In other words, you're saying it's too common to trope?
That's not how it works.
Not Actually Indie
Straight examples with mooks are too common to be notable, but aversions with important characters are too common to be notable. We've got a tropable pattern that unimportant characters consistently go down like puppets with their strings cut when shot, and important characters consistently do not, but the trope page as-is doesn't reflect that.
edited 4th Jun '12 6:15:19 PM by Desertopa
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Desertopa: Thank you.
Ninjad by Desertopa.
No i am saying mooks and redshirts dying often instanly is part and parcel of being a mook and redshirt. It is not a seperate or unique story element but part of other elements that already exist. You are a mook or redshirt one of things you do is die instantly. They may not always die instantly but is one of things they are expected to do.
It is not notable or unique at all. Unless a story goes out of it's way to make mook/redshirt death an uncommon thing there is no point to including mooks. one shotting the security guards no big deal. One shotting the super soldier mooks despite how mighty they are and have stomped all over the good guys through out the story and despite the best weapons take several shots to stop. One shotting that is likely an important plot element. That would be notable. Your using it to drive a story point. One shotting the storm troopers/security guards is not.
None of you have yet to say or show how a common or plain mook or redshirt dying instantly in any way is unique or seperate from being a common mook or a common redshirt or pointed out how it is even notable.
If I go fire up my dvd collection at home, read any of my books that have deaths by gunshot, played my collection of games, etc. It would reach a pretty impressive body count of mooks who die insantly by gunshot. It is not a unique element by any stretch of the imagination but part and parcel of being one of the mooks or redshirts.
Instant death for key characters is not only more notable but plays important roles in story telling. One shotting a protaganist, antgonist, or any of the secondary characters is quite an impact on story telling.
Especially when the usual assumption is one these types of characters tend to survive being fatally shot or get a drawn out death scene. When they don't survive that is an imporant point in the plot.
They don't get to say good bye or some other talking action which happens frequently not rarely, they can't take any dying actions like saving someone with a well timed shot, pushing the destruct button in their death throws after they stumbled across a room, or have a drawn out and dramatic death scene.
Tell me how would the scene in Return Of The Jedi play out had Vader been dead on the spot. He wouldn't be able to save look and redeem himself. It changes the story and how characters are affected. On the reverse how would Enemy At The Gates be different in the final scene if commissar Danilov had survived being shot by Major Konig or had a drawn out death scene instead of being a corpse.
The character being instantly dead makes it so the situation likely has to be dealt with in a different manner then the above listed situations. No dying conversation, no last minute stumble across the room, no last second redeeming death moments they are just dead. That has an impact on any story. You then have to handle the situation accordingly and this can change how a story works.
Mooks or red shirts dieing instantly rather rarely is not unique outside of being a mook or red shirt.
edited 4th Jun '12 6:40:17 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
I don't really know what to say. Yes, Mooks getting shot by Instant Death Bullets is really common. That's what makes it a trope. Not all tropes have to be important plot elements.
If you want to YKTTW "Significant character dies instantly for dramatic purposes," go ahead, but I don't see any reason to get rid of the current trope.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Mooks and redshirts being shot and dying instantly is not a separate trope. It is part of being a mook or redshirt. It is NOT separate from being a mook or redshirt their whole existence is to get their ass kicked and often die instantly. I have explained this several times in several ways.
If you want to create another trope related to mooks and redshirts be my guest.
Who watches the watchmen?
Yes, Mooks will often, but not always, die instantly when they get shot. They're also often faceless, bad at aiming, and bad at catching intruders. Are those not valid tropes either?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
All sub pages of the Mooks page execept for The Guards Must Be Crazy which applies to Mooks and Red Shirts. When the hero makes a classic guard mistake they are likely to be holding the Idiot Ball.
The mook/redshirt pages aleady cover mooks/red shirts falling/dieing easily. Instant Death Bullet has nothing to do with a common mook biting the big one. You know something that happens to nearly every mook or redshirt who comes onto the screen.
