The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything - Television Tropes & Idioms

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We are The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.
We just stay at home and lie around.
And if you ask us if we do anything,
We'll just tell you,
"We don't do anything!"
—The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, VeggieTales

They don't pillage. They don't plunder. They don't invade Port Towns, kidnap beautiful maidens, or battle the Royal Navy on the high seas. They've never been to Boston in the fall. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, in fact, seem to mostly just drift aimlessly on the high seas, drinking cider and possibly singing sea chanties. If you ask them, they'll probably just tell you they like the way it looks on their resume. Or maybe they'll just tell you that "We don't do anything."

In general, a member of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything is any character who, despite having a certain canonical job, is rarely seen engaging in that job. They might indeed be a pirate who rarely goes out and steals treasure and raids ships — but they might just as easily be mobsters who don't steal or smuggle, students who don't go to class, office workers who never seem to do more that hang out in bars, or ninjas who just didnt get the memo about that whole "stealthy assassin" thing.

This may be because writers and fans are in love with the romanticism implied in a life of adventure and crime, but don't want to actually show the characters doing any of the myriad of things that makes thieves, assassins, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and other unsavory types pariahs in Real Life. This can result in a strange dissonance where the friendly, messianic nature of the characters is at odds with the openly predatory nature of the professions they claim to engage in.

Examples

Anime

Naruto is full to bursting with Highly Visible Ninja. Virtually all formidable military personnel in its universe are ninja, anyway, so the more familiar definition of the term has more or less fallen by the wayside. (They're more like Jedi-for-hire.) Humorously, the ANBU Black Ops actually do act like ninjas — performing assassinations, covering their identities, appearing and disappearing from the shadows, etc. They are basically ninjas for ninjas.
The Straw Hat Pirates from One Piece don't pirate, pillage, or plunder in any manner — they're literally The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. The crew's illegal activities are more in the nature of battling with various corrupt governmental ruling forces.
The Vongola family from Katekyo Hitman Reborn have yet to do anything terribly illegal, despite being The Mafia. Even Reborn, the teeny-tiny assassin, never manages to kill anyone with his array of magic bullets. They do engage in mob wars (mostly in self-defense) later on.
In the Love Hina manga Kitsune claims to be a freelance writer, but there's exactly zero evidence to support this. The anime, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt to explain where she gets her money.
- Doesn't she also tend bar or something like that? It becomes a mild part of the plot where while we don't actually see her working, we know she's there.
Kochikame revolves around police officers who are rarely ever seen doing any police work.
The vast majority of Soul Reapers in Bleach never seem to do any actual Soul Reaper duties like hunting hollows or cleansing souls, instead preferring to hang around the Seiretei all day and pop up whenever Ichigo is in need of reluctant allies/enemies. Apparently, making officer rank means you get delegated to a desk job... Much like in most real-life armies, really, except that these don't run on Authority Equals Asskicking like the afterlife does.
The main cast of Cromartie High School are basically "The World's Best Behaved Delinquents". They constantly talk about how tough they are, but the only fighting between school is Maeda constantly being kidnapped, they don't smoke, and never do anything illegal (deliberately).
Space Pirate Captain Harlock. He even once robbed a ship and threw the valuables in space, and has claimed that pirates who steal are dishonoring the name of pirates.

Comic Books

Tintin is allegedly a reporter, but only ever acts as one in the first Tintin books, Tintin In The Land Of The Soviets and Tintin in Congo.
Jon Arbuckle from Garfield is supposed to be a cartoonist. He has spent the past 30-odd years as a professional Butt Monkey instead.

Film

Bounty Hunters in the Star Wars Expanded Universe act more like mercenaries.
The protagonist of the B Movie Werewolf identifies himself as a news writer, but we don't see him writing at all. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew, writers themselves, do not let him off easy for this.
The various pirates in Pirates Of The Caribbean are generally implied to be a bunch of murderous thieving scum, but we don't see a whole lot of "honest pirating" going on after the raid on Port Royal in the first film by the Black Pearl crew under Barbossa. And we certainly never see Jack's crew attacking any merchant vessels or raiding any settlements, which is, you know, what pirates do. This is brought up in the beginning of the second movie: Gibbs tells Sparrow of the crew's annoyance that they hadn't been doing anything to get any money in the year since the first film, and were completely broke as a result.
The Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Who doesn't raid and plunder other ships. Or spend much time on ships. Or seem to have any crew whatsoever. Or do anything all that dreadful. And isn't even named Roberts.
- Well, it was happening before the main plot of the story. Everyone knows for sure that 'Roberts' is a pirate who tends to steal stuff and kill people. Wesley doesn't seem to have a problem with his job, and neither does his replacement.
  - This could be explained by the ruthlessness of his predecessors. In the novel it is suggested that Roberts is so well known for never taking prisoners alive that by the time Wesley takes up the role most victims surrender immediately and send their valuables over on a long boat.

