Cut Lex Luthor A Check and Fridge Logic

On Cut Lex Luthor a Check some examples are character acknowledging In-Universe that a character could make money legitimately, sometimes with the villain providing a reason why they can't. But a lot of other examples are Fridge Logic, describing how the villain could hypothetically make money legitimately:

• Batman (1966) episodes:
  • "The Joker's Flying Saucer". The Joker creates a flying saucer that can (based on the Joker's comments) travel through outer space to other planets. He decides on the standard "conquer the world" strategy when he could have just sold the design to NASA for billions of dollars. Then again, this is the Joker.
  • In "The Penguin's Nest", Penguin opens a hugely popular restaurant, which by all indications positively rakes in the cash. However, Penguin chooses to use it as the front for a forgery scheme instead of simply living off the restaurant's proceeds.

• An unusual example would be Oliver Queen on Smallville. Being a billionaire, he develops tons of ridiculously advanced technology...to rob the rich to give to the poor. He seems to have given up on that after a while and concentrated on blowing up Lex Luthor's evil facilities. I think this is a misread of what Oliver was doing. He wasn't just stealing from the rich to give to the poor. He was specifically targeting Corrupt Corporate Executives. It's explicitly stated that the items he stole were already stolen before and he was taking them back.

• In 24 series 5, within a couple of hours of getting hold of Lynn's access card, Lynn's sister's boyfriend is able to find the terrorists to sell it to them. This guy should have been working for CTU!

• Iron Fist (2017): Madame Gao develops a synthetic form of heroin that works by skin patch and prevents the user from building a tolerance, making each hit as strong as the first. Had she marketed her innovation to the medical industry for its usefulness in pain management^note One of the biggest downsides to most painkillers is diminishing returns, she could have made billions legally and had an easier time selling it on the streets if she so desired. And since it's not injected, it would prevent the spread of diseases from sharing needles, namely HIV and hepatitis. In short, Gao could have cornered the medical and recreational opium markets had she set her sights higher than local druglords.

These all read to me as cases of audience members thinking up ways a villain could be using their talents and technology to make money legitimately, which is YMMV and not an objective trope.

Edited by RustBeard on Sep 4th 2021 at 9:30:36 AM

CLLAC was originally built based on exactly that Fridge Logic. It would be interesting to sort through the examples and see if we should do a soft-split or hard-split (or if the examples are currently too unclear to split at all).

I'm not sure a soft-split makes any sense. A trope can't be both objective and subjective.

When a subjective trope occurs In-Universe, it is objectively present in the work. We've done an In-Universe and Audience split before.

Sure, if the trope was subjective first. But this one is (framed as) an objective trope.

Wouldn't we need TRS to make it pprimarily subjective?

Most tropes don't need to be acknowledged in universe, the "subjective" part of this trope is not a positive or negative assessment but recognizing a division between a characters goals and their means of doing so. It's the same thing with Reed Richards Is Useless and Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat. It's not really a audience reaction vs in universe but the trope and lampshade hanging / conversed trope. The point where we divide a trope like that would be something like The Vamp vs Evil Is Sexy, where one is talking about the content and the other is talking about the response the audience has to the content.

But CLLAC requires the tropers to make some assumptions about a villain's motivation, means, and background. In the real world there are gifted people who turn to a life a crime to make money. To say a villain could've just made money legitimately implies there are no other factors at play.

Edit: Also many criminal organizations have legitimate businesses that they own in order to launder their money. It wouldn't be unusual for a crime lord or gangster to continue their illegal activities even though they own legitimate businesses.

Edited by RustBeard on Sep 7th 2021 at 3:21:07 AM

The trope is that a character uses a billion dollar device used for meager ransom or random jackassery. The motivation doesn't matter to the trope, only that it it had non-criminal value.

I think the motivation is important. It doesn't really matter if a villain could make money legitimately if their goal isn't to make money. Furthermore, value tends to be subjective. There are plenty of inventions that were hailed as the next big thing at first, but didn't turn out to be all that successful.

Motivation is important to the overall story, not to CLLAC.

Motivation is an interesting topic of discussion, but is not relevant to the trope.

Shriek from Batman Beyond tried to sell his sonic technology for demolition use, but the Corrupt Corporate Executive dismissed it as overpriced compared to dynamite. The exec instead hired him to kill Batman, in the ensuing fight Batman ended up shorting the equipment causing him to go deaf. Subsequent appearances had Shriek make numerous other advanced sound-related technology but his focus was on getting revenge on Batman. All of that is not a subversion or aversion of the trope, just slightly more justified than normal.

See, that doesn't make sense to me. If this trope is supposed to be about villains who could make money legitimately, why include villains who aren't interested in making money?

But my bigger issue is that this trope relies on speculation. Most examples read "if you think about it, this villain could be rich if they went legit." That's an Audience Reaction, not an objective trope.

It's no more subjective than Flynning or "Friends" Rent Control, all tropes have to be filtered through the audience perception and how it compares to reality. It's why all Artistic License subtropes are objective. Audience Reaction and YMMV are supposed to be more like Memetic Mutation or Ensemble Dark Horse, something that happens external to the work due to fandom discussions even if it is rooted in the content of the work.

