Is this an example?

Yeah, the first two are stealth complaining about the show, so that's an easy cut. As for the third ... I mean yes Shkreli is widely hated, bu, that's not what is meant by Acceptable Targets (vague as it is). If it has to stay, I would word it to be more about the whole startup-bro culture (your tech-bros, dotcom bros, etc) than Shkreli in particular.

Edited by laserviking42 on Mar 20th 2022 at 6:51:56 AM

Those examples for Dexter's Laboratory seem stretched. Basically none of the supposedly dark episodes are actually that dark. They deal with things that, in real life, would be something serious, but the episodes are just as light-hearted as you could expect from the show.

Removed. I don't know a thing about that group and don't know how I would rewrite it. Also, from that same page:

• Abandon Shipping:
  • The relatively-popular ship of Thea/Tommy from Season 1 died a quiet death in Season 2; both because of Thea/Roy, and because Tommy was (posthumously) revealed to be Thea's half-brother on their biological father Malcolm's side. Of course, this also means that Tommy's already-existing Big Brother Instinct towards Thea can be explored further in fan works, assuming they don't kill him off as per canon). Or, y'know, Incest Yay.
  • Supporters of Oliver/Felicity have been steadily jumping ship across Seasons 3 and 4 as their relationship became more and more toxic — more than any other relationship on the show (including Oliver/Laurel, which saw pre-series Oliver cheat on Laurel with her sister). For some, this is not only because of the increasing drama and angst in a formerly subdued, drama-free relationship but also because they feel Olicity takes up screen time better spent on other plots and characters. Their unnecessary conflict concerning Oliver's secret son William has also turned off a lot of fans, with the audience divided over blaming Oliver for lying to his fiancee when he specifically promised he'd stop or blaming Felicity for breaking up with him when she's kept secrets herself, which caused her to lose supporters. Season 5 did not help fan-perception of the ship, as the temporary relationships Oliver and Felicity had that season were far less toxic than their own and made people question why they even got back together at the end of the season considering how badly the initial relationship ended. What absolutely killed the pairing's popularity, however, was the ending to the 2017 crossover Crisis on Earth-X: the infamous double wedding, which was hated by everyone except the most diehard of Olicity shippers. After that, only Olicity's most hardcore supporters bother to defend the pairing these days — everyone else, including regular Olicity shippers and fans who didn't give a damn about Arrow or Olicity, came to outright despise it.
  • Oddly inverted with the Lauriver ship. Despite initially being despised at the beginning of the show, it grew more popular as the show went on due to Laurel being Rescued from the Scrappy Heap after some major Character Development (combined with the above decline of Olicity's popularity), and every attempt the writers made to sink the pairing only made it more popular. In particular note is the 100th Episode Milestone Celebration, which solidified it as a Fan-Preferred Couple, where Oliver and "Laurel" showed more chemistry together as a couple than they ever did during the first season (and more chemistry than Oliver and Felicity ever did since becoming the Official Couple). The forced separation between the two at the end of the episode is still regarded as one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the entire series.

The first two seem fine, if a little negative, but this is a negative trope, my question is about the third one. It says its inverted. That is playing with and YMMV can't be played with. Plus from my research it really isn't inverted as those who didn't ship the two didn't suddenly start, its just the ones who did got louder. Does the last one really belong?

Edited by Bullman on Mar 20th 2022 at 6:46:49 AM

Just reading the Abandon Shipping description made me feel exhausted ... anyways, you are correct, YMMV cannot be inverted. Cut away.

I'm curious to whether these examples on Magical Negro count:

• An interesting variation is when a black character gets advice from their mature, future self. They may literally be magical, as we never learn how the future self appears in the present.
  • In a milk commercial [1], a little girl meets a frowsy, tired woman who says "I'm you from the future". When the girl drinks milk, the woman suddenly becomes an award-winning athlete.
  • There's a car commercial where a young man gets a ride from his older self, showing him the type of car he could get. When he drops the younger man off, he says "By the way...your future wife is in there."
  • A 2022 commercial for Crypto.com [2] takes place in the bedroom of Le Bron James in 2003. The present-day Le Bron is telling him about the future, but declines to tell him whether he should turn pro.

Thoughts?

Its gone.

From Mercury's section in Characters.RWBY Salems Faction:

• Asshole Victim: Subverted. After losing his match to Yang, the episode ends with the audience seeing Yang inexplicably attack a defeated opponent who is lying on the ground. They angrily begin booing Yang in support of Mercury. However, Emerald made Yang hallucinate Mercury attack her, so she fought back in self-defense. The audience couldn't see the illusion and didn't know that Mercury had prosthetic legs, so was neither in pain nor danger.