If they don't fall easily they may be a mook sub-type or they may be a character instead of a nameless face. The fact that they don't fall easily is what sets them apart from bog standardMooks and Red Shirts.
I am sorry there is nothing worth noting at all about a mook or a red shirt dieing in one shot. When they stop being easy meat they stop being a common mook or redshirt. That is covered by by their respective pages.
Their entire job is usually to die and they almost always go down on the first hit. While other characters are a bit more reselient and have a tendency to survive or die slowly. Of which we have a whole host of various tropes that cover that.
Movies: This group of nameless guys who die from one shot/stab/arrow/kung fu chop/karate kick/ray gun whatever is used to dispatch them and trivial injuries=mooks or redshirts. Same for live action, same for comics, literature, manga, and web comics.
Videogames have a bit more wiggle room with game design and difficulty setting but it is still pretty common for Mooks to drop on the first shot in quite a few games until you get further in.Then they start becoming one of the mook sub types.
I will say it one more time. Dieing easily and often instantly is covered by being a Mooks or a Red Shirt. It is not worth noting at all they die instantly something that is already expected of them for the mere fact that they are mooks and redshirts.
Who watches the watchmen?
I see the Awesomeness.
Like Tuefel, I consider the whole "dying instantly when confronted" to be an inherent aspect of being a mook. That's why Elite Mook are people you actually have to put effort into fighting. It's why I feel that instant death for main characters with no build up and no drama is odd, it's like what Whedon did to Wash. A sudden gutpunch out of nowhere.
Fight smart, not fair.
Even if dying instantly from even a single gunshot is ubiquitous to being a Mook - and I still don't think it is - I don't know why we need to overhaul the entire trope to exclude Mooks. All we have to do is say "When it comes to mooks, this trope is almost always in effect, so those examples aren't worth mentioning," at the end of the description.
You're making this way more complicated than it needs to be. It's just supposed to be a trope about a common way that guns are unrealistically portrayed.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Saying it is in effect for mooks and not to put them down is still excluding them. You are saying the same thing with different words. Dying instantly is one of the things mooks do. It is not noteworthy to have a mook die from a single shot. Their entire existence is to die often easily to show how bad ass the one side is. They exist to die to be defeated. Same for the red shirts.
Actual characters are supposed to better, faster, stronger, tougher etc. Having them die instantly is definetly note worthy. Especially when heroes are injured or killed their scenes are replete with long death scenes, final speeches, final actions, or its just a flesh wound or the armour saved you.
Their entire purpose is to be there for characters of a story to defeat period. We have tropes for when we start doing other things then having them exist to be cannon fodder for the various sides in a story.
I am not making this more complicated at all. You are. I have presented a rather large pile of examples and proof and supported my points. You have not shown me anything to support your side that was of note at all. Your above arguement is an excellent example. You have yet to show me how a mook dieing from a single shot is even remotely worth bothering noting.
Die slow or die quick. Choose the fate of these extras, writers take your pick. Be it magic, bullet, blade, or beam. For them to die is their existing theme.
Who watches the watchmen?
Here's what I'm trying to say:
The current trope is about the Artistic License writers take when writing about gunfights, and how they erroneously show bullets as being able to instantly kill people.
The trope your sandbox describes is something like "a character instantly dies from a bullet for dramatic purposes."
Regardless of what we do about including mooks, those are still two very different tropes.
That change is unnecessary. If we want to exclude mooks from the example section, all we have to do is exclude mooks from the example section. We don't have to change everything else about the page while we're at it.
For the sake of argument, I'll just concede your point that mooks dying instantly from single bullets is un-noteworthy.
Now give me your argument for why we should change everything else about the trope description.
edited 6th Jun '12 11:00:41 AM by abk0100
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
The current trope isn't about anything. It is still arguing with itself and the information included in the blurb is questionable which is why all the useful notes stuff was supposed to get cut and shifted to a useful notes page. Showing bullets killing someone instantly is not erroneous at all. I have no idea where you got that idea. Instant death from gun shot is very very common.
The trope description as it existed and exists is erroneous. Go through the history and find the last big hunk of description. You can get shot in arm and die instantly from shock or you can get shot in the head, get lucky, and survive.
