What are the limits of Just Eat Gilligan?

The first half of Just Eat Gilligan really focuses on specifically the one character in a story who messes things up every time.

"Even a useless character can have his place in a show: as Comic Relief, a Kid-Appeal Character, or even a Hate Sink. But sometimes one person is so repeatedly and hopelessly incompetent that even the audience takes notice. If one character (or some other factor) is the main reason for every failure, why does the rest of the cast not account for that? Why do the rest of the castaways keep Gilligan around? Why don't they just shoot him? (or lock him in his room, have a volunteer take him somewhere out of the way, or send him on a Snipe Hunt?)"

However, the the second half of the intro and the laconic are much broader.

"A very simple action would solve all the story's problems, but they don't do it because there'd be no plot."

The final AKA paragraph is very odd because it is mostly comprised of disguised examples that vary widely in what they cover.

Don't Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: The trope namers were very successful. Recruiting adults wouldn't have immediately fixed the issue (an alien invasion).

Just Use the Eagles: This complaint has been debunked.

Just Ground Megan: I've seen very little Drake and Josh and it's been years, but doesn't Megan hide her true nature from her parents? Drake and Josh are the protagonists and they don't have the ability to ground her.

Just Move Out of Hawkins: The protagonists are mostly children who do not have the ability to decide to move on their own. Besides, moving would not prevent the inter-dimensional entities from going around killing people, as evidenced by the fact that some of them did move and the show continued to have conflict.

Just Fortify the Abbey (Red Wall): I'm pretty sure they do? Don't they get sieged a lot?

Just Spank Dennis (the Menace, US): Ignoring the issue of spanking, Dennis is regularly shown being punished.

Just Eat the MacGuffin: What does this even mean?

How broad is this trope? How simple does the solution have to be? Does it have to be made by the protagonists, or any character?

This is weird. The page's original description is a lot clearer about the page being about actions, not characters. It seems to have mutated to its current form over a period from 2015-20, starting with Smug Trope inserting language to the first paragraph that seemingly makes it about a character, then eyebones - who, bizarrely, previously added the paragraph about how no writer could be so stupid as to miss this stuff, which is one of the few remaining parts of the description pointing to the original definition - removed most of the remaining language that would have clearly defined it as being about an action, with the edit reason "Removed repetitious bit, again. Also removed digressive mention of Idiot Ball that was not apt." For reference, this was roughly what the description looked like not-quite-immediately before this latter removal. (The current Idiot Ball paragraph seems to have been added in more-or-less direct response to that removal.)

The first paragraph did still contain the line "It's any question viewers may have to which the only sensible answer is: 'Because then there'd be no show/movie/novel/game, that's why.'" That bit was eventually expanded into its own paragraph that should have made the actual definition clearer, albeit still potentially making it more specific than originally intended, but then Chariset almost completely removed that paragraph and even rephrased the invocation of the Anthropic Principle to apply specifically to "eating Gilligan".

Under different circumstances, I'd just take this to the description improvement thread as the record's pretty clear as to what the trope is supposed to be, but I suspect the name suffers from Trope-Namer Syndrome and is responsible for at least two different tropers (I suspect eyebones may have been more well-meaning) being misled as to what the trope actually is to the point of "correcting" the description to be closer to their misconception, so TRS may be called for.

Also, shouldn't this be YMMV? Pretty much any example can be subject to a Justifying Edit, and what's "obvious" to one person may not be to another (as Critical Research Failure can attest). It's already listed under Tropes Needing TRS for this reason, so I'm just going to add a bit about this definition confusion there.

(As for the list of alternative names, that seems to have originally been added partly to get claims to alternate names out of examples but was never really necessary and has gotten way out of hand.)

(Edit: removed my malformed tilde markup, which apparently I still haven't gotten the hang of.)

Edited by MorganWick on Jul 4th 2022 at 11:43:46 AM

eyebones is Fast Eddie, the site founder, for the record. The former is his account he created after retiring as admin.

This is another really, really old trope that wouldn't fly under our current rules.

1. It is named after a character, violating Trope-Namer Syndrome.
2. It combines objective elements: this character keeps messing up all the plans, with an audience reaction: this character should be eliminated.
3. It cannot decide whether it is about the character or the plot.

In terms of current tropology, Gilligan is The Millstone, so any examples that are about the character instead of the story are misuse and should be merged over there. What's left is the plot critique, and the critique is very specifically: "Everything that goes wrong could be solved if the characters would just take The Millstone out behind the shed and beat them senseless."

This situation calls to mind Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?, which is also about an audience critique of a work in which one or more characters refuse to apply a simple and obvious solution to their problems. What is important to remember here is that these are critiques, not in-universe story elements, unless the characters call themselves out.

Doylistically, the plot of Gilligan's Island only works if Gilligan keeps messing up all of the escape plans, because otherwise they would escape and there would be no show. So the answer to the question, "Why not murder Gilligan," is, "because that's the point of the show."

A wick check would help to determine how much overlap there is between Just Eat Gilligan and The Millstone, but I think we may end up applying definition-only treatment to this legacy trope.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 5th 2022 at 10:41:15 AM

As I noted, the trope only appears to be specifically about The Millstone because of repeated mistaken edits to the description, and until 2015-20 or so, could be easily described as "any situation where a course of action that should be obvious to the characters and writers would easily clear up all the cast's problems". Most of your critiques still apply with some minor rephrasing though.

~Hellboy 33 I noticed you tried to TRS this, but it got rejected due to a lack of a wick check.

I was thinking about wick checking this myself. I'll dump a possible link here—maybe I'll work on it too if I get a chance.

Possible link —> Just Eat Gilligan Wick Check

I don't really have the time to wick check it myself, so if you could at some point, that would be great.

Thanks. I think I may do that when I get a chance.

We have Just Eat Gilligan: scope and YMMV? going on. It might be worth moving this discussion there as more active and current and may have new things to consider.