Discussion Main / WhyDontYouJustSHootHim

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him? (new crowner), started by MetaFour on Jun 15th 2011 at 11:12:39 PM

Is this one of those tropes that are not supposed to have examples? I am trying to figure out a film with an argument involving this trope, but the lack of examples here is rather hampering me.

I don't think this trope is honestly represented. Evil villains stem from truly evil people. Evil people always overplay their hands. They engineer their own destruction. Evil people like to destroy good, and have a very strong self delusion that they are essentially good. They will not subject themselves to introspection or criticism because that insults their, "pure goodness." Evil people also turn their hands sooner or later. If you start dating someone, you'll soon see who they really are after a little while. They no longer feel they should have to keep on their mask, and have done you your favor (by letting you please them), so they start off with their usual list of silly demands. Other related tropes are actually realistic. Evil people do have a problem with just shooting someone because they want to show off first. They want to have it their way, and let the world know their frustrations that they just can't be worshiped for their, "pure goodness." In the end, evil really is just stupid. It's based on self-deception and protected by a refusal to examine things. It's like they've made a pact with the devil, that if they keep on committing evil, they may have anything they want, and will never suffer guilt, embarrassment, shame, or anything of that sort again. It was told to me that it's like they need to commit evil in order to survive. If you threaten this, they consider you a murderer, after them, wishing to kill them because you're going to take their "oxygen" away (or maybe something of the like). In the end though, this trope seems silly and immature that we present evil people in such a stupid light, because hey, we like to laugh at their stupidity, but the truth is, they do engineer their own vulnerabilities by doing stupid non-nonsensical things. On top of it, they won't review their own stupid decisions unless they do it their way, so they won't see that they're not in control of the whole bloody universe. After all, they look down at others and see themselves superior that they can see things they way they do (they way they think things really are, which is that they're they only justification for the universe, that it's really all about him or her, he or she is actually God himself). I suspect that this trope has evolved from deeper stories of yester-centuries as people began to carefully illustrate evil, and realized the critical problems with evil, in how it deals with the truth, and in how it relates to other people. Take the J. R. R. Tolkien novels where Sauron was going to smash the pipsqueaks easily, but failed embarrassingly because he engineered his own destruction. He thought he had it all under control and just needed to fix the last few loopholes of his progress and engineered the opportunities for Frodo and Sam. He was arrogant and refused to deal with the problems he was creating for himself. Even the ring's constant pressure on Sam worked against him, because that fueled the relationship development between Frodo and Sam, which actually made their partnership stronger, and that pushed them all the way to the mountain, despite all the massive obstacles in the way. Didn't Sauron think of how he was actually making Frodo and Sam into better people through constantly pressuring them through their own evils? No, of course not, because he doesn't understand that. He doesn't believe in it's existence and certainly doesn't want to because then he'd see he's not in control, that he really is a total loser who got it all wrong and was going to be destroyed through his own scheming. So, this trope listing isn't fairly representing the issue because it fails to understand the psychology of the trope in how it's astonishingly accurate.

re:cut

Have you looked at the number of inbounds? This was the main pages for years, it's going to have tons of inbounds and generally speaking "ptitle redirect" isn't going to have much weight for a cut list reason because anything other than that type of case isn't going to be made anymore.