Arthur Cleanup

Buster definitely knew about D.W. constantly messing with Arthur’s plane (and was even present for some of it). Nevertheless, he’s as unsympathetic toward Arthur as the rest of the kids following the hit.

But yeah, I believe that trope is for characters for whom not showing empathy for other people is the norm, not for when a character who normally cares about other characters suddenly doesn’t for one episode/scene.

Edited by kablammin45 on Oct 12th 2023 at 2:36:02 AM

I believe that would be an example of No Sympathy instead.

I just added Arthur's friends under No Sympathy.

• Idiot Ball: D.W., having been hit on the mouth thanks to the Tibble Twins in the previous episode, doesn't realize that her Never My Fault speech is causing Arthur's fists to shake when he confronts her for breaking his plane. She keeps rambling until Arthur's fist meets her shoulder.

I feel like this is less her being an idiot and more just Aesop Amnesia; she's four years old after all.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 12th 2023 at 7:01:59 AM

That entry also contains a factual inaccuracy, as the episode where D.W. gets hit on the mouth by the Tibbles ("Attack of the Turbo Tibbles") isn't "the previous episode" before "ABH"; in fact, it's from the previous season.

They really expect a 4 year old to have the memory of an elephant, huh?

Ignore this- accidentally posted twice when trying to fix a misspelling.

Edited by fragglelover on Oct 13th 2023 at 10:11:43 AM

Not to mention that the Tibbles hit her with a swing while playing a game- not exactly the same thing as being punched out of anger.

I’m wondering, is this opening paragraph in this Karma Houdini entry really necessary? If anything, the fact that D.W. is known for always avoiding punishment even though she usually gets Laser-Guided Karma is Common Knowledge.

• Karma Houdini:
  • D.W. is an interesting example. She's well-known for several episodes where she acts particularly bratty and doesn't get punished, but the amount of times she does get punished actually outweigh those instances. It just happens that the cases where she doesn't get punished are so infamous that it's the only cases people remember. Specifically:
    • "Play it Again, D.W.": She consistently drives Arthur and the rest of the family up the wall by overplaying her Crazy Bus CD, and faces no repercussions for distracting Arthur from trying to do his homework or for falsely accusing him of taking her CD.
    • "D.W. Goes to Washington": She acts extremely bratty and ungrateful for their entire trip to Washington, bringing up how much she'd rather be at Ponyland. When she ends up meeting the president, he loves her and her parents completely forget about all the frustration they just dealt with.
    • "D.W.'s Very Bad Mood": Possibly the worst offense. She screams and yells through the entire episode, regularly insulting her family and friends while David and Jane do absolutely nothing about any of it. Worse yet, not only is she not punished, she's rewarded with an invitation to Francine's party.
    • "Arthur's Big Hit": The other most known example. She breaks Arthur's model plane after ignoring multiple warnings not to touch it, and the most we hear is a throwaway line where David and Jane tell Arthur "We'll deal with what she did, but what you did is bad too." This happens offscreen though and her lines toward the end of the episode suggest she was barely called out for it.
    • "Arthur's Perfect Christmas": She kicks and screams over not getting the one toy she really wanted, and rather than Jane calling her out for her ungratefulness, she rubs her and sympathizes with her. She has a quick attitude adjustment, but it's still far and off from what could be considered unpunishable.
    • "The Pageant Pickle": After fake-crying, D.W. tricks Arthur into acting like a monkey, embarrassing himself in front of the play's audience. The episode ends with Arthur's friends making fun of him for it.
    • "D.W., the Picky Eater": D.W. throws a big tantrum in a restaurant after ordering salad and screaming "I! HATE! SPINACH!" Arthur and his friends try to get her to try different foods, and in the end, D.W. is brought along to Arthur's favorite restaurant, where she declares that she loves spinach after unknowingly eating it.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 23rd 2023 at 5:05:39 AM

Based off the first paragraph, is the overall example even valid? If she only gets away with things a few times, that are fixated on by the community, then it doesn't really sound like Karma Houdini. The end of that trope's definition says:

"Karma Houdinis must have ABSOLUTELY nothing bad to ever happen to them"

Yeah, it's like how Garfield is labeled as a Karma Houdini despite his entry stating that karma does get him.

Cut as misuse. Some of this doesn't even sound like she needed "punishment," as the episode shows a way to change her mind without punishing her, such as encouraging her to try new things. Are all the people writing these entries just really authoritarian parents who think there's no way to teach a tantrumming child without grounding them or something?

Speaking of Common Knowledge, on CommonKnowledge.Western Animation:

• Arthur:
  • While D.W. is a bit of a brat occasionally (as most minors are at times), she's not nearly as big of a brat as the fandom makes her out to be—she's just a normal four-year-old girl.
  • A common criticism is that Mr. and Mrs. Read never punish D.W. for her behavior, but there are actually several episodes where she is punished for her actions, such as "Go to Your Room, D.W." and "D.W.'s Baby".
  • People remember "Grandpa Dave's Memory Album" as "the episode where Grandpa Dave got Alzheimer's". In reality, while he is getting a brain condition that affects his memory, the specific ailment is left ambiguous.

The first entry is redundant to Ron the Death Eater on the show's YMMV page, but I’m thinking of crosswicking the second entry to that page. The third one is already on there.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 23rd 2023 at 9:48:28 AM

Sorry; I was the one who added the first and didn't realise it was redundant. I see no problem with moving it.

Nitpick but the use of "minor" and not "child" there feels really off. Like a 4 year old will not be bratty in the same way a 16 year old will.

I went and crosswicked the second example onto the YMMV page.

