Needs Help: Spoiled Sweet

Sweet is always being there with hugs and a shoulder to cry on. Sweet is asking about other people's emotions and putting their feelings first. Sweet is going out of your way to put a smile on a friend's face. It's being highly empathetic and emotional about other people's emotions. It's a naive belief that all people are good and wonderful at their core and that you should be good and wonderful back.

Media tends to code this set of behaviours as very feminine in part because it shows a lot of weakness and vulnerability.

Now as for Spoiled, that does not simply mean rich. A spoiled character is indulged in everything they could want, doted on by family and friends alike.

They aren't simply given money as compensation for being ripped from their mothers, forced into relationships they don't want, and general financial abuse to condition them to do everything the holder of the purse strings says. Takashi is being financially abused by his grandmother. He's not spoiled. He lets people who don't know him well think he's spoiled as a mask, but it's pretty clear the truth is a lot less pretty.

edited 26th Nov '14 10:17:21 AM by shimaspawn

So what's the consensus currently? (Sorry for jumping in late)

There was no crowner, but it was decided that this trope needs a thorough clean-up.

There appeared new examples on the page that could use a peer-review. I'm incline to delete them.

• Fred from Big Hero 6 is a borderline Cloudcuckoolander and Manchild with a boundless supply of enthusiasm and care for everyone around him. He's also secretly wealthy with his own butler, and lives in a mansion complete with his own room decked out with action figures and arcade video games.

This one is a guy, so that would make him out — I haven't seen the work, but the context looks ok to me, actually. But but but—- he's a grown up man.

• Detective Conan: Sonoko Suzuki is too flighty and childish to be The Ojou, but she doesn't flaunt her wealth in an overly rude manner. She's actually grateful that Ran doesn't try to mooch off of her.

I don't know the work, but it looks like another "rich but fairly decent and not always rude" misuse.

Also, there was another attempt to make the description gender-neutral but I reverted it back and PM'd the troper about this TRS discussion.

I think that the biggest thing disqualifying Fred is that he's not spoiled. It's his money. He worked for it. He's using it as he sees fit. That's not the same as being spoiled so he's not Spoiled Sweet. He's wealthy and a genuinely sweet guy. He fails the spoiled bit, not the sweet bit.

From what I remember of the Detective Conan example, Sonoko is a rather strange kind of rich girl in that her wealth doesn't come up at all unless her family is brought up (either in conversation or when an episode deals with some new priceless trinket that they're making a spectacle of putting on display), and when that does come up, it's made quite clear that they're filthy rich. Yet despite having a lot of reasons to act as your typical Rich Alpha Bitch, she does not. Not to her best friend, to her classmates, and not even to her best friend's not-boyfriend. She can be quite snobby to the latter and to his shrunk alter ego, but it seems to be born out of genuine dislike/distrust for his person rather than Rich Bitch-style arrogance. She acts more like the average mildly-vain, boy-chasing mall girl from a lower middle-class background than anything else.

Maybe she's a subversion?

edited 2nd Dec '14 12:01:23 AM by MarqFJA

I thinks you're saying subversion when you mean not an example. This trope doesn't require wealth beyond measure, and wealth beyond measure doesn't mean you're spoiled. A lot of classic examples are upper middle class.

I honestly did not know "filthy rich" equated to "wealth beyond measure".

It's really immaterial. Being rich isn't neccessary as long as they're well off enough to spoil their kid.

Well, she definitely is well-off enough to be spoiled, but in hindsight, she is more of an aversion or subversion of Rich Bitch (she's not bitchy, but she is somewhat vain and boy/man-chasing in general... unless you bring her one and only Love Interest into the equation, that is).

FYI: I started the ykttw for Wealthy Philanthropist see here as we spoke about it above. It's basically just a trope name with laconic and one example, but hopefully more examples will flow and I'll get to writing some description. Any input welcome!

I think Fred should probably count. Not sure where you got the idea he's a self-made man, since he's a slacker who gets everything from his billionaire parents and isn't a genius like the rest of the cast. He's kind, naive, accepting, and basically everything that the trope asks for besides female.

Except spoiled. We never see his parents doting on him. He never seems like he's particularly better off than any of the rest of the gang other than he dresses better. There's never this idea that his parents will just give him anything he wants at the drop of a hat.

But he does get everything he wants, at least monetarily. He has rooms full of superhero memorabilia and a butler who caters to his every whim in a giant mansion that his friends can wreck for science with no repercussions, and when he gets trapped on an island he only needs to call for a helicopter to come pick him up. He provides the funding and materials for his friends' superhero careers. While his parents are implied to be away often, from what we see in the stinger he seems to have a good relationship with his dad at least. And he dresses the worst of his friends...

