This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Cidolfas: Not sure about the It Was a Dark and Stormy Night example. Did anyone ever think that this was in widespread use? My understanding is that a single author became moderately famous for very bad writing, and his example was seized upon to represent it. Does every trope necessarily indicate widespread use, and if it wasn't in widespread use it's automatically a Dead Unicorn Trope?
Captain Chops: Removed
- Anchovies (a Stock "Yuck!") as the standard pizza topping.
Though they may be nonexistent in some locales, anchovies on pizza are moderately common.
Ojuice5001: Hi, I'm the one that wrote the "white wedding dress, only for virgins" example, and I suppose my reason for thinking the custom must not have ever been taken seriously was just that it makes so little sense. After all, it obviously makes sense only in a culture that takes the ideal of the virgin bride seriously. But these cultures are precisely the ones where a non-virgin bride would never advertise this fact by wearing a non-white wedding dress, and no one would expect her to. So okay, I can accept the custom was taken seriously, but surely in the sense that all brides wore white even when they weren't virgins (probably even when their non-virginity was a matter of common knowledge). So the custom's theory is that the white dress signals virginity, but of course it was a useless signal in practices. Especially if, as seems likely, the majority of brides weren't virgins and still wore white.
But yes, I see now that the custom probably was taken seriously no matter how easy it is to spot the flaws in its logic. I was just forgetting how illogical many traditions are. And hey, it's a custom that seems to depend on most brides actually being virgins, so surely it makes sense that someone would confuse it with a Dead Unicorn Trope for that reason.
- arromdee: It's not as illogical as it seems, because anyone who is divorced and has a second wedding would obviously not want to wear a white dress.
Blork: Removed this example
- To a certain extent, the Evil Chancellor trope might qualify, as while Haman in the Purim story is a fairly ancient example, and some works of Persian literature do use the trope, it isn't found in the Arabian Nights, the work its most associated with. Counts as an example of Lost in Imitation as well, but deserves mention here given Terry Pratchett's frequent jokes about viziers being Always Chaotic Evil.
Because as mentioned in the description there are stories that play it straight - the Evil Chancellor page has quite a large list of them. If the claim about the Arabian Nights is true (I've never read it so I don't know if it uses this trope, but then again I've never heard the trope strongly associated with it either) then it might count as Common Knowledge.
LO Rd: Removed my Who Wants to Live Forever? example, because as pointed out
- It wasn't a trope that got inverted, because it probably was never a trope as in the plot of a story, but it was something people wanted in real life... it was half the point of alchemy, for a start, and those legends of the Fountain of Youth existed before people started writing stories in which someone finds it and it doesn't work out. This is kind of like how we rarely see it played straight that money makes someone happy. We don't need it because we can understand why someone wants to be rich without it.
it's not really an example.
arromdee: How is Aliens Steal Cattle one of these? It isn't real in the sense that there aren't aliens stealing cattle in the real world, but as a trope, it's certainly real, i.e. there really is fiction where aliens steal cattle.
Henry Hankovitch: Take a look at the page for Aliens Steal Cattle. Pretty much all the examples are from comedies and satire, and are relatively recent. But there are no examples I know of where aliens are depicted stealing cattle for some dramatic reason...unlike aliens mutilating cattle or abducting humans, which were commonly depicted as part of spooky, dramatic experiments. Thus, the "examples" for aliens stealing cattle are referring to a dramatic trope that never existed; like a looney-tunes type cartoon character declaring that the butler did it.
Rann: Put back Black Dude Dies First since it was removed without a single bit of explanation. And honestly, how many movies have you seen with a multi-ethnic cast where a black person dies first without it being lampshaded beforehand? Unless you can name five, it stays in.
Trogga: It doesn't say so on the page.
arromdee: Looking at the actual page for Black Dude Dies First, I see these examples:
- Doctor Who: simply about a black guy dying sometime in the middle of the episode (not first), in an episode where almost everyone, black or white, dies.
