeatedly before going off to a big tournament or some other plot-mandated event.
Need For Speed: Underground and Underground 2 started off giving street racers enough money to buy import sports cars, but Most Wanted and Carbon finally went to over-the-top extremes showing quite a bit of street racers with enough gold to buy German supercars won from street racing alone!
While court trials are Serious Business in real life, the Phoenix Wright games elevate this to a new level with how over the top its cases get. And while being a lawyer is quite a respectable career in real life, they're practically superheroes in the gameverse.
- Superhero lawyers? What a crazy concept.
The rather unknown party game Poy Poy treats throwing stuff at each other like the biggest thing ever. Okay said stuff are things like big rocks and rockets but still

Anime & Manga

In the world of Yu-Gi-Oh and especially the sequel Yu-Gi-Oh GX, the card game of "Duel Monsters" is a global phenomenon. National tournaments, academies, politics, etc. all revolve around a fairly simple collectible card game. And this isn't even including the mystical occult properties, known only to a few, that somewhat justify this hooplah: Duel Monsters is actually based on magical games powerful ancient Egyptians used to play. Yes, ancient Egyptians.
- Yu-Gi-Oh the abridged series shows that by replacing 'Duel Monsters' with 'Children's Card Game' everything sounds ten times more ridiculous
In an attempt to lampshade/subvert this, GX's protagonist Judai attempts time and again to convince his opponents that their reasons for getting into the game are wrong, and need to remember that the main point of the game is to have fun. Pretty amusing when you consider that these people go to a prestigious boarding school for the sole purpose of learning how to play it better.
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX has now revealed that actually cardgames are the foundation of the universe, rather than just mere ancient Egyptian game of power.
- Really that makes sense. At one point during GX, Duel Monsters is placed next to business and politics in terms of importance and world-control. You heard me. A CHILDRENS CARD GAME HAS REPLACED RELIGION IN TERMS OF GLOBAL IMPORTANCE.
Akagi breaks people's minds by playing mahjong.
- And the author's other series, Kaiji, features people backstabbing, beating up and nearly killing each other over rock-paper-scissors.
In Beyblade, the sport of Beyblading itself. It seems like if anyone wants to Take Over The World, they have to do it with dueling tops.
Subverted in Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer, CLAMP's version of a typical shonen battle-game series. At first, it seems to fit perfectly, as Angelic Layer matches are broadcast on the sides of buildings to large crowds, Angels are treated as Companion Cubes, and Shuuko has abandoned her daughter in favour of playing professionally. However, as we progress through the series, we realize that it was just a busy public place where people wanted to watch a sport (much like football), people that take the game too seriously frequently learn from being defeated that they should just have fun, and Shuuko's debilitating self-loathing, which propelled her to leave her child, is cured by her coworkers' support and her daughter's forgiveness. The competition is seen to most people as just a normal, if odd, game.
Duel Masters is another card game anime. It's not quite as blatant about it as Yu-Gi-Oh, but stadiums are still packed full of spectators watching our heroes play cards.
Bread is treated as Serious Business in Yakitate Japan, although given the wondrous properties of the hero's own bread, (including the ability to rearrange the fabric of reality and send people back in time), perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.
In Ai Kora, quite a number of characters seem to take their personal fetishes far too seriously (including the protagonist!) One chapter involves Maeda butting heads with a band of militant meganekko fetishists, who are up in arms over a fake glasses fad and go around breaking the glasses of "false" meganekko.
Serial Experiments Lain. The Wired: Serious Business. Just like the actual Internet.
One episode of Suzumiya Haruhi No Yuutsu stakes the end of the universe on the outcome of a baseball game. (Although not without some Lampshade Hanging.)
- The What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome Deep Immersion Gaming duel between the SOS Brigade and the Computer Society probably also qualifies. This one's less The End Of The World As We Know It and more just kids getting a little too excited over a competition, though.
  - Come to think of it, Haruhi takes pretty much everything this way, game or no.
Possible Subversion: Arguably, the moral lesson of Martian Successor Nadesico is that treating Humongous Mecha Anime as Serious Business can cause, or at least exacerbate, all manner of death and destruction. If nothing else, the series constantly employs Mood Whiplash to keep its own audience from taking it too seriously.
The gondolier business in ARIA consumes all of the protagonist's lives. Sure, it's their profession, but they're basically just transporting tourists through the canals of New Venice and it is indicated that they'll stop once they get married.
This troper felt very strange about Spice And Wolf: on one hand, economics ARE a Serious Business in the Real Life, but on the other, the medieval economics, with all their perplexing barter and currency exchange techniques, look like a goddamn Card Games rules set whenever characters start going into detail about them. Of course, the said troper Did Not Do The Research on the topic but was it all really that convoluted?
- Yes.
As Hayate No Gotoku advances its plot, it seems the butler career becomes more and more Serious Business. The bare minimum seems to be equivalent to applying for a shounen fighting manga's character job. Props if you also have a Finishing Move.
Lucky Star's Anime Tenchou brings gallons of hot blood, various superpowers and nuclear explosions to the humble business of running a comic and animation store. Why can't real managers be like this guy? And wait till you see his boss...
In the manga Iron Wok Jan, Chinese cooking competitions can fill stadiums and attract celebrity judges, and a particularly famous food critic is a popular celebrity. There's even a shadowy organization that secretly controls all food production and distribution throughout Asia and is trying to take over the Chinese cooking industry of Japan by defeating Japan's top young chefs in a cooking competition.
Characters in Hunter X Hunter think deeply and strategically about everything they do, in hilariously excessive detail, from playing rock-paper-scissors to using Internet search engines to making sushi to buying antiques to guessing a secondary character's gender. At one point, a character haggles down the price of a cell phone, and a crowd bursts out into applause.
Averted in Hikaru No Go: The main characters take the game of go very seriously...but this is justified, as they ARE professional players (much like go players in the real world). Additionally, it is made clear that the world at large doesn't particularly care about the game, when it even knows it exists.
Grander Musashi takes sports fishing very seriously, to the point that anglers call out a technique whenever they throw fishing lines into the water, and treat their fishing rods and lures as CompanionCubes. There's even an academy that trains would-be anglers in the dark arts of fishing. In the sequel, seven divine lures that everybody is after created by Poseidon are the reason for the sinking of Atlantis.
Keroro Gunsou plays with this trope by having Keroro and Giroro treat everything from vacuuming, to going to the beach, to jumping rope, as though it were either a major military operation or a Cooking Duel to decide the fate of the galaxy.
Lunch becomes serious business in one episode of Ah My Goddess, with Skuld and Mara fighting over a boxed lunch with bombs and magic, culminating in Skuld throwing herself off a roof to catch it before it hits the ground.
Metal Fighter Miku makes woman wrestling Serious Business
The japanese junior high school tennis circuit in The Prince Of Tennis.

