∇
troperville

People will wait to call the EMS because the EMS providers will insist on interrupting the game to get information. Grandpa will be just fine for another hour and a half because (and I quote) "those neurosurgeons can just turn him back on, you know, like in that movie?"

— A medic trying to remain sane

Fiction is not reality. While fiction rarely shows the negative consequences of a trope, reality is not as forgiving. Every trope here can have serious if not fatal repercussions in reality if people treat them as if they were true. These may originate as a case of Reality Is Unrealistic. See also Do Not Try This At Home. The result of doing something on this index may well be a Darwin Award.

This is an index. A description of why a trope fits here is fine but examples should go on the respective trope pages. Try not to add 300 additional bullet points if it can be helped.

Tropes:

Adults Are Useless: Truth in Television to the extent that all humans are by nature biased and fallible. But children rarely have the knowledge or experience required to deal with dangerous or otherwise critical situations, and this trope can lead to them not getting help when they need it in such a situation.
Aerosol Flamethrower: Runs a danger of overheating and exploding, or burning yourself.
All Animals Are Domesticated: No, pandas are not "cute and cuddly" and will maul your ass like any bear would if you get too close. Same for many other animals - even some "domesticated" animals can be dangerous if approached in the wrong way, and wild or stray animals should be left alone.
Almost Lethal Weapons: It's extremely hard to inflict minor wounds on someone with a lethal weapon.
Appeal To Nature: A logical fallacy that states solely because something is "natural," it is also always safe/safer than something "chemical" or "artificial" or "constructed." Ignores that there are some very harmful "natural" things (such as dangerous insects, inedible or poisonous plants, and diseases, all of which sometimes must be combatted via non-"natural" means), and can lead to people who need artificial means to survive or improve quality of life forgoing them for "natural" solutions that don't work as well or don't work at all.
Annoying Arrows: Don't yank that arrow out, unless you like torn organs, muscles, and infections, not to mention bleeding to death. In fact, try not to get shot by arrows at all. There's a reason why crossbowmen and archers were hated in the dark ages.
Ass Shove: Shoving things up your ass at high speed is not safe for your anus or rectum, and many objects or substances are just plain dangerous to put up there.
Booze Flamethrower: Slightly less dangerous than the Aerosol Flamethrower above, but don't do this unless you're a trained performer. If you don't blow hard enough, don't duck fast enough, or don't blow it out the right way, you are getting a mouth full of fire.
British Royal Guards: As that page will clearly tell you, mocking the guys who are dressed funny carrying assault rifles with fixed bayonets, will get you in a lot more trouble in real life than it will in fiction.
Bulletproof Human Shield: Human bodies are pliable and not great against supersonic metal. This is especially true for armor piercing rounds and high caliber.
Can-Crushing Cranium: Slamming an object into your head is never a good idea.
Chainsaw Good: Rule Of Cool aside, chainsaws are not intended to be used as weapons and are as likely to kill you as the guy you're aiming at or break and jam.
Choke Holds: While not quite as bad as a Tap on the Head, chokes can still be fatal or cause permanent injury.
Concealment Equals Cover: Don't assume that the wooden door, fence, interior wall, car body, or even concert bricks you're behind will protect you from bullets. It won't.
Convection Schmonvection: Being near a fire, a lava pool, a hot oven, a nuclear or conventional explosion, or some other source of radiant heat can be just as deadly or injurious as being in it. A flashpoint is where an object instantly catches fire when the air is a certain temperature.
Cool Clear Water: Just because water is clear doesn't mean it is safe to drink. It may have lethal chemicals, organisms, or be lethally hot. In fact, the water may be clear DUE to those things: it could mean everything in there (besides microbes) is dead.
Cool Bike: Two-wheel motorcycles and scooters are some of the most dangerous vehicles to drive. There is a reason that even people who know how to drive already need to get special training and a special license for riding one in most countries. Riders (or passengers) are also advised to wear leather or Kevlar clothing covering their bodies to reduce the risk of broken bones and deep cuts in the event of a wreck - and don't even think of getting on a motorcycle without a helmet. There's a saying among bikers that it is not IF you will crash but WHEN, even for experienced and careful drivers.
Cool Car: Some of the more "cool" cars are also more difficult to drive safely or have quirks in control/handling or such that can get an inexperienced driver into an accident.
Cool Pet: Keeping a pet bear, tiger, cobra, ape, etc., is often an extreme strain for both owner and pet, and exceedingly dangerous.
