Awkward snowclone: Bowel Existence Failure

Can you Guess The Trope here? Is it about people's innards sponaneously disappearing? Or perhaps it's about dying as the result of intestinal cancer?

Nope. This is Snow Cloned off Critical Existence Failure, which is a trope about how in gaming, a character can do everything at full efficiency with one hit point left, but drops dead instantly upon hitting zero. This trope is almost entirely unrelated; the only relation is that both involve death: in this case, it's about a death scene shown less gruesomely than normal (e.g. clean, with no bowel release).

Yep, awkward snowclone is awkward. How do we deal with this one?

edited 16th Oct '11 12:52:08 PM by Spark9

Not just "more gruesome than normal", but that the corpse gets a "code brown" because the digestive system is slower to shut down.

This trope is:

Corpses in media don't shit themselves when they die like corpses in real life do.

Not whatever the OP is going on about. I have no idea where they got that.

Oops, I meant to type that the trope is about a death scene being depicted as much [i]less[/i] gruesome.

Anyway, the trope has no relation to the trope it's a snowclone of.

The current name is pretty bad. I seem to recall we had problems coming up with a better one, though.

My lame suggestion: No Dead Body Poops.

How about Dead Bodies are Clean?

But the trope is the opposite. This is a list of works whose characters shit themselves when they die.

I would presume that would mean that there's no blood.

x3 No, that sounds like when you see corpses in an ME's office and they're all free of makeup and scrubbed as they look over them.

edited 16th Oct '11 1:53:03 PM by shimaspawn

"No examples of this trope being played entirely straight are listed below because, if they were, this page would be longer than the rest of this website twice over."

edited 16th Oct '11 1:36:02 PM by SalFishFin

Oh, you're right.

This is ridiculous. How can "character dies without releasing bowels" be a trope? It happens in fiction, but it happens near-universally, it happens unintentionally and it means nothing!

But the reverse is tropable. It's an unusual turn to realism to depict the indignity of death. We can note on the page that it's rare, saying why it's rare, noting that's it's Truth in Television.

It's a universal trope just like Nobody Poops.

Ah. But at least with Nobody Poops, it's what most would call an acceptable break from reality - casual viewers might scratch their chin and say, "Isn't it funny how Jack Bauer can go a whole day without going to the bathroom?" and then chuckle because they know the alternative would be silly. With this trope, most people don't even know the body releases its bowels upon death. So though there's some point in addressing why characters never "poop," the reason they never poop on dying, if you asked the writers, is, apart from everything else, "why would they?"

I'm not going to argue this one out - go ahead, find a proper name for this trope. I think we do have a separate problem though with Nobody Poops . Because "Nobody Poops" is far from omnipresent. "Nobody Poops Unless Plot-relevant or Funny" is. As a result, we have a list of aversions that's very long and that attempts to catalog every example of a character urinating or shitting — regardless of the associated trope, of which there are many.

edited 17th Oct '11 5:14:55 AM by Routerie

Nobody Poops is a trope partly becase everybody knows how, well, shit happens in Real Life. Fewer people are aware of the fact that it also happens (for slightly different reasons) after somebody dies.

Post Mortem Bowel Evac? Or something derived from that?

edited 5th Nov '11 9:32:26 PM by Gargus

"Name is a Snowclone" is not an automatic rename, even if you fail a Guess That Trope. Can we see a Wick Check or something? Is there misuse? Any demonstrable problems? If there's nothing actually wrong with the trope, we don't need to have this thread.

It's still a bad, non indicative name. Which is where we disagree, some people want trope renames if it can be improved, others consider it a later/last course of action.

edited 6th Nov '11 5:22:27 PM by kyfhv

If all you have is "I think it can be improved," you're wasting everyone's time. That'll fly in YKTTW, but we're here to fix problems, not to tweak names for no reason. We don't like snowclones, but that doesn't mean you get to start a TRS thread and say "Hey guys, this title is a snowclone. So what should we rename it to?"

We only have so many TRS slots and this is taking up valuable space. So what's the problem?

edited 6th Nov '11 6:50:05 PM by troacctid

The problem is the name sucks. It's not witty, not funny, non indicative, and it's a snowclone. Unfortunately, there have been no consensus rename suggestions.

If this thread stalls forever it'll just be closed, but until than rename suggestions are welcome.

I personally can't think of anything, every title seems to be long and awkward.

edited 6th Nov '11 7:00:37 PM by kyfhv

(I never thought I'd type this...) Posthumous Pooping? Crapping Casualties?

As for a wick check... It has exactly 50, which is convenient. I'm assuming aversions to be correct usage, as that's what listed on the article. This is my first Wick Check; I assume you leave out indexes, tropes that say "see also" and the such.

Jojos Bizarre Adventure Abridged: Can't tell. It's part of a quote about removing someone's pants, with no context provided.
Repo The Genetic Opera: Correct
Trope Distinctions A-C: Correct
Action: Correct
A Song Of Ice And Fire: Correct
Circle Of Magic: Correct
Comic Books: Correct
Cupcakes: Incorrect. It refers to somebody's innards being removed.
Demonophobia: Correct.
Empowered: Can't tell. It doesn't say if anyone poops, it just tells me someone died.
Fallout 3: Incorrect. "Played very straight", it says.
Final Destination: Incorrect. It says the character wasn't even dead.
Hollywood Heart Attack: Correct.
Honor Harrington: Correct.
Human Centipede The Musical: Correct.
LA Noire: Correct.
Manswers: X Just X, seems correct
Misfits: Can't tell
Ōkamiden: Incorrect. Refers to a live character soiling himself.
Organ Drops: Correct.
Realm Of The Elderlings: Can't tell. Says "explicitly noted".
South Park: Correct.
The League Of Gentlemen: Correct.
The Sopranos: X Just X
Tower of the Swallow: X Just X
World Of Warcraft: Can't tell
Twin Peaks: Correct.
United States Angels Corps: Correct.
Yume Miru Kusuri: Can't tell.
Out of the 29 listed here, there were only 4 definite incorrects, and 9 of which I couldn't tell. Just over are definitely correct.

6 other articles just said "averted". The only reason I list them separately is because I've seen some confusion over what was played straight— if people mistake the trope for "folks go to the bathroom when they die" because that's what's listed, they'll think an aversion is someone not going. These are probably correct (albeit X Just X) examples, but just to be on the safe side...

Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Preacher
Supernatural
The Acts Of Caine
Bowel Existence Failure
VG Cats
Sorry if I'm making this more difficult than it should be. For the record, I think the "only list aversions" system is annoying, and we should make the trope about when people do soil themselves so we can list straight examples.

EDIT: AAAAAAAGH. Why is all on one line of text?!
EDIT II: Wooh, fixed it. I am the man.

edited 6th Nov '11 8:42:18 PM by Webby

edited away

edited 23rd Nov '11 3:14:35 PM by kyfhv

This trope shows up here almost as much as...never mind. Put up a redirect and move on. We've had this discussion at least twice already.

bump. We gonna do anything here or what?

Let's get a crowner; I see lots of conflicting suggestions in this thread.

I like No Dead Body Poops, even if it is a snowclone, because it's actually connected to a related trope.