Literature

Several of the nobles and royalty of the Discworld are trained as assassins (although many are not, since the assassin final exam is lethally off-putting), but that's more for the quality of the general education offered by the Assassins' Guild. They rarely, if ever, kill anyone. Of course, in the world of the nobility, knowledge of how assassins think is also a valuable life skill for anyone wanting to live past twenty.
The Thieves' Guild in Jennifer Fallon's Demon Child and Hythrun Chronicles series is practically an official branch of the government, with high-ranking officials — even sympathetic ones — constantly looking the other way regarding their activities and frequently enlisting their help.
Tom and Joe decide to become this type of pirate in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, because stealing is a sin. Huck isn't troubled, since he calls it "borrowing".
Cameron "Buck" Williams, in the Left Behind novels, is constantly referred to as a great investigative reporter. He almost never files reports or writes anything, and when confronted with an international conspiracy that's already killed two people he knows, he... agrees to bury all the evidence if they'll spare his life. Granted, that was before he became one of the "good guys", but we still don't see him do much journalism afterward, and the bits of his articles we do see are rather underwhelming.
Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is a Vice President at Pierce & Pierce, a prestigious Wall Street firm. Despite all that information, what his job actually involves is never explained, and he it is implied that he mostly hides in his office watching TV and compares business cards during lunch, while his evenings involve eating at expensive restaurants and murdering people.
Messrs Ibram Gaunt and Ciaphas Cain from the Warhammer 40000 novels are Commissars Who Don't Shoot Their Men Very Often. Gaunt picked up his abnormal leadership style from his mentor, who also believed in this style of encouraging over shooting too, while Ciaphas, being a Dirty Coward for whom self-preservation is top priority, recognises that not earning the enmity of troops by field-executing them is vital to avoid getting "accidentally" killed by them. As Cain put it, "Commissars who throw their weight around tend to end up dying heroically for the Emperor even when the enemy is suspiciously far away."
- And that goes double if he was to work with Catachan.
Many of the officers in Catch22 don't actually perform their jobs. Major Major Major Major (not a typo) actually structured his entire day around avoiding people.

Live Action TV

See the Monty Python sketch Non-Illegal Robbery.
Although the first couple of episodes showed them in high school, pretty much all the school-age characters — especially Bobby, Donna, Audrey and James — in Twin Peaks soon joined The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. The trouble was that each episode of the show was supposed to chart the investigation a day at a time — but the plot also required the teenagers to investigate murders, hatch plots, seduce hapless detectives, blackmail... everything except attend class on a school day. On the other hand, the adults in the show tended to have jobs that tied into the small-town community — and therefore the plot — much more, and were shown at work all the time.
Many Soap Operas include business executives who spend most of their time on the job planning man-hunting schemes or ways to character-assassinate their boss and take his place, and rarely do any actual work. This also applies to police officer characters on soaps who seem able to drop everything and take three-month tropical vacations once a year. Conversely, medical doctors on soaps are frequently seen doing their jobs, perhaps even being overworked, as the main doctor characters will be involved in any sickness or injury whether the patient is a child, gunshot victim, cancer patient, or heart attack patient.
Come to think of it, how many times did Doctor Who's Sarah Jane Smith cry out "Stop the TARDIS, Doctor — I'm on deadline!"?
In Edgemont, a show based around teenagers in high school, the students are never shown actually in class (and rarely studying or doing homework). Of course, showing a scene in class would clash with the fact that There Are No Adults.