1-2 minutes of useful activity is the exception not the rule. You get your heart blown out, spine severed, several organs destroyed. Most people drop dead on the spot. Most are dead in a matter of seconds from the trauma and shock their body just suffered. Needless to say the vast majority of head shots are lethal. You know what makes a gun effective is they rip up your insides pretty badly when you get hit.
edited 6th Jun '12 11:12:24 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
''Showing bullets killing someone instantly is not erroneous at all.
You're right, I did say that wrong. What I meant to say that it's about bullets reliably killing people instantly. In real life, if you shoot a room full of people, a lot of those people will survive to either shoot back at you, or at least to writhe on the ground in agony for a while. In fiction, a common narrative convention (also known as a trope) is to ignore that fact, and just have them all be dead instantly.
"Most people drop dead on the spot."
I'm having a hard time finding the statistics, but I don't think you're right.
edit: does this convince you?
edited 6th Jun '12 11:35:40 AM by abk0100
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
No it doesn't convince me. That guy is lucky. There are a number of other shootings where all it needed was one shot and that is it.
It all boils down to a large number of factors and luck. Spraying fire into a room full of people is going to get mixed results. Your not aiming your shots your just hosing down the crowd. You will get anything from wounded to bodies on the floor depending on what your shooting, what direction they are facing when they are hit, and where they are hit.
Someone standing sideways or at an angle is going to produce a different ballistics pattern then someone hit center mass in the back or chest. If you are firing though things like hand bags, thick clothing, did the round go through someone else arm before hitting another unlucky person etc. You hit someone square in the chest or even at a angle you are very likely going to kill them.
Military, police, and wide assortment of people aim their shots center mass. Draw and imaginary line just below the tops of a human shoulders. Draw another one just above the floaters. That is where they roughly aim.
The reason is that is where the bulk of your most important organs are heart, lungs, liver etc. Then you have arteries, large blood vessels, and loads of blood bearing tissues. Then you have a large network of nerves that tells all these bits and pieces how to work.
A bullet comes through it causes injury in a couple ways. The direct damage from the bit of metal going through the body. The shock wave rips and tears tissue, blood vessels, and nerves. It creates a temporary wound channel which is what does all the ripping and tearing and a permanent one which is the whole that can vary in size and shape. We add in ammo that creates large wound channels, deforms or fragments, tumbles(spins around it's central axis end over end) and it gets messier. The more "important" bits are hit by the bullet the much more likely they are to be dead where they stand. There are a few locations if a bullet hits it your dead before your body even hits the ground. Heart shots, head shots, and if you severe any of the top 1/3 of the spinal column.
Most people die of the shock from the trauma of the gunshot wound. The shock causes everything to shut down leading to almost immediate death. Quite a few people are dead within seconds. The rest are usually dead very shortly after from blood lose or shock. If someone survives a gunshot you have a very short amount of time to get them medical attention.
There are exceptions to the rule. People who take what should have been a fatal injury and survive. People like this are pretty damn lucky. Usually it is some quirk or little factor that saves them. We even have tropes that relate to that.
It boils down to where your shot, what your being shot with, how far, what ammo, what the bullet does after it hits, quirks of anatomy, and luck.
I would say spray and pray scenes where everyone is dead are pretty unrealistic. But scenes where it looks like everyone is even trying to aim are comparatively more realistic. We can assume that they are not checking for those who are just dead or need medical help they are just passing the bodies by.
Also the same mechanics that make bullets lethal also make arrow and blade injuries lethal for a lot of the same reasons.
Who watches the watchmen?
According to wikipedia Even a shot to the heart will only kill a person 85% of the time (go to citation 39)
Police aren't just trained to shoot one bullet into a person and then stop - they're trained to unload their entire clip into their target, even at point blank range.
And that article I linked you too, I mostly wanted you to read this line: "Shots to roughly 80 percent of targets on the body would not be fatal blows, Dr. Fackler said."
