InstantDeathBullet Clean Up Help.

The last TRS decision for Instant Death Bullet required the moving of a large number of 'Averted tropes' off the page. They are currently contained in the SandBox.Instant Death Bullet page.

Some of the entries contain straight use of the trope others need additional context and sorting from averted tropes.

Due to the large number of works across several types of media extra hands are needed for this effort.

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Discussion Page for Instant Death Bullet

edited 14th Sep '13 7:48:35 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Throwing my hat into the ring. I'll start devoting effort to it once the It Got Worse cleanup is at manageable levels.

Thank you much. I was going to start doing some work myself this Saturday when I have my long quiet shift at work.

It Got Worse wick cleanup is now over, so I'll start focusing on this a little more.

I am still stumbling around works I am not that familiar with.

I know in general we wanted to clean up aversions but does it look like any of the entries are proper use of an aversion and could be put back?

The one that stuck in mind was the Pineapple Express example.

Alright, I might be way out of my league here, (only thing I've done in the works area was the recent "It Got Worse" rally) but I think I can help with this too.

Just to be clear when I start, we basically want to find all proper/straight uses of the trope (whether alone or in part of the listed examples), and proper subversions and the rare proper aversions back in, move examples that are different tropes to where they ought to be, and then delete the rest? Or leave the rest in sandbox for later? I can pretty much start this tomorrow, I gave a scan of the page and I saw plenty of straight uses and subverions I could extract and re-write.

As for the Pineapple Express example, the part about Red I think is a subversion, because it has all the parts required for the guy to just die as per the trope, but he gets up twice. It appeared to be played straight (though the type of movie isn't known for having lots of instant death) but in the end wasn't, instead of not coming into play at all.

I've been studying the aversion and subversion pages and thinking about this a lot and I think I've got a fair grip on the aversion issue. A subversion of this trope would be that it looks like it will play out just like a typical instant death shot, but then we see the character either recover or die slower than we expected. Aversions would be that at no point did it look like the character being shot would have died instantly, or in the type of movie we didn't expect it to anyways. Most of these aversions can be ignored since part of being an aversion worth writing down is that it was a notable exception, not just an exception. Most modern action flicks WILL have plenty of non-instant, gory, painful deaths and we don't really need to mention how that's not this trope.

If I can find where an aversion is actually another trope, like the scareface example looks like Plot Armor I'll move it there.

Also, any chance of me being allowed to edit the description [carefully], or do we have to leave it alone for now?

edited 5th Dec '12 7:12:13 PM by DoveAlexa

Good point it is subversion. I am a bit tired today and not really on top of things. Been fighting off the latest fall/winter bug brought into work. Been avoiding editing as I space out when I edit while sick.

I think for now we should aim at salvaging the straight examples and then look for subversions and maybe a limited selection of aversions.

If you want to tweak the main blurb I would do a temp write up here but remember we want to keep it relatively clean of Useful notes info and keep it generally focused on the general Instant Death Theme also keep it from being too wordy.

Aye Aye Captain!

Don't feel bad about detecting the subversions though, I sat here for 2 hours getting it straight starting at 1 AM. For a while I was convinced an avertion meant no one got shot at at all! That was at 2:30AM.

I hope you don't mind, but I've taken to added caps-locked notes to the ends of averted trope examples where I took out the straight example and added it to the main page. I thought it was better than removing the averted remained since they could potential go in another trope. If it gets annoying I'll try and do the whole job of taking out the straight and finding the averted a new home at once.

There is a chance I missed material or took other material with the aversions. Other reason I need a hand with the work. I will take a peak at what you did later. I don't a lot of time today to do editing gotta get all nicely dressed for work today.

Been doing a bit of thinking about where we can drop some of the not-really-examples to get them out of the sandbox, and I've come up with a few alternatives:

• Death Is Dramatic
• A Million Is a Statistic (for the comparisons of plot-centric characters vs. random Mooks)

Sounds good to me.

Is Death Is Dramatic actually mutually exclusive with Instant Death Bullet?

Yep. They cover two different but definetly related conventions.

Both tropes have certain specifics that make them seperate.

One relates to the drama related to death the other is a gunplay trope

They both interact for sure but not always.

