Musical Hell / Tropes S to Z

Main: Musical Hell

Navigation: Tropes A to F | Tropes G to L | Tropes M to R | S - Z

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• The Scrappy: Diva lists these characters as sins, and often subjects them to The Verdict at the end of each episode.
• The Scottish Trope: God and Heaven are "the opposition", while Jesus is only referred to as "the opposition's child/kid/son". Satan is "The Boss."
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Spice World breaks Diva, who goes on to leave early and skip work the next day... Only for it to manifest anyway by shifting her screening of The Music Man with the remake.
• Ship Tease: With her angelic counterpart Donna.
• Shared Universe: Kinda. The show is set in Hell, which could be considered another dimension, but Diva does consistently interact with the Reviewaverse. It's more than likely the Hell of the Reviewaverse.
• Shout-Out: Monty Python clips are brought up in abundance.
  • Whenever a moment worthy of a Face Palm comes up, the clip of the mass face-palming from "Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult" comes up.
  • From the Grand Finale, Donna tells Diva "A great philosopher once said, 'Laughter can be a powerful thing. Sometimes it's the only weapon we have.'" Diva flatly tells her she just took that from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: "So let it be recorded, this session of the Infernal Court in Musical Hell is now adjourned." (With added words such as "thankfully" if it was a particularly terrible musical.)
• So Okay, It's Average:
  • Diva was surprised when she found Rock and Rule to be this, and doesn't condemn the characters or production staff to anything, instead opting to order them to study self-help books.
  • She has this reaction to Repo! The Genetic Opera, concluding that it's neither as bad as its detractors say nor as good as it wants to be. It has one of the lowest sin counts on the show, and was awarded its first-ever Saving Grace.
  • Rinse and repeat with La La Land, which is the first film to lead off with a Saving Grace rather than a sin for the beautiful production design, earns only six sins (most of which relate to a single character), and is one of the few where Diva orders no punishments at the end. What Diva found to be an unsympathetic male lead and a bland, low-stakes plot, however, earned it a hearing if nothing else. This seems to have been a deliberate Breather Episode, as next on the agenda? Cats.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Among her issues with the Masquerade number in The Phantom of the Opera (2004) is that the dancers' black-and-white costumes badly contrasts with the song's lyrics describing all the color in the scene.
  • Diva considers this the biggest failing of Dear Evan Hansen, noting that Pasek And Paul's uplifting songs do not fit the story of a teenager who exploits another family's trauma for his own gain. It doesn't help that said teenager, Evan, struggles to carry a conversation in spoken dialogue but becomes eloquent in song form.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • invoked Titanic: The Legend Goes On - as well as the series itself - sees its first sin for its terrible editing, consisting of random jump cuts and repeated Stock Footage.
  • Diva sins Glitter for its needlessly bizarre editing, with random speed shifts and showy transitions, saying it's what happens when an amateur editor wants to show off their new editing software.
  • Diva cites Cats for its notorious visual effects, and specifically, how Tom Hooper's Bad Boss attitude and Universal giving the effects team little time and money led to them being a mess.
  • Diva finds Ben's CGI Beast form in Descendants 3 to be hilariously bad and feels it's what one gets if Tom Hooper directed The Lion King (2019).
• Spell My Name With An S: Throughout the Rock of Ages review, Diva constantly mispronounces Julianne Hough's last name like "how", when it's actually meant to be pronounced like "huff".
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • Diva calls out Cassie's expanded plot in A Chorus Line as its biggest sin, as it diminishes the screentime of the other auditionees, which spits in the face of the show's message that everyone has an interesting story to tell.
  Cassie: Zach, we're all special.
  Diva: But some of us are more special than others.
  • Diva points out that Mr. Quilp spends so much time on its titular villain's antics, and not enough on the goodly Little Nell, that it makes her death so hard to care about.
• Strangled by the Red String: invoked In her The Music Man review, she criticizes the lack of chemistry between the two leads.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • invoked One of the things she sins Jekyll and Hyde for is setting up the hospital's board of governors as a bunch of stodgy, hidebound snobs who hamper Jekyll's research, even though they turn out to be completely right.
