Split some of the examples.: Fate Worse Than Death

Really, most of the examples are actually examples of And I Must Scream. Should we just merge the whole thing to that one or what?

I think And I Must Scream is just a subtrope of Fate Worse than Death.

Aaand what's the difference between them again?

From their laconics:

Fate Worse than Death: Still alive, but wish you weren't. And I Must Scream: Fully aware but completely immobile.

So a hypothetical difference would be someone who is allergic to dogs being marooned on the planet of dog people (well, okay, that's probably not really worse than death, but it can't be pleasant), as opposed to fully paralyzed and unable to communicate.

From the description of And I Must Scream, it's an extreme and specific form of Fate Worse than Death.

edited 27th May '11 2:34:41 PM by Earnest

There's some clean-up needed to move some examples from Fate Worse than Death to And I Must Scream, but otherwise they seem sufficiently distinct, and there's loads of examples of Fate Worse than Death that are not And I Must Scream.

On an unrelated note, this is currently listed under the Stock Phrases index. Should it be? "Fate worse than death" is a stock phrase of sorts, but the page isn't collecting examples of it being used that way.

I think it's quite literal (Fate Worse than Death), if the laconic and the examples are to be believed.

We may only need to move some specific instances (i.e. those belonging to And I Must Scream) to its proper page, or delete it if it's already there.

Oh right, here's what I think should've be done; among the FWTD examples, the ones overlapping with AIMS should be deleted.

From what I understand, Fate Worse than Death is Exactly What It Says on the Tin-a fate that's worse than death. And I Must Scream is a subtrope where there is no way out of the fate that isn't extremely improbable to happen any time soon, and normally is extremely unlikely to ever happen, if not outright impossible. It's a Super-Trope of Taken for Granite and Who Wants to Live Forever?.

As for being a Stock Phrase: no. It might be said a lot in fiction, but the trope is not about characters using the phrase.

edited 2nd Nov '11 5:01:01 PM by ading

Is there a reason why article images have been getting purged?

Fate Worse than Death only counts as such if the victim is still alive? I guess that would follow from taking the name literally, but I don't see it mentioned in the description. What about an especially horrific fate in the afterlife? That can be worse than just dying and being dead.

edited 11th Nov '11 5:45:34 PM by ArcadesSabboth

The nothing after death would be the assumed death. If they are conscious and able to experience things, they are alive for the purposes of torment.

If you're referring to the TF 2 pic that was removed from this page, it's already being used on another page; we like for individual trope pages to have unique images. Here's the IP thread, for reference.

edited 22nd Nov '11 6:03:33 AM by Willbyr

I would have thought that Fate Worse than Death is something that won't kill you but you wish it could and And I Must Scream is something that would kill you under normal circumstances but due to immortality and immobility have to experience it forever.

My description of And I Must Scream does make it incredibly specific for a trope.

edited 24th Nov '11 9:42:53 AM by treelo

A Fate Worse than Death is where you wish you could die, but you're still able to do something. And I Must Scream is where you can't do anything about it.

Cleaned up the Film, Literature and Live Action TV sections.

I think Jafar's "You'd be surprised what you can live through." line should be at the top of the page.

I've heard one I think might be better: "There's a limit to how much pain you can endure, but not to how much you can suffer.".

As it is a universal phrase and truely selfexplanatory, it should be exactly this: Circumstances that are that horrible that everything, even death, seems unquesrionably preferable to it. This would both include terrific states of being in life, eschatological torment, and possibly even excrucifying sloooooow death you can only wish it was over (like, well, crucification, impalement, and definitly scaphism). The two above page quotes are far more fitting than the current one, which definitly fails to convey the meaning.

edited 1st Mar '12 9:10:19 AM by Scientist

What's left here?

Combing through the examples of both tropes and making sure they're on the right page. (I did the Literature, Film and Live action TV ones a while back.)

I think that an important part of And I Must Scream is that the victim cannot commit suicide to end his torment.

Is there still work to be done here, or is this finished?

Can't say I am an enormous fan of the current page quote - seems dull and simply repeats the name of the trope, without being trope namer or anything. I preferred the one from House, or Blackadder's "A fate worse...than a fate worse than death eh? That's pretty bad."

That Blackadder thing is amusing. Me like.