- "Partial parody" in Power Rangers
- An example where the character is a robot who merely talks "black" and the actual black humans don't die first.
- Inversion in Frankenfish
- Parodied in Scary Movie, and based off another parody in Scream 2.
- Canadian Bacon: The characters discuss the trope, but the black guy lives.
- Characters in Buffy talking about the trope. Nobody dies.
- Parodied in South Park. This one references a movie where the black guy really does die first.
In other words, the first example of this happening at all is the tenth example on the page, unless you count Transformers, which still has an aversion in the same movie.
Most of the rest of them are like this too. A couple examples are actually of the black guy dying first (and there are more than five of them), but that would be expected to happen a few times by pure chance, and the majority of the examples are aversions, inversions, parodies, etc.
Fire Walk: Part of the issue is that the period we focus on, and what we notice, is after the main trope is in effect, and that playing with the trope s a lot more memorable. It wouldn't be surprising if there were a tendency for 70's horror movies to include a Scary Black Guy who then gets killed off to show how strong the monster is. But a few decades later that tendency will be picked up in public perception, while its actual usage fade out.
arromdee: Deleted:
- The trope is less about dying first per se, than that minorities almost never survive violent movies, as recorded here.
- The trope is less about dying first per se, than that minorities almost never survive violent movies, as recorded here.
Aside from being discussion in the main page and a Justifying Edit, there's a big flaw with that link: by definition, minorities are a minority. There is a relatively small number of them. If you look at a movie where a lot of people die and few survive, chances are low that the survivor is going to be a minority—that's inherent in the definition of being a minority. If a movie has 10 cast members, it includes 2 blacks, and only one of them survives, there's an 80% chance the survivor isn't black—simply because blacks are a minority, so they're going to be a minority among survivors too.
At least dying first doesn't have this problem.
arromdee: Took out:
- This troper thinks Black Dude Dies First is simply a misnomer: It's "the black dude always dies." And typically, in any film where the cast is killed one by one and most don't make it out... well, there's typically one black person among the cast, and the survivor will be the white Final Girl (and her white Love Interest) or the white main hero (and his white Love Interest, though interracial main couples are becoming more and more common.)
It's amazing someone put this in after I wrote the above.
To say it again: "Black guy always dies" doesn't make sense because blacks are a minority. By definition, a minority means there aren't a lot of them, and therefore the chance of any particular role—such as "last survivor"—being one is small. Black people could be completely evenly distributed and they'd still be unlikely to be sole survivors simply because of math.
Fast Eddie: Pulling this:
- Whedon might have been referring to Scream, which might have been intended as a subversion to the horror movie genre.
... easy to forget, I guess, that Buffy predates the Scream franchise by a goodly number of years.
arromdee: Removed:
- However, beyond this site, this troper has never heard it said that the black dude dies first... merely that he always dies. And that much is true.
Please, people, read the discussion pages. This is the third time I had to take this out. If there's only one survivor, the survivor usually won't be the black guy, simply by chance—there are more white guys, so it's more likely the survivor will be one of them.
Etrangere: Oh, well. That makes it all better then. Is there a trope for Justifying Racism? I think it's called BINGO!
arromdee: If it happens merely because it is a mathematical fact that most of anything—including "sole survivors"—won't be a minority, it's not justifying racism, it's demonstrating that it isn't racism.
Blacks are 13% of the population of the US. Assuming the proportion of blacks in movies is the same, that means that in 87% of all movies where one person survives, that person won't be black; the black person won't exist or will have been killed off without any bias or racism involved. If you want to claim that black people get killed off in movies a lot, you need to show that black people ket killed off more often than you would expect from this.
arromdee: I just deleted another one. Come on, people, can't you participate in discussion?
