Arthur Cleanup

There once was a kid character
Some people really did hate her
She feels their wrath
Call her a sociopath
But she's just a young, bratty sister.

Yes, lately people keep claiming that D.W. is the incarnate of evil in a young-Aardvark form. We're here to clean up that misuse, and if we come across other issues, we'll have to clean that up as well.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 24th 2020 at 8:31:11 AM

The NightmareFuel.Arthur and TearJerker.Arthur pages were a mess last I saw them.

EDIT: They look better now but should probably have an eye kept on them.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Mar 24th 2020 at 5:37:14 AM

I’m suprised that there isn’t a Never Live It Down entry for her, particularly when she broke Arthur’s plane.

I'm a big fan of Arthur, and I do agree that most of the D.W. hate is absurd. In fact, in the first season, D.W. was actually sympathetic and Arthur kept being mean to her.

Arthur's Big Hit is overhated IMO. Again, Arthur is rude to D.W. before she does anything bad.

Changed this on hate sink:

As much of a brat as D.W. is most of the time (and can be borderline sociopathic from time to time), she does have her fair share of redeemable moments. We do not get that from her Cousin Cora from "D.W. Thinks Big", who constantly bullies D.W. by taking her personal possessions and blaming her for something that was her own fault. Cora exists to be loathsome enough to have the audience root for D.W. for once.

I deleted the Borderline Sociopath part.

Good fix.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 25th 2020 at 6:32:47 AM

The entry is about how Cora is a Hate Sink. Nevermind seems you realized that in the interim.

Edited by jjjj2 on Mar 25th 2020 at 6:35:33 AM

Yeah, I changed my post after re-reading the entry.

Found this on Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:

• D.W. in Arthur has done a few things that are quite unsettling to see a 4-year-old do.
  • In "D.W. All Wet", after her titular older brother plays a prank on her by making her think there is an octopus (which she's afraid of) in her bathtub and gets in trouble for it, she openly says that she hopes an octopus eats Arthur. This might just be seen as childish hyperbole on her part, if it weren't for the fact that she's later shown dreaming of that very thing happening to Arthur with a smile on her face!
  • In "Arthur's Cousin Catastrophe", she essentially psychologically torments Arthur gleefully over his fear of his cousin Monique, whose bullying of him when he was younger was a legitimately traumatizing experience for him.
  • In "Prove It", she makes up several false science "facts" and uses them to con the other kids her age in the neighborhood out of their money. Her goal was actually to use the false "facts" she presented to bother Arthur into taking her to a real science museum, but nevertheless she doesn't show any remorse for the fact that she had to con other kids out of their money to accomplish it.

First one about hoping an octopus eats Arthur is just a kind of dumb thing kids say. I highly doubt she genuinely wished for Arthur's death.

Second I'm unsure about due to having not watched the show much, but I've become suspicious of anything that describes D.W. as an sociopath or whatever.

Third is definitely quite cruel, but D.W. is only a child; a child being unempathetic sometimes doesn't mean they're automatically a sociopath.

Overall, I'd say cut the first and third examples; tentative on second until somebody provides a more detailed view on her behavior in that episode.

Edited by jandn2014 on Apr 20th 2020 at 3:19:56 PM

DW is pretty mean and bratty and cruel at times. That's not disputable, I think we can all agree this is true.

The issue is that these kinds of examples make DW out to be a sociopathic monster, when she's just a little kid. Kids don't have senses of empathy yet, so these are all normal kid things to do.

Once when I was a kid I was genuinely excited to see my friend cry over a failed test. Doesn't make me a sociopath, just meant that as a kid I was a fucking asshole who hadn't developed empathy yet. Would never do something like that nowadays!

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 20th 2020 at 3:21:59 PM

That's the problem with people and D.W.: children are still developing social skills at a young age, and can sometimes act unsympathetic and cruel. People just don't realize this and automatically assume that it means D.W. is a Enfant Terrible.

Yeah, they're applying adult standards of thought and behavior to a character that is the furthest thing from an adult — to such an extent that you wonder if they've ever seen a four-year-old in their lives.

And honestly, they're going out of their way to exaggerate what she's doing. In the second example, Monique's "bullying" of Arthur isn't exactly the nicest thing in the world to experience, but you must lead a pretty charmed existence if getting spun on a sprinkler, dressed like a baby, and tossed around with a judo throw is that big of a deal. (And these are Arthur's memories, so we don't truly know if we've seen how they truly went down in the first place).

This stuff would be concerning if D.W. was in late childhood or a preteen, but she's barely left toddlerhood.

So here are some problematic examples from KidsAreCruel.Western Animation and ManipulativeBastard.Western Animation:

• Arthur's four-year-old little sister D.W. tends to make conscesending remarks at his expense and loves to get him in trouble and take advantage of him, sometimes even seeming to outright take delight in his suffering. A great example of just how cruel she can be is the episode "Arthur's Big Hit", where she constantly bothers Arthur while he's trying to build a model airplane and later breaks it by intentionally throwing it out a window while playing with it, not showing any remorse for it and instead saying it's Arthur's fault for having build a plane that didn't fly when she threw it. That's some surprisingly callous behavior from a preschooler! However, she does have a fair share of genuinely nice moments.