Western Animation

The card game in Chaotic is only serious business in parallel universes (two, in fact). On Earth, it is just a very popular game and nothing more.
Comedy example: Much to the dismay of The Omniscient Council Of Vagueness, most of the world of Metalocalypse worships the Heavy Metal band "Dethklok" as living gods; allowing them to do anything, including destroying nations.
- In fact, Dethklok IS a nation, with the world's 12th highest GDP. And it's just 5 guys.
Would you believe noodles? In the European/Korean animated series Pucca, the noodles made at the local Chinese restaurant are such Serious Business that in one episode, when the chefs believe themselves disgraced because of a just-barely-unfinished bowl of noodles, they go to a DEATH COURSE to redeem themselves, while in another, when they split up into three separate restaurants over a fight, it causes a sort of Zombie Apocalypse, with most of the inhabitants of the village wandering as an aimless, lifeless, pathetic mob, mumbling and moaning about the lack of noodles until they reunite.
Serious Business was parodied in the episode of Family Guy "E Peterbus Unum". In one of Peter's ancestral flashbacks, the Union won the Civil War with a drinking contest (even though in reality, Robert E. Lee was a teetotaler and as such would never have agreed to such a contest).
- Did... did you seriously Did Not Do The Research link a factual inaccuracy related to the Civil War being won with a drinking contest that wasn't the Civil War being won with a drinking contest? That entry is Serious Business!
Subverted in Futurama, when the Harlem Globetrotters show up to challenge Earth to a game of basketball. When asked what's at stake, the Globetrotters reply... "NOTHING!" After Earth loses the game, further Lampshade Hanging is done by the commentator, who states that "This is a dark day for humanity. Earth... has been beaten... at basketball." In the DVD Commentary, the creators admit that the entire plot was a jab at the network, who always wanted the stakes to be as high as possible.
- However, in another Futurama episode, the Omicronians are so angered by not being able to finish watching the finale of Single Female Lawyer - they attack the earth, demanding to see the rest of the episode. Talk about Serious Business taken to extremes! Fortunately, Fry's knowledge of 20th Century television helps save the day.
- Then, of course, Star Trek has actually become a religion in Futurama. As explained by Nichols: "As country after country fell under its influence, world leaders became threatened by the movement's power." Since then, all the episodes and movies have been dumped on Omega 3 (a forbidden world) - and it became forbidden to use the words "Star" and "Trek" in the same sentence (although in one episode, Hermes mentions the Federation and gets away with it).
Played for laughs in many recent episodes of South Park.
In an episode of The Simpsons, barbershop quartet music is Serious Business: Homer and the Be-Sharps start touring around the world, and as Homer's agent put it, "women are going to want to have sex with you". Granted, it was a spoof of Beatlemania, but still.
The animated series Recess had one jigsaw/card game thing called "Ajimbo", which everyone slowly becomes addicted to, becoming like zombies that literally forget how to play other games like kickball.
Justified in Reboot, where ordinary computer games are a life-or-death matter, for the people inside the computer.
The good guys in Get Ed are couriers. The bad guys are evil couriers, bent on ruling the package delivery market with an iron fist.

