Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help.
It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread
for ongoing cleanup projects.
I remember that story arc, and indeed they never portray the assignment as irrational even though it's pretty damn intense for a six year old (especially for the time period when kids couldn't just Google that stuff). I think the comic is fairly inconsistent with the kind of education first graders get in general, more for Artistic License than to make a point. While the comic is often critical of the education system, it does more often try to vilify Calvin for acting so irresponsible about it (spending the entire week to gripe about how the assignment is unfair instead of actually doing it).
v Calvin being in first grade isn't Negative Continuity because he's never in any other grade - he's just Not Allowed to Grow Up. It's the curriculum that's wonky.
Edited by mightymewtron I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Note that the edit was on YMMV.Calvin And Hobbes. Eh, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a thing, and Calvin being in first grade is due to Negative Continuity. The examples should be cleaned of natter and admit to Artistic License/Rule of Funny, but the core complaint (This isn't something Calvin should be expected to do) is still valid.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.Yeah, the only other commentary in the arc is that Susie claims to be "almost done" with it after about a week. Susie generally isn't depicted as anything more than fairly precocious, so it's essentially Watterson saying "the assignment isn't that hard and Calvin could do it easily if he applied himself." Which... it isn't?
It's not Strawman Has a Point because there isn't really an argument, straw or otherwise.
I do think it would be Unintentionally Sympathetic because (even though Calvin didn't do it at all), it's apparent that it's easy to sympathize with Calvin for the assignment being so grueling.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.I think Larkmarn has hit the nail on the head here: Calvin has a point, but he's not a strawman, because his behaviour is not set up to make any argument. (What would that argument be? That children are lazy and don't do their homework?).
The assignment is clearly unrealistic and over-the-top, but it's played for comedy. Calvin and Hobbes is not an author tract about the educational system.
And Calvin is clearly not intended to be your average six-year old, and that's one of the points of the comic, so he can't be set up as a strawman for children in general.
I'm not so sure about Unintentionally Sympathetic, though. Another point of the comic is that most of the time, we're seeing the world through Calvin's eyes, so he's supposed to be sympathetic.
Edited by GnomeTitanPart of the trope seems to be that a strawman can usually just mean a character where the author takes it as self-evident that you're not supposed to agree with or care about their position. Calvin's refusal to do the assignment isn't meant to be framed as sympathetic or an argument, so much as it is that it's something that is supposed to be immediately seen as stupid and wrong. And while the arc does play it for humor a few times, the humor invariably arose not from the assignment being complete nonsense, but from Calvin's refusal to even attempt it. If you actually read the arc, at no point does anyone say "this assignment is nonsense", aside from Calvin. Hobbes thinks it sounds pretty easy and thinks Calvin just needs to do a couple leaves every day, Susie finishes it in about half the allotted time, and his parents don't even really try to help him.
Basically, from the way the arc is framed, it's pretty clear that Calvin was meant to be an absurd exaggeration of a procrastinating child: he insists on taking a two-week assignment and blowing it off until the last hour from the get-go. The audience is supposed to take the message, more or less, that Calvin could have done the assignment easily if he applied himself. And it falls apart if the audience goes, "wait a minute, I'm in high school and I'd probably have trouble finishing that assignment."
Edited by MBGI agree with MBG here. "Strawman" does not have to literally mean "making an obvious argument". It can also mean a character that is implicitly placed in the wrong or in an unsympathetic situation. If the argument here is that Calvin is supposed to be your "typical kid", then that basically states what the creator thinks about typical kids.
But Calvin is not a typical kid, and I don't think the creator ever intended him to be seen as one.
I agree that there is a problem with the story. The assignment is ridiculously difficult and over-ambitious, but this is not played for laughs or even noted. So it does make you wonder what the author was thinking.
There may be a trope for this. However, for the reasons I've stated before, I don't think either Strawman Has a Point nor Unintentionally Sympathetic fits.
It just struck me that there may be a strawman here, but it's not Calvin, it's his teacher. Her giving him such a difficult assignment could be seen as a strawman argument, but it's one contra the school system and pro Calvin, that is, quite the opposite of what we've been discussing. Take it for what it's worth.
Edited by GnomeTitanThing is, at least two other arcs that I can think of have a "Calvin get a school assignment and slacks off and/or does the bare minimum of work" plot (the report on bats and the report on Mercury with Susie), with it being clear we're supposed to see him as being lazy.
That said, reports on animals and/or planets seem a bit more likely than "collect and label fifty different leaves"...
There's also a very similar arc with a bug collection, but I think even that was only ten or twenty different bugs he needed to catch and label.
