This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Way To Break It Hero launched as Nice Job Breaking It Hero Discussion: From YKTTW
Working Title: Way To Break It Hero: From YKTTW
Demetrios: I definitely agree about the Dungeon Siege II example. It was enough to make me say "What a rotten ending".
Greenygal: Deleted from the Atlantis entry: "Except that humanity are also the descendants of the Neglectful Precursors that originally created the Wraith and then left them there. Yeah, Humans Are Bastards." This is hardly the fault of the Atlantis characters, and it's not as though there aren't enough things to pin on them as it is.
Jisu: No idea why the quotations were over here, but I'm putting them back where they were unless someone objects.
Fast Eddie:Pulled too many too long quotations...
- Homer: Homer do good?
Bart: No, dad, you doomed us all. Again.Way To Go, Serge: It will eventually turn out that, for a minimum of the first sixty percent of the game, you were actually being manipulated by the forces of evil into doing their sinister bidding for them. In extreme cases this may go as high as 90%. The clear implication is that it would have been better to not get involved in the first place.The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches, Cliché number 168.
...please see Administrative Policy
Nornagest: Pulled natter from the Baldurs Gate II entry:
- This editor has never met a player who could legitimately claim to have beaten Kangaxx with standard tactics.** Is cheating a standard tactic?**Kangaxx is easy. Just buy a scroll of protection from magic, equip your tank with +5 weapon, cast the afromentioned scroll on the tank and have him hack Kangaxx apart. Just remember to keep other party members away. Also the 5th level spell Spell immunity (Abjuration) works though it has quite short duration.*** Please, people, he did say standard tactics. There are many tricks that can be used to defeat Kangaxx, but that's all they are, tricks that have no place in normal combat. Scroll of Pf M is a one-of-a-kind item, and at the point where you meet him, the only +5 weapon you have access to is a single staff in a shop. Without rigging the fight in advance, even the game's end boss is easier than him.
...and modified the example slightly. I took Kangaxx out handily with a combination of Minute Meteors and the aforementioned staff of the magi, but as a former tabletop D&D player I already knew the proper tactics against a demilich. Without some sort of foreknowledge you wouldn't have a chance.
- FrozenWolf150: There technically IS a standard tactic you can use to beat him. Since you had to fight not one but two regular liches just to get the bones to reactivate Kangaxx, there's a chance you may have used scrolls of Protection from Undead on your party (available at just about every temple) as well as gotten the Mace of Disruption +2 ahead of time. Given the layout of Kangaxx's tomb, it's pretty easy to tell that he's at least a lich, so if you used the same tactics, you'd actually be in good shape. The Protection scrolls make you invisible and untargetable to his demilich form as well, and the Mo D+2 can kill his demilich form in one hit if he fails his save.
Final-Fan: Deleted an entry for Real Life examples because it was far from clear that it was an actual example. From the perspective of the Chinese, the Communists mucked up the country pretty badly but the brutality of the Japanese invaders was LEGENDARY. And from the perspective of the USA, I don't know if China was ever a bigger threat than Imperial Japan — by now they could be but they're mellow enough not to be.
- * America defeating Japan meant no Japanese troops to deal with Communist guerillas in China or providing a buffer against Soviet Russia. Remind me, who won the Chinese Civil War again? (Though arguably, this trope is a slight inversion as the communists are arguably better than the Imperial Japanese, and the populace were very disenchanted with the Kuomintang (ruling party of the Republic of China to the extent it had one) even before then).
Why is the Diablo entry under the Tabletop Games header? Shouldn't it be under Video Games?
DGM: Wasn't there a "Way to Go, Serge" trope that covered this very concept? I can't find it now, but I remember it being here.