Couldn't Find a Lighter: Fire spreads incredibly quickly and is often dangerously hot outside the flame itself.
Cure Your Gays: While thankfully no longer presented as valid in most mainstream media, this trope is still presented and marketed as valid in some conservative and religious media. The risks of these therapies can include severe psychological trauma, financial loss (paying for repeated therapy that does not "work"), depersonalization, dissociation, derealization, unhappy or unhealthy relationships, and suicide among others - as well as not encouraging safe same-sex behavior when the new "heterosexuals" "backslide."
Death Is Cheap/Disney Death: While most preteens, teens, and adults know death is painful and permanent, children under the age of around seven or eight do not have the mental capacity to truly understand the finality and permanence of death - which means that such young children should not be exposed to media containing this trope, at least, not without lots of parental discussion alongside it. Worse, in a misguided attempt to "protect" children from psychological trauma, this trope is often enforced in children's media - which increases the chance that children will believe it. Combining a child that believes this trope with a found gun or a high place to walk/jump from = tragedy.
Defiled Forever: This viewpoint in real life causes extreme psychological damage to abuse, rape, and human trafficking victims, is a reason for Honor Related Abuse, and sometimes leads to suicides.
Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: The visible part of the tornado is merely the center. The tornado proper extends quite far away from the funnel cloud, to the point where you must distance yourself quite a bit from it if you don't want to subject yourself to winds sometimes in excess of 200 miles per hour. Beyond that you are still in danger of shrapnel.
Electric Slide: Touching a high-tension power line will kill or severely injure you, rubber gloves or not. Technicians working on these require special equipment for a reason.
Every Car Is a Pinto: In real life, it is extremely rare for a car to explode following an accident, or even to catch fire at all. Because of this trope, bystanders have pulled accident victims from cars, causing further injuries, or worsening already existing ones.
Explosion Propulsion: Sure, explosions do make things fly quite fast... body parts included, or other people in the way of it. Or parts of the thing you're trying to make go faster. High explosives aren't toys, kids!
Farts on Fire: You can incur severe burns on your anus and genitals doing this if it goes wrong. It can also lead to internal burns.
Fingertip Drug Analysis: Don't taste the mysterious substance if you don't want to get poisoned or burned by an acid or base.
Firing in the Air a Lot: What goes up must come down. Bullets fired into the air could potentially land on someone a fair distance away, injuring or killing them.
Grievous Bottley Harm: Breaking a bottle almost always causes injury to the person trying to make a weapon out of it. Bottles used in TV are very thin and break easy. On the other hand, an unbroken bottle actually is an effective club... (Don't Try This at Home, kids!)
Hard Head: Any head injury should be treated immediately, regardless of whether the patient feels "fine". Brain hemorrhaging could be occurring.
Harmless Electrocution: Electrocution is fatal by definition. Electric shocks that don't accomplish death by electrocution (even "controlled" shocks such as electroconvulsive therapy, but especially lightning and high-voltage shocks) can still create burns, heart arrhythmias, brain damage including ongoing seizures, nerve damage, organ failure, and other disabling, possibly permanent damage.
Harmless Freezing: Hypothermia and frostbite are not harmless. Cells burst apart when thawed. Warm slowly.
Healing Herb: Some herbs are indeed medicinal. This means they have side effects, often unpleasant, sometimes lethal. And interactions with other herbs and with pharmaceuticals. And dosage requirements, which are a lot harder to judge in a plants with natural variations than in carefully built pills, which means overdoses with all their attendant problems, or alternately, underdoses - not getting enough of the effective substance(s) for a proper therapeutic dose. Also, no herb is a panacea, and some that may be good for some problems could cause or worsen others, just like pharmaceuticals.
Heroic Fire Rescue: Don't do it if you're not a firefighter. Firefighters have experience with fire conditions, protective gear, training - and even they sometimes die or get seriously injured rescuing people from fires.
Herbivores Are Friendly: Most animals are territorial, and there's a reason why some herbivores have very deadly defensive mechanisms. Some of the most dangerous animals in the world are herbivores.
Hollywood Fire: It's not the fire that usually kills, it's the smoke. Also, fire creates incredibly hot temperatures within seconds (and not just within the flame itself), and within one to two minutes something can be fully engulfed, unlike in the movies.
Hollywood Heart Attack: The Hollywood portrayal of a heart attack has caused many people to mistake or outright ignore the symptoms for them in real life.