Jordan: I had a thought about what might be intended in the Black Dude Dies First idea. I have noticed that when you have a character who is a Mighty Whitey, they will survive while non-white characters drop like flies. This isn't just because of racism, but more that they are the main character and thus for obvious reasons don't die. Tom Cruise's character in The Last Samurami is a good example of this. Similarly, in the Iron Man movie, Yensen's death suggests a related idea that Magical Negro characters have a habit of sacrificing their lives for other characters. What brought this to mind, is that in Blood Diamond, I was actually surprised that Leonardo di Caprio's character dies in the movie because typically, he would be the white survivor (Granted, his character fits Redemption Equals Death rather neatly).
Aquillion: I think the problem is less the Black Dude Dies First trope (which was definitely real at one time, if you watch older movies with token black characters), and more with the way that trope's page used to describe itself. It isn't a huge complicated issue involving racism and bias and all that; it's just that movies used to be made primarily for white audiences, with black characters (when they appeared) in minor supporting roles or as a Token Minority; obviously, minor characters got killed off more quickly than major ones. But that doesn't mean that the trope isn't real — while there's a lot of subversions in recent years (as black audiences got more money, directors catered to them with more important black characters who were unlikely to get killed), the Black Dude Dies First page itself has plenty of token blacks who died early, enough to make it clear that the trope was real at one time and doesn't belong on this page. It's a trope whose meaning is misinterpreted, perhaps, but it was still definitely real.
arromdee: That only has a substantial effect if there are a number of main characters and relatively few supporting characters and tokens (or to put it another way, a number of survivors and relatively few people killed). Now, some works are like that, so you could say the trope exists in those situations. But most of the examples on Black Dude Dies First are not. Most of them are either not examples at all, or modern examples where it's just chance (or where almost everyone dies and it's statistics).
Incidentally, the page has an example of a white guy dying first in a Korean film. That's caused by exactly the same thing as many of the black examples—if most people die, then it's likely that the minority will die.
Henry Hankovitch: That's the whole point. It's a bit ridiculous to claim that "minority characters always die" because a bunch of movie execs sit in a back room and go, "dammit, they sneaked another black guy in the movie. We'll see about that—make sure he gets eaten in the third scene!" Instead, it comes from people taking what may be a statistically normal event, and ascribing meaning to it—making it a trope. Smug Football Player probably always dies, too, but he doesn't stand out as a icon, so there isn't [much of] a trope around it. Whereas it's a commonly heard sentiment, whether serious or merely for humor's sake, that black characters in horror movies are going to die because they're black. It's a trope that people express, refer to, and describe/subvert/invert, despite having not existed as an ethos in the first place.
arromdee: Restored the Buffy example, which was one of the reasons I created the page to begin with. It all depends, of course, on exactly what Joss said—and while everyone refers to his statement, I've never seen an exact quote. If you go by what most people think he said, however, it just isn't true.
And it probably isn't referring to Death By Sex either, since if so, Buffy wouldn't exactly be a "subversion"; she didn't have sex for a long while and when she did, her boyfriend turned into a ravenous killer.
I might add that I can think of a lot more examples of blonde->pure characters than blonde->Libby.
Jason: The quote from Joss on the VHS tape of Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest before the actual show "I saw so many horror movies where there was that blonde girl who would always get herself killed. I started feeling bad for her, I thought you know it's time she had a chance to, you know, take back the night. The idea of Buffy came from just the simple thought a beautiful blonde girl walks into an alley, a monster attacks her and she's not only ready for him, she trounces him.
Lord TNK: Since there have been old westers using the clothing motif, even if for kids, it doesn't belong here. The trope had a proper origin.
arromdee: That was one of my original examples, and I put it there because I kept watching old Westerns (including ones for kids) without ever seeing it. If a couple of Westerns did it, it's no more a trope than the fact that a couple of butlers committed murders. It clearly is not as common as believed, unless I got very unlucky.