The difference in my mind is that proper sword technique is something that's established. We know what the average cost of an apartment is. We don't know how the market will react if someone invents say a teleportation machine or a weather controlling device. We can speculate, but it's all just guesswork until someone actually invents it.

And we can have a good idea that a free energy generator used to power a Doomsday Device can be more profitable than whatever ransom you ask for.

Maybe look at it this way, the fact that there are so many lampshade hangings and efforts to justify or explain the "why don't they just sell the tech?" question In-Universe indicates that there is a flawed logic at play. And like I said, using a revolutionary invention for mundane revenge or petty theft is a wholly objective trope akin to Worthless Yellow Rocks.

The fact that there are so many lampshade hangings and attempts to justify why the villain doesn't monetize their technology could also indicate that it's a common fan criticism. With Worthless Yellow Rocks, the items have an established value. With Cut Lex Luthor a Check, unless the technology is stated In-Universe to be valuable, any perceived value comes from fan speculation since the tech is hypothetical.

Edit: Also, I thought Worthless Yellow Rocks was when it's presented In-Universe as being an ignorant decision to give up such a valuable item.

Edited by RustBeard on Sep 8th 2021 at 5:42:20 AM

You are assuming that fictional concepts like cold fusion, autonomous worker machines, matter replicator and anti-gravity don't have an acknowledged real world value. If it's something extraordinary to the setting that gives it value. You're making a distinction where there is none.

See, that also assumes that those items are extraordinary to the setting. Uncommon, maybe, but in comic and cartoon worlds, anything goes. So while in our world a teleporter would be groundbreaking, it might just be another Tuesday in the Troper Comics universe.

This also implies such technology would be legal. Major technological gamechangers inspire legislation. A device that creates matter would be heavily regulated. There would be attempts to ban automated workers.

No there wasn't. We literally have had automated workers for decades.

You're also piling on even more Fridge Logic to explain why a device wouldn't be profitable, which eventually just gets you to world building and regular logic, not "a realization on your way to the fridge during a commercial break".

If something is not extraordinary in the setting then it is not the trope. A jetpack in Superman or Green Lantern comics is rather mundane, but would be a big deal in Batman comics.

^ That's going two steps beyond what you're accusing examples of doing. Throwing up hypothetical roadblocks. Thing is, if those issues are text in the story then in it still the trope. Because again, the trope is developing advanced technology and using it for mundane goals, it doesn't matter if they tried to make legitimate money first.

But what if it isn't clear that this advanced technology could be used for a greater purpose. Hypothetically, let's say a Mad Scientist character invents a device that can disintegrate living tissue and uses the device to hold the world hostage. Fans might suggest that the villain could've sold the device to a medical company who'd use it to remove tumors. But it's also possible that such a device would be impractical to use in surgery and might do more damage to the patient. If it isn't clear that the device has a medical application, does Cut Lex Luthor a Check apply?

You could spend pages and pages explaining the theoretical applications of anti-gravity, that doesn't mean it is not a highly sought after technology. You can remove all hypotheticals from those examples, leaving it with just the technology and petty crime, and the examples still stand. It seems you are so caught up in the fridge logic editors are putting into their examples you are completely missing the trope for what it is.

First, you're still trying to add more Fridge in an attempt to disprove the fridge.

Secondly, let's use a legitimate example instead of a hypothetical, since it directly addresses the point you're trying to make:

• Deconstructed in issue #16 of Ultimate Spider-Woman: Change With the Light, when the Beetle provides a number of rebuttals to the arguments that supervillains should just patent their technology. Even if you can patent your technology, there's always the danger that some Corrupt Corporate Executive will try and screw you out of your share of the profits, something the Beetle claims happened to the Shocker when he tried selling his shock blasters to Justin Hammer. Starting your own business is no guarantee of success either, particularly when many businesses fail within their first year of operation. Then there's the fact that many supervillains do not want to spend their time working for people they view as Pointy Haired Bosses who got ahead through asskissing and brownnosing, rather than actual talent. This obviously isn't the case most of the time, but supervillains as a whole tend to be misanthropes....

I don't think this is a deconstruction. It identifies an invention and a turn to crime instead of legitimate earnings. That's the requirement.

That reads more like a Justified Trope than a deconstructed one... and an out-of-universe justification unless all those ideas are literally expressed in the work. A deconstruction might be for Lex Luthor to be offered billions of dollars in licensing deals for his IP and realize that he's in the wrong line of business. A reconstruction might have him try to market his product and get so fed up with all the regulations and corporate backstabbing and whatnot that he just goes off and commits evil with it anyway.

Isn't there at least one Superman arc in which Luthor does market his inventions and becomes the richest man in the world in a more-or-less legitimate way?

All that is necessary for Cut Lex Luthor a Check (and Reed Richards Is Useless) is for the Potential Applications of a revolutionary technological achievement to be overlooked by a work in favor of having superheroes and villains duke it out with ray guns and gravity beams and whatnot.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 9th 2021 at 2:08:48 PM