Yes, and in every single one of those situations, he is the one controlling his wealth. That's not being spoiled. That's just being rich. Spoiling involves someone else handing you everything you ask for. Not you having the control to give yourself what you want.

But the wealth comes entirely from his parents. He doesn't work or manage his house; he uses what his parents give him. It seems unnecessarily restrictive to say that you need to see a character go through their parents every time they want something to call them properly spoiled, and if you do then a lot of the examples on the page should get the axe. A character who's given an unlimited credit card and free reign is just as spoiled as one who runs to Daddy with new demands all the time.

I agree that Fred counts for the reasons stated above; his parents give him free reign that's implied to not require any responsibility for negative repercussions since the money will pay for it. He's definitely spoiled.

I think he's closer than a lot of the other misuse (and Shimaspawn not having seen the movie is getting his character very wrong), but I don't think he counts anyway because we don't really see his relationship with his parents. That we can infer it's not terrible isn't really enough.

In fact, his wealth is sort of supposed to be a surprise twist/joke (since he doesn't act like it at all), which kind of immediately negates the premise of the trope.

edited 29th Jan '15 1:47:53 AM by Clarste

I have to agree; there's not enough explicit context about his wealth and its circumstances to make him a clear example.

Bruno from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas?

Im sure I can think of more.

I guess I can understand your second point; "Wow, this sweet character is spoiled!" is pretty different from, "Look, this spoiled character is sweet!"

I don't think having a close relationship with one's parents should be a requirement for the trope, though. Parents who give their kids whatever they want because they're to apathetic/distant to really deal with them is a common form of spoiling, and having to see a character's parents limits this to characters who get enough screen time to have a shown family. Again, if that is a requirement then a lot of examples on the page will have to be cut.

edited 30th Jan '15 1:58:53 PM by IniuriaTalis

You don't have to ever see there parents on screen to know that's who is spoiling them. "Daddy bought me this new convertible in pink because the other one was blue and it totally didn't match my dress for the prom." That's all it takes is a few seconds of dialogue to get across the idea that a girl has her father wrapped around her pinky.

People keep adding male examples. I always PM the editors but - in these two recent cases, they insist they are valid examples. I do not have the mod power, obviously, but here are the examples for your consideration.

• A Brother's Price has Cullen Moorland, the son of a noble family. In a world where boys are almost routinely spoiled because they are very rare (about one boy born for every ten girls), he could be a Spoiled Brat, but manages to avoid this - in contrast to other people of the same social standing, he doesn't look down on Jerin, who is only landed gentry, but is all excited to meet someone new. He has a very happy disposition, and tends to spontaneously hug his sisters when they do something nice for him. He envies Jerin his freedom, having genuinely no idea at all how much work people poorer than him have to do every day.

• Eddie of Class Of 3000 has an insanely huge fortune (his father is apparently the head of the "Earth Division" of Cola-Cola, but still goes to a public school and treats the other students in his class with respect and kindness. While he did have an episode that revealed his lack of appreciation for material things (he doesn't need to treat them well, because he can always simply buy another), this was more out of childish naivete than malice. in "Am I Blue?", Eddie's Spoiled Sweet status is not only confirmed, but made into an asset. When Philly Phil's latest invention turns the whole Class of 3000 blue, everyone except Eddie stops practicing their music to bask in their celebrity status; when the color wears off, Eddie is the only person who is able to play at a school assembly, because he never stopped rehearsing.

Plus I should note for completeness that I deleted Portia from The Merchant of Venice. To my best understanding, Portia is not portryed as spoiled, naive, shallow or pampered at all. He father was not a Doting Parent. Apart from being rich and generally an all-around nice noble woman, she doesn't fit this archetype.

edited 16th Mar '15 11:48:10 AM by XFllo

Eddie doesn't sound shallow from that description. He sounds uninterested in his success which is another archetype that rich characters can fall into. They're fabulously wealthy, and yet they largely ignore wealthy and fame as just background noise. It's another trope that needs to be made, but it's not quite this one.

A Brother's Price I might buy because the entire book looks like intentionally gender flipped romance tropes. So they specifically put him in an Always Female trope to highlight the gender swapping.

edited 13th Feb '15 9:25:29 AM by shimaspawn

That sounds accurate to my ears.

I've been quite busy in RL, so I've had little time time for this project. Somebody modified the description to include guys again. In bold bellow:

The Spoiled Sweet character is a naive, spoiled, rich or comfortably (upper-)middle class girl (or guy) who has everything they could ever want, but instead of being mean to everyone, she is as nice as can be to everyone.

I don't want to edit-war over this.

I'm a mod. I can take care of it.