  • Diva points out in Legends of Oz that the fake appraiser was right to point out that the Gales' twister-damaged home was completely unlivable at the moment, while Dorothy's insistence she can fix it is naiive and hysterical.
• Stunt Casting: Diva discusses it in her review of Jekyll & Hyde, finding it a gimmick that reeks of desperation. While it has produced some great results, other times it has not, including David Hasselhoff in the title roles.
• Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard: She says that J. Edgar's "They were the last five magical balloons in all of Lovelyloveville!" line in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure is the stupidest line she's ever heard an actor utter.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Her review of Love Never Dies discusses this. When she sins "Bathing Beauty" despite its inanity clearly being deliberate, she explains that without something entertaining, deliberately bad is just... bad.
  • Also discussed in At Long Last Love in regard to its "Find me a Primitive Man" number, noting that it's not good, but not funny enough that its badness is the point.
• Subverted Catchphrase: Diva refuses to do the last part in Burlesque, feeling the movie doesn't deserve it, and is unable to do so in Sweeney Todd as everyone starts pushing her to do said movie. She also does a Blah, Blah, Blah version in A Troll In Central Park to get it over with quickly, and in "Tentacolino", after "Greetings, mortals!", she comments on the original episode, and how weird it looked after three years. She lets The Baker's Wife finish her catchphrase in David Copperfield with a baffled "what was that?" in reaction to the weirdness in that film.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Expected from musicals who deserve an infernal judgment. A good indicator is whether Diva eschews the opening phrase or adds something to the closing one. The Sextette review downright starts with her saying "I'm not gonna lie, this review's gonna hurt".
• Sudden Downer Ending:
  • She sins Love's Labour's Lost for its abrupt bleak epilogue, which sees the characters of the otherwise upbeat romantic comedy struggle through World War II (including the death of Boyett), and the Foregone Conclusion of the War's end isn't enough to lift anyone's spirits.
  • She sins Country Strong for having its protagonist commit suicide by overdose immediately after her triumphant comeback concert.
  • Diva takes issue with Mr. Quilp for ending with Little Nell's tragic death after it spent so much time and energy on the antics of its titular villain.
• Tempting Fate:
  • She decides not to punish The Apple and its makers because she finds it So Bad, It's Good and mockingly asks what her superiors are going to do about that. Cue the reveal of her next assignment: The Swan Princess Christmas. "Oh, me and my big maw..."
  • Diva makes this mistake a lot. At the end of her review of The Phantom of the Opera (2004), she declares the movie to be the worst possible thing that could happen to the musical...then she sees her next case.
    "Oh, fuck..."
  • Sweeney Todd is alright, better than the Disney knockoffs Diva usually gets assigned with. Then it's shown The Princess and the Pea is the next case.
    Why do I keep saying this kind of thing?
  • After reviewing The Country Bears, Diva does this yet again, although she catches herself immediately afterward:
    "This session of the infernal court in Musical Hell is now adjourned, and please let the next case be anything but a bad Disney cash grab... No. No, I didn't mean anything, don't you dare use that as an excuse to send me something truly heinous like - oh, for fuck's sake!"
  • After passing judgment on Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3, Diva asks what could be lazier than the series' racism allegory. Cue the reveal of her next case.
    "I had to ask..."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • In Diva's opinion, Gene Kelly's Old Master character in Xanadu would've made a much more interesting protagonist than Michael Beck's wangsty wannabe artist.
  • Discussed in her review of The Lorax. She thinks that Audrey would have made a better protagonist, because she is interested in trees and cares about them, unlike Ted who’s really just doing it because his crush on her. Not to mention that the movie never really explains why she knows so much about the trees when barely anyone else does.
  • Diva feels that practically anyone in Dear Evan Hansen would've made far better protagonists than its titular one. For example, she says that the Murphys' family drama compounded by Connor's suicide is quite compelling. She sins the film for its misuse of Amy Adams, who gives it her all in an underdeveloped role that barely allows her to sing.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Diva list several examples of this for Geppetto, mainly not exploring the town's reaction to a sentient wooden puppet boy in more detail and especially the town where the population's children are created by a machine to be absolutely perfect but that serves no other function than to teach Geppetto that having a kid that's perfect isn't what it's cracked up to be, despite being what Diva describes as a "speculative fiction gold mine".