Opera

The Pirates of Penzance. At best, it's mentioned that they attack other ships, but they have rules about only attacking bigger ships than themselves, and to let orphans go unharmed, with obvious results. What we actually get to see them do is drink, sing about poetry, attempt burglary, and try to get married! When they capture the General's daughters to force the last, they succeed in overcoming the still more ineffectual police, but instantly surrender in face of an appeal to their loyalty to Queen Victoria.

Video Games

The MMORPG EverQuest features gnome pirates who have to constantly remind each other to talk "piratey." They're bad at following through on the details, but they like the idea of being pirates.
Although Samus Aran from Metroid is described as being a Bounty Hunter, she's usually never seen hunting bounties. She seems more like a kind of mercenary than anything. It's possible the definition has changed in the future, though; all of her jobs are given to her by the government.
- Not to mention her nemeses the Space Pirates, who seemingly exist only to antagonize her...
  - "Pirate Logs" of the Metroid Prime series sugest that the Pirates think Samus exists only to antagonize them.
- This troper recalls seeing somewhere that Samus became a bounty hunter for an excuse to fight the Space Pirates. It seems the definition has changed in the future - Rundas, Gohr and Gandrayda all seem to have the same kind of jobs as Samus. Although, admittedly, if Metroid 2: Return of Samus was given by the government and not a personal vendetta, it's probably about the closest to bounty hunting she's been.
Captain Falcon from F-Zero falls into a similar rut, although the focus of his series is mainly on his side-business, racing. All of his shown Bounty Hunting is literally All There In The Manual.
The Super Mario Bros. are allegedly plumbers. However, the only thing they ever seem to do involving plumbing is their habit of traveling via pipe — which real plumbers are not noted to do either◊, but nevermind...
- In the live-action movie and Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga, they do use their plumbing skills to stop an attempted sabotage/flooding at a dig site and then in a castle basement. Likewise, the animated series would occasionally show them using their plumbing skills and equipment, either for actual plumbing or for dire situations.
Blue Rogues in Skies Of Arcadia are more in the nature of random do-gooders and adventurers, and look down on pirates who actually engage in, y'know, piracy. After the opening scene, they basically never do anything illegal again.
- As they do spend a lot of time messing up the navy of the not-Spanish-really Empire, one could think of them as English privateers without an actual England to endorse them.
In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness, there's an exploration team composed of a Slakoth and a Slowpoke who call themselves "Team Slackers, the zero-motivation exploration team". Each time they appear, they point out the fact that they don't really do anything besides just laying around, and they wonder why they even formed an exploration team in the first place.
Let's not beat around the bush here: In Monkey Island, pirates who actually do anything pirate-related are about as frequent as chicken's teeth. Even the protagonist, self-proclaimed "mighty pirate" that he is, never does anything more nefarious than your average Kleptomaniac Hero.
- He does break a lot of stuff though. And the third section of Curse of Monkey Island involved a lot of good old fashioned pirating, minus killing people.
Though the "pirates" from The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker love to boast about being the terror of the seas, they mostly just act as roughneck ferrymen for Link and the many people he rescues or works with over the course of the game. They're even ruled by a little girl whose mother was the previous pirate leader. To be fair, they do engage in about one and a half acts of actual piracy, but they don't seem particularly cutthroat in either case.
- They hold the hostages they just saved for a ransom (though they did let at least one go for free because their father couldn't pay), steal an entire shop of bombs and don't seem very upset over the total destruction of Greatfish Isle. Pirate may not be exactly accurate, but they do do some fairly unpleasant things for money.
Dungeons And Dragons-based video games (such as Neverwinter Nights or Stormreach) tend to feature an inordinate number of career adventurers sitting around in taverns or campsites, practically begging you to delve into loot-filled dungeons in their stead, as well as a bunch of adventurers who are just waiting for someone with actual work ethic to turn up and talk them into seeking fortune and glory (i.e., the main character).
The Baldurs Gate series at least tries to justify the latter as much as it can manage (mostly that said adventurers have come into a situation they couldn't handle alone and need a group to help them with), but still lets in a few Fridge Logic NPCs here and there.
The town of Rogueport in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is a parody of the Grand Theft Auto Vice City-style setting, and as such has several examples of rogues, bandits, and roughnecks who are rarely, if ever, seen stealing or doing other unsavory things. Goombella even remarks of one character: "At least he's supposed to be a thief, but I've never seen him steal anything."
The "great adventurer" Toma in Chrono Trigger spends pretty much the entire game drinking in a bar and talking big. In the game's present day, you learn that he did find what he was looking for, at least.
Gordon Freeman of the Half Life series is a scientist who is never really seen doing any science.
- Lampshaded in the sequel, after Gordon has thrown a switch as part of a lab experiment:
  Barney: "Good job, Gordon, throwing that switch and all. I can see your MIT education really pays for itself."
- In his defense, I imagine it is difficult to perform science without first removing the immediate threat of being eaten and/or shot.
In the MMORPG City of Villains, you play a supervillain. Strangely, most of your missions seem to be either hits against other villains, or battling even worse villains. Occasionally, you actually rob a bank or battle The Statesman.
The explorer in Flipside in Super Paper Mario never actually goes out and explores anything, but he might say a few things about places Mario and company have already been to as the game progresses.
In Final Fantasy XII Vaan wants to escape the poverty and oppression of Archadian occupation to become a sky pirate. Fran and Balthier are notorious sky pirates. And Reddas is a former sky pirate who runs a whole smuggler's port full of sky pirates. Don't expect to see any actual piracy in the skies though (or on the high seas or anywhere else for that matter), or even an explanation of what sky pirates actually do with the massive amount of free time they seem to have.
Mother 3 has a Thief family, one of whom is a main character, Duster. One of the conversations with the townsfolk, involves a girl calling you "a thief that doesn't steal anything." IRC. They do do sneaky things, but not in a criminal way. They are considered to be somewhat odd.