Novium: I think the real-life examples are fairly pointless. There's hardly anything in history that doesn't (eventually) cause something (even indirectly) that we would consider "bad". And with most bits of history, it's very hard to know if something is actually worse, because it is so subjective, and there are so many factors involved. it seems to me that in stories, it's very easy to tell what would happen if things went differently around major plotpoints- because stories tend to telegraph exactly what is a major plot point and what the choices are. Randomness or the small pebble that starts the rockslide kind of elements have to be added in. But real life? There's a reason counterfactualism has such limited scholarly use. For example, the 9/11 and afghanistan example. funding pakistan to fund the people fighting the soviets fits into the larger context of the cold war. it wasn't some isolated thing that only had one set of consequences... but knowing all of those consequences is impossible. Likewise, it is equally plausible that 9/11 would have still happened; certainly al-quaida's existence doesn't hinge on the wreck that is/was afghanistan. Alternatively, you could say that the real problem wasn't funding the mujahadeen but failing to stay involved, so that in the power vacuum lead to feuding warlords which lead to even worse conditions which lead to the taliban's rise to power. And this could go on and on, and we could do it for almost all of the real-life examples. So, personally, i don't think they belong, and just are asking for big discussions (digressions) on the main page. And that's my two cents.
Medinoc: Do the Final Fantasy Sequential Boss examples really count?
Charred Knight: I put more detail in the Mujahideen, the problem was that while the Mujahideen where helpful in fighting both the Soviet Union, and Taliban, one of the fighters of the Sovient Union just happened to be Osama Bin Laden. As I already mentioned most of the Mujahideen where warlords who fought constantly leading to one of them taking over most of the country as the Taliban, and several others becoming the Northern Alliance. The term Mujahideen simply mneans a struggler, a person in a fight, in this case the various Islamic wars.
Sikon: The Ori aren't gods. Some viewers may see them as such (depending on your definition of a god), but it wasn't the writers' intent.
Mike Rosoft: The following real-life examples have been removed (by somebody else), I am storing them here for the time being:
- The USA supported the various Mujahideen groups against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the defeat of the Soviet Union, they began to fight each other, with the Taliban eventually winning the war. The rest either allied with the Taliban, or fought the Taliban with several forming the Northern Alliance. Fast forward to September 2001. Oops.
- America and Britain helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, supporting his increasingly repressive replacement the Shah, until in 1978-79 there was a successful rebellion against him (and by extension the US, see Iran Hostage Crisis). Khomeini, who had become popular by opposing the Shah, became Supreme Leader of a new theocracy. Nice Job. But wait! The US then proceeded to move against its new enemy by giving weapons and support to another adversary of Iran ... Saddam Hussein. Nice Job.
Chuckg: Removed the claim that the US armed Osama bin Laden. It must be remembered that there were two primary sources for the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet occupation: the United States and Saudi Arabia. Osama was at that time one of the bagmen between the mujahideen and the Saudis. Osama never touched US money by his own admission during the late 90s, when he was still (occasionally) talking to the world media.
Lord TNK: Although that could be more a denial than admittance, since that would undermine his movement.
Chuckg: Um, what? If Osama could genuinely prove that he was able to get the CIA to help fund his efforts to kill Americans, it would only make him look like a jihadi rock star. You have to remember that the ability to lie, cheat, and steal the infidel blind is seen as a virtue by Wahhabi extremists. The claim that Osama squirreled away CIA seed money in Afghanistan to build Al Qaeda with (especially if it had been timed for, oh, say, the 2004 elections) would have been the nuclear bomb of pro-Islamic propaganda tools, handled correctly.
Osama never even tried to play that card in the propaganda war. And regardless of whatever statements he made in '96 and '98, he could have recanted them at any time post-2001, and never did. Inference: he's really, really damn sincere about never having touched CIA funding in Afghanistan.
Chuckg: As for the Saddam Hussein example, which I just noticed: we didn't create him, we didn't put him in power, we didn't give him the idea to go attack the Iranians or the Kuwaitis, he bought 98+% of his armaments from European and Russian sources, and nothing we sold him even marginally came back to hurt us while we were kicking his ass twice. So, what exactly was broken by the US again? Sure, Saddam Hussein was a complete waste of space on the Middle East, but he was like that before we ever met him.