Hysterical Woman: This Discredited Trope, now reborn in a more "respectable" sense as claiming that women are "emotional" and have more psychosomatic ailments, leads to death and prolonged suffering in women^note who actually do have physical ailments that are dismissed as "all in your head."
If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You: This trope has led to the idea that healthy food must taste bland or bad, and as a result, people eat more "flavorful" and "tasty" junk food rather than create or find recipes for delicious/flavorful/spicy healthy food.
Incredibly Obvious Bomb: Terrorist bombs (as opposed to say, dynamite used legally in mining and construction) and military land mines are usually engineered to not be obvious, because their effectiveness and fatality relies upon their not being detected until they explode. Nor do they generally tick. Odd smells, strange wires, and objects that are out of place or suspicious are far more likely to be a bomb. In the case of mines/minefields, if they are unmarked (and there are a variety of markings - it is a very good idea to look these up before going to a possibly mined area), watch out for dead animals, damaged vehicles, avoided areas, and wires or suspicious ground formations.
Improvised Zipline: Real ziplines take a while to construct and require specific, strong materials so they don't break. The cords are designed to support the weight of an elephant or two for a reason.
Instant Emergency Response: In most moderate-sized cities, fire and police response is around four to five minutes with EMS being around six. In major urban areas add a few more minutes. In sparse rural areas and/or during a busy night or disaster, times of 20 minutes to an hour even for immediate situations are not unknown. The only time instant emergency response happens is due to luck. This is why learning at least basic first aid is a very good idea no matter where you are, and why it's always a good idea to call for help sooner than later (e.g. it's better to have the police on their way while the burglar is trying the door handles than when he's smashed the window and is inside, and better to have the fire department on the way when you first smell smoke/burning rather than when the room is about to be fully engulfed in flames). It's also one of the more contentious issues in the gun control debate.
Instant Sedation: A drug that might instantaneously make someone unconscious is also most likely to kill them because of its potency that slows or stops nervous system or vital functions far too quickly or effectively. On the flip side, don't expect something tranquilized to go down immediately - it takes time for it to spread through the bloodstream and leave the target conscious enough to be very, very annoyed with you.
Jammed Seatbelts: Seat-belts and shoulder belts do jam occasionally (or worse, melt), but nowhere near as often as they do on TV or in the movies, and fear of this causes people to not wear them and instead go headfirst through a windshield. If you must worry about it, keep a knife or seatbelt cutting tool in the glove compartment. The only exceptions to this are ice-road travel or travel over a bridge of questionable integrity over a body of water where the risk of a breakthrough into the water is higher than that of a vehicle collision - in which case the concern isn't even jammed seatbelts, but that wearing a seatbelt will add time to your escape from frigid or deep water.
Law of Inverse Recoil: If you don't account for recoil, you WILL lose control of your gun and shoot off-target — maybe even someone. The heavier caliber guns can also hit you in the face. Do NOT adjust your grip by putting your thumb next to the cylinder of the revolver. That will break or cut off your thumb and give you severe burns.
Laxative Prank: This is, in fact, a criminal offense in most jurisdictions, and a particularly dangerous one as the victim can become dangerously dehydrated, have a dangerous drug interaction, or even experience a bowel rupture. Some supposed prank laxatives, such as Visine, are more likely to kill than loosen bowels.
Magic Plastic Surgery: Real plastic surgery causes scarring and requires extensive and painful recovery time, things they don't show you on TV. Repeated operations can ruin the skin and facial structure. Also, it's surgery, and invasive surgery at that.
Missing Backblast: Firing a rocket launcher or a recoil-less rifle in an enclosed space will kill the person firing it and those around him or her.
Mismeasurement: An all too common cause of death and serious injury in Real Life. It's always a good idea, especially when dealing with chemicals (especially consumed drugs or medications, or anything that can cause a fire or explosion) to make sure the measurements are correct, and to always assume less is better. Also, when working with extremely strong acids or bases, add them to the water, not the other way around, regardless of measurements.
Mooning: In some locations, showing off your ass can and will get you arrested for public indecency, or maybe even second degree sexual assault if the prosecutor is upset enough and/or can prove there were children around - which, unless you can afford a damn good lawyer to get it down to drunk and disorderly conduct, means likely felony charges, prison, and a spot on the sex offender registry.