So, about the rest of the Karma Houdini entries:

• Karma Houdini:
  • D.W. is not the only one that has gotten this though. In the episode "Arthur Accused!", Mrs. MacGrady absentmindedly mixes in a bag of quarters Arthur had donated for a school fundraiser into a brownie batter. Arthur winds up taking the blame for the misplaced quarters and winds up in trouble at school. At the end of the episode Buster solves the case freeing Arthur's name but Mrs. MacGrady is never punished for her absentminded mistake that got Arthur falsely accused in the first place. Example acts like she did this out of malice.
  • Buster steals a fossil from a dig site. He asks if he can take it home, and when the rangers specifically explain to them why he can't, he smuggles it in his hat. Buster does feel bad about it and tries to give it to Arthur, but when they both return it to the museum, they get rewarded with a nameplate saying they both discovered it. Example sounds fine.
  • For that matter at the end of "Locked in the Library" we don't see if Miss Turner or any of the other library staff have to answer for closing up for the weekend without making sure Arthur and Francince have left. It was a mistake.
  • In the episode "So Funny, I Forgot to Laugh", Arthur’s friends get zero punishment for their hypocrisy. Is hypocrisy really a punishable action? That's the first I've seen this trope applied towards a mere hypocrite.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 23rd 2023 at 4:25:51 AM

• The "Arthur Accused" example is 100% a shoehorn, yeah. It was an honest mistake on Mrs. MacGrady's part and it wasn't like she meant to put the quarters in the brownies. Cut.
• The fossil example checks out somewhat, yeah. Buster blatantly disregarded the guard's directions.
• The "Locked in the Library" example was another honest mistake. Cut.
• IIRC the last example is referring to the times when the other kids (Francine, especially) acted like bullies to Arthur and other kids, isn't it? That feels more like Fourth Wall Myopia maybe? I don't believe "So Funny" addresses the fact that Francine had bullied Arthur (and thus had no room to talk when she started calling Arthur a bully for making fun of Sue Ellen) within the episode, does it?

Edited by kablammin45 on Oct 23rd 2023 at 4:35:19 AM

Would it be okay to re-add the "Arthur Accused!" and "Locked in the Library" examples under Idiot Houdini?

I don't think they fit the definition. It's not like they benefit from their stupidity, they just don't get punished onscreen, which is more a matter of Law of Conservation of Detail than anything.

Honestly, now I think about it, the Francine and Muffy hypocrisy thing for "So Funny I Forgot To Laugh" sounds like a case of Unintentionally Unsympathetic. I don’t think the narrative meant to make them come off like that.

I also think Arthur’s Furry Confusion page is severely bloated and could use a major reduction (incidentally, it’s the only individual work on the entire wiki with its own page dedicated to this trope).

Given that Furry Confusion has been redefined to only refer to cases where non-anthro members of the same species as the anthro characters are shown with no in-universe explanation, the majority of Arthur examples don’t qualify. Most of them are more Fridge Logic than anything else, and there’s also a lot of speculation about whether Furry Lens is in play. If we get rid of those, there’s still a lot of examples, but not so much that I think the show deserves an entire page for them.

Remove all cases that aren't non-anthro animals appearing in the same work as anthro animals of the same species.

Maybe that Unintentionally Unsympathetic example could read something like this:

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In "So Funny I Forgot to Laugh", Arthur's friends giving him the Silent Treatment, disallowing him to eat lunch with them, and referring to him as a "bully" are meant to be giving him karma for taking his jokes towards Sue Ellen too far. However, among them are Francine and Muffy, both of whom insult other people fairly often, making their labelling of Arthur as a bully come across as hypocrisy.

That looks good

I found this under Characters.Arthur Older Children

• Idiot Ball:
  • "So Funny I Forgot to Laugh" represents such a moment of weakness for Arthur that it's unconvincing.
  • Arthur's cost-cutting ideas in "Arthur Read Super Saver" are more likely to come from the four-year-old-cast, like bathing in water from the Molinas' sprinklers, or trying to cut his family's water bill by getting Pal to lick food stains off the flatware.

First example is pretty blatantly a Zero-Context Example. Second one seems fine.

Now I think about it, I wonder why D.W. wasn’t the star of the episode in the second example, it would’ve made a lot more sense for her to be doing those things.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 25th 2023 at 11:26:46 AM

On SeriesContinuityError.Western Animation:

• In a flashback in "Arthur's Baby," a baby Mr. Ratburn is called Emil by his mother while he scrawls multiplication sums on the wall. However, in future episodes, his first name is said to be Nigel.

That wasn't a flashback though; it was a Fantasy Sequence, so it could easily be explained away as Arthur not knowing Mr. Ratburn's real first name.

I saw this under YMMV.Arthur S 1 E 11 Arthurs Baby D Ws Baby

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • It sucks for D.W. that she can't sleep and that her room stinks because she has to share it with Kate. However, Kate is only a newborn baby and can't help it. Meanwhile, as chronicled in the FU DW video concerning this episode, D.W., intentionally or not, treated Kate very poorly during the entire episode, including obsessively hovering over her, blaming her for her own mischief to make her parents stop loving her, and trying to sell her at a garage sale.
  • Similarly, the Read parents lose sympathy points for deciding to move newborn Kate into D.W.'s room in the first place, as the loss of sleep and awful diaper smell is now forced onto her, a four-year-old who doesn't really deserve it, instead of the parents who are supposed to be responsible for the baby.

Neither these explain how they’re meant to be sympathetic. Bonus points for citing a guy (Who somehow has a TV Tropes page) who is hate-obsessed with a fictional 4 year old. Makes her out like she’s abusing poor Kate.

Also, it’s kind of weird how the first entry treats D.W. being bothered by Kate as Wangst, but then the second entry bