Hindsight Cleanup

Bringing up the following examples from Mortal Kombat: Conquest:

• Harsher in Hindsight: The ending to the show, where Shao Kahn kills everyone, is oddly prescient of Mortal Kombat 9, which ends with Shao Kahn killing almost everyone. In both cases, Raiden unwittingly caused the destruction and Kahn used super-powerful proxies to fight in his stead instead of fighting himself.
  • Before Shang Tsung and Quan Chi formed the Deadly Alliance they formed the Unholy Alliance.
  • If the Kreeyans were a little more insectoid and a little less sexy they’d be Kytinn.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the first episode, the spirit of Scorpion possesses Takeda, one of the Baron's bodyguards. Years later in MKX, a warrior named Takeda using chain whips and trained by the Shirai Ryu appears.

Yeah, I'd say cut all of those examples except for the first "Hunger Strikes" one.

I'd say cut those examples; they seem like stretches.

YMMV.Mortal Kombat 9

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Stryker's pre-battle quote is "Police brutality, coming up!", a threat he makes good on even if the player chooses not to use a Fatality. A few years later, police brutality would become a hot button issue in America due to several publicized police shootings.

This was surprisingly added back in 2016 (AKA the worst year ever before 2020 came along). Wasn't police brutality a thing before 2011 anyway?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jun 5th 2021 at 1:06:32 PM

It's Black Comedy. It's supposed to be offensive. Remove.

It isn't hindsight anyway, Shrek 2 made a police brutality joke and that came out in 2004. Hell, according to Wikipedia, police brutality was a thing since the mid 19th century, with the earliest case of police brutality towards African Americans being in 1991.

This was added to Cruella under Hilarious in Hindsight, after someone moved it there from Memetic Mutation:

• Some people responded Cruella's "I was born brilliant" line in the trailer by pointing out that she was outsmarted by dogs/puppies in the original story.

From the get-go, it seems to be cuttable, but I discourage impulsive cutting.

I’m not seeing the hindsight part of that entry.

There were probably even earlier cases of this happening to black people, but it probably never got attention due to the lack of things such as the internet.

Bringing up the following examples from Skyfall:

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Silva's hacking attacks on MI-6, using skull imagery and insulting language while completely taking over the organization's computer systems and releasing classified information on agents, call to mind the massive hack attack on the film's distributor, Sony Pictures, that crippled the company in late 2014 and led to the release of a large number of private and compromising documents, including many related to Spectre, the follow-up to Skyfall.
  • After the explosion at MI-6, the news reports "a terrorist attack in the heart of London, leaving 6 dead and many more injured". In March 2017, a terrorist attack in Westminster (just two bridges further) also claimed the lives of 6 (including the perpetrator) and left many more injured.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Word of God said that Silva was inspired in part by Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds. Christoph Waltz, who played Landa, was later cast as Franz Oberhauser aka Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Big Bad of the next film, Spectre.
  • Q says they "don't go in for" things like exploding pens anymore, but in the next movie, he's given an exploding wristwatch.

• Cut the hacking one. Attacks on the systems of a film studio are not equatable with an assault on government security organs, even if the other parallels are ironic.
• Keep the Terrorist attack. Very serious, and the echoes are eerie.
• Q department is always changing its mind anyway - are we really expecting consistency?

Found these three on Pokémon Red and Blue while checking a wick for another project:

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the Pewter City Museum, there is a model of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated in 2003. While it's still explicitly referred to as such in the Japanese version of the remakes (since the Japanese versions were released before the accident happened), in the English version, it's simply referred to as "Space Shuttle".
  • As soon as the player finishes his objective there, the S.S. Anne would be last seen leaving Vermilion Harbor. Now, think back to the anime episode that loosely adapted that plot...
  • Before the Rival battle in Pokémon Tower, he says: "Your Pokémon don't look dead! I can at least make them faint!" Flash forward to the popularization of Final Death runs, particularly the Nuzlocke challenge, and the line goes straight from general jerkassery to a Deadly Euphemism, with a possible side of Kick Them While They Are Down if you'd lost one of your Pokémon recently.

I don't know the series or universe, so I can't tell if the last is an example, but neither of the first two seem to be serious moments in the first place, and the Shuttle wasn't supposed to be funny either, so not FAM. Can I cut?

Harsher in Hindsight doesn't need to be played dead seriously. It can be neutral. The first one was outright changed due to the circumstances so I'd keep it, but the second is a half-context example and the third I'm unsure of, as it only applies to a specific population that does Self Imposed Challenges and not all of those challenges are taken seriously.

Yeah, I don't think either the second or the third fit. Especially the third, because we're not supposed to trope fanworks on the pages of the works they originate from. The first seems fine, seeing as how they actually dropped the name Columbia from the English version (I'd never even heard of that before; sounds like one of the weirder gen 1 cases of Earth Drift).

