They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste - Television Tropes & Idioms

Some tropes get unexpected reactions; but sometimes the reaction is what the author or creators were going for. For example, the Uncanny Valley can be intentionally invoked.

When the trope in question is usually considered bad or otherwise undesirable, we can say They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste.

Tropes that get this treatment include:

Boring Failure Hero
Boring Invincible Hero (Refuge In/Rule Of Cool combined with this tends to result in Showy Invincible Hero)
Broken Aesop (commonly in parody and satire)
Ensemble Darkhorse (although this usually results in The Wesley)
Any of the Fuels:
- Fetish Fuel (especially when invoked by Author Appeal or Fan Service)
- Nausea Fuel
- Nightmare Fuel
  - (If Nightmare Fuel is intentional, then we have a trope for that as well: High Octane Nightmare Fuel.)
- Paranoia Fuel
God Mode Sue (For the Catharsis Factor, as well as Rule Of Fun for videogame player characters)
Narm (Setting up a situation that makes you laugh, even though you know you shouldn't. Preferably with some form of Take That at your heartless, insensitive self.)
- On the other hand, if the Narm somehow works into the setting without a Take That, we get Narm Charm.
So Bad Its Good
Special Effect Failure
Squick
The Scrappy (Frequently in action or horror movies, an annoying character is introduced, then eventually killed in a satisfying way.)
Strawman Has A Point (commonly in parodies, deconstructions, and satires)
They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot
Truffaut Was Right
Unfortunate Implications (commonly in parodies, deconstructions, and satires)
Uncanny Valley
What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?

Sometimes, this is the result of Stylistic Suck. Direct opposite of Unexpected Reactions To This Index. Good art achieves Emotional Torque, but the emotions only have to be strong, not good.

Examples: (sorted by trope(s) being invoked)

Boring Invincible Hero

Judai of Yu-Gi-Oh GX knows he is one and turns to The Dark Side because of it.
Ip Man is unabashedly nationalistic and as a result the titular hero Curb Stomps the Northerner Jin and the Japanese challengers, firmly making him a ~~Boring~~ Invincible Hero.
Nagi Springfield of Mahou Sensei Negima is generally treated this way, so that his mysterious disappearance is an even bigger mystery.

Dork Age

Back during the Dark Age, Batman writers intentionally invoked a Dork Age with Azrael, as a Take That to the fans asking for a Punisher-as-Bats. Not that they wouldn't have kept writing the character as such, had it sold well.
Also "Reign of the Supermen" (and by extension the whole Death and Return of Superman), and Artemis as Wonder Woman. All were intended to revalidate characters sometimes derided as old-fashioned. Reign of the Supermen takes the cake, though, featuring as its replacements a badass-looking cyborg, a Superman who's willing to kill and has bitchin' sunglasses, a teenager with a leather jacket, and a power-armor using badass. Yes, DC, we get it, popular trends at the time are no replacement for the single most iconic hero of all time. Thank you. Bit of subtlety wouldn't have killed you.
- Of course, Superboy and Steel ended up being beloved additions to the franchise and Cyborg Superman is an enduring villain, so that worked out. As for the killer with the bitchin' sunglasses, well... yeah.
  - There's a reason for the fan reaction, by the bye: Neither Steel nor Superboy claimed to actually be Superman (thus making it possible for them to be Heroes), unlike Cyborg Superman and Sunglasses Dude; Cyborg Superman, when revealed to be a villain had logical reasons for pretending to be Superman (ruin his reputation). Sunglasses Dude was just a plain ol' Scrappy.
  - So naturally, when they made the Animated Adaptation of that arc, the villain was based primarily on Eradicator/Sunglasses Dude.

God Mode Sue

Alex Mercer from Prototype eventually develops into this, and the developers have admitted to wanting to let the player feel real powerful.
- Doesn't stop the strike teams from being a pain in your godly ass.
  - Or a source of free helicopters.
Don't forget the titular character of Suzumiya Haruhi.
Citan Uzuki from Xenogears. Mostly because his several dozen Sueish traits are well camouflaged and dribbled out in a way so as not to overshadow the other characters story-wise.
Sarda. Although at the moment, it would appear that he's out of action.
Alucard mostly exists to curb stomp everyone in sight.

IKEA Erotica

The Handmaids Tale intentionally invokes IKEA Erotica in order to show the lack of passion in sex in Gilead.

Record Of Loudness War

Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges. Intentionally blunt, overgained, and jagged-sounding, to be as unpleasant as possible.

The Scrappy and related

An intentional Scrappy: Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Wesley was supposed to be an annoying would-be Replacement Scrappy when he first showed up. I mean c'mon, he's named Wesley!
Final Fantasy Tactics provides another intentional Scrappy. Argath/Algus is a arrogant, bigoted Jerk Ass whose every statement just causes the player to hate him more. This makes the ensuing Boss Battle after he crosses the Moral Event Horizon all the more satisfying. (Nothing says Shut Up Hannibal like a sword to the face.)
- In fact, it was so satisfying, Square Enix added another boss battle in the PSP remake where he comes back from the dead just so you can kill him again.
Thomas Covenant, title character of the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant series, is a rather deliberate Wesley - the author spends the entire first book making him as thoroughly unlikeable as possible, and nearly the entire series is told from his perspective.
- On the other hand, Linden Avery, the other prominent point-of-view character from the Second Chronicles on, is a deliberate Replacement Scrappy.
Dale Stuckey is so much of a Scrappy that everyone in universe treats him as one.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles introduced a very deliberate Scrappy in the form of Riley, and then spent the rest of the second season systematically making her work and turn her into a sympathetic character, which culminated in her rather brutal, shocking, and heartrending murder.
Rosh from Jedi Academy is probably an intentional case of Scrappydom, as the way to the Dark Side ending is to kill him.
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni. After certain fans accused Ange of being a Mary Sue, Ryukishi07 struck back in Episode 5 with the character of Erika. Erika seems to invoke nearly every characteristic of a Mary Sue one can casually think of: she's a new character who comes from nowhere with unrealistic hair and eye colour, usurps Battler's position as the detective, and is given the ability of the "Detective Authority", allowing her to do things Battler couldn't in previous episodes, as well as possessing Genre Savvy and intuition that borders on premonition. The fact that she is a literal Author Avatar is almost certainly a lampshade.
- It Gets Worse in ep 6. There's a new witch, who's even more of an Author Avatar. She has actually been writing books about the games in the Meta-world, and she has even more of the power of premonition then Erika.

Sliding Scale Of Silliness Versus Seriousness

Monty Python isn't supposed to make any sense, or be taken seriously at all.

So Bad Its Good

The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra (film).
- And Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (TV show).
- And Grind House (double feature). In fact, the second movie received some criticism for not being stupid enough.
House Of The Dead Overkill: Done in Grindhouse style specifically to invoke this.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Metal Wolf Chaos can't be anything other than this.
Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes and its sequels aimed for this and hard. The cartoon somehow failed to be bad...

Special Effect Failure

One of the favorite things about the old Doctor Who was the corny special effects, so the new series keeps the corn flowing. Of course it's modern corn, so it doesn't look as hilariously out of place as the truly old-style special effects would.

Strawman Has A Point

The character Stephen Colbert intentionally invokes this.

Uncanny Valley

The dancing doll sequence in Mirror Mask played to this.
As did many of the threats in Courage The Cowardly Dog.
The monsters of Silent Hill combine this with Freud Was Right to come up with some seriously disturbing-looking creatures.
Those creepy, creepy singing dolls that Willy Wonka burns with sparklers at the beginning of the Charlie And The Chocolate Factory movie

Unfortunate Implications

The Iron Dream was all about this, as the frame story is all about how the book within a book was written by an alternate version of Adolf Hitler.
Dollhouse is supposed to be about this. It's pretty easy to overlook them, though.

Multiple tropes

Maus uses Character Derailment and Not As You Know Them for tragic effect, twisting the knife on Vladek Spiegelman's characters to show what a tragedy the Holocaust was.
- Note that the Character Derailment of the brave, determined, generous mouse didn't come during the holocaust; it came many years after he had survived the war, re-united his with imprisoned wife, and moved to the United States... which only makes the situation more baffling. The story goes into some detail trying to examine the cause.