Also the same mechanics that make bullets lethal also make arrow and blade injuries lethal for a lot of the same reasons.
The reason bullets instantly kill people so often is because audiences think they can. When someone is killed with a blade, they're usually killed in some way that seems particularly lethal (throat cut, hearth stabbed, whatever). But when someone gets killed with a gun, mook or not, it often just takes a single shot to anywhere near the center of mass.
edited 6th Jun '12 12:26:25 PM by abk0100
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
While this is getting offtopic it could be handy for getting the spin off usefulnotes set up.
85% percent kill rate is nearly every time. I gurantee if you get your heart turned into hamburger your dead. No more blood to the brain the rest of your body pretty much just shuts down along with it. Those 15% who survive probably had enough of their heart intact to keep them alive long enough to get help or were really lucky. Also the bulk of those statistics are for handguns.
Police don't always unload they also train to take single shots. You can shoot someone once and have them die. It only takes a single gun shot wound to kill you. Sever an artery, destroy the heart, sever the spinal coloumn in the right spot and your just as dead if you blew their brains out.
You only need 2 and 3/4 inches of penetration into a human being to inflict a fatal injury on the torso. Most hand guns can inflict 8-14 inches of penetration to account going through bones, clothes, objects, limbs etc. Rifles and shotguns do better and leave nastier wound patterns.
You can die from a single gun shot. You can die instantly from the gun shot. It has nothing to do with audience believing that is the way it is. It has to do with fact. Shock and trauma kill you just as easily as the totality of the physical damage.
Destroying the heart with a bullet or sword does the exact same thing. Stops the organ from working ie getting blood to your brain. That is the same thing slitting the throat does. Your body shuts down and that is it. Most people die from the shock alone.
Bullets don't just punch nice neat little holes in people. For that matter neither do blades or arrows.
This is what bullets do inside of tissue if they are not hitting bone
◊. 10cm=3.9 inches enough for a lethal wound, 20cm=7.8 inches, 30cm=11.8inches. The light colour is the temporary cavity the dark is the permanent damage. You get that on your heart your screwed. The temporary wound cavity causes injury by ripping and tearing tissues this includes, tendons, muscle, blood vessels, nerves, and another surrounding tissue. The ones that have arms branching off are bullet fragments causing additional damage.
Snipers have killed quite a few people with chest shots alone. Single rifle bullet to the chest is all it takes.
Hitting someones bones makes it worse. The bullets have a high chance of fragmenting sending both bone and bullet fragments through out the body doing more damage. If your aiming center mass which police and military are trained to do, your much more likely to to hit the heart, liver, lungs, and diaphram.
Now back to Mooks and Instant Death Bullet which is for story and not usefulnotes. Characters are always tougher, have body armour, are extraordinary shots, and their guns are almost always better. Mooks and red shirts are lousy shots, flimsy, likely to have crappy gear and exist to get their asses kicked. All of that is covered by the related tropes that pertain to heroes, villains, mooks, redshirts, and their various supporting characters.
When you kill any character be they the Protagonist, the Antognist, or supporting characters of any sort with a single shot your stepping away from an established norm. Character x is simply dead. That is it. It happens enough to be noticeable in a variety of works. Last check using the sandbox page after a clean up, a minimum of 20+ plus examples. It would not take much to go find some more examples. The page as it exists and previously existed does little to convey how this trope is defined or used and still has the useful notes junk crammed into it.
The huge list of aversions and other problematic examples, 90+ the last time I bothered counting, is a sign something is fundamentally wrong. A quick look at this write up and the one before it shows the write up is pretty much the entire problem. It looks like a failed YKTTW that got launched anyways. They started with an idea and never really defined it and others started trying to flesh it out. It led to the mess we have now. I am willing to bet this article was drafted up before we started to really use YKTTW. I would be willing to bet it would never have made it out of YKTTW with either of those two write ups and if it somehow did would be where we are now.
Who watches the watchmen?
Now back to Mooks and Instant Death Bullet which is for story and not usefulnotes.
No, not back to mooks. Enough with the mooks. The current description barely mentions mooks. This trope is not about mooks.
