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DeadUnicornTrope is full of tropes that have extensive non-parodic use.

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Aquillion Since: Jan, 2001
#1: Oct 26th 2024 at 10:21:52 AM

Part of the issue is that the description starts with a very vague "wasn't in broad use to begin with", which allows anyone to declare anything to be a Dead Unicorn Trope despite having a clear unironic source, just by vaguely handwaving and asserting that the usage wasn't broad for some nebulous definition of broad.

The most glaring one is that it uses Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 as an iconic example - presumably this is intended as a Take That! to Moral Guardians by saying that their tropes are overblown (true!), but gore-shock games were still a very real genre; much of the focus was on Mortal Combat in particular, but other games also fit the description (the Real Life section in that article is massive for a supposed Dead Unicorn Trope.) Another part of the reason why people mistakenly think that this is a Dead Unicorn Trope is probably because of changing social mores; at the time when they came out, games like Doom and Mortal Kombat were shocking, but nowadays they aren't.

Likewise, The Butler Did It is given as an iconic example of an Dead Unicorn Trope, despite most of its article being a truly massive list of straight examples going back to at least 1915.

A lot of other things in the list below specifically list what the tropes are based on, or say things like "it's far more commonly parodied than played straight" (eg. Black Dude Dies First), which isn't what Dead Unicorn Trope is about. More generally, it feels like the list has become a list of every single trope that gets commonly parodied or played for laughs ever.

Unlike a lot of other, more ambiguous tropes, this is something where we ought to be able to reasonably objectively be able to determine if something fits just by glancing at its trope page - if it has older unironic examples that the parodies were parody-ing, it's obviously not and could never be an Dead Unicorn Trope.

I suggest setting a clear standard - if prominent examples can be found that aren't parodies of the trope and which existed before it started to be parodied (where "prominent" means it's reasonable to assume that they're the sort of thing the target parodied), then it's not an Dead Unicorn Trope and gets taken off the list. Possibly also replace "broad" with "prominent" in the first sentence, noting what prominence means in this context further down - the point of a Dead Unicorn Trope is that there isn't an actual target for the parody; if a clear target can be identified then it doesn't fall under this trope.

It doesn't make any sense to go "Acktually Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000-style games only made up 5% of the market" when the vast majority of parodic examples are just flatly a Bland-Name Product intended to parody Mortal Kombat specifically.

Edited by Aquillion on Oct 26th 2024 at 10:25:46 AM

Reymma RJ Savoy from Edinburgh Since: Feb, 2015 Relationship Status: Wanna dance with somebody
RJ Savoy
#2: Oct 26th 2024 at 5:45:23 PM

Some entries seem to be saying "It was played straight but not quite how it's remembered". I'm surprised it doesn't have a cleanup yet. I remember that around 2010 there was first-person in the description from editors fighting over what counted.

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Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#3: Oct 26th 2024 at 6:38:22 PM

A bunch of stuff that appears straight in fiction but wasn’t Truth in Television, like Droit du Seigneur, was removed a while back, and the description notes this. But there may still be work to be done here.

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Nen_desharu Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire from Greater Smash Bros. Universe or Toronto Since: Aug, 2020 Relationship Status: Who needs love when you have waffles?
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
#4: Oct 26th 2024 at 9:36:25 PM

Some of the entries in Dead Unicorn Trope should be moved to Undead Horse Trope.

By the way, Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 is queued up in TRS as it is too close to Murder Simulators.

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LordGro (Old as dirt)
#5: Oct 27th 2024 at 11:59:46 AM

@OP, your definition of Dead Unicorn Trope is narrower than what the page describes.

A Dead Horse Trope is not just any trope that gets frequently parodied, it's a trope that is mocked specifically for being a discredited Cliché, i.e. a trope that used to be really common in the past.

Correspondingly, Dead Unicorn Trope is not a trope that did never see straight use in the past, it's just that the (straight) trope was never as common so as to be a genuine cliché.

if it has older unironic examples that the parodies were parody-ing, it's obviously not and could never be an Dead Unicorn Trope.

This is not the original definition of Dead Unicorn Trope. It seems to me the "Another Note" tacked on at the bottom has muddled the waters by claiming that this is about "tropes that never seem to have been played straight in the first place". It's not.

I'm guessing, but I suspect you parse the eponymous "Dead Unicorn" as saying that the (straight) trope, like the mythical unicorn, never existed in reality. But I think the intended connotation of "unicorn" in this usage is not non-existence, but rarity. It's not about tropes that were never played straight, it's about tropes that were much less common in reality than their reputation as "Dead Horse Tropes" would make you believe.

My impression is that The Butler Did It is a genuine Dead Unicorn Trope, as is Black Dude Dies First. Even if there have been straight examples of these, their reputation as overused clichés is undeserved. Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, on the other hand, is not a Dead Unicorn Trope, because it is a not a trope that is widely parodied to begin with and not a Discredited Trope at all. Rather the trope in itself is a parody of real video games, which is something entirely different from a Parodied Trope. (This is the same kind of mistake that has led numerous editors to falsely label Droit du Seigneur as a Dead Unicorn Trope in the past.)

Edited by LordGro on Oct 27th 2024 at 12:07:53 PM

WarJay77 It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000) from My Writing Cave (Troper Knight) Relationship Status: Armed with the Power of Love
It's NaNo, Bay-beeee! (8,356/50,000)
#6: Oct 27th 2024 at 12:07:49 PM

Unsurprisingly, that "author's note" was added unilaterally in 2021, as is often the case with these things.

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MorganWick (Elder Troper)
#7: Oct 28th 2024 at 2:16:26 AM

Oldest Internet Archive copy if it helps. I can see how an unfamiliar troper could see the original description as somewhat confusingly contradictory. Probably also relevant that the archived discussion sees a lot of struggling with natter and ill-fitting examples from fairly early on.

Edited by MorganWick on Oct 28th 2024 at 2:22:13 AM

artman40 Since: Jan, 2001
#8: Nov 7th 2024 at 6:41:10 AM

And then there are tropes like Aliens Steal Cattle that were parodies to begin with. In this case, it's a combination of aliens stealing humans and aliens probing cattle.

Lymantria Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph from Toronto Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: Historians will say we were good friends.
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
#9: Nov 11th 2024 at 1:15:36 PM

[up] Don’t those fit the intended definition of Dead Unicorn Trope? At least I thought so.

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