Misused: Kill It With Fire

By "misused", I mean lots of ppl used Kill It with Fire when it should be Playing with Fire or Fire-Breathing Weapon. The definition is "something that is weak to fire", right? This older thread explained this better. To some extent, this problem also exists with Kill It with Water and Kill It with Ice.

Also, this ykttw was made as a response to that.

I kinda regret that we have to change the name Kill It with Fire, but yeah, I agree that it's not 100% clear. Not helped by the phrasey name.

Thoughts?

Opened.

What about splitting this trope into two new ones: the proposed "Weak to Fire" ykttw for things that are, well, weak to fire, and "Kill it with Fire" for instances of fire actually being used to kill things (which is honestly what I thought this trope was already about.)

Depends on what "weak to fire" means.

Does it mean something that:

1. Can be killed with fire?
2. Can be killed only with fire?
3. Can be killed only with one of several specific means, including fire?
4. Can be killed only with one of several specific means, of which fire is the most efficient, practical or convenient?
5. Can be killed with anything, but fire is the most efficient, practical or convenient?

edited 8th Oct '14 1:24:06 PM by DiamondWeapon

6. Does fire do more damage to it than other things?

At least as far as I understand it, fire is something's "special" weakness. I.e a human can indeed be killed with fire, but he obviously can be killed by other means. Not here; this thing can only be killed (or be especially weak to) fire. Everything else may damage them, but only a little, and just treated as minor annoyance.

So for the posts above me, I'd say it's 4 or 6. 3 and 5 is slightly stretching it, but acceptable. The rest... no.

I think that the traditional video game weakness system is the heart of this trope, in most cases they take double damage from fire or in some games fire spells cause a stun to certain fire weak mobs.

Final Fantasy for example is notable that it makes all Zombies weak to fire, if you get the status effect Zombie you are weak to it too.

Bump

Kill It with Fire is also sort of a meme for "removing something". I would be inclined to disambiguate it.

Or "destroy completely and/or with extreme prejudice".

Is the typical video game weakness example of "takes double damage from fire" even a trope? In most cases, there's no particular significance to fire being the elemental weakness—it's just one of many elements that are part of an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system. You could easily replace the weakness to fire with a weakness to ice, lightning, or wind, and it would hardly make any difference.

It's not just video game thing; it exists in fantasy in general, and I think in folklore itself. Some monsters can only be destroyed with fire.

I think it is a valid trope. It has implications for the plot - the hero may not be able to defeat an adversary until he's figured out its vulnerabilities, for example. The question is, of course (and I suppose that's what you mean when you query whether it's a trope or not) whether there's something special with fire that warrants a fire-only trope, or if it should include all similar vulnerabilities.

I never questioned whether "can only be damaged by fire" was a trope. That's quite different, and it's a lot more interesting than "takes more damage from fire."

It is fairly common for characters in media of all kinds to have a weakness of some sort. That that weakness happens to be fire is not significant in and of itself; the story has to make use of it in some way beyond just having bigger numbers pop up onscreen when they get hit with a fire-based attack or having the character lose more fights than usual when facing fire-based foes.

Bump

Taking more damage from a certain source is certainly a trope. If fire should be seperate from lightning, acid, sonic, silver, holy, etc. I am not certain, but recurrent game mechanics are tropes.

That is for sure a trope and is sometimes actually part of Standard Status Effects IE Oil in Final Fantasy makes you weak to fire damage and gear can do the same thing. an example wearing that makes you take 5-10% more fire damage when worn and reduces poison damage by 200, meaning that if you take 201 poison damage you only take 1 damage. That being D3 those stats change depending on how the random stats rolled.

The opposite can be true too a status effect buff can make you immune to or resistant to damage and gear like a Fire Shield makes you immune to or resistant to fire.

As for if it should be different trope, umm I do not know. There are plenty of very specific stuff for each element and such in certain games but not in others a single trope could get insanely cluttered.

It could be split based on the way the math works for the weakness, multiplicative or additive and not by element but that does not work for the instant kill weakness or references to the video game mechanics in works outside videogames.

edited 3rd Nov '14 6:26:41 PM by Memers

I don't think the specific methods of calculating the extra damage or the specific elements involved are meaningful distinctions. We can group all of those things under one trope.

That said, I am not entirely sure that the tropes we already have cover such instances. Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors is the closest I could find, but that's more about the relationships between the elements than about specific weaknesses.

Well the reason I said some make big deal out of specific elements is some works do, especially fire hence this trope. Take Final Fantasy for example Zombies are always weak to fire and light and the Oil status effect increases damage taken by fire damage, no other status effect exists for other elements. Some see it as Elemental Favoritism as it is more useful than the other elements, Element Favoritism can also take the form of the game just restricting access to certain elements like say Final Fantasy VII restricting the wind element to one a summon and that is it or Final Fantasy X missing a water summon, one of the game's primary elements.

As for types of weaknesses and resistances, we would at least need a Sliding Scale Of Weaknesses And Resistances because of the many ways it can be implemented

• Absolutes
  • Instant Kill - hit an enemy with their Elemental Weakness and they die.
  • Elemental Immunity they take no damage from said element, games where characters you are limited to certain elements this can be a form of cheap difficulty or unbalance. IE World Of Warcraft's first raid Molten Core had every boss immune to fire so mages HAD to be frost spec, the immunity has been patched out because of its unfairness.
  • Elemental Absorption - They get healed by taking specific elemental damage.
• Damage increase and decrease.
  • Percentage Based - Hitting their Elemental Weakness increase damage by set percent, standard seems to be +/-50% unless it directly states a percentage.
    • When resistances are stackable they tend to experience Diminishing Returns, IE Kingdom Hearts has +25 resist items but equip two of them and it only goes up to 32~, or have a cap in which nothing beyond it has any effect.
  • Additive Based - weakness or resistance adds or subtracts a specific number of damage to each attack, very simple calcs 1 resist resists 1 damage, something that tends to be used for resistance more than weaknesses.
• No weakness or resistances Not A Trope unless we want to go with the fact that sometimes these things are conspicuously missing.
• Element Weakness Causes Status Effect - Hitting them with their elemental weakness causes some status effect which could be stun, a Damage Over Time, destroy a part of the body, reveal a weak point, or make them take more damage from other sources.