No Medication for Me: Going off your meds unless recommended by a certified doctor isn't advised, especially if you're mentally ill, or have certain physical illnesses (such as insulin-dependent diabetes or HIV/AIDS) where there is no cure as of this date and the medication is keeping you alive, even if it's a burden to use properly or its side effects suck. In addition, withdrawal symptoms for some medications can include things such as seizures, so you should NEVER just suddenly stop taking medication.
Non Fatal Explosions: Real Life explosions kill and injure. If people aren't killed or injured in one, it is solely due to luck. If nothing else, your ears can suffer permanent damage with burst eardrums being one of the most common explosion effects. The blast wave of an explosion does most of the damage and it is why someone who looks "fine" can actually have fatal internal injuries.
Not the Fall That Kills You: It's not, all right. It's the sudden stop at the end, regardless of where you land or how (if) you break the fall. Hitting water can tear off limbs.
One Drink Will Kill The Baby: While pregnant women are advised to eliminate alcohol in the first three months of their pregnancy, much media exaggerates the danger. As a result, there are a number of cases of women who accidentally took a drink and then remembered they were pregnant going to dangerous lengths to attempt to induce vomiting to "save the child."
One-Man Army: There's a reason why most military organizations emphasize teamwork, and why police call for backup. Many Real Life one man armies had help and almost always got wounded or killed.
Only a Flesh Wound: Injuries that don't involve vital organs and are left untreated can still result in death from blood loss, infection, or permanent debilitation, and they leave permanent scarring.
Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers: Always call a lawyer if you're accused of anything with consequences above a citation. On a related note, if your country allows silence as a right, use that right until/unless your lawyer advises you otherwise. If you are involved in a lengthy interrogation without a lawyer, demand one and don't answer questions if possible.
Outside Ride: Being on the outside of a moving car or train is likely to result in injury or death. Being on the outside of a moving aircraft is certain death, unless you're a professional barnstormer. Either way, it's not something you should be trying on a whim.
Pants Positive Safety: Carrying a loaded firearm in anything but a holster specified for that firearm can get you or others shot.
Pull The IV: Get some gauze first, then pull it. Slowly. Very slowly. Leaving it out in the open will have it bleed for quite a while, increasing the risk of infection.
Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: If you're asked to do this, he probably just wants to shoot you.
Rearing Horse: You're probably going to fall off and look like a total dork if you're on the rearing horse. Oh, and it might fall over on top of you afterwards and crush you.
Science Is Bad: Poses danger to the development and future of humanity itself by stunting progress and discovery.
Shot to the Heart: If your friend is going into shock, DO NOT, under any circumstances, stab him in the heart with a giant needle.
Soft Glass: Normal glass can be far harder than you'd think, and breaks with nasty sharp edges besides. More often, it does not break and will injure you.
Soft Water: A fall into water may cause less injury than hitting solid ground, but it will still be lethal from a significant height, resulting in similar crush injuries.
STD Immunity: You don't have it. Always use a fresh new condom if you aren't with a monogamous partner. Disease transmission can also occur through open sores and other skin lesions, plus saliva (but rarely AIDS). Immunity is very rare and practically impossible to be immune to more than one.
Suck Out the Poison: Trying to suck the venom out of a snakebite wound is highly ineffective in almost every case, and will often increase the victim's risk of infection and the first-aiders' risk of poisoning.
Super Window Jump: Again, no matter how fast you jump through it, it can still cut you. If you punch a window and it breaks, you are lucky if you aren't bleeding... or if it shatters. If you absolutely have to break a window to escape danger, throwing a heavy object at it or kicking it with the steel toe of a protective boot is a better option.
Tap on the Head: A blow to the head is more likely to kill or lead to long term injury than temporary unconsciousness. At best, you'll get a concussion.
Trash Landing: Glass and sharp objects are commonly found in garbage bins. Safer than concrete or glass, but only should be attempted, as the page says, if the alternative is certain death.
Underside Ride: Even more likely to result in death or injury than Outside Ride above - being run over by the car or other cars or torn up on the road and/or things on the car.
Variable Terminal Velocity: All things fall at the same speed, regardless of mass, weight, or other factors save for air resistance. Don't jump after someone who's fallen off a ledge hoping to save their life, not even if you've got a parachute. They're going to die.
Weapon For Intimidation: Sometimes this does work in Real Life, but other times it makes things much worse. One should only threaten someone if your life is at risk and you are willing to face the consequences of following through on your threat.
Worst Aid: If all you know about first aid is what you've seen on TV, you are not the best person to administer it.
You Can Panic Now: Where moral panic goes, sometimes deaths and injuries follow.