Duplicate Trope: The Precious Precious Car

I'm not buying the distinction between this and Watch the Paint Job. Supposedly the former is for when the car's owner isn't a main character, and the latter for when they are, but I can't think of any other time we've made a distinction like that and I don't see how it materially affects the underlying trope.

The trope is "someone is overly attached to their Cool Car, and is punished for their avarice by something bad happening to it". How does their being a main character make a difference?

edited 11th Feb '14 9:54:22 AM by johnnye

The main thing in The Precious, Precious Car that I see as different is the karmic aspect, while Watch the Paint Job entails that the damage would get the character in trouble.

WTPJ:

"Maybe he owns it. Maybe he just bought it, probably blowing a fortune on it." [...] "...the more a character fawns over it as though it is one of the most important things in the world to him..."

I mean, that's a potential distinction we could introduce, but I don't see it as one that's communicated by the descriptions as they are.

I think the difference is that one is a one off gag. The other is basically a character treating a car as a separate character. The reason that the later has to be a main character or at least a recurring character is that it needs to involve far more character development.

I notice that some of the works I'm familiar with in the Watch the Paint Job examples are just cars being damaged or totaled somehow, without any fawny scenes beforehand or angsty scenes afterward...well, not that I can remember, anyway. On the other hand, The Precious, Precious Car has some examples where the car doesn't end up getting wrecked.

It's possible Watch the Paint Job is intended to be the car equivalent of Ashes to Crashes/Priceless Ming Vase/Doomed Supermarket Display etc. while The Precious, Precious Car is about the owner's attitude towards the car—i.e. one is the vegetable stand getting knocked over, the other is its owner yelling "My cabbages!"

I think both are tropable. I agree, however, that the names and descriptions here are too close. I'd never have come up with that distinction if I didn't go through the examples on each of them.

Now, I've got a YKTTW going for Companion Car. I think it's sufficiently distinct from these two as written, but I figured I'd just double check to see if people agree.

Agree that Watch the Paint Job is intended to be a Chekhov's Gun (needs set up) and that The Precious, Precious Car only requires the aftermath.

edited 13th Feb '14 10:23:25 AM by DonaldthePotholer

It sounds a bit like you and Troacctid are arguing the exact opposite of each other regarding which one is which.

There is definitely a trope about a person having a desperately prideful attitude about their beautiful red sports car, and that almost always being a setup for the car getting damaged somehow. There's usually a long setup to this, with a lot of near-misses that the guy gets very panicky about. Take, for example, Ferris Buellers Day Off (although in that case it's the character's father who loves the car).

The Priceless Ming Vase-style "if you see a beautiful car, it's going to get totalled" is just the above trope Downplayed, in my opinion, but I can see how someone else might think it should be separate.

It seems to me that Troacctid was suggesting the former should be TPPC, and the latter WTPJ, while Donald was suggesting the other way around. Personally, I don't think it's a distinction worthy of upholding.

No, I meant that The Precious, Precious Car does not include the Chekhov's Gun aspect, it only refers to the owner's attitude. The scene where a guy fawns over his car would count regardless of whether it is later damaged. This is based on the presence of several examples where the car doesn't get wrecked.

edited 14th Feb '14 2:47:50 PM by troacctid

OK, so we could have one trope that was about "people who fawn over their cars", and one trope about "expensive cars that get totalled".

The problem with that is that we then lose the idea that the two things are frequently causally connected, which I think is itself tropable.

Unless we were to make the second trope "someone fawns over their expensive car, and it gets damaged", and either cut any cases of cars getting damaged where we don't see their owner at all, or call them Implied Tropes or Downplayed Tropes as appropriate.

Implied Trope makes good sense here, yeah.

This thread was clocked, but not announced; doing so now.

So does anyone else think anything needs doing with these, or is it just me? At the very least they need to be defined more clearly so they don't keep getting mistaken for each other.

Clock is set.

Clock's up; locking for inactivity/lack of consensus.