An example of works that use multiple bullet points would be Tales Of Xillia 2 in which it uses immunity, 50% resist/weakness, and if you hit the mobs weakness as your first attack all following hits in the combo will be treated as if they are still hitting the weakness even if you use elements they are immune to or resist. Diablo III uses additive and percentage based calculations in its weaknesses and resistances as well as several elemental immunities that ended up being patched out.

edited 4th Nov '14 9:18:33 AM by Memers

I could see the Instant Kill version being worked into something not limited to video games and elements. If a character's weakness is extremely severe (e.g. a single stray spark from an ordinary campfire is enough to kill them), the severity of that weakness might be noteworthy enough to be a trope. But, on the other hand, if we add a general weakness trope, you could say that this is just the exaggerated version of that. Hm...

Elemental Immunity might be noteworthy, but there are so many other immunity tropes already out there that I'm not sure how it would fit in. No-Sell is often used for this purpose, but I'm not sure it really should be.

Elemental Absorption...Well, we've already got that trope, but as it's currently written, it seems to have a different purpose.

Additive and percentage-based increases could be grouped under one trope, I think, as long as the description mentions such. It might also be a good idea to include vulnerabilities to status ailments, which usually take the form of being more likely to contract said ailments rather than taking more damage. And, of course, if the weakness has some atypical effect (e.g. taking away some of the enemy's abilities), that could fit as well.

edited 5th Nov '14 11:51:09 PM by MrL1193

I was more thinking of 1 big page for the whole thing but subtropes would work too.

Elemental Immunity would be kind of a subtrope to No-Sell but slightly different in places like some video game elemental immunities can enable Swimming In Lava, null the effects of extreme weather, float over earth based traps.

Yes Elemental Absorption is something completely different, it would have to go under a different name but I have no idea what that could be as Absorb is the standard name for it since it started back in the NES days. Final Fantasy calls items that have this skill 'Elemental Eater'

For a weakness / resistance trope I would prefer at least a soft split as they really do tend to get handled differently like additive can occasionally force Elemental Immunity if the hits incoming are low enough to be canceled out and weakness tends to favor fast multi hit attacks while Multiplicative tends to have soft cap or Diminishing Returns to prevent Elemental Immunity unless it is the flat 50% per item then they have a tendency to not stack at all.

edited 6th Nov '14 1:15:13 AM by Memers

The Videogame definition of "Elemental Absorption" is covered by Feed It with Fire.

So, in essence, this, along with Kill It with Water and Kill It with Ice, should be rewritten as Sub Tropes of Situational Damage Attack? EDIT: Or is the Super Trope more of a Missing Sister Trope of Attack Its Weak Point? Either Way, I can definitely see a Lightning version, as both a Sub and opposite Trope to Lightning Can Do Anything.

edited 7th Nov '14 3:39:53 PM by DonaldthePotholer

It is a subtrope to Attack Its Weakpoint yes. I do not think we need the 'subtropes' Kill It with Fire, Kill It with Ice, and Kill It with Water, they are just Same But More Specific we just need to combine them into a Elemental Weakness trope and pair that with the rest of them.

• Instant Elemental Death
• Elemental Weakness
• Strong To Element
• Missing Elemental Weakness- some games which have mechanics specifically for elemental weakness have bosses that do not have them which might make it a Difficulty Spike.
• Immune To Element
• Feed It with Fire, the trope is so sorely underused that it might need a rename.

Probably in a page covering something like Sliding Scale Of Elemental Damage.

If you look at bestiaries for RP Gs hundreds of mobs are in it and each one would fall under one of those Kill it with Element tropes, and then there is the billion other elements out there Lightning, Earth, Dark, Holy, Nuclear, Wind, Gun, Life, Heart, Metal, Poison, Time, Space, Gravity, yeah no we do not need tropes for that.

edited 7th Nov '14 4:45:32 PM by Memers

Yeah, add in things like pokemon where psychic and fairy are elements and I don't really think it matters what you call the elements as long as they exist. We might want to link these tropes to Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. It touches on the ideas here and is often a direct result of these tropes.

Yeah Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors is the sign of what a lot of weaknesses and strengths are and help avoid having to constantly use Enemy Scan to see what they are. However many weaknesses are pretty arbitrary or have multiple of each◊[1]◊ or some being strong or weak to absolutely every element.

The way I see it Kill It with Fire means fire is a character/object/monster/whatever's Achilles' Heel.

For when something can only be damaged/destroyed by fire, or when fire interferes with a Healing Factor which allows it to be hurt, then that should fall under Kill It with Fire (or to what it might be renamed to).

For when something takes extra damage from fire, but also from other elements/sources, or when Standard Status Effects can inflict temporary sensitivity to fire, it should be under Weakened By Fire or what that ykttw will eventually be called.

Instances where a character uses flame-based powers/abilities without mention of whether the target is specifically weak to fire should be moved to Playing with Fire or Fire-Breathing Weapon as usual.

The same goes for Kill It with Ice and Kill It with Water.

There seems to be a situation where fire is used as an all-purpose destroyer of things. That should probably be a subtrope.

edited 4th Dec '14 3:39:38 PM by Ejia