The difference supposedly is that Creepy Mortician is comedic, while the other isn't. The examples don't convince me.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
A trope can be sometimes played for laughs and sometimes be played for drama or horror. Merge the tropes.
im ronox and im The Cynic i like to review stuff
This is a new Trope?
que pasa I hope you guys enjoy this site if you have smart ideas lets trope together
World's Toughest Milkman
Checking the Internet Archive, they both seem to date back to mid-2010. Also, it seems like they were originally duplicates, and the serious/funny distinction seems to have been added later for some reason.
Oldest archived Creepy Mortician: [1]
Oldest archived The Creepy Undertaker: [2]
edited 10th Nov '14 8:34:16 PM by Xtifr
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
No, the other one.
I could potentially see a difference in what part of the handling of the dead they deal with, like dragging the bodies around or technical examinations, but the heart of the trope is still just that people dealing with the dead are creepy, whichever part they're dealing with.
Humourous and non-humourous isn't a distinction I'd make between tropes.
I say merge.
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Jupiterian Local
Yeah, Played for Laughs vs Played for Drama isn't really a good reason to split a trope. Merge 'em.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
fuse them <Begins Fusion Dance>
edited 11th Nov '14 6:41:52 PM by tryrar
Hi
Break out the sutures and clamps.
Which title should use the merged trope, though?
The Creepy Undertaker sounds a bit more generic than Creepy Mortician, which may be considered advantageous for a more inclusive trope. However, there is also the Undertaker trope for the Western character, so I'd favor more Creepy Mortician to avoid trope title confusion.
No, the other one.
Inclined to agree. The Creepy Undertaker has slightly better stats, though.
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By stats, do you mean wicks? 60 (13 of them a redirect) against 33, that's not much a difference, it can be corrected either way rather easily.
Note that a few work pages mention both (showing further that the two tropes are confusing), so the total number of wicks will be lower than the sum of them in the end.
No, the other one.
Yeah. If it was a significant difference I wouldn't agree.
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Tentative merging of the two descriptions, tell me if it still needs some work:
Be they morticians, pathologists, funeral house workers or gravediggers — people who deal with the dead have always been assumed to be interesting, because, well, they deal with the dead. That is why in fiction, it is popular to present workers in those professions as either outright creepy, or at least have a way-off sense of humor. Especially if they don't look creepy (or aren't normally so), looking at something like this for the first time can creep any guy out. They play around with the bodies of the deceased, joke while performing scientific dissections, or at least die first during a zombie attack. They are also suspect for profiting from someone else's death; after all, such a person may seem a little too happy about the fact that, now that someone has died, the mortician is going to get paid for the funeral.
The trope can just be Played for Laughs as well as Played for Drama, with often a lot of overlap between the two. The more unsettling version lurks around the graveyard and has an unhealthy obsession with his deceased clients. When they're not in the graveyard, they can be found in rather eerie places, such as near newly deceased bodies or in coffins. Often they are the primary suspect whenever something particularly creepy happens. May turn out to be a Living Doll Collector. Prone to spout ominous-in-context lines like "Be seeing you..."
If they accidentally encounter a living person instead of an expectedly dead one, it may be related to Waking Up at the Morgue or Buried Alive. Also see Black Comedy.
Compare with the Undertaker character in Westerns.
edited 22nd Nov '14 2:03:43 PM by StFan
So, any objection? Or can I start merging the two tropes under Creepy Mortician?
That description is good and I don't have issues with a merge.
eta: Guess I misread something.
edited 26th Nov '14 2:38:06 AM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
No, the other one.
Not opposing.
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Done for the merge.
In passing, I've removed some aversions that didn't seem too notable.
The trope still has a few problem with zero-context examples; I've commented out most of them.
Starting to work on the wicks.
It seems like the wicks and description are done, and I've added the note on the discussion page.
Turning the lights out.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Creepy Mortician and The Creepy Undertaker look like they're pretty much the same trope. It would take little effort to merge them by extending a bit the definition. They have most of the examples already in common from the look of it.