Literature

In Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (and its two film adaptations), the Golden Ticket contest quickly becomes a global obsession.
The board game of Azad in Iain M. Banks' The Player Of Games is so complex and wide-ranging it resembles life. The entire structure of the interstellar Empire of Azad is informed and held together (and named after) the game, used to settle commercial and military disputes. The winner of the great tournament is made Emperor. Playing Azad is very Serious Business.
Beer brewing takes on literally mythical proportions in The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers.
In Gullivers Travels, the nations of Lilliput and Blefiscu are engaged in a war over which end to open a hard-boiled egg, the wide end or the narrow end. Swift intended this as a not-so-subtle satire of both the schism between Catholic and Protestant Christians and the rivalry between England and France.
American Psycho does this with business cards - there's a serious rivalry in Patrick's firm about how good they look, right down to the subtle shades of white and the font. In fact, they're so serious, Patrick kills the people who have business cards better than him (don't worry, that's not a spoiler).
The novel Epic's main plot is about a group of far-future colonists using a sword and sorcery MMORPG as a system of government. Also, their economy is based around it too.
- Arguably a Subversion, since the primary narrative thrust of the book is that this system doesn't work.
In the Thursday Next novels, art and literature itself are serious business, with wide riots about the surrealist movement, black market fake manuscripts from renowned authors, and fanatics going door-to-door to convince people about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays.
In Michael Chabon's Summerland, Little League baseball is the key to saving the world and three other worlds.
Dr. Seuss's Butter Battle Book is a clear parody of the Cold War and accompanying Soviet/U.S. arms race. The issue that caused the division and started the whole thing off? Which side of the bread is buttered.
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash elevates pizza delivery as serious business. Electronic timers are placed on each pizza box from the very second the order is placed, and should the thirty minute timer expire then... Well, what happens next begins with the owner of the pizza company personally visiting the wronged customer and apologising profusely. Since that boss is the Don, each and every pizza delivery driver knows well enough that they'd be better off breaking the speed limit, their cars, the sound barrier, anything, than deliver a pizza at 30:01 or later.
- Stephenson seems to be somewhat fond of turning mundane everyday situations into Serious Business™; consider Randy tackling his everyday bowl of Cap'n Crunch in Cryptonomicon, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hess features the eponymous game, universities studying which appear to be the only way to get a tertiary education and the study of which takes over people's lives like joining a religious order.

Live Action TV

By far the worst offender has to be commercials. In almost any given ad, the product of the ad is Serious Business. This ranges from out-of-the-blue conversations about what the product is or does, to the ever-common chases and fights over the product -- forgivable for cartoon commercials for kids' cereal, embarrassing if it's a commercial for some product obviously intended to be purchased by adults -- to the worst of the lot, beer commercials, such as the Bud Light ad where a man in an arctic station trades away all his clothes for a bottle of beer, then has the gall to tell the other (now warm) guy that he got the raw deal.
- A1's "yeah, it's that important" ad campaign is about being Serious Business.
- Another ad that is set in an arctic station, similar to the above Bud Light example, has some people pull up and find all the people inside starving to death. They find that there are plenty of rations and enough food to go around, then they come across the reason for their hunger: there's no more Heinz ketchup left, the only bottle being empty.
- What would you do for a Klondike bar?
Professional Wrestling is very much Serious Business, as any issue, no matter how heinous, threatening, or illegal, can be settled by getting into the ring and fighting it out. In some of the more extreme cases, this can get handwaved, as the commentators will explicitly say that a wrestler "declined to press charges" in order to get his hands on the other wrestler at the Pay-Per-View this Sunday, only $49.95, call your cable or satellite provider to order now.
- In Mexico Lucha Libre (as they call it) is more or less a religion
The British TV series Playing For Real featuring the lives of the Real Falkirk Table Football Club, who lived and breathed Subuteo.
Firefly got canceled, and the fandom howled. This was such SERIOUS BUSINESS, in fact, that the fans eventually got themselves a movie made despite only a handful of episodes being aired.