  • Diva points out in her review of De-Lovely that Cole Porter's life has the makings of a great biopic, especially with his marriage with Linda Lee Thomas, yet the film squanders it with a Cliché Storm.
  • Diva believes that Popeye would have otherwise been worthy of its cult classic status - with Robert Altman's improvisational Signature Style suiting that of the original Fleischer Bros. cartoons - had it not been a musical.
  • When discussing "Western Animation/The Scarecrow" Diva points out that the idea of an animated adaptation of Feathertop has plenty of potential in both Disneyfied and more faithful forms, but the muddled storytelling, annoying side characters and plot holes mean that the film fails to make the most of the core concept.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
  • Diva marked down The Nutcracker in 3D for this, pointing out that the fantasy world was inexplicably more depressing than the real one... despite the fact that the film is set in central Europe right around the time the Nazis and other tyrannical governments were rising to power in real life.
  • She also looked down on Pennies from Heaven for this reason, calling it a "depressing, nihilistic slog" and even refusing to hand out her usual sentence at the end, reasoning that suffering through it was already punishment enough.
• Torches and Pitchforks: The mob from The Phantom of the Opera (1925) comes after her as she tries to explain Shock Treatment's complex relationship with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, ultimately deciding that it's best described as a Spiritual Successor. It doesn't placate them ("Oh, you people are impossible"), but she soldiers on with the review anyway.
• Totally Radical: Diva namechecks this as the first sin of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming Out of Their Shells, feeling that it hasn't aged well and is more prevalent than usual.
• Trailers Always Lie: Diva sins Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again for putting Sophie's pregnancy and Cher as Ruby, which pop up in the last half-hour of the movie, front and center in the trailers. In particular, she considers juxtaposing Sophie's pregnancy with her mother's past a better story than the end result.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Diva sins Music for Felix's plotline, which sees him barely interact with any of the cast and get killed with no setup or resolution. She finds his plotline a culmination of the filmmakers' lack of interest in their marginalized characters.
• Troubled Production: Diva opens her review of The Thief and the Cobbler by discussing its legendarily protracted production, noting that it's what happens when Executive Meddling and artisitic ambition go out of control.
• Truck Driver's Gear Change: Diva gets exasperated when this appears in bad musical numbers, such as the intro song of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Golden Films) or the Love Theme of Beauty And The Beast.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Mentioned by trope name several times in the Saturday's Warrior review, with respect to the character Pam and her vague Soap Opera Disease.
• Two Decades Behind: One of Diva's complaints about "The Beauty Underneath" in her Love Never Dies review is that it sounds like it was originally from the mid-1980s, even putting it over footage of a David Copperfield show from that era and noting how well it fits there.
• Unfortunate Character Design: Diva calls out Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss for its rather young designs for its title characters, which especially make scenes between Juliet and the far-larger Prince uncomfortable to watch.
• Unfortunate Implications:
  • Diva sins Lost Horizon for its very strong Mighty Whitey themes, since the High Lama is white and his chosen successor is also a white man. She goes on to say that this might not be so bad if not for the fact that the Asian characters are all one-dimensional and often stereotypical. Putting John Gielgud in yellowface and calling him "Chang" certainly doesn't help, and neither does Shangri-La lacking a decent irrigation system until a white engineer comes up with one. ^note This wasn't even Values Dissonance; even at the time, Pauline Kael declared that it was rather suspicious that the film's idea of a utopia was a society where white people rule over Asians and black people don't exist.
  • Diva suggests this being the case of the titular character of A Troll in Central Park reacting inappropriately to being kissed by a toddler, with romantic "visual language" and "dialogue" being used for what was supposed to be an "innocent and platonic relationship". The sin card for the moment is simply No. Just... No.