- I just watched Sagebrush Troubador. Gene Autry starts with a white hat and one bad guy wears a black hat; however, Gene switches his hat out for a black one halfway through the movie, and the bad guy with the darkest hat isn't the one who killed the mine owner.
- Me again. Public Cowboy No. 1; Gene starts with a black hat... and when he switches it out for a white one, his sidekick puts on a black hat.
- Guns and Guitars has Gene-white hat, Gene's sidekick-black hat, girl (wearing a man's hat)-dark gray, villain leader-;light gray, other villains-light and dark gray
- The Singing Cowboy has the main hero with a white hat and the main villain with a black one, but doesn't apply it to secondary characters.
- In Old Santa Fe the main character (who is not Gene Autry) wears hats of both colors at various times.
Twitch: Removed the "martini-flavored Spy Fiction" argument, which is based on an extremely narrow reading of the trope. Sure, Bond is the most famous and the Trope Namer, but just because Sydney Bristow doesn't wear a tuxedo, drink vodka martinis or play Baccarat doesn't make Alias a Stale Beer spy story. Martini-Flavored and Stale Beer are just the terms for the extremes on the realism scale for Spy Fiction. There are piles of examples of Martini-Flavored stories in comics, novels, film and television, and even if all of them were simply imitating Bond, that doesn't invalidate the trope's existence, they reinforce it.
Eric Der Konig: "The ridiculously macho, endlessly sequel spewing, action hero franchises parodied in such works as The Simpsons (the Mc Bain franchise), Last Action Hero (the Jack Slater franchise) and Tropic Thunder (the Scorcher franchise) only really exists in these selfsame parodies. It's a conflation of two phenomena that never met in real life: Cloney, low-budget '80s movies starring the likes of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme on the one hand, and the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series (neither of which took themselves too seriously) on the other. The fact that even in the 2000s people still parody 80s/90s action movies is a result of Small Reference Pools. "
I think those are parodies of the cheesy action flicks of the 80s, think Predator, Commando, Bloodsport (which spawned 4 sequels), and so on. So this really doesn't seem to fit here, but I've put off removing it to read any comments, or see if maybe I'm misreading it.
Ununnilium: Yeah, I agree. These were an actual phenomenon. Cutting it.
Ross N: I disagree. I still think we have a case of several different things that actually existed (Lethal Weapon/Die Hard, big budget Schwarzenegger action blockbusters and low budget action franchises) that have been smushed together into a compilation parody. Bloodsport barely made a ripple in cinemas and most of its sequels never made it to the big screen at all. Commando never had a sequel, and I've never even seen a reference to Predator in any of the stock parodies (and for that matter Predator itself is a bad example as the sequel had a different star).
Aquillion: The problem with listing Zombies Eat Brains as a Dead Unicorn Trope is that it's a very real trope, and not just one that exists only in parody or criticism — lots of humorous depictions of zombies are clearly using it only for its own humor value, and not in a 'lol, look at Dawn of the Dead'-fashion. Brain-eating zombies has life as a real trope in its own right, and gets used because it's funny; it's not something that only appears in 'subversions or criticisms', and it doesn't get used because anyone really thinks that there's dozens of deadly-serious brain-eating zombie movies out there. I don't think many people think of it as a serious trope, no, but a comical trope is not the same thing as a dead unicorn trope.
- Airwolf is certainly trying to subvert this: The F.I.R.M. wear white the whole time and they're slightly dodgy.
Isn't this just a subversion of Color-Coded for Your Convenience, though?
- The notion that fictional mobsters are always Italian is a Dead Unicorn Trope that can be attributed to the popularity of The Godfather and The Sopranos combined with parodies that use Small Reference Pools. As this gangster movie-loving troper will attest, there are just as many movies and tv shows with Irish, Jewish, Russian, and other "ethnic" gangsters, along with non-ethnically specific crime syndicates.
Is "there are no gangsters except The Mafia" really something that people think is a trope? I see this as just an example of people using the most famous gangsters. It's an example of Small Reference Pools, but not this.