Asshole Victim is when someone dies or suffers a grisly fate and it wasn't in response to what they did. Does this count as a valid example?

Also, from Trivia.One Piece:

• I Knew It!:
  • It was speculated among the fandom for many years that Ace and Luffy were not blood related, despite a remarkable physical resemblance and matching personality traits. Eventually, this was confirmed, but then the Wham Episode came when Oda revealed who Ace's actual blood family was.
  • Was that Dragon and his revolutionaries skulking in the port the night after Sabo's boat got blown up? Yes it was, and Sabo is alive, has signed on with the revolutionaries, and is absolutely badass, just as predicted.
  • There were numerous fan predictions and fake spoilers of Blackbeard showing up with the Level Six prisoners during Whitebeard's war on the Marines. Sure enough, he did, but not when they thought, him stealing Whitebeard's power and with Avaro Pizaro either.
  • There was speculation that Charlotte Pudding, Big Mom's daughter and Sanji's arranged fiancee wasn't as nice as she seemed, despite helping the Straw Hats get to Sanji's location and the appearance of two of her sisters who were in perfectly arranged marriages and were willing to betray their colossal mother. It seemed to die down when she implied she willing to die for the good guys, only to be revealed in the next chapter she was just pretending to be a nice girl and was evil all along (how evil? She tells Sanji's sister Reiju that she plans on killing the whole Vinsmoke family on Sanji's wedding day).
  • While on the subject, many fans had also speculated that Pudding was the three-eyed girl who first appeared with Big Mom in Chapter 651. This was confirmed in Chapter 850.
  • Quite a few fans correctly guessed that there would be a live-action adaptation of One Piece.
  • Due to one online fan translation changing Katakuri's name to "Dogtooth", it was speculated that Charlotte Katakuri was hiding an array of sharp, animalstic teeth beneath his cape. Ironically, this was a complete coincidence, since this translation missed the intended theme of his name ("Katakuri" is a type of starch, which fits with the Edible Theme Naming of Big Mom's children) and mistakenly changed it to English because "Katakuri" is also the Japanese name for a flower called the dogtooth violet.
  • Many predicted that the Live-Action Adaptation would be streaming on Netflix. They were right.
  • Quite a few fans correctly guessed that the live-action series would be filmed in South Africa.
  • The moment the live-action series was announced in 2017, many fans predicted that Mackenyu and Emily Rudd would respectively play Zoro and Nami, which was eventually confirmed with the November 2021 casting announcement.
  • Those who read the Live-Action Adaptation's casting news correctly guessed that Garp would be making an appearance in the first season.

True example?

Edited by gjjones on Mar 20th 2022 at 10:31:12 AM

In Expansion Pack World, there's this Narnia example referencing a question in the description (put in a quote block first for context) that it itself doubts:

• As mentioned above, The Chronicles of Narnia books needed a lot of expansion to facilitate more stories. This caused plot inconsistencies, some of which were explained in the prequel, The Magician's Nephew. The specific example in the intro may not be one, though: the prophecy is not "four humans", but "two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve," that is, two boys and two girls that are not native to Narnia or its neighbors. This one actually was explained in Prince Caspian; the humans that founded those countries came over from Earth in the intervening centuries.

Given that, does it not count as an example?

Edited by harryhenry on Mar 21st 2022 at 5:02:31 AM

Asshole Victim is not necessarily their fault (that would be Laser-Guided Karma) but their general assholishness just meant it would happen sooner or later. Onto that specific example ... let's see:

• Subverted. After losing his match to Yang (who lost the match?), the episode ends with the audience seeing Yang (did Yang lose the match??) inexplicably attack a defeated opponent who is lying on the ground. They (the audience??) angrily begin booing Yang in support of Mercury (did Mercury lose the match?) . However, Emerald (a third person?) made Yang hallucinate Mercury attack her (wait what? Yang who lost the match? I thought a "he" lost the match), so she fought back in self-defense. The audience couldn't see the illusion and didn't know that Mercury had prosthetic legs, so was neither in pain nor danger.

I can't even tell what's going on in this example. Is someone set up to be the Asshole Victim then at the last point, turns out not to be? That would effectively be a subversion, though other tropes might fit that better. But it needs a rewrite to be clearer.

—-

I mean ... yes? The example shouldn't reference another example (even in the trope description), but yes the later Narnia books were add-ons to a story that didn't exactly have them in mind in the beginning.