Sports

Pick a sport. Any Sport.
Pick a movie about sports. Any movie about sports.
Australian cricket legend and World War Two fighter pilot Keith Miller put things into perspective when he was asked how he handled the pressure of international cricket. His reply: "Pressure? A Messerschmitt up your arse is pressure. Playing cricket is not."
Legendary football manager Bill Shankly (link for baffled non-Brits) told an interviewer "Someone said 'football is more important than life and death to you' and I said 'Listen, it's more important than that'."
In Brazil, there's the phrase "o futébol é como uma religião", "soccer is like a religion", which perfectly describes how passionate are Brazilians (and Latin Americans overall) about soccer.
- A particularly tragic case of soccer being taken far too seriously in that part of the world; Andres Escobar, a Colombian national team player who was murdered following an accidental own-goal which saw Colombia kicked out of the 1994 World Cup. It's generally agreed that his death was a result of the match; some argue, however, that it wasn't just the work of a particularly ticked-off fan, but committed on the orders of drug dealers who lost out big on bets made on the game. Either way, it's a pretty harsh example of this trope.
- In Central America, the Soccer War of 1969 claimed thousands of lives. There was a great deal more at stake than soccer, though.
- Hailing from Italy, this author can testify that most Italian males, and an unexpectedly (and depressingly) high percentage of females, are absolutely batshit crazy about soccer. This author has an otherwise extremely smart friend who inexplicably cries himself to sleep whenever his team loses (this does not happen rarely). The Italian situation is so bad that soccer influences politics, and vice versa. And yeah, soccer-craziness-caused deaths do occur.
  - This was actually mentioned in a Jack-In-The-Box commercial.
Melbourne Cup Day, a holiday in Australia celebrating a horse race. It's only a public holiday in Victoria, but the rest of Australia pretty much shuts down while the actual race is running.
- This troper was studying abroad in Queensland on Melbourne Cup day, and during finals time librarians brought out a big tv, in the library, to watch the Melbourne Cup.
Australians as a nation are, for the most part, utterly mad about almost all forms of sports (but especially the ones they're really good at, such as cricket and Australian Rules Football). Here's a fun exercise; watch any Australian commercial TV news broadcast and make note of how many of the stories relate to sport in some way. Bet it's over half. Of course, if you happen to live in Australia and aren't particularly interested in sport, it makes an otherwise wonderful country somewhat less wonderful to live in. It doesn't help that when they lose something that they normally win (as happened a couple of years ago, when England unexpectedly won the Cricket Test Series), they can be pretty bad losers.
Three words: Red Sox Nation.
- Three more words: Raider Nation.
This tropers younger brother literally cried when the Patriots lost Superbowl XLII, and was absolutley impossible to live with for the next three months.
The Serious Business of sports was mused upon in a Sunday(?) comic of Frazz, wherein Frazz and his cycling partner concluded that the unimportance of sports made them the most important thing there is.
Hockey. People who think Canadians are always polite and well-behaved have clearly never been in Vancouver during a Canucks game.
- ...or seen them burn squad cars over the results of a Montréal Canadiens game.
- ...Or been on Whyte Avenue during the Edmonton Oilers' Stanley Cup run in 2006.
- In 1994 the Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals to the New York Rangers. Cue riot.
- Oh, 1955. Maurice "The Rocket" Richard gets suspended for the rest of the season and the playoffs for hitting an official. Cue the riot at the next Canadiens home game.
  - Incidentally, he received a 16 minute standing ovation in 1996, and when he died in 2000 he received a state funeral broadcast across the country, with the Governor-General and prime minister attending. In Quebec, Richard was truly Serious Business.
- Or the hatred of the "Leafs Nation" by everyone else in the country.
- I fear what will happen when the Leafs win another Stanley Cup. It's when not if.

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