Misused: Lampshade Hanging

I feel like I may be opening a can of worms here, but here we go. Lampshade Hanging is the act of acknowledging the use of a trope, right? A lot of the wicks just seem to mean any time a trope is joked about or parodied.

Another problem is drawing the line between "character acknowledges something" and "character lampeshades something". Is telling the hero he's an idiot really lampshading Idiot Hero? Or calling a name weird lampshading Who Names Their Kid "Dude"??

I suppose I should back up my claims with a wick check.

"Lampshade Hanging found in: 15073 articles, excluding discussions."

Oh, Crap!. This is especially going to be hard since there are usually several wicks per page. Not to mention how many times "lampshaded" is just said with no wick.

—- Correct

• Abandoned Warehouse: Joke about the "abandoned warehouse" district in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
• Abandoned Warehouse: Conversation from Darkwing Duck about how many of their battles take place in {{Abandoned Warehouse}]s.
• Aborted Arc: She Hulk comic acknowledges abandoned arcs and forces characters do a high speed run-through of how they'd have gone.
• Aborted Arc: The Dawsons Creek example.
• Aborted Arc: The Thirty Rock example.
• A Boy and His X: The Brentford example. "A boy and his bike! I feel sick!"
• Absent-Minded Professor: A quote from Half-Life calling someone a "stereotypical absent-minded professor".
• Absolute Boyfriend: A joke about how convincing it is when a Bishounen character cross-dresses.
• Absurd Altitude: A Family Guy joke acknowledging this trope's occasional tendency to label the countries as if on a globe.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: A conversation from Nodwick about how ridiculously large (and impractical) the sewer system is.
• Acceptable Professional Targets: The Shallow Grave example— an accountant character's inherent boringness is acknowledged often.
• Accidental Innuendo: The Austin Peay University example is correct.
• Accidental Public Confession: Says, "Lampshaded all the time on Dexter", followed by... a conversation having nothing to do with the trope?
• Ace Attorney: The Catchphrase example seems correct.

Incorrect

• YMMV/ABBA: Under What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: "'Honey Honey' is really about sex, so much that in the version heard in Mamma Mia!, when the lines 'you do your... thing' and 'you're a dog-gone beast' are sung, the singer is clearly enjoying herself."
• Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai: Under Incredibly Lame Pun. It's required for the trope that the other characters find it lame; that's not a lampshade.
• AB Negative: It's a quote from a reviewer, pointing out a cliche.
• A Brighter Sun: Pothole under Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?, because someone comments on a weird name. Even though that's required to play the trope straight.
• Aborted Arc: "Snoopy is writing a novel. One part of the plot involves a king living in luxury while his people starved. In tying up the plot threads, Snoopy left him out." That is a parody.
• Aborted Arc: The El Goonish Shive example looks more like a lampshade of Red Herring, that just happens to involve an Aborted Arc.
• Absentee Actor: Character is Put on a Bus for 4 episodes of How I Met Your Mother, with the narrator saying that she'd been gone exactly four weeks. It's a joke, but it's not lampshading.
• Abusive Parents: An abusive dad says he's never seen someone be so cruel to someone they love. The son says, "really, dad?"
• Accent Tropes: Potholed under "When a character's odd accent is commented on".
• Acceptable Ethnic Targets: A character with dwarfism mentions people being freaked out by little people, and then screams in a napping guy's ear.
• Acceptable Lifestyle Targets: Character addresses the audience to say "Don't worry, this isn't a sitcom aimed at young people that makes tentative reference to casual drug use but then pussies out by including some punititve moral message".
• Acceptable Religious Targets: Weird Al acts as if he is going to apologize for his "Amish Paradise" video, but in reality is just yelling at any Amish folks for watching TV.
• Accidental Innuendo: There's an example with a magnet that says "I've been touched by someone with Autism and it was fantastic!", and it mentions Tumblr bloggers lampshading it. That would just be mocking. It's not even the work lampshading itself, anyway.
• Accidental Public Confession: The Yes Sir Prime Minister example describes this narrowly being avoided, and another character saying to always treat the microphone as if it were on.
• Ace Attorney: Sinkholed on the words "smartass comment about his stoicism and general motionlessness".

Acknowledging something that happens to be a trope The act of Lampshade Hanging is acknowledging a trope, but often times it is perfectly normal to acknowledge something regardless of it's usage as a trope. Sometimes it would seem weird if they didn't acknowledge what was right in front of them.

• Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai: Sounds more like a Butt-Monkey noticing that what he's doing stinks than like a lampshade of it.
• A Bronx Tale: Under Machiavelli Was Wrong: "Sonny and C openly discuss the question of whether it is better to be feared or loved."
• Accepted: Under Fun with Acronyms: A fake school calls itself South Harmon Institute of Technology. A character comments, "You do realize that that makes us "shit", right?"
• Accidental Bid: "Done with a sneeze on the Totally Spies! episode 'Do You Believe In Magic?'. Sam then laments that the mission has gone over-budget."
• Accidental Innuendo: The Buffy The Vampire Slayer example has someone make a comment that sounds wrong, and another character say it sounds wrong.
• Accidental Innuendo: A joke on How I Met Your Mother involving the cast watching a kids show full of unintentional dirty jokes and laughing.
• Accidental Innuendo: The El Goonish Shive example has one character say something innuendo-y, and another saying not to phrase it that way.
• Accidental Pervert: The title character of Hayate The Combat Butler opens a door without knocking after acknowledging that another character may be changing on the other side.
• Accidental Truth: After this trope happens in Tales Of The Abyss, a character says "It seems our lie has become the truth."
• Ace Attorney: Under Tsundere, where it's said of one character "she's so openly hostile it's almost cute".
• Ace Attorney: Under "Wham Episode and Wham Line" it says that the judge lampshades it's frequency, with the quote, "This is a most unexpected turn of events. For the...fifth time now?"

Can't tell

• Triumphant Example/A: Potholed with the text "It's just a talent he has" under Accidental Pervert.
• Abandoned Warehouse: Just says "Kevin lampshades it".
• Aborted Arc: In Friends, a character gets a job, then isn't shown working anymore, then a few episodes later reveals he quit.
• Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Says: "Lampshaded and parodied in the Simpsons episode parodying The Count Of Monte Cristo, where everyone including Marge as Mercedes turns on Homer as Dantes for his revenge plot."
• Absent Aliens: Says, "Lampshaded in Gundam AGE, with the UE calling humans "Earthlings." However, contrary to popular rumors from the Fan Dumb, the UE are actually citizens of Veigan, a human nation formed from colonies in Mars when the Earth Federation left them for dead after a disease outbreak."
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Homer Simpson saying, "Wow, these are good scissors!" after cutting through a jumprope, several leashes, and taking out a suspension bridge with a pair of barbershop scissors. Might just be an understatement.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Under Touhou Soccer: the blade in question can't cut the soccer ball, and it's called into question what the ball is made of. Can't tell, 'cause it's not exactly lampshading a trope...
• Academy Award: Just mentions Billy Crystal regularly lampshading it when he runs overtime.
• Academy of Adventure: The X Men example just says that "it's been lampshaded by the cast."
• Accentuate the Negative: Just says of the Nostalgia Critic: "His overly grouchy attitude is lampshaded during many of the reviews." (Can you Lampshade something that's not really a trope?)
• Acceptable Inevitable Targets: Under the "Real Life" folder for The Elderly, one bullet contains vague, passing mention of someone lampshading something. (Either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.)
• Accidental Aesop: The Sa Ga 2 example describes opium being changed to bananas in the localization, and an NPC asking why bananas were illegal. That might be a lampshading of something, but not this.
• Accidental Innuendo: The Soup example. I don't get it, so that's not helping me.

Index/NA

• Trope Distinctions/A-C
• I Thought It Meant/A-C
• Abridged Series Tropes

I don't have too much time today, so I only did about 40 pages, and about 53 links.

14 correct (26%) 15 incorrect (28%) 11 acknowledging stuff (20%) 13 uncertain (24%)

That's up to 50% correct if all the uncertain examples turn out to be exactly correct, silly me. And of course up to 20% more if "acknowledging stuff" is determined to be correct.

Thoughts?

edited 25th Mar '12 2:29:56 PM by Webby

Actually a girl.

With this much misuse, we might as well just nuke it. It's not like it's an important trope or anything.

Anyway, is this something for Special Efforts? Would probably take a lot*

of effort*

emphsis here too

to clean this up. I don't think we can do much with the trope page itself.

It could help with cleaning up the description a bit, but I don't think it will have much effect.

edited 25th Mar '12 2:40:01 PM by Feather7603

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

Honestly, I don't think there's much we can do with this. It's a legitimate trope that keeps being thrown around.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

Yeah, this is kind of huge. Maybe I should've tried Special Efforts instead, especially with the TRS backlog. I'm not as familiar with it as TRS, and I don't know what constitutes a "special effort" and if I'm supposed to lay things out any differently.

Actually a girl.

TRS is for deciding stuff. Super-large works commencing after TRS go into Special Efforts, for example.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

If something is outside the scope of TRS, should it get taken to Special Efforts? I thought it was exclusively post-TRS huge stuff, which was why I started here, but looking over it again it doesn't seem to be.

Probably dumb of me, especially given the backlog.

Actually a girl.

I think you're interpreting it a little too narrowly. I'm looking at what you've labeled as incorrect and seeing a fair share of non-incorrect-ness.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Also, we have over 1,500 wicks for this trope.

40 wicks doesn't sound like a significant sample size.

Put me in motion, drink the potion, use the lotion, drain the ocean, cause commotion, fake devotion, entertain a notion, be Nova Scotian

Fifteen thousand wicks. Forty-three thousand inbounds. So signature, it is built into our logo. Imma go ahead and recoup this TRS slot.

edited 25th Mar '12 5:26:32 PM by FastEddie

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty