Trope Misuse Cleanup In General

Too Dumb to Live. It is a death trope which requires the character die from a stupid decision, yet many examples use it interchangeably with What An Idiot (dumb decisions in general) and Idiot Ball (uncharacteristic dumb decisions).

There's also Even Evil Has Standards, which is most often confused for Everyone Has Standards. Less often it is confused with Pragmatic Villainy. I'll explain all three:

• Even Evil Has Standards: An unambiguously evil villain finds something too evil. I.e. They are appalled at another character committing genocide out of racism, or they find Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil.
• Everyone Has Standards: A villain is simply disgusted by rape or racism in general.
• Pragmatic Villainy: This villain is willing to do anything if it will advance their agenda, but won't do something if it does nothing to advance their agenda. I.e. They don't engage in wanton acts of villainy /pick up the Villain Ball because they know it is of little value, not for any moral reasons.

Too Dumb to Live isn't quite that strict (though people do still misuse it as What An Idiot and Idiot Ball). Specifically, it only requires that the character perform an action that should have resulted in their death or serious injury due to their own stupidity. There are two ways of showing this: Having the other characters point out that the action should have resulted in their death or serious injury due to their own stupidity, or having the action actually result in their death or serious injury due to their own stupidity.

Sorry if that comes off as patronizing, just didn't want to have this turn into the opposite problem.

edited 28th Mar '16 7:25:32 PM by Discar

^^ Everyone Has Standards is not villain-exclusive. It's when characters make a moral stand regardless of their own position in terms of morality. "Whether someone is a weirdo, villain, pervert, jerkass, geek, or just way too nice, deviant from the customs of "normal" society — one often finds those things that can only go so far."

But yes, Even Evil Has Standards gets shoehorned quite a bit, most often when jerkass characters are regarded as "villains". It's also often confused for villains who have standards of any kind, even if it's "you're not being evil enough".

edited 29th Mar '16 4:44:36 AM by Morgenthaler

Not according to the trope page.

^^ I didn't say Everyone Has Standards is villain-exclusive. I was pointing out Even Evil Has Standards is misused when, given the context, Everyone Has Standards is the correct trope.

edited 29th Mar '16 3:35:31 PM by maxwellsilver

Looking at the history, there's basically an edit war that's been taking place over months regarding that line. I'm going off something ~Fighteer said forever ago. Unfortunately, I can't find the actual thread (searching for Too Dumb to Live in forum threads just leads to this one), so I'm calling him in to see.

The clause in question is correct: to qualify for the trope, the character must die as a direct result of their own stupidity, which must be In-Universe — Watsonian rather than Doylist. Otherwise it's just complaining.

edited 29th Mar '16 3:58:31 PM by Fighteer

Could have sworn you were the one who originally said it could be a little bit broader. I was specifically quoting you (from memory) for the definition.

Oh well.

"Stupidly" putting one's life in danger is basically par for the course with heroes. A broader definition would wind up qualifying any character that acts in a reckless or brave fashion at any point.

Huh, I did? I can't recall now. I may have made an allowance for the character being saved by circumstances outside their control — in other words, they clearly would have died had someone or something not intervened. Still, that's an awfully tricky distinction to make.

I mentioned this in another thread, but Every Helicopter Is a Huey has some glaring misuse, both in the form of "Work features a Huey" — which the descriptions states is not an example — and a few "Work doesn't feature a Huey", which the line below the description and above the examples list states is not acceptable.

Reality Subtext has a number of examples that fall under trivia such as Casting Gag and Actor Allusion, or just arguable similarities to concurrent or later events, when the description states it is about influences on writing, whether intentional or subconscious.

Riddle for the Ages is explicitly about mysteries deliberately left unanswered by the writers, yet a lot of examples have answers, either by Word of God, All There in the Manual or simply later events in the series.

I'll be taking a chainsaw to those (non) examples shortly.