Webcomics

Dechs, aka Shadehawk, of Antihero For Hire, functions more like a Bounty Hunter than an antihero "for hire". It's mentioned that he advertises his services, but almost all of his hero activity is random patrolling. We only see him actually hired for something once, and that job gets broken up by a Lets You And Him Fight between him and Crossroads.
Terror Island has Ned Q. Sorceror, DDS, who was bathed with "rays of pure dentistry" in his backstory, but has never been seen to perform the functions of a dentist, preferring instead to give long tedious speeches about "moonitaurs."
Seem to crop up a lot in Sins Venials. Everyone wants to be a pirate, no one really knows what they do.

Western Animation

Lampshaded in The Simpsons
Bart: Do you even have a job any more?
Homer: I think it's pretty obvious that I don't.
- Earlier seasons did focus a lot on Mr. Burns and the Power Plant, but after that well ran dry, they basically Brother Chucked an entire section of Springfield. This is also true of the school, although less so.
For a literal example of this trope, see the Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Piratsy Under the Sea". The Rangers encounter the Pi-Rats, rat pirates who like to go treasure hunting. However, the Pi-Rats are stuck inside a sunken pirate ship, so all they can do is hunt the same treasure over and over.
Popeye's a sailor man (toot toot), and certainly engaged in lots of high seas adventure in the comics, but famously had very few encounters with ships or even water in his animated cartoons. An average of one Popeye cartoon per year (out of ten to twelve made) showed the sailor actually doing his job.
- A big exception was during World War II, where quite a few cartoons portrayed him as having (re)joined the navy.
Captain K'nuckles from The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack claims to be an adventurer, yet he seems to actively avoid doing anything that involves leaving the harbor or performing manual labor. If he ever does go on an adventure, it's usually because Flapjack guilts him into it, or else by sheer accident.
The Whalers of the Moon in Futurama, who freely admit there aren't any whales on the moon, and even have a song about it. (Of course, their real job is "amusement park robot", but still...)
- Also Professor Farnsworth, who is only seen teaching in one episode. (He intentionally makes his course titles sound difficult so no one will sign up.)
  Professor Farnsworth: I don't know how to teach. I'm a professor.
The Trope Namers in Veggie Tales.

Other

Many Renaissance Festival village ensemble stock characters are like this. There's a ratcatcher who's almost never seen actually catching any rats, the highwayman who almost never robs anybody, and of course pirates and privateers who are there on shore leave and don't actually loot or plunder (though of course they may sing about such things).
One Twenty-Sided blog entry parodies the Veggie Tales quote at the top of the page with the (Video Game) Pirates who don't buy Anything
There are entire countries ruled by "revolutionary" governments who don't seem to engage in much reform.
Larry the so-called Cable Guy.

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