Follow TV Tropes

Following

Playing With / Glurge Addict

Go To

Basic Trope: A character who loves all things oversentimental and faux-inspirational.

  • Straight: Candy has a collection of motivational kitten posters, movies about orphans, sappy romance novels, and figurines so cutesy as to be tasteless.
  • Exaggerated: Every single surface in Candy's (pink and sparkly) home is covered in said figurines, and she speaks to them in baby talk.
  • Downplayed: Candy enjoys one glurgey movie as a Guilty Pleasure.
  • Justified: Candy lives in a world so crapsack that even the "cheerful" stuff is cynically made, and it's the closest to anything positive she can find.
  • Inverted: Candy loves things that try too hard to be dark and horrifying, only to be laughably edgy instead.
  • Subverted: Judging by her interests, Candy seems to be one of these, but it's really just a case of Bile Fascination.
  • Double Subverted: The tackily sentimental stuff grows on her.
  • Parodied: Candy's collection is literally made of sugar. She has a tendency to cry over its sheer sentimentality and accidentally dissolve it.
  • Zig Zagged: Candy seems to have glurgey interests, but it's just Bile Fascination. The interests grow on her for real, until she watches a movie that's way too nauseating even for her and swears off of glurge for good. Except for the one "hang in there" kitten poster.
  • Averted:
    • Candy has no interest in cutesy stuff.
    • Candy does like cute things, but only if they're actually tasteful and uplifting, instead of just trying to be such.
  • Enforced: "We need to show Candy is a Wide-Eyed Idealist. Let's make her addicted to sentimental stuff."
  • Invoked: Candy is raised in a cult, grows up internalising seemingly positive but actually toxic beliefs, and is discouraged from ever questioning them.
  • Defied: "No way. I'd go into a sugar coma if I touched that stuff with a ten foot pole."
  • Lampshaded: "I swear you could get diabetes just from stepping into Candy's home."
  • Discussed: "How can you think a picture of a kitten hanging on for dear life is cute?" "How can I not? Just look at its wittle face!"
  • Conversed: "Does anyone really love that stuff as much as Candy does?" "Oh, my next door neighbour certainly seems to, he's always quoting pseudo-inspirational lines from terrible movies."
  • Exploited:
    • Someone easily scams Candy with a fake sad story that moves her to tears.
    • An enemy blackmails her by threatening to destroy her Kitsch Collection.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Nobody takes Candy seriously because of her interests.
    • Candy believes in the underlying harmful messages inherent to a lot of glurge. She claims positive thinking is enough to cure any disease or overcome any disability, tells people to stay in toxic relationships because she thinks love martyrs are admirable and can change their abusers, and massively spoils her children right down to gifting a puppy as a present "like in the movies", only for said puppy to end up neglected. In short, her oversentimentality deprives her of any real empathy, making her unpleasant and bigoted.
  • Reconstructed:
    • People find her relentless positivity has a certain charm, and it helps that her love of all things sugary makes her the best baker in town (although only those who can get past the garish pink of the frosting find this out).
    • Candy knows that glurge is often problematic, but enjoys it anyway without taking its messages to heart.

Back to Glurge Addict

Top