Slightly misleading name: The Dog Shot First

I just did a bit of clean up on this article, and it seems like there were quite a lot of misplaced examples along the lines of "character outlandishly tries to claim self-defense", when this is a trope about retcons or adaptation decay that attempts to make morally ambiguous situations or actions less so. We may want to consider renaming it to something clearer.

edited 16th May '11 11:10:25 PM by Haven

Retcons and Adaptation Decay aren't actually mentioned in the article though. It's confusingly written, but it looks to me as though the intended meaning is that Executive Meddling, or the author thinking that the protagonist would lose sympathy for a necessary Shoot the Dog moment leads to the target of the Shoot the Dog acting in a way that makes the Shoot the Dog less performing "an ambiguously (a)moral act because current circumstances make it the most pragmatic and logical thing to do" (as the Shoot the Dog page puts it) and more "self-defence".

The name is quite clear for what the trope involves - a situation where a pragmatic character would need to Shoot the Dog, but the Dog attacks them first, removing any moral questions about whether the hero had a choice. A rewrite of the description to make it more clear would be good though. Less emphasis on the Executive Meddling part and more on what the trope is about maybe?

edited 17th May '11 1:32:33 AM by Valentine

This sounds good, and has the added advantage of being much less likely to draw complaining than the definition given by the OP. It still might, of course, as this can be caused by meddling executives, who as we know are Always Chaotic Evil (yeah, right) - but that's not a big problem right now and shouldn't need to be addressed until/unless it comes up.

Self Defense Retcon ?

This trope isn't actually about retcons though.

Rather than a rename, I think the description needs to be cleaned up first. There's a lot of focus on Executive Meddling and the "original scene" and all that before eventually admitting that those have nothing to do with the trope in a line near the end. Obviously it's based on the Greedo scene from the Star Wars special edition, but no description should ever be written around exactly one example.

The core of it seems to be "heroes can only kill in self-defense because they can't be shown to kill in cold blood, no matter how justified."

Which is why in action movies, the bad guy could be the worst son of a bitch ever, but when the hero has a chance to just take him down, he has to change his mind, then the villain tries to get in a shot so that the hero can finish the job in a way that's allowable for the good guy.

edited 17th May '11 7:25:16 AM by DragonQuestZ

So restore the removed examples?

It doesn't mention retcons by name, no, but the description is all about the "original scene" vs. the "edited scene".

But that's not what this trope is about. It's about executive meddling leading to a re-editing of a scene to make a character less ambiguous.

I think the fact that you can look at the name of the trope, look at the description of the trope, and then say the latter has to be changed to fit the former indicates that the name of the trope really is overriding what the trope is actually trying to talk about.

Ah, no. I'm not saying that the trope description is incorrect, just unclear. I'm not saying the trope description needs to be changed to match the name, it just needs to be made clearer.

Look, the original YKTTW seems to have started off with a heavy emphasis on Executive Meddling (but not on retcons or re-editing other than that the "Han shot first" scene was mentioned), and during the discussion it was pointed out that it didn't need to be restricted to examples where Executive Meddling was responsible. I'm not just pulling this explanation out of nowhere.

I'll point out as well the last paragraph of the current description is still quite strongly supporting what I'm saying:

"Sometimes this trope comes into play without Executive Meddling; the writer assumes that the Viewers Are Morons, and that they will lose sympathy with a hero who kills preemptively, even if, in the situation at hand, only a hero who was Too Dumb to Live would let the baddie live. "

edited 18th May '11 4:53:56 AM by Valentine

Bumping because as written, this page is easily mockable by people who dislike TV Tropes. It makes us all look like bitter ex-fanboys (not unlike what would have happened if that "Nuking the Fridge" YKTTW had actually become a trope.)