Needs Help: Good People Have Good Sex

Crediting Tonwen for the OP. They gave others permission to launch this thread for them.

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The Problem

Good People Have Good Sex is extremely unhealthy at the moment and this can be easily demonstrated by the results of the wick check, results below.

• 4/50 explicitly contrasted the healthy sex life of the hero(es) with the unhealthy one(s) of the villain(s).
• 3/50 contrasted a Loveless relationship with a healthy or at least active one
• 17/50 examples described the hero or heroes having good sex
• 2/50 described the hero as a Sex God. These are explicitly misuse.
• 8/50 just described people having sex. These are also explicitly misuse.
• 5/50 were other forms of misuse (a recurring one was confusing it with Sex Is Good)
• 9/50 were ZCEs
• 2/50 were Index Entries

Now... the reason I did not mark the top 3 as correct or incorrect use is due to the secondary issue. The trope is very unclear about what it wants to be, or at the very least, has enough contradictory elements to make it unclear.

The image and full description seem to emphasize this is a trope about contrasting the hero's healthy and romatic sex to the villain's, which is either gross, unsuccessful, unfulfilling, or "deviant" (although I found no examples of the last one).

The Laconic and most common use, however, probably caused by the first paragraph of the description doing nothing but talking about how the hero is great at sex, are simply describing that the hero or heroes have great, healthy sex lives.

I also separated out the Loveless vs healthy/active examples, as two of the three are about loveless heroes vs sexually active villains.

My proposed solution(s)

I have proposed solutions for the three definitions that seemed to be the most tropeworthy of the bunch.

• The first is about what to do with the (seemingly) intended definition of contrasting the hero's healthy sex life vs the villain's unhealthy one. I propose renaming the trope and tweaking the description and laconic to make it crystal clear that this is the intended definition.

• The second is about what to do with the "loveless vs active" examples. I think these would be best as a sister or subtrope, so we can yard them (or make a split trope for them, if that's within the reach of the thread.)

• The third is for the "hero has good sex" examples. I would just axe them as " the hero is good at sex" seems like chairs to me, but if people think that they're a trope, they can be yarded too.

The other misues, at least in my opinion, are redundant with existing tropes, or People Sit on Chairs, and should just be cut off.

Macron's notes

~Tonwen

Macron's notes

Rename and retool to Hero Villain Sex Life Contrast / Contrasting Sex Life Morality if possible (that wick count makes me think it's not) and cut/yard other concepts from examples.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I don't agree with the idea of axing the "good characters have good sex" idea. The number of good characters who most certainly aren't good at intercourse is just as plentiful as those who have positive sexual experiences. Plus, not everyone has healthy sex lives out in the real world.

Trust no one.

I agree with this, I think. Chaste Hero and Celibate Hero - I forget which is which - are Older Than Dirt out of longstanding cultural norms (similar to Virgin Power). I think there is a convention in which heroes are chaste or romantic, while antiheroes and villains are sexual, and the choice to portray a hero having a sex life, and what a "good" sex life looks like, is often a deliberate one.

If the point is to deliberately contrast heroic and villainous sexual relationships, though, I think separating the loveless and deviant villains is splitting hairs. And the trope should be added to Good and Evil for Your Convenience (right next to Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains).

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Right, what we need to do is hone in on the contrast part. Heroes having good sex is only relevant if there's a meaning behind it, otherwise it's sort of just the norm in media unless they want to make a point out of showing bad sex. Point is, I don't think that the concept in isolation is a meaningful concept if there's no contrast or symbolism behind it.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

A Chaste Hero is unaware of romantic love others might feel for them. A Celibate Hero actively shuns romance.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Sep 22nd 2022 at 7:23:54 AM

Right, okay. Both are relevant, then.

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

I think renaming to indicate that "good" means "healthy" instead of either "morally right" or "satisfying [to their partner]" would be good.

Edit: Oh, and I was voting to tweak the definition to be it about heroes having healthy sex lives and villains having unhealthy ones.

Another edit: Maybe that should be Yarded because I misread the tally in the wick check for those examples. Either way, I don't think "hero is good at sex" is sufficiently different from Sex God, and the other ones about heroes having sex in general are probably Chairs.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 22nd 2022 at 7:43:31 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

If this trope is about contrast, all that should matter is that the sex the heroic characters have is portrayed as better than the sex villains have.

Edited by SharkToast on Sep 22nd 2022 at 6:16:57 AM

Yeah, to sum up my points on a few things

• The new title needs to emphasize the contrast, the current one is probably best left as a disambiguation between the new title, Happily Married, Sex God, and any other potentially applicable tropes.