  • Diva notes that Hollywood has a tendency to cast able-bodied actors as disabled characters, as Music does with its title role, which creates the implication that disabled people cannot represent themselves. Overall, Music is flooded with mishandled representation of marginalized people, and Diva accuses the filmmakers of parading these characters without giving them relevance in their own story.
  • Diva sinned Charming for a sequence where the leads get captured by a bunch of cannibalistic, dark-skinned giants in face paint and African-style jewelry and Phillipe is forced to endure the affections of their leader, who also happens to be the only one that isn't rail-thin. The sin card for the moment simply reads "Yikes".
• The Unintelligible: Diva's bailiff, who talks like the adults from the Peanuts cartoons (albeit with vocal chirping, which Christi said was inspired by the Murlocs from World of Warcraft, rather than a trombone "wah-wah" noise).
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Diva sins Jekyll & Hyde for failing to make most of the members of the hospital's board of governors as unlikable as they were clearly meant to be. Not only is their refusal to back Jekyll's research far more reasonable and understandable than the play presents it, they don't seem like bad people (the Bishop of Basingstoke excepted). While they have the collective flaw of being snooty, it's hard to fault them for it considering they come from upper-crust backgrounds in the Victorian era, and it certainly isn't bad enough for their murders at Hyde's hands to be at all cathartic.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Diva points out that The Phantom of the Opera (2004) downplaying The Phantom's deformity makes it seem like he's making a big deal about nothing, and notes that he can easily cover it up with makeup.
  • Diva calls out The Phantom again in the show's sequel, Love Never Dies. While The Phantom in the original musical is a [1] Jerkass Woobie, being a psychotic murderer with a sympathetic backstory who ultimately lets Christine go with Raoul, The Phantom here lacks any of the original's redeeming qualities. Since The Phantom is now a wealthy impresario instead of a sewer-dwelling outcast, this makes him nothing but a bully hiding under weak excuses.
  • Diva's criticisms of La La Land focused mainly on the male protagonist, Sebastian, who is supposed to be a tragically under-appreciated genius, but whom she finds to be a pretentious Know-Nothing Know-It-All with a white savior complex.
  • Diva calls out Zu in Music as a self-absorbed, emotionally callous trainwreck rather than the quirky and lovable misfit the writers think she is. What makes it worse is that the filmmakers expect their audience to empathize with her rather than the autistic Music.
  • Diva finds King Rowan in Cinderella (2021) to be this. He's written to be a Bumbling Dad, but Pierce Brosnan's performance makes him a cold and self-absorbed Abusive Dad, and his "comical" serenade of his wife is an unearned redemption moment.
  • Cinderella also has Vivian, the equivalent of the Wicked Stepmother; the film gives her an Adaptation Expansion backstory portraying her as a broken woman whose own dreams were repeatedly crushed by her controlling first husband, but as Diva points out, this is only ever explicitly brought up in a single Info Dump scene, and does little to explain why she treats her own family even worse than he treated her.
  • One recurring problem Diva and Donna have with Saturday's Warrior is that the character Adam, the patriarch of the family the film focuses on, is clearly framed as a caring father and a wise voice of reason, but instead comes off as a micromanaging Smug Snake who passive-aggressively dunks on everyone around him, especially his wife and kids, to mask his own insecurities (a cutaway gag in the review compares his mannerisms to those of Mr. Huph, the abusive boss character from The Incredibles). He even slaps his eldest son in the face at one point for a minor act of disobedience, and the movie seemingly takes his side.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Diva has ragged on a number of films, including RENT, Can't Stop the Music, and Xanadu, for portraying having a "normal" day job to pay the bills as essentially a Fate Worse than Death, and sending the message that one should strive for immediate artistic success or nothing. She notes that these movies could only have been made prior to the 2008 recession, when having any job at all became a luxury for many... and one of her main critiques of La La Land is that it takes this position despite being both made and set after the recession.
• The Unpronounceable:
  • Diva's real name is 267 syllables long... but even she can't pronounce "Terrance Zdunich."
  • She made a joke suggesting that the name of Prince Chulalongkorn of The King and I was such by having several other YouTubers struggling to read it, but Diva grew to see the joke as needlessly offensive to Thai people, which resulted in her taking down her review of the film.