• D.W. Read can often be quite the manipulative little bitch as well; quite a few episodes in the series have her get exactly what she wants at the end by tricking others (usually her titular older brother). A notable example of her manipulativeness is in "Prove It", where she intentionally makes up several false scientific "facts" and sells them to other kids with the intent of bothering Arthur into taking her to a science museum. Even Brain is unable to refute her "facts" despite knowing she's lying! Oh, and did we mention that this whole scheme was pulled off by a four-year-old? It should also be noted that she shows no remorse whatsoever over the fact that she had to knowingly lie to other kids and screw them out of their money to accomplish this. Her manipulative side mostly disappeared after the characters' personalities were Flanderized in later seasons, but Season 18's "The Pageant Pickle" saw that side of her make a comeback when she uses Crocodile Tears to trick Arthur into humiliating himself in front of her preschool spring pageant's audience.

Although the first one at least mentions that D.W. is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, both of these entries still reek of Sociopathic-D.W. syndrome.

The entries on Troubling Unchildlike Behavior were added by a troper who was banned over this very issue, so I think we can safely delete them.

I removed all the entries on Troubling Unchildlike Behavior.

A minor one, but some people are citing the "It's not Stupid Bus, it's Crazy Bus! Stupid Bus is a lame puppet show!" line as an example of Wrong Insult Offense, but is it though? Because "Crazy Bus" is not an insult, it's what the song is actually called.

I looked through YMMV and here are some entries I think may need attention, if not outright cutting.

• On Alternative Character Interpretation, they say that maybe D.W. is an Enfant Terrible who manipulated her parents into spoiling her. It also suggests that the parents should use worse punishments than Go to Your Room!.
• Under Catharsis Factor, it says that the infamous punching scene is "satisfying" and that D.W.'s brattiness is "bitchy".
• The outdated term "Family-Unfriendly Aesop" is used.
• Under "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, it says that Grandpa Dave got Alzheimer's, but in the actual episode, it is a brain condition, but the exact one is not stated.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic calls D.W. "stupid" for thinking a toy plane could fly, even though, not gonna lie, that's the kinda thing I might've thought at age four.

• The Alternate Character Interpretation entry has the usual venom against D.W., and I really don't like the implications of her deserving stricter punishments given I've seen people want this four-year-old to be physically punished. It's also eye-rolling that they call her "actively malicious" for boo-ing at her brother when she was a baby. I say cut the sub-bullets, though the first bullet for D.W. is okay.
• That's just straight-up misuse of Catharsis Factor since the trope is supposed to be video-game only and hasn't been split by TRS yet.
• Can't tell if the Family-Unfriendly Aesop entry is misuse or not because I can't tell if the troper considered it a bad aesop or just a difficult one to accept, but I think it could be moved to Hard Truth Aesop for at least the "it isn't healthy to hold in negative emotions" part.
• I guess the "Funny Aneurysm" Moment could stay if we don't speculate on his brain condition being Alzheimer's. It might better fit Harsher in Hindsight though.
• As annoying as the anti-D.W. spite is, Unintentionally Unsympathetic isn't wrong since obviously a lot of episodes that intend to make D.W. sympathetic just fall flat for the fandom. The part about her being stupid about the plane can be cut though, because four-year-olds can make mistakes like that. If anything, it's when she acts smarter than a typical four-year-old that makes her more unsympathetic, which the entry acknowledges.

Honestly, would it be accurate to list "Arthur's Big Hit" under Misaimed Fandom? Because clearly a lot of these people missed the point that violence isn't warranted for petty disputes if they're just happy that a four-year-old got punched.

Edited by mightymewtron on Aug 4th 2020 at 9:35:38 AM

Cleaned.

Also, Mr. Ratburn's name is occasionally potholed to Sadist Teacher. While he is tough and no-nonsense, and characters have imagined him as a Sadist Teacher, I doubt he actually is one.

The on-page example says he's a subversion.

WhatAnIdiot.Arthur says that D.W. was an idiot during the "I hate spinach" incident, but preschoolers are notorious for their lack of impulse control. Also, it mentions that the waitress was "overworked", but A.) We don't know that. Not all waitresses are overworked despite the common portrayal in fiction and real life statistics. and B.) What preschooler understands the concept of "overworked" anyway?

I feel like that incident was already declared to be invalid but I guess it wasn't cut (or was re-added).

It's amazing the things people declare are "idiotic" or "sociopathic" for this character to do. Four-year-olds tend to overreact and do selfish things. Also, what kind of a show would it be if D.W. just behaved well all the time and the conflict never escalated?

In fact, War Jay's limerick should be a page quote for something... maybe Common Troping Mistakes. It's an infamous case of shoehorning, and it's already mentioned in the shoehorning section.

Edited by ccorb on Sep 5th 2020 at 7:53:28 AM