A pet peeve of mine: when Actor Allusion is used when an actor plays a character vaguely similar to an earlier role. Like "It's not the first time X plays an Anti-Villain who later joins the heroes".

Meta Power Up seems like the super trope for Experience Booster and others in the description, but if so, it gas a lot of examples of its subtropes in its examples list?

I wrote this on the discussion page for Funny Afro, but I think this is where it should be?

This trope is not being used correctly when it is being added to trope pages. Take for example the addition of it under Uvogin's character description from Hunter x Hunter. Or even the High School Musical/Corbin Bleu tag on the page itself.

"Funny Afro" should only be used when the afro is acknowledged by the characters in the medium as funny or when it is used by the creator to make gags or jokes. I'm not even sure it should be used for Real Life examples since outside of clowns.

Basically, it's not enough for a character to have an afro for it to be an example of this trope, as afros in of themselves aren't inherently funny. For a large portion of the global population an afro is just how hair grows.

Let's Get Dangerous! has several examples per page that don't fit the trope description. (Plus lousy example indentation). I did a little cleanup on the Discworld entries, but 1) I don't know a lot of the works involved to know if the examples can be fixed and 2) I have a Chemistry quiz soon.

Thanks muchly for any help!

Faux Action girl is a trope that is very badly used.

• Sometimes they add a female character, if she lost a single fight, but has won the rest.

• Even if she loses a lot of fights, it's no worse than the male characters victory-defeat streak.

Losing a couple of fights = / = Faux Action Girl.

Edited by JoLuRo075 on Jun 4th 2019 at 1:36:02 AM

I don't know if many of the examples on Did Not Do the Bloody Research are accurate or not. For example, these either feel like Accidental Innuendo brought on by slang differences or otherwise unintentional mishaps:

• In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Jim refers to the Pachycephalo as "Pachy", which sounds a little too much like a racist term for Pakistani people.
• Robots has a character with a large rear end named Aunt Fanny. In the US, it's just an allusion to her large butt. In the UK, it means... something else. So she was renamed Aunt Fan.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic caused a minor controversy over the word "Spastic" being used in "Word Crimes". He apologized on Twitter, saying he didn't know that it was an offensive slur.
• One episode of The Powerpuff Girls featured the Mayor catching a flying object and exuberantly yelling "I've got it, I've got the little bugger!" The first part of the line was apparently looped when it aired in Europe.

Ambiguously Brown is a trope that I think gets overused. If a character has as much as a vaguely brown skin tone and their ethnicity isn't discussed, even when no one's ethnicity is discussed, they get listed as Ambiguously Brown.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Jun 4th 2019 at 5:21:30 AM

IIRC, last time I looked, Did Not Do the Bloody Research argued with itself in its own definition. I kinda think that says it all. :/

There was some disagreement over whether certain examples qualify as Ultimate Evil in this IP thread.

Hey, just wanted to say I just cleaned up several misused examples on Through a Face Full of Fur from people who are treating it as Luminescent Blush 2.0. I'm pretty sure I managed to get most of the 'human character blushes' misuse off the page, but the western animation section is so bloated I might have missed a few.

Also put up a note clarifying what counts as this trope and what counts as Luminescent Blush. Hope that was okay.

Edited by TokoWH on Jan 24th 2020 at 1:23:26 AM

~Dawalk86 is still adding a lot of examples to Through a Face Full of Fur that aren't animals, or don't specify if they are so I can't tell if they're valid.

Couldn't find a better place for this, but New-Age Retro Hippie's Video Games section has an "example" that... isn't really an example at all, but just a "this isn't used much but would work in something similar to X game series", along with an unrelated general example:

• There are few if any video games actually set in the hippie world or where you play a hippie yourself, although the setting would be perfect for a casual game similar to Virtual Villagers. There are a few dress-up games for girls that let you choose hippie-like attire.

Edited by Zanreo on Feb 28th 2020 at 2:10:18 PM

Examples Are Not General. Cut.