That's funny, I don't recall Orion from Men In Black being anything more than just a cat. He wasn't mean, he wasn't a snark, he wasn't nice; he was just a regular cat with no definitive personality to speak of that can be summarized with any single word.
edited 31st Mar '11 8:02:06 AM by SeanMurrayI
Dragon Writer
Orion had the MacGuffin. That was all.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.
Whatever the case, this page mostly just comes off as a catch-all for cats in fiction that do not fit any existing tropes about cats with personalities—or, as is the case with Orion, do not fit any tropes about personalities at all.
I don't see much rhyme or reason for having this.
edited 31st Mar '11 10:10:38 AM by SeanMurrayI
Welcome, traveller, welcome to Omsk
Yeah, my gut feeling is that this isn't a trope, for the reasons mentioned.
It does not matter who I am. What matters is, who will you become? - motto of Omsk Bird
I agree that this is not a trope. Vote cut.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Meh, for what it's worth, it does have a good way to separate the examples of Cats Are Mean from its inversions. I suppose that could otherwise be accomplished by a soft split within the Cats Are Mean page though...
I don't think we need to list inversions of Cats Are Mean at all.
I do have to come to Orion's defence here. I think the movie suggested that he actually cared about or had some loyalty towards his owner, which would be a good defining trait (and so unusual in a cat!)
More on topic, I agree that this is way too broad to be a trope. I can imagine there being a more specific trope where cats are, say, used as a symbol of something good (I'm not saying such a trope exists — though see, say, the religion of Ancient Egypt — but only that it is conceivable as a trope). But what we have here now is just "sometimes cats are not mean, but are, in fact, some variety of nice," which is not a trope at all.
Agree with cut.
edited 31st Mar '11 1:08:10 PM by girlyboy
Sophia Gata Hernandez Lopez
Please cut Cats Are Good.
Though neo YT Pism suggested that we could softsplit Cats Are Mean to list inversions, aversions, and subversions.
edited 31st Mar '11 2:29:38 PM by EdnaWalker
Perpetually Confused
Listing aversions are pointless, unless there's something really notable about them.
To quote Averted Tropes:
Inversions to Cats Are Mean themselves don't really make for very interesting examples (Cat X is not evil, but animal Y is). The best inversions would be listing those where a cat is good, and a dog is evil.
edited 31st Mar '11 2:47:44 PM by Ghilz
^I'd still say that that would leave us with the inverse pretty much being the same as the aversion.
edited 31st Mar '11 2:55:50 PM by SeanMurrayI
Perpetually Confused
And it's gone.
Alot of people, myself included, brought up in the YKTTW
that this is not a trope. It's simply a big list of aversions of Cats Are Mean: "Theses are cats who happen to be good". Edna Walker launched the trope, but never addressed those criticism. There's no pattern here.
From Noir Grimoir:
From Wacky Meets Practical:
2 more tropers, along with myself, agreed with the above.
From thegrenekni3t