This never got a reply, but I'm adding another question in case anyone sees:
Is the fact that the fourth horseman of the Apocolypse is death a separate, unrelated trope? Should examples that are clearly about that and not about the Eastern concept of "four is death" be removed?
I was trying to clean up before (mostly obvious things like "there are enemies based on the Four Gods and they're really hard bosses, so four = death!"), but I noticed that the description says:
On an unrelated note, Christianity also has several examples of Four Is Death, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the fourth of which is Death) and the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, and Glory).
It describes those two things as examples, which I'm not sure is true. Should they be? Or should that be moved into the paragraph of "these are some unrelated appearances of death" with a note to the effect of "do not add examples that are just the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse or the Four Last Things unless there's some clear, unambiguous Eastern connection to "four" (四) = "death" (死) / "shi" / etc specifically?
Like I said above, I think the problem is that four is a sufficiently small number that it randomly shows up in a bunch of contexts; and that this trope is meant to be a very specific Eastern thing centered around references to those homophones and the cultural stuff that grew up around them. The fact that there are Four Horsemen and the last one is Death is an unrelated coincidence that has nothing to do with this trope beyond a brief note in the description along the lines of "here's an odd coincidence, but they're separate tropes; list anything about the Four Horsemen there and not here unless it's clearly intended to be a cultural-crossover thing."
Just looked at the Live Action TV and Film folders and woof. I think "Disney Channel shows normally end after their fourth season" is my favorite entry. Yeah, everything western that doesn't directly reference this trope needs to go. I'll have a crack at it.
The line about the Four Horsemen dates all the way back to 2008
, which I might have taken to mean that, while the trope was *inspired* by the Japanese association, the wiki elders, working before a more formal definition of what a trope is, considered any association of four with death to count... but besides the fact it doesn't go back to the oldest copies in the Internet Archive, the page image at the time, the logo of 4Kids Entertainment, wouldn't even fit that definition, just being a snarky Take That! So all it really means is that this page has been being misused, to the point of infecting the above-the-fold portion of the page, for a very long time, to the point of getting a mention at the end of the archived discussion
.
Some of the misuse may be due to the inertial force of wiki tradition. I remember when Elite Four wasn't a trope but Four Is Death was.
It is. ~Alley Oop was the OP — paging them to see if they have any thoughts with regard to this Trope Talk.
Yeah, this page is in need of a deep clean. I think a lot of the issues with the trope come from how old it was, so it became a dustbin for any and all examples of meaningful uses of the number four in media, and not all of them were erased with time.
Yeah, I was the one responsible for the Elite Four TLP in the first place, because that particular brand of misuse was so widespread and two different ideas in Japanese media were getting conflated on the same page. The idea of four mighty generals who happen to often be opponents comes from Buddhism, where four has a holy connotation, and is associated with organized religion. It's very distinct from the Sinitic word for "four" being a homonym for "death" and being considered a unlucky, which is more of a folk religious or superstitious idea.
But yeah, these ideas are extremely specific to the Sinosphere and only to cultures where "four" and "death" sound the same, and it's flagrant misuse to put examples of media from anywhere else unless they have a person of East Asian descent in a prominent position who's obviously doing it on purpose.
Though there's a lot of misuse with Asian media as well. I remember having to delete an example from Resident Evil Village which said that the antagonists being the Four Houses who are associated with horror movie monsters, and that's a massive stretch, even if Capcom is a Japanese company.
Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 11th 2024 at 10:36:32 AM
Examples from an Animesque would still qualify if they’re clearly referencing the Eastern tradition. So would this, I assume:
- Four Is Death: The sushi chef is perturbed by Deckard's order of four pieces, trying to get him to order two instead.
Since it’s a presumably Japanese character. But many other examples wouldn’t fit, like:
- 4:44: Last Day on Earth is, as its title suggests, a movie set during the last day on Earth, with everybody aware that the world will end at 4:44 AM.
I'm a bit leery of making tropes culturally specific when they might not necessarily be so. Sacred First Kiss is one that comes to mind; I know of one American example of it that has to be excluded because of the line at the very top saying that it's a Japanese cultural trope. This was more of a problem in the past with Otaku trying too hard to name tropes in Japanese.
