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.
Not helping in your doubt is that the anime use Black Comedy
As a trans woman myself, I also disagree that it's really faux horrific, and given (from what I hear) the anime's relatively sympathetic towards her, I doubt it was supposed to be mocking her dysphoria (which playing it that way would be).
TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faer
Though, the character died 12 year old from a heart attack which seems over the top. While dysphoria is definitely intimidating, the reaction seems exaggerated. I don't know if this would be the right use of the trope then.
Edit: this seems to hinge upon whether it was intended as comedy. Is this played for laughs in the work and how?
Edit: ↓&↓↓ makes sense.
Edited by Sirena
From what I understand, Black Comedy is something usually treated seriously being Played for Laughs. Faux Horrific is comedy drawn from something that's not actually scary being treated as something terrifying by in-universe characters.
To me, the question is not "was the event played for laughs ?" but "does the event count as something that is not actually scary ?". If Lily had actually been a boy, the answer would have been more likely to be yes. However, I know many trans people can get very disturbed by reminders that their body doesn't match their gender, but as a cis person I have a very poor grasp of the actual degree to which this is the case.
Edited by Nazetrime
Yeah, I think Faux Horrific should be based on quality (is it frightening/disturbing) not quantity/degrees (how much is it scary). I think the example is as inaccurate as a child dying of a heart attack because they saw a clown. It's not scary to most people, and the degree seems absurd, but it isn't fake scary.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
To be fair, the death is both a combination of dysphoria, the fear of getting older and losing her appeal as a child idol (in fact, iirc I think that was what the scene was emphasizing, with the dysphoria part being closer to subtext) and her constitution being weak from overwork, it wasn't simply a healthy 12-year-old getting a heart attack from a facial hair.
I do think it is supposed to be over the top, but not in the sense that "getting a facial hair isn't scary but she treats it as scary, lol." Rather I think it's just supposed to emphasize how this was Serious Business for her. She's not the only character who has extreme reactions to something, and she's not the only unrealistic death played for drama or Rule of Cool.
I think it's zigzagged. Facial hair by itself isn't scary, but additional factors (for Lily's case, a big remainder of her of who she is not) frightens her in a legitimate way.
I also think the scene was portrayed as over the top in some way. Mentioned before how some of the girls were either Black Comedy and/or over the top. Only one of gheir death was portrayed seriously straight.
Edited by WhirlRX
To give context to those who don't know the work, Zombie Land Saga is about a group of girls that was brought Back from the Dead to become an Idol Singer group. The youngest of them, Lily, is trans and died before really hitting puberty. While the circumstances of her death can be summed up as a heart attack induced by her stressful child actor job, The Last Straw was finding a single strand of facial on her face. I noticed that last event was the basis of a Faux Horrific entry for the anime.
What little I know about gender dysphoria gives me a few doubts about whether a trans girl seeing a clear sign of male puberty would qualify as Faux Horrific, so I wanted to know what others thought before doing anything about the entry.