Um, that's what I just said - a death can involve both, or so I'd assume. So they're not mutually exclusive.

Sorry misread. For media well that obviously is dependant on the media. On the wiki they have crossover in general.

edited 6th Dec '12 7:42:26 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Half of the Lord of the Rings examples are Annoying Arrows, so if they aren't there already I'll move them there. If the page existed, some of this stuff could go in "instant arrow death", but I think the only examples I saw were the LOTR ones and a nearly no-content example for brother cadfael.

Right, trying out a charge for the page description. Its really been bugging me since it just barely starts to state what the trope is before going off on a tanget about when heros shrug off bullets and how mooks fire badly, which is not what the trope is exactly about. Sure we can talk about that, just not in the first paragraph where everything needs to be crystal clear.

My attempt: (not final): "In works of fiction, guns behave in strange ways. Often, and especially in gritty action films and old-timey westerns, guns seem to fire not bullets but death itself. Mooks, Heros and BigBads alike can die instantly from a single bullet fired in their general direction, and the kill may even be bereft of blood. In some works, this is employed slightly more realistically with bloody headshots, but are just as instantly deadly as their weakly aimed counterparts.

In some works, this end is saved for Mooks and actual Villians, or Mooks alone, while a Hero gets the benefit of a long, painful DramaticDeath complete with tears and sad music. Don't be surprised though, if an instant death bullet finds its way to the Hero's skull in the end just for shock value.

This trope is largely responsible for the tendency of Mooks and Red Shirts to come from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. If the Hero or Villain were killed or critically wounded in their first gun fight early in the story it would have a drastic effect on the outcome of the story. Additionally, Heros and Villians alike may just be wearing Plot Armor to avoid being shot at only until their part in the story is completed.

Constrast Only a Flesh Wound and Almost Lethal Weapons where instead of instant death, gunshot wounds are merely inconvenient as well as Rasputinian Death, Made of Iron.

Not to be confused with Shot to the Heart"

EDIT: touched it up some more

edited 10th Dec '12 5:30:53 AM by DoveAlexa

That description looks pretty good to me.

Okay, left it for the weekend for more feedback, and since everyone seems okay with it I'll be putting the new description on the page now and getting back to sorting, (busy weekend).

Works for me.

A lot of the stuff left behind is just junk, so if it's clearly not IDB or any other trope, I'm just going to delete it since it makes it harder to find stuff that goes at least somewhere else.

If it is junk i would zap it. If you think it can be saved and moved leave a little note or mark by the entry and I will poke at and try find a home for it.

I normally use the tilde swish mark ~ this when I mark entries for large clean up so they are easy to find when I go to mov ethem.

Okay, most of it is just death is dramatic. I'll be combing out junk from top down so mostly the leftovers will be at the top, if not I'll try and mark. There is also the wolf's rain entry which is bugging me, because I can't tell if the dying character in question is a wolf or a person. Not a big deal, it can just go into death is dramatic but if its a guy biting another it could also go into Man bites Man.

edit: Also, these three examples are all not IDB, and while might be death is dramatic, since they spend the whole movie dying, and in same cases narrating said movie, is there a special trope for that? They seem pretty special to me.

"* In the Film Noir classic Double Indemnity, the narrator gets shot prior to the movie's start, and retells everything before dying. In other words, he slowly bleeds to death for the whole movie, not kicking it until the end. The movie's what? An hour? Ninety minutes? That's some perseverance!~

• Averted in Dead Man. This is, in fact, the core of the film's plot: Johnny Depp's character is shot early on and spends the rest of the movie dying.~
• Averted in The World Is Not Enough. Renard spends the entirety of the film with a bullet lodged in his brain that is slowly killing him."

edited 12th Dec '12 3:57:34 AM by DoveAlexa

Yeah I saw those. Dying Narrative/Death Bed Narrative or something like that I will take a look around.

The closest we have is Posthumous Narration. I did spy a YKTTW for characters who are not yet dead.

The World Is Not Enough could possibly fall under something Time-Delayed Death or You Are Already Dead. The antagonist will die from the nature of the injury sooner or later if he is not killed first.

Ok found the best fit for The World Is Not Enough. Living on Borrowed Time

edited 12th Dec '12 4:50:12 PM by TuefelHundenIV