From Dishonored

• Harsher in Hindsight: The Rat Plague and some of the characters' dialogue about it becomes painfully familiar following the COVID-19 Pandemic.Pretty sure that plot element was based on the bubonic plague. Either way, I deleted it as a COVID shoehorn
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Pretty much Yahtzee's main rant about the game was he was annoyed about Corvo being a Silent Protagonist. So The Knife of Dunwall gives Daud a speaking role. Indeed, Harvey Smith later confirmed that the developers had grown tired of the trope and wanted to change gears and voice Corvo, but that it was too late in development to bring it in. Come the sequel, and Corvo's now Suddenly Voiced.So they were planning on having Corvo be voiced, but couldn't due to time, then had him voiced in the sequel? Not sure if that's an example
    • Which got a whole lot more hilarious when Corvo's voice actor for the sequel is none other than Stephen Russell.Seems like unrelated actor trivia
  • Part of the game's worldbuilding mentions something known as "The Fugue Feast," in which all rule of law is abandoned for an extended period of time and all crime is legal. Not even a year later, The Purge came out.
    • Although The Fugue Feast was based on a popular cultural phenomenon of 'inverted time' when the social roles and customs were reversed or in other way changed. The most common example is the Venetian Carnival and Ancient Roman Bacchanalia. The 'time outside time' concept is also present in various cultures.Seems like this entry just said the previous entry isn't valid hindsight, if they're both based on similar ideas
  • One of the guests at the Boyles' party remarks that the new Lord Regent will "make us great again".Isn't "Make [X] Great Again" an automatic cut?

Think so, yes. And it's been standard fascist/authoritarian rhetoric since before Donald Trump was even born anyway, so it's not like it'd be "hindsight" in the first place.

Edited by nrjxll on Jun 7th 2021 at 9:00:53 AM

Drake Bell's recent scandal makes the pages for the Nickelodeon shows he was on worth watching, especially that Fairy Odd-parents movie where he played an adult who still acted like a child. I imagine the hindsight shoehorn vultures are already circling.

...Well now I'm gonna make that connection between the movie and his scandals. Not gonna list it on the page though.

I don't know what happened (and I honestly don't want to), but Drake & Josh already has something about it under "Funny Aneurysm" Moment:

• Drake's status as the KidAnova and the aforementioned episode where he wrestles his girlfriend becomes very uncomfortable after several allegations of abuse against Drake were made public in real life.

That's not even a good example anyway; there's no correlation between childhood romance and abuse allegations.

That makes two reasons to cut.

Bringing up the following examples from Spectre:

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Bond stopping the plan to explode a stadium in Mexico City has kinda become this after the terrorist attacks in France on 13 November 2015, two days after the film's French release. Considering terrorist attacks that happened a couple of days earlier in Beirut, Lebanon, and the fact that, in the movie, the titular organization orchestrates a series of global terrorist attacks in order to "persuade" the world's intelligence agencies to unite under a single banner, makes it ripe for conspiracy theories.
  • The fact that some reinforced surveillance laws in the wake of the January attacks were voted on the very day of the November attacks didn't help and had a particularly eerie resonance, considering the "Nine Eyes" global surveillance merging program in the film.

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At one point in Sherlock, Moriarty says "It's not the fall that kills you. Never the fall. It's the landing!" Considering Max Denbigh's demise...
  • Just a few months later, Shere Khan would be sporting a scarred face with a milky-white eye, and revealing a disorder for Disproportionate Retribution, and tells someone about the nature of the cuckoo bird.
  • A 2012 interview had Daniel Craig admit that it was difficult to include the more camp elements of the Bond franchise after being so effectively parodied by the Austin Powers films. Cue the reveal that, just like in Austin Powers, Blofeld and James Bond are revealed to be brothers.

Harsher in Hindsight:

• The terror attacks don't sound similar. Sounds like another coincidental release date.

Hilarious In H Indsight:

• "It's not the fall that kills you" is a very old saying. Don't know how Sherlock is connected. And a ZCE in any event.
• Fan Myopia
• Should be on the earlier work anyway, but Bond and Blofeld aren't brothers. Bond was raised by Blofeld's family. So it's not similar.

Edited by maxwellsilver on Jun 8th 2021 at 1:34:07 PM

This is on Elmo Saves Christmas under Harsher in Hindsight:

• The Bad Future, during next year's Christmas, also qualifies for this with the COVID-19 pandemic eventually affects reality (most of the stores are closed, shut down, public gatherings are restricted restricted, and everyone is isolated).

COVID shoehorn. Cut.

From The Day Today:

• Hilarious in Hindsight: As mentioned on the main page, the series appears to have somehow inspired the television news program openings of today, complete with computer-designed graphics and overly pretentious music. Compare and contrast, if you will, The Day Today's opening with that of the current BBC News, or Channel 4's.

I know that YMMV.Lily Orchard is locked, but here's some stuff from there.

• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: While Lily's line "Fuck you, Cishet scum!" in the Over A Barrel review was something of a funny jab at Tumblr, the line is put into a very different light once she came out as transgender.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Many of the early Rather Vocalized Illusion episodes centered around anti-feminism, anti-social justice, and a fetishization for Free Speech that one would typically expect from a teenager with little perspective on the real world. Cut to five years later and Lily has grown up while darker sections of the internet seem to have adopted these same mindsets with an almost violent passion.
  • Lily's initial Glass of Water videos discussing the negativity of Digibrony and Tommy Oliver become this with Season 5, where Lily has been at her most negative and bitter.
  • Lily's silent Pony OC slowly became increasingly tired and frustrated with Commander Firebrand in her appearances in Taking Too Seriously. Then comes the news that their real life friendship is over for much the same reason. Heck, pretty much everything involving her and Josh is this now.

EDIT: I mistook the heartwarming moments for Heartwarming in Hindsight. Sorry about that.

Edited by MrMediaGuy2 on Jun 8th 2021 at 4:51:22 AM