• The "Loveless" examples were separated because a majority of them had a loveless hero contrasted with a sexually active villain, which feels distinct enough to at least be worth yard.

• As Gaston said , "The hero has good sex" is nearly indistinguishable from Sex God, and pretty much all of my examples I found in the wick check are very low context and don't establish why it's an important or meaningful narrative element, just that it's "a thing that's there" with no real pattern to them.

"Grandmaster Combat, son!"

Good Sex Evil Sex, like Good Scars, Evil Scars?

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

To Good Sex Evil Sex.

I'm a bigger fan of something like Hero Villain Sex Life Contrast.

Good Sex Evil Sex may just lead to fixation on what constitutes "Evil sex", or people confusing it with something like Bondage Is Bad or even Sex Is Evil.

"Grandmaster Combat, son!"

I'm not a big fan of Good Scars, Evil Scars analogy, as I saw it has a lot of examples that show only one of the two (the description doesn't really require it).

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Good Colors, Evil Colors had the same problem once upon a time.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I have seen Good Scars, Evil Scars examples misused as just "character has scars", so I don't think that Good Sex Evil Sex would be good re-name for a trope that really needs a better name

The issue with Hero Villain Sex Life Contrast is that it doesn't have the "good people are good at sex" implication that the description focuses on, as the title implies the contrast can be that the villain is good in bed while the hero isn't. Unless we do agree to broaden/re-tool the scope of the trope to also fit that idea.

Edited by BlackMage43 on Sep 22nd 2022 at 9:14:05 AM

Weren't we also trying to get away from snowclone titles like that?

It could be a straightforward Heroes Have Better Sex Life Than Villains. It's not witty, but it's as clear as it gets.

Edit: or Heroes Have Better Sex Than Villains

Edited by kundoo on Sep 22nd 2022 at 10:55:26 AM

You didn't see anything.

I'd rather go with "sex life/lives" instead of just "sex" to avoid confusing people into thinking this is related to Sex God.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 22nd 2022 at 1:57:55 PM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Heroes Have Better Sex Lives Than Villains is annoyingly wordy, but otherwise works.

Did my suggestion seem valid that a contrast between heroes and anti-heroes might also count?

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

Maybe Good People Good Sex Lives would work. Yes, it's another "[adjective] [noun], [adjective] [noun]" name, but I think it would say what the current name was trying to say. Or maybe Good People Have Good Sex Lives would work; it would be easier to change valid wicks to it due to the addition of a single word.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 23rd 2022 at 3:29:34 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

That doesn't really convey that the trope needs a contrast with the villains' bad sex lives though. Considering that the largest proportion of the examples in the wick check only has half the trope ("the hero or heroes having good sex"), that's probably not a good idea.

I would like to point out that the current description only considers "villains have weak, unfulfilling sex" to be a "corollary" of the first paragraph, and before March 2017 it was described as "another version", which while being clunkier language (presumably the reason for the change), makes clearer that the two parts are not intended to be taken together as both being definitive of the trope, but rather as different manifestations of it, or perhaps with the villainous part as an Internal Subtrope. (Notably, the discussion page consists primarily of people being confused about a different distinction, whether it's about heroes having "correct", idealized sex or just incredibly pleasing sex, all of it from 2015 or earlier.)

My inclination would be to keep the current name as being solely about heroes and other good characters having good sex, and possibly split off a separate Bad People Have Bad Sex trope, while also cleaning up the description to not only make clearer what the trope is and isn't but also do something about the meandering last few paragraphs describing adjacent phenomena (which probably doesn't help with trying to figure out how important the second paragraph is). The idea that the contrast is what's important doesn't seem to have ever been consciously part of the trope and would likely need to go through the Launch Pad. However, in works where Sex Is Good or at least natural, that doesn't hold the Chaste or Celibate Hero as the ideal, identifying the contrast may be necessary to keep the trope from being chairs (by making sure there's a connection between the good person and the good sex), and if it's determined that the original concept was chairs regardless, a trope focusing on the contrast would probably be the only thing salvageable from it.

Edited by MorganWick on Sep 23rd 2022 at 3:34:05 AM

I'm not sure that the idea that good people have good sex is tropeworthy on its own. It seema incidental. Some people are good, some people have good sex life, but there's no obvious connection between the two facts. And when there is a connection, it's too self evident (good people are more attentive to each other and are not jerks) to be a trope.

You didn't see anything.