What's the difference between Nobody Poops and Bottomless Bladder?
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Solid vs liquid waste... which isn't a difference at all, unless you feel the need to categorize the aversions. (If a character does either, it should be an example of neither.)
But the two look like they were made with different intentions. Nobody Poops looks related to decency standards, particularly on TV. Bottomless Bladder looks related to Acceptable Breaks from Reality, particularly in video games.
I read both as avoiding going to the bathroom at all. I can see a difference in using either Acceptable Breaks from Reality and Conservation of Detail, but I'm not sure it's worth keeping them apart.
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...I'm not sure I see anything other than aversions. What instances of this can we list?
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer
Dragon Writer
When it's a matter of Conservation of Detail, straight examples are allegedly everything.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.
We can list exaggerations, lampshades:
- The Trail Of Anguish informs you, "You don't need to use the bathroom right now. It's an adventure game, after all."
- There was some Lampshade Hanging in Galaxy Quest (or in a deleted scene, at any rate) where one of the Thermians mentions to Alan Rickman's character that Earth's "historical documents" (television programs) did not contain any information regarding waste facilities on the ship and "we extrapolated based on your anatomy" - revealing what looked to be the most horrendously painful toilet ever created.
- Pleasantville makes a point of this - Jennifer enters the bathroom to discover that there are no toilets, because they aren't necessary.
I can also imagine listing some notable aversions, if we can describe related significance. In Psycho, the sound of a toilet flushing was apparently controversial and practically a cinematic first.
What about when it's Played for Laughs? I imagine these make the biggest chunk of the aversion examples.
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer
If Nobody Poops is played for laughs, absolutely, we should list it.
But if someone shitting is played for laughs, that's not this trope at all. That's plain Toilet Humor.
Alright then, let's start by doing a cross-check with Toilet Humour. If we find duplicates, we leave them where they seem to fit better, and remove them from the other page.
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
and : Sounds reasonable.
Grand Poobah of Crimestrikers
Maybe we could rename the trope Nobody Poops On Camera, or something similar.
"But... nobody told me I needed a signature!"
Why? People now misuse the page for "on-screen examples of people pooping." How would the rename change that?
This is why I hate "aversion only" trope pages.
If Nobody Poops but you have a big long list of people pooping, then clearly people do in fact poop.
Between Nobody Poops and Bottomless Bladder, the latter name seems to have the better basis.
It's not that nobody poops/urinates, suggests "Bottomless Bladder." But some characters go for significant lengths without doing so, even though we see their every move.
(That isn't, however, what Bottomless Bladder is really about. It's about how video games skip mundane activity, such as bathroom stuff, sleeping or changing clothes, unless it's story related. So all "aversions" where it is story-related, including all examples from other media, aren't aversions at all, OR examples.
Hammer of the Pervs
How is this trope not omnipresent? You almost never see anybody use the toilet, period, let alone take a shit.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.
Dragon Writer
Answer: Conservation of Detail.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.
True, you rarely actually see someone take a dump on film outside of scat porn, but it is not true that all that mentions of pooping and toilets and the like are entirely unheard of in works of fiction.
See Toilet Humour for starters.
edited 12th Feb '12 2:49:35 PM by Catbert
As I said briefly earlier, I don't think Omnipresent Tropes should ever take the form of X Never Happens (i.e. X Hardly Ever Happens). It should only take the form of X Always Happens (i.e. X Almost Always Happens).
Sure, people in fiction almost always Dont Poop. But people in fiction also almost always Dont Burn Hospitals. In fact, they far more often Dont Burn Hospitals.
Obviously, real life people do poop regularly but rarely burn hospitals, which is why Nobody Poops is worth noting at all. But "omnipresent tropes" as a category has absolutely nothing to do with occurrences' real-life frequency. It ''only' concerns whether they always occur in fiction.
Hammer of the Pervs
Okay, I guess that makes sense.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.The more I look at it, the more I just see Conservation of Detail, But More Specific.
Considering the amount of aversions, I think it looks less and less of an actual trope.
The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.
Dragon Writer
Too bad we can't call it Conservation Of Bladder.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.We can't? Aww... 
You gotta get yourself some marble columns
I don't think it's a Dead Horse Trope, exactly — fictional characters aren't shitting left and right, unless you count the rich verdant landscape of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic — but I'd say it's shifted a bit. Lampshades and subversions of the lack of bathroomness in fiction constitute a trope at this point. So the lack itself may be more specific conservation of detail, but there's more there than that.
The child is father to the man —OedipusIt's less that I think it's a Dead Horse Trope and more that I think it's not a trope at all.
The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.
Crown Description:
Nobody Poops currently lists aversions and lamshadings. The aversions far outnumber the lampshades and form a list of list whose only criterion is "someone poops."
Nobody Poops is a trope about fictional characters not pooping. Its examples? A few lamshadings, along with hundreds of aversions and subversions i.e. examples of people pooping.
We do not need a list of fictional characters pooping. If poop tropes exist, and I'm sure they do, make pages for them. But "X poops in work Y" is not a trope, least of all the trope Nobody Poops.
The problem is that we listed this as an Omnipresent Trope, which is usually a license to list aversions. But though Nobody Poops is common, and it is the norm, it is not an omnipresent trope. It just occurs so frequently that we should only list lampshades, exaggerations etc (and there are many). We probably should not list any trope of the form "X never occurs" under Omnipresent Tropes; Omnipresent Tropes lists things that nearly always occur.
Let's drastically clean up this page. We could move the examples to their own appropriate tropes, but they weren't added with tropiness in mind, so we could equally justifiably just delete them, optionally YKTT Wing poop tropes from scratch.
No Periods Periods has a similar problem. Bottomless Bladder does, but less severely.
edited 12th Feb '12 1:01:30 AM by Routerie