The huge list of aversions and other problematic examples, 90+ the last time I bothered counting, is a sign something is fundamentally wrong. A quick look at this write up and the one before it shows the write up is pretty much the entire problem.
The examples being a huge list of aversions is the fault of the bolded notice saying It's probably easier to list exceptions than examples: It has nothing to do with the write-up.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
It has everything to do with the write up. The write up provides nothing for a proper example or description of the trope in use. Doesn't any tenative examples or try and help people along. Instead it it is poorly written forcing people to look to the only clear line in the entire description. As it is the trope is not functional at all.
The sandbox does a much better job by a long shot. Describes the trope, how it might be used, gives tenative examples, gives basic guidelines, tells you what you should avoid, and even gives you a proper description of how an aversion for the trope should work. The current and previous description does no such thing.
edited 6th Jun '12 6:13:55 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
What help does the write-up need to provide? This is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Someone gets shot and immediately drops dead.
I think this would be fine if the stupid "easier to list exceptions" tag were removed and it were turned into a normal trope: List some EXAMPLES. If it's very common, then we just need a dozen examples and it's fine.
I don't see anything wrong with the write up. Gunshots in media are instantly fatal or mere annoyances; this is the fatal kind, but it's totally unrealistic since there are very few ways to actually kill a person instantaneously.
edited 7th Jun '12 1:47:41 PM by Escher
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Can't help but noticing you and others keep changinge the description. Whats wrong with it. Let me break it down for you.
The brand new line added recently. This statement is inaccurate in general. The various aversions show exactly why. They are full of people staggering, limping, dying slowly, bleeding to death, crawling etc.
Not accurate either and is arguing with the theme of the trope already.
This is innacurate entirely. I could find no such examples of this anywhere. Police are wounded or killed more often when they are caught reloading, fail to follow various procedures for approaching a "downed", failure to properly check suspects for a weapon and letting their guard down, getting shot in a traffic stop is increasingly common,or are surprised by a armed criminal.
This is also arguing the theme of the trope.
This innaccurate. In fact the opposite is typically true.
This example is sort of ok but misses the mark in general. Such scenes have happened in westerns. The first example that springs to mind is from the Quick And The Dead.
The reason there not many of them was they got shot. Not necessarily because the opponents were surviving being shot to make careful return fire.But simply because someone else shot them. Between other armed inviduals, criminals, and law enforment if you ran around shooting people it was sure bet someone would return the favour. If you were known as a gunman you were considered a threat to the public. Quite a few became victims of mass ambushes or assassinations to be rid of them.
This part I can agree with. No arguement. If it did not get put into the sandbox it should be added in at an appropriate spot.
Useful notes chunk.
Pieces of this read like natter in the examples. Only worse it is in the description.
edited 7th Jun '12 4:51:19 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Everyone can at least agree that this should list examples instead of aversions, right? Can we just take it into YKTTW to get some real examples?
edited 7th Jun '12 5:52:40 PM by abk0100
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
There are several existing examples on the page we can use right off the bat. Just gotta dig them out of the rest of them.
Who watches the watchmen?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Ok went through cleaning out all the aversions. There are some entries I am unsure about and left a ~ followed by a note or question. There are some aversions left in because they are done properly. Ie a character is shot and believed to instantly be dead, but is revealed through the story to still be alive.
I placed the cleaned up list under the sandbox under a section for itself. Feel free to edit, adjust, add to, take away but please leave us some edit reasons to make this easier.
Who watches the watchmen?
Crown Description:
What would be the best way to fix the page?
Instant Death for mooks/redshirts is not notable at all. One of the things they are expected to do is die easily often instantly. It is no way notable at all. If that is case we might as well list quite a lot of media with a fight scene with mooks/redshirts and guns.
The issue last time was the blurb of useful notes junk. It was supposed to get cut out and made into useful notes but it got forgotten. Now we have page with over 90 aversions and the write up has been changed at least twice to write ups that fail to define the trope, explain how it is used, or fails to give clear and consistent details.
Who watches the watchmen?