Prfnoff: Prince Charming was a recognized trope, often played straight, before the first Disney cartoons were produced. It's already listed on Dead Horse Trope; it can't be both that and this.
- The stereotypical "Prince Charming" that's been subverted and parodied so many times comes almost entirely from two Disney movies: Snow White and Cinderella, and even the latter was self-knowingly quaint. By the time Sleeping Beauty rolled, around it was bordering on parody; the Queen actively mocks it in her Flash Forward.
Nezumi: On Fairy Tales... I'm not so sure if their idealism and inevitable happy endings are a Dead Unicorn Trope. They were frequently much darker than they are given credit for... but they still usually did end with the hero triumphant, the villain getting their just rewards, and everyone living happily ever after. The misconception is not that they were, for the most part, ultimately idealistic, but that Bowdlerization has created a false impression that above and beyond this, they were inoffensive fluff lacking in anything even remotely dark or frightening.
arromdee: removed
- Similarly, there are no contemporary accounts of people spitting on American soldiers returning from Vietnam—in fact, a 1971 VA poll found that 90% of returning Vietnam vets reported a friendly homecoming. The notion first emerged in the media in the 1980s.
Google is not too hard to use. I actually found a case where someone claimed this and commentors said that they personally were spit upon
. Also try this book
. And this Snopes thread
. This one is a right-wing site
, but it makes an insightful comment:
- Do you see the rich, frothy irony present here? Lembcke writes that, "If spitting on veterans had occurred all that frequently, surely some veteran or soldier would have called it to the attention of the press at the time." But today, Shafer admits that lots of vets are telling him that they were spit on and he doesn't believe any of them. Who's to say that the exact same thing didn't happen in the sixties and seventies?
Here's another article
, though I can't vouch for the site itself.
And of course, Jim Lindgren's post: http://volokh.com/posts/1170928927.shtml
. That one also has some commentors trying to claim it didn't happen because they couldn't find a reference for the exact activity "spitting on a soldier returning from Vietnam at the moment he got off the plane"; spitting at a recruiter, spitting at a soldier in uniform who didn't just get off the plane, etc. don't count, even though he dug up contemporary articles for them.
arromdee: Deleted
- Google searches for science fiction stories in which it turns out the main character is in an alien zoo will turn up articles advising against writing such stories because it's a badly overused gimmick—but not the supposedly common stories themselves.
Star Trek: The Cage
Twilight Zone: People Are Alike All Over (based on a short story)
Superman the animated series: The Main Man
That's just offhand. There were a bunch of EC stories and several in written fiction.
Twentington: I removed this one: "School bullies who steal lunch money from students they beat up. Not only because the bullies usually do it For the Evulz and not for theft, but also because schoolchildren almost never pay for lunch with cash (it's usually prepaid for)." since there was a great deal of dispute — indeed, at my local schools (my mom's a teacher) most students still have lunch money that they carry every day.
BritBllt: I'm not removing it, but I've gotta ask...
- The myth/hentai genre that Japanese mothers are so obsessed with their sons doing well on their entrance exams (tests that apparently make the American SAT seem like a coloring book) that they'll have sex with their sons, to make sure they're not too frustrated and to bribe the teacher/principal and possibly the teacher/principal's son for good measure. To add extra freakiness, the dads in these situations are at best, blissfully oblivious what with not trying to literally work themselves to death and at worse know their wife is consenting with sex with their son and only draws the line with said wife wearing a chastity belt, thus the son can only get oral sex. YES Japan is practically the capital of all things weird, perverted and weirdly perverted, but even by Japanese standards this is taken about as seriously as the Weekly World News and only lives in the world of hentai where that's wholesome in comparison to tentacles and hermaphrodites.
Is that really something that comes up a lot in stories about/from Japan? I'd never heard of anything remotely like that until reading about it on this page. Maybe I'm just not watching the right anime... O.o