—-

Bumping my query.

Edited by laserviking42 on Mar 20th 2022 at 12:18:23 PM

It is an example of the trope, since each book adds on new parts to the world, but you wouldn't know it from that write-up. (And the writer of the justifying edit is mistaken; all humans in the Narnia world are descended from Adam and Eve, since the first humans to arrive in Narnia came from our world.)

Checking the edit history, it appears to be a bit of old natter folded into the example in 2014, and just left there.

Edited by harryhenry on Mar 21st 2022 at 5:36:47 AM

Good Adultery, Bad Adultery clarifies that it requires at least two instances of adultery to be contrasted in the narrative, but what if it's one case of adultery where the morality of the situation is discussed? Cuz in Human Resources they have an entire song where characters pretty much claim that hooking up with someone else's lover is okay if you're in love, but if it's driven by sex alone, then it's not. It feels like a Discussed Trope but it's only about one situation.

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 20th 2022 at 1:09:24 PM

Considering the trope description has in bold: "there are at least two instances of cheating, and the work treats one as 'good' and the other as 'bad'", I would have to say that having two instances is rather integral to the trope.

That may be more Sympathetic Adulterer than anything else.

Well, this is a case where one case of adultery is split into two different hypothetical scenarios — one where she's genuinely in love with the guy and one where she just wants to get laid. The former hypothetical is defended and the latter hypothetical is shunned.

It's not really Sympathetic Adulterer because she's not supposed to be sympathetic for doing this — the work is showcasing a flawed Double Standard in these characters' eyes, as they're Love Freaks who will only justify this if she's in love with the dude.

From Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:

• The Bus Came Back: The trailer shows the return of Flabébé, which was unusable throughout Gen VIII.

Was this Pokemon explicitly written out of the story? This seems like shoehorning.

No Put on a Bus, not The Bus Came Back.

There was a pre-emptive Put on a Bus entry that caused an edit war on the same page and was eventually removed, so that can go, too.

Might need a commented out note saying not to include those examples for Scarlet and Violet at this point.

Cool. Deleted and added a commented-out note citing this thread.

I think it's misuse. It's a one-on-one tournament match. The villains are fixing the matches so set up Mercury to fight Yang because Yang is so predictable in a fight, she's easy to manipulate. So Mercury throws the match to make Yang win the fight. As she leaves the arena, Mercury attacks her from behind, so she shoots him down. This triggers the tournament audience to boo and security to rush out to arrest her.

That's because one of the villains is sitting in the audience and has an illusion ability. She made Yang hallucinate that Mercury was attacking her. What actually happens is that she shoots a downed opponent in the leg for no good reason. She's easy to frame because she is a hothead in a fight who always wins her matches through a rage-linked power-up. Meanwhile, Mercury is secretly a double-amputee with cyberlegs, so he can take Yang's attack without being injured. She's disqualified and her reputation is damaged.

The show's audience sees what Yang sees, so we're fooled by the fake attack as well, and only see what really happened afterwards. While the internal audience is set up to sympathise with Mercury and demonise Yang, Mercury's just another Huntsman student to them — a young man who is training in the most noble and revered profession in the world, who is done a dirty during the setting's version of the Olympic Games (which is supposed to showcase how noble and honourable the next generation of Huntsmen are).

The show's viewers know he's an arsehole and a jerk, but we're set-up (with Yang) to think he's attacking her from behind, only to learn that he and his partner has just framed one the heroes — successfully. That hero is the one we're being set up to sympathise with. The villains are in full villain mode here, and successfully achieve exactly what they planned.

So, there's no Asshole Victim set-up here. We see a villain attack a hero only to learn that it never happened and she's just been framed on live television to further the villains' plans.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Mar 21st 2022 at 1:50:09 AM

Is it an example of The Bus Came Back if a minor guest character who appeared in one or two episodes recurs four or five seasons later?

For a character to qualify for The Bus Came Back, they would have first had to have been Put on a Bus, i.e. explicitly written off the work.

Speaking of The Bus Came Back, if the character appeared in a temporary setting in the main show (i.e. at a summer camp for a few episodes), and was written out because the characters left that location, does it count as The Bus Came Back if the character appears again in a spinoff focusing on their home life?

Like, they weren't written back into the same story, they just came back in a separate story in the same universe in a different location.

Do minor characters even apply for buses? It's expected of them to never show up again after the scene they were relevant for.

She was a recurring character in a four-episode arc, but it was a temporary setting to begin with.