Yeah, there used to be a lot of that. IIRC Nakama (the previous name of True Companions) had a miserable renaming fight that got so bad, there were accusations of one side using bots in one crowner.
But it got renamed, as did countless others. I do worry Four Is Death is attracting shoehorn-y examples (like the aforementioned Disney Channel one), so maybe it could be brought into TRS after all so it can be reworked into a clearer trope. Or we just need a Long-Term cleanup thread. I don't know.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 11th 2024 at 4:54:43 AM
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall![]()
I share your misgivings a lot of this time, but in this case, it's safe to say that it is culturally-specific, since it's based on a specific Chinese/Japanese linguistic feature.
That is to say, any Western uses of "4=death" are either deliberately referencing the East Asian trope, or coincidences that shouldn't be troped.
Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Aug 12th 2024 at 5:03:02 AM
I don't know if that's true. People know about the concept and it's spreading. Take the "Four Knocks" from Doctor Who for example, in which the Doctor's death is foreshadowed with four knocks.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall@15: Even if the trope emerged due to a Chinese/Japanese linguistic association, I feel like tying it down to that culture/language seems unnecessarily restrictive. Non East Asian creators might associate four with death due to exposure to Chinese/Japanese works and incorporate the numerical symbolism in their own work without having to know why the association exists.
Yeah, such an attitude is an attempt to cordon off the Sinosphere as incapable of influencing other cultures.
A little while ago, I added A Robot Named Fight! to the page because its secret boss is explicitly, consciously associated with both death and the number 4 in a way that the Australian fella who made the game was pretty clearly invoking the association. So that's at least one example of someone from outside the Sinosphere using the association.
Ukrainian Red CrossAnd, well, the Doctor Who thing I mentioned where "Four Knocks" = "Death".
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallIt still seems like it could be a coincidence. I didn't actually watch that far, but isn't there supposed to be a Red Herring with The Master's drumming, and in-story that's "The heartbeat of a Time Lord"?
No. At the very end, Graham gets trapped in the weird radiation chamber thing and does multiple four-knocks to get Ten's attention. Ten has to go in and take the radiation to save him and dies.
It's not a red herring. Even if it was, how would it make the association "a coincidence"?
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
No one's going to argue against 13 Is Unlucky or Lucky Seven examples if they show up in non-Western works, so it's ridiculous to disqualify Four Is Death examples (assuming that they're actually associating the number with death, and it's not simply a random Numerological Motif or Arc Number) simply because they came from non-Sino works.
Also, I'm pretty sure the Rule of Seven was codified by The Bible rather than anything Western thought, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there.
Edited by Adept on Aug 22nd 2024 at 4:13:53 PM

Four Is Death has a problem:
The number four, and death (or sometimes just "bad things") are both extremely common. Not only that, there's a bunch of other tropes that can involve the number four (Elite Four, The Four Gods, the Four-Element Ensemble, the Four-Temperament Ensemble, the shitennō, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse etc.)
This means that a lot of coincidental intersections of four and death end up on the page. I've tried to remove the most glaring examples over time (eg. groups of four bosses that don't even reference death at all) but it needs more thorough cleanup than I think I ought to do without discussing it with people first, and it needs more eyes on it in general.
I don't think there's any actual solution beyond just cleaning it up regularly - the description is already as strongly-worded as it can reasonably be, the trope name and definition can't really be changed because they're describing a well-defined existing trope, and there's not really anything wrong with any of those things anyway. It's just that coincidental intersections of 4 + death are also very common, and sometimes it's hard to tell if it's a coincidence or not, especially when an example's description doesn't give much to go on.
Just look at... pretty much any section focused on western works. There are some clearly correct examples even in those sections, and some absurd ones in eastern ones, but that still makes it pretty easy to see the problem.
(The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are a particular problem because the fourth one is death and AFAIK that fact is a coincidence that is totally unrelated to this trope, but it becomes really hard to get people not to add stuff based on the Horsemen when they seem to line up to this trope so closely.)
Edited by Aquillion on Jun 10th 2023 at 6:17:17 AM