Looking up the strips, Calvin never technically argues that the assignment is impossible because the assignment is too hard - he argues that it's impossible because there's not enough time to do the project, since he refuses to work weekends or afternoons. He complains about having to collect fifty leaves, but the strip suggests that it's a decent project to do in two weeks. Also, there's an Arboretum nearby, suggesting there is indeed a way for a student to find a variety of leaves. Calvin just doesn't consider the Arboretum until literally the last minute.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.@Gnome Titan: What I mean by "typical" is that Calvin is meant to be seen as a character that has the traits of an archetypical kid, but Turned Up To Eleven. Calvin being an exaggeration doesn't stop him from being seen as endemic of childish flaws the way the Homer Simpson being an exaggeration of a dumb father doesn't stop him from being an American everyman.
That's pretty much what a "strawman" is. It's a flimsy, exaggerated example of whatever trait is being critiqued that makes it easy to pick apart. Calvin is, thus, a flimsy, exaggerated example of a lazy schoolkid who created his own problem by procrastinating. The problem (as I understand it) is that the thing he's shown as being lazy and procrastinating about was rigged from the start. That's where the "has a point" comes in.
The thing is, Calvin isn't trying to make the "point" that the example states he is. His complaints about the leaf collection isn't that it's too much work to reasonably do, but that he doesn't see any reason to spend so much time on something he views as pointless. There's a difference between "the assignment is unfair because it's too much work for a kid to reasonably do" and "the assignment sucks because it's pointless and I don't want to do it." The latter point is the only one the comic actually makes.
Also, just for reference here's the first strip in the series.
Although I think the most important thing to remember here is that I don't think Watterson was really making any sort of argument for or against the school system or Calvin's procrastination. It's just a character-driven story arc that would almost certainly have played out the same even if the number of leaves required was more reasonable. He probably just came up with "leaf collection" idea and attached an arbitrary number to it that happens to be unrealistic if you really think about it.
If anything I think it would fit Unintentionally Sympathetic, since 50 leaves really is an unrealistic expectation, unlike nearly every other assignment Calvin procrastinates on.
Reaction Image RepositoryI don't know...in my view, that first strip only seems to support my point.
Calvin makes TWO arguments in that strip: 1) that collecting leaves is pointless and 2) that he has to collect fifty different ones. That second fact is so important that the number is bolded and the last panel emphasizes that he tried to loophole to reduce the number of leaves but his teacher already nipped that idea.
The next few strips then try to make the argument that fifty leaves is a reasonable number because all he has to do is collect 3-4 different leaves a day (or five, barring weekends) and that Calvin is just too lazy/contrarian to do it. It also presents his classmate as an alternative: rather than complaining about the assignment, she turned it into a fun "treasure hunt" that allowed her to be almost finished with a week to spare. And at the end, the strip also tries to present the idea that Calvin could have gone to the arboretum to get the assignment done. (An argument that I would still question because when I was growing up, most kids didn't even know what an arboretum was. Hell, I'm college-educated and this query is the first time I've ever heard the term used in casual conversation. I wasn't even sure what an arboretum actually did until I Googled it.)
Tl;dr: The story pretty much presents Calvin's refusal to do the assignment as completely in the wrong, and makes case-after-case why he iswrong. His initial disagreement with the assignment isn't merely that he doesn't want to do it, but the amount of time that he would need to dedicate to get it done. He is shown several "reasonable" methods of getting the tedious time finished bit-by-bit, but refuses them.
Personally, I'm more convinced than ever that this might be a valid case of Strawman Has a Point.
Edited by NubianSatyressI'm inclined to concur with Japanese Teeth. It is a ridiculous assignment not called out as such in the text, but it's not Strawman Has a Point because it's very doubtful Watterson was intending to make any sort of argument or point, even comedically, other than continuing the established characterization that Calvin is lazy. If you could somehow track him down and call him out on it, I'd guess there'd be a reasonable chance that he'd admit to not having put that much thought into the specifics.
Unintentionally Sympathetic sounds more appropriate.
Should we move to a forum or discussion page? This is kind of ridiculously long for a single example.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Indeed, it seems that people are just reading the strip in different ways, and it will probably not be possible to reach a consensus either way.
Which is fine, actually, since Strawman Has a Point is marked as YMMV (I didn't notice that until now - my bad).

Recently, I noticed that an instance of Strawman Has a Point in Calvin and Hobbes was deleted, with this being the stated edit reason:
I personally disagree with this removal. For context, the entry was about a Story Arc where Calvin is presented as wholly in the wrong for not reacting well to an assignment; but while he does handle it in about the worst way possible, the narrative never addresses that the assignment itself (gathering fifty leaves, each from a different species of tree, then putting them in a collection and labeling each one with both its tree's common and scientific names) is downright unreasonable to expect a first-grader to do, which vindicates at least some of Calvin's resentment at having to do it.