Not Tropeworthy: Hospital Hottie

This was previous contested in another thread about Hello, Attorney!, but that one died off so I want to bring it back to the table again. Tropes like Hospital Hottie, Good-Looking Privates, and Hello, Attorney! aren't so much tropes as they are tropers listing which fictional characters/actors & actresses they find to be attractive. For now, the pages are almost entirely Audience Reactions.

I feel that there's a trope here, but it's just "live-action and drawn work tends to feature nothing but good-looking people" (which is already partly covered by Hollywood Homely and Generic Cuteness), and doesn't really have anything to do with their line of work.

Also, this may be the wrong thread for this, but Hello, Attorney! is a bad name. It reinforces the misconception that Hello Nurse is about nurses, rather than just attractive women.

I shouldn't have let the Hello, Attorney! discussion die. There was pretty much universal support for turning that into a redirect.

For a while, I thought Hospital Hottie was about makeup and wardrobe standards in TV hospitals versus real life. But it really isn't. It's just - TV hospital folk look better than their real-lie equivalents. And as Doktorvon Eurotrash says, that's just an arbitrary But More Specific variant of "people on TV look better than their real-lie equivalents," i.e. Shows Hire Attractive Actors.

If House had been a police procedural or a legal procedural, it would have hired an attractive cast in exactly the same way as it did as a medical procedural. And, in fact, we have tropes for Attractive Officer and Attractive Attorney - because half the shows on TV are about doctors, cops and lawyers. If we had more 24 or The Mentalist clones, someone would write-up a Hot Counter Terrorist or Sexy Medium page.

None of these are tropes!

It might be kind of cool to have an All Casts Are Attractive type page for ensemble dramas, one that lists only aversions, but that's probably asking for trouble.

edited 21st Jun '12 4:31:18 AM by Routerie

Incidentally, it looks like people have been curating Good-Looking Privates to keep it in-universe ("Loves A Man In Uniform," perhaps?). The laconic is still "Attractive military personnel" though, and the main page still contains, for example:

"Rory Williams from Doctor Who - Adorkable in civvies (or his nurse's scrubs), but totally Badass in any uniform, be it museum security guard, modern combat fatigues or particularly his signature Roman centurion outfit. In "A Christmas Carol", he's dressed as the last one for his honeymoon, so clearly Amy loves it too.

The wicks appear to consist mostly of that interpretation of the trope.

I have to disagree. We have plenty of bad "hotness" tropes, but this is not one of them. This one is regularly invoked, lampshaded and parodied; it's a real and quite common trope.

eta: in fact, this trope is basically why Hello Nurse has the name it does. (Not that I think Hello Nurse is a good name for that trope.)

edited 21st Jun '12 3:28:54 PM by Xtifr

We could fix it to make it about that sort of thing. For example, Hot Librarian is a fine page (if a show were actually set in a library, and its cast were hot, that wouldn't be an example of Hot Librarian). Hot Nurse should have an analog, but its examples should be more like "Hello Nurse from Animaniacs" rather than "Lead #3 in Gray's Anatomy."

This trope is heavily tied to the thought of being taken care of by an attractive individual, which makes them even more attractive. It's a case where one plus one equals more than two.

Yes, like the common daydream of being nursed to health by a hot nurse. I've seen it in a lot of manga at least.

That's essentially what Naughty Nurse Outfit amounts to though. The tropes in my original post are really just a listing of whoever the editor finds attractive.

Hospital Hottie just states that any medical personal is hot and then goes on to to be a list of characters who the editors find to be attractive.

edit Hot Scientist is another one.

edited 24th Jun '12 9:47:11 PM by Lionheart0

By the way, if you want to revive the Hello, Attorney! TRS thread, just find it in the morgue and PM a mod to unlock it. It's not gone forever.

edited 25th Jun '12 1:24:17 PM by djbj

Ah. Thank you.

Then it's a case of a legit Trope being misused. There is a similar debate going on with Hot Mom / Hot Dad right now.

Granted, however, there is a legit reasoning described earlier in the thread that prevents me from just up and suggesting the Trope be In-Universe only; although that reason would have me want to merge this Trope with the Naughty Nurse Outfit "Trope".

On the other hand, Hospital Hottie may be one of the few Tropes where there seems to be a Truth in Television justification; I'm thinking such Tropes as Hot Librarian and Hot Scientist should be reduced to In-Universe only.

edited 26th Jun '12 7:30:08 AM by DonaldthePotholer

Hospital Hottie ought to be about the desire to be taken care of by a hot nurse/doctor, and/or the fact that being a nurse/doctor makes someone more attractive.

A common enough trope that it is lampshaded and everyone is pretty well aware of it.

Naughty Nurse Outfit ought to be about people using a sexualized version of the outfit to Invoke the above trope.

Yup, that matches my analysis as well.

This and Hot Librarian are probably the two out of all our Hot X tropes that actually reflect an actual trope—ones so common that it's regularly lampshaded or invoked or discussed in-universe.

edited 14th Jul '12 11:23:41 AM by Xtifr

Clocking due to lack of activity.

I think that at the very least, we should fix the description, so it's not just "anyone the viewer finds hot". But aside from that (and chainsawing bad examples), I don't think there's a lot required here.

If we want to rework this into Hot Nurse Fetish, fine by me. But "the cast of X medical drama" or "the lead actor in X film" should not be an example.

The main problem seems to be that editors keep using this to list "fictional medical professionals people find attractive", which leads to too many Zero Context Examples.

Anyway, how should the description be tweaked to prevent this?

edited 23rd Sep '12 3:13:42 AM by ThatHuman

I think some examples should be cut and the description should clarify that a character only counts if her (or his) attractiveness is commented on or if she's (or he's) flirtatious.

We have too many other tropes that border on "fictional X people find attractive", including Hot God and Good-Looking Privates.

In this case, I think lexicon has the right idea on how this should work.

edited 14th Oct '12 4:07:32 PM by Prfnoff

Should we start deleting "fictional medical professionals people find attractive" who are neither flirtatious nor commented to be attractive in story?

I'd let them remain if they dress in an unrealistically sexy or stylish way. Too short skirt, open shirt, obvious use of hair products, and stuff like that.

edited 25th Oct '12 4:20:32 AM by AnotherDuck

Well the Naughty Nurse Outfit page says that it's not actual sexy nurses themselves so we could go with the definition of "medical professionals who are flirtatious by either behavior or dress, or any hospital worker who is commented to be attractive in story."

This seems like Naughty Nurse Outfit, but they're ACTUALLY NURSES! to me.

They don't need to wear one of those.