Zeke: Yeah, I admit it — I thought of "Nice Job Breaking The Cutie" first, then found an example to fit. You know you'd have done the same.
Zeke: I meant to explain my removal of this a while ago:
- Since the Chozo both created the Metroids and raised Samus, why didn't they tell her "Oh, by the way, don't kill all the Metroids or you'll doom the galaxy."
- Probably because they already had "Don't commit genocide" as a general rule?
Krid: Removed this line:
- Then again, the Matrix is a lie.
This leads up to my point: There is a significant difference between a deception and a lie. The stated purposes of the Matrix was to provide humans with a 'reality' they could live with, and that is exactly what it did. People were born, lived, and died in the Matrix, and their lives were no less a 'lie' than ones lived outside of it. There are a great many things that people choose to willingly overlook for the sake of keeping themselves happy, such as that their meat comes from once-living creatures, or that people actually have to DO jobs like those seen on Dirty Jobs. Perception IS reality, and they created a perception heaven for people in an objective hell.
Zeke: You make an excellent case for Cypher's point of view in the first movie, which I've always considered one of the most interesting parts of it. That said, don't expect a lot of people to agree with you. The Matrix is objectively a lie — that's what it's called when you intentionally lead people to believe something you know isn't true (in this case, that human civilization still exists and people aren't being used as fuel tanks). Many people would prefer the truth to any lie, however pleasant, and nobody would prefer to be denied even the choice. As for the ethics of the machines... well, maybe they're concerned with morality, and maybe from their perspective what they're doing is moral. From my perspective, screw them. The "life" of an evil machine that wiped out my civilization has no moral weight at all. And even if it did, it's still them or us. I choose us. (All of this applies to you-know-who as well.)
Wild Knight: Is there a villainous spin to this trope (i.e., Nice Job Breaking It Villain, the villain does something that has the unintended consequence of making things go to hell), or would one just make note of this trope being inverted in those cases? ...for that matter, is that considered an inversion?
Removed the Battle For The Undercity example under World Of Warcraft. Whether you like Wrynn or not, it's not this trope.
Peteman: Removed:
- Again with the rabbits. Rabbits are a massive pest in Australia, eating the local flora, pushing out the local fauna (eg, bilbies). Rabbits (and foxes as well) were brought over from England, so that rich toffs would have something to hunt. They escaped into the wild and bred like...yeah. In the 50's, the Myxomatosis virus was released into the rabbit population, but some proved immune and survived and by the late 80's early 90's the population was back at around 300 million. Then calicivirus was accidently released into the population in the mid-90's, and in the colder areas the virus was weaker thus allowing the rabbits there to build up an immunity to it, plus the others who would be immune anyway due to genetic variation. Thus, we now have rabbits which are resistant to both Calicivirus and Myxomatosis. Damn. Let's not even start on the attempts to get rid of them with ferrets.
I'm not really sure how this counts. If the intentionally released disease proceeded to kill off a whole bunch of other native lifeforms, I'd buy that. From what this trope example describes, the better NJBIH would be the ferrets, since it implies the ferrets were brought in to fix the problem, only to cause problems, which is the spirit of NJBIH.
Headrock: I've just spent a while going over the examples, and it seems to me that either a lot of people don't understand what this trope is about, or I don't. This trope is about when the hero thinks he's achieved a noble goal and saved the day, when in fact he/she has created a larger (or at least equally dangerous) problem in the process (or in the final action). However there are still many examples where people simply describe someone failing in a spectacular way and dooming the world. Isn't this trope supposed to occur when SUCCESS turns into FAILURE in a twist of fate, rather than through an outright bad decision on the hero's part? Isn't it that the hero did what appeared to be the best possible action, but ironically it turns out to have been the worst? If I'm mistaken, ignore me. Otherwise, there are MANY examples in the article that completely fail to understand the whole idea. I gave up trying to fix/remove them one-by-one.
