Agreed. In fact, that sentence is better just removed:
- With this daughter, Tevye is shown to be on the edge of committing Honor-Related Abuse — but he never carries it out, making him a failed patriarch but keeping him from becoming a failed human being.
All it does is make me wonder what production of the play this editor saw, in which Tevye contemplated anything even vaguely resembling Honor-Related Abuse. Considering that the trope is largely about modern "honor killings", the comparison is practically obscene.
FiveMinute.net: because stuff is long and life is short
Imo, even having the quote at the top of the page be from Tevye is problematic. First of all, he doesn't hate Russians: he hates kossaks. There is another Russian character that Tevye is shown to generally like. This is still during the pogroms, he has every reason to hate kossaks. His view that Chava is betraying the community is also entirely reasonable, given that Tevye cannot see the future. While the audience knows that the Revolution is about to change everything, including the second-class status of Jews, Tevye has no way of knowing that. Even rabbis who were credited with prophetic powers at the time did not foresee Russian society doing a complete 180 on anti-semitism within 20 years. The best example of this trope I've come across would probably be Holden Caulfield.
I feel like Uncle Ruckus would be a very fitting, iconic and well-known example of this trope, but I don't know how to work it as a page image without falling in to JAFAAC territory.
If anyone knows a good visual scene that demonstrates the trope, I'm willing to scour torrents for a screen.
The link for Fiddler On The Roof potholes Moral Event Horizon. I don't care whether you think Tevye was right or wrong to draw that line in the sand (basically "You cannot marry someone expressly forbidden by God and expect me to bless the union"), but it cannot possibly count as the moment he becomes irredeemably monstrous. Even if you took the final concession away from him, he was never a monster; he never crossed any kind of Moral Event Horizon.
It's not like he was planning to kill his daughter for her choice in husbands. He just disowned her. Yes, it's a big deal, it's heart-rending and dramatic, but it's not the act of a monster. Perhaps the act of disowning one's child has been used as a Moral Event Horizon in other tales over other circumstances, but that definitely isn't the case here.
So someone please choose a more appropriate trope to link to. Thanks.
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