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Never trust a laconic. They're full of lies.
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Misuse. Look at the YKTTW. And the trope description clearly states that it's taking the most powerful character out of the way for an episode. The laconic agrees with that. All of the "But maybe's" are attempts to broaden the trope to allow other situations to fit.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
If that's the case it needs a clean up.
If the overall idea is to write out the more-powerful character out so as to preserve the drama and avoid them solving the plot, they fit into the trope. The laconic definitions are supposed to be brief and concise and they don't necessarily encapsulate the sum totality of a trope's intricacies; it's an easy way to get the point of the trope across.
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In this case, though, the laconic agrees with the main trope description and with the description as it was YKTTW'd. This trope is taking the main or most powerful character out of the way briefly — for one episode— in order to allow the other characters to solve the plot. Not taking them out of the way for a sizable part of the game or the season.
edited 4th Oct '11 10:03:10 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Aspiring Mentat
Do we have a trope for taking them out of the way for longer than one episode? If not, I think the description should be rewritten to fit that. The emphasis on short-term exits can stay, but confining it to only one episode is too restrictive; sometimes there are two-part episodes, sometimes (like in anime) the pacing is really slow and events are stretched over many episodes.
I updated the description, changing "Episode" to "Story or arc"
I didn't see any examples where the Deus ex Machina was removed for longer than needed for the drama in the story.
I've gone through and removed examples that I could identify as permanent. Some of them I didn't know because I'm not familiar with the source material. Also made the Laconic fit the new expanded definition.
edited 20th Nov '11 10:35:32 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Oppression anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere.
What about when it's not temporary? Do we need another trope for that? Changing this one's definition would be simpler, since there's still a clear common core idea: The character is removed because they would break the plot by being too powerful. I see the similarity between the temporary and permanent versions as much greater than their difference.
Maybe I've been sitting up too late, but I can't actually think of any examples at the moment.
It seems to me that the article specifies incredibly powerful characters being kept out of the way for an episode or so—the first half and the laconic version specifically. A lot of the examples deal with keeping the Gamebreaker powers out of the way for quite a lot longer than that. Misuse or a misleading description?
Now collecting White-Haired Pretty Girls.