  • She remarks in her Pete's Dragon (1977) review that she's terrible with human languages, but she can pronounce the name of the main town, Passamaquoddy, in one go, unlike Dr. Terminus in his Villain Song in that film.
• Values Dissonance: invoked
  • Diva points out in Lost Horizon that Shangri-La — a society that isolates and indoctrinates outsiders into a very specific belief system, discourages dissention, has next to no contact with The Outside World, and in fact is waiting for the outside world to destroy itself whereupon the utopian society will be the focal point of a new and better civilization — is effectively a Cult, and thus extremely creepy by modern standards.
  • Diva sins The Mighty Kong for retaining the original film's Hollywood Natives and doing nothing to update them.
• Values Resonance: invoked
  • To Diva's astonishment, Dick Deadeye gets a Saving Grace for this, noting that it not only succeeds in updating Gilbert and Sullivan's legendary Victorian social satires for the '70s, but sending numerous messages that are still relevant in the 21st century, successfully bridging the values of three very different time periods.
  • Diva says that the fact that the Mobsters' song in It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, in which they praise America as "a swell country without no gun control!", "could easily have been written yesterday is both very impressive and very depressing."
• Villain Ball: Diva sins Mok in Rock and Rule for his numerous "rookie villain mistakes," even keeping a running countdown of them, despite considering him the best character in the film.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: invoked Diva points out the trope's double-edged sword in Arabian Knight. On one hand, she praises Richard Williams's animation as the film's saving grace, saying it's "some of the best cel-animation you're likely to see anywhere." On the other hand, she sins the movie for having several stunning sequences that never come together as a unified whole, pointing out that Williams didn't even create storyboards for the film until Warner Bros. got involved.
  Sin Card: Cool, and...?
• The Voice: Artistic representations exist, and she’s been known to manifest as a burst of flame or inside an inanimate object, but Diva herself is never seen onscreen. Christi herself said the two recurring clips listed on Idiot Ball are to compensate for how Diva can't use facial expressions.
• Waxing Lyrical: The very first instance of her Catchphrase is "Judge, jury and executioner here, far, wherever you are".
• Wham Episode: The review of Portal 2: The (Unauthorized) Musical goes more in-depth about Diva's past and feelings towards her position than other episodes. It introduces Donna, head of Musical Heaven. Her interactions with Diva reveal that Diva used to have a lot more faith in musicals (and possibly that she is an Fallen Angel), implies that Diva wants to go back to that time but doesn't believe she can, Donna encourages Diva to rethink her chosen path. It is the first episode that actually provides backstory on Diva, and some future episodes still allude to Diva's history and struggle with being a Caustic Critic.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: She sins A Troll in Central Park for this. She's already annoyed with the trope and notes that while Gus and Rosie's workaholic father doesn't have time to play boat with them in Central Park, him getting fired and evicted for shirking his responsibilities to adhere to his kids' every whim isn't ideal parenting either.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Diva accuses the writers of Rock-A-Doodle of operating on a "sure, why not?" mentality.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Diva sins Glitter for its 90's era fashion sense despite being set in 1983, which is enough for her to question why it's set in that year to begin with.
• World of Weirdness: Since the show's setting could count as the Hell of the Reviewaverse, yes. The Reviewaverse is weird. For one thing, it frequently interacts with Hell.
• Yellowface:
  • Diva cites Lost Horizon its first sin for casting John Gielgud as the Tibetan Chang once his name comes up in the opening credits.
  • Diva also sins Dick Deadeye for its racially insensitive designs for the Asian characters.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Diva is on both ends of this in her review of The Devil's Carnival. She tells the audience that everyone, "even the absolute worst of you, is capable of change and becoming a better person." Then Donna comes down to say it applies to her as well, and when Diva says all she's done for the past decade is make reviews of bad musicals, she's pointed to the comments... Which are full of people thanking her for making them laugh and cheering them up. Donna tells Diva that despite what she thought of herself, she was making a lot of peoples' lives a bit brighter.
• You Meddling Kids: Appropriately enough, Diva opens the Scooby-Doo review by saying that she "would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling cherubim."

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