I don't know if you meant to put this here instead of the Trope Repair Shop, but I found these;
- Four Is Death: The bus Plankton willingly tries to get run over by was said to come by 4:00.
- Four Is Death: When SpongeBob falls asleep at his Pretty Patty stand, he dreams that he and his pineapple house are shown aging waiting for customers to come:
SpongeBob: I'm ready!
Middle-Aged SpongeBob: I'm ready.
Old SpongeBob: I'm ready.
(SpongeBob is now dead, in his place is a tombstone reading "R.I.P. I'm Ready" and his house is gone) - Four Is Death: Mr. Krabs tells SpongeBob and Patrick a story of a man who stuck his tongue out at people 444 times, which prevented him from putting it back in. The number also foreshadows how grotesque the episode becomes.
- Four Is Death: This was only the fourth time Glove World was seen, and is shutting down forever.
All of these come from the Recap pages of the SpongeBob SquarePants episodes "One Coarse Meal", "Patty Hype", "Face Freeze" and "Glove World R.I.P.", respectively. All of these look like coincidental shoehorns (the third one doesn't even have anything to do with death). Combined all the shoehorns in the OP, I see how this is be a problem.
I’d advise bringing this to TRS as well. I think the problem is that the title seems to convey the idea of “the number four is used in a scenario that also involves death”, regardless of there being any actual symbolism or not. I think it needs to be renamed to something like Four Death Symbolism or something among those lines.
back lolThe reason I posted it here is because the trope description does make a point about it only being used for when the number 4 is both significant and associated with death/misfortune, and it's possible a lot of the misuse is older and just hasn't been cleared out enough from the time when the main article didn't have that clarification.
But it's true that maybe we should go on a wick check just to make sure.
Bumping because I was looking at Resident Evil Village and saw Four Is Death listed under the "Four Houses General" tab in place of what really should be Elite Four, so it's clear people still aren't getting the message as to what Four Is Death really means.
Also because TRS is closed for now as we've hit the maximum number of opened threads at the moment and who knows when I'll have the ability to create a new thread there. In the meanwhile, we can just focus on cleanup.
Edited by AlleyOop on May 7th 2021 at 10:51:57 AM
Bumping again to keep this thread from falling off, as TRS is still locked for the time being.
I made a thread about it earlier but it died before it could get unlocked. Anyway, while the page description for Four Is Death makes it clear that it is only meant to be used for examples where the "four" association is fairly significant, there's still a great deal of misuse of it for any instance of four being associated with various possibly coincidental negative things (either to themselves or their enemies), or former examples of what is now known as Elite Four. As there are currently 1922 wicks it's a lot of wicks to comb through manually to check for misuse. So I was hoping to get some help on that.
And possibly make some changes to the trope description to cut down on future misuse.
To see some examples of what I mean, here's a sampling of the Anime/Manga section alone:
Edited by AlleyOop on May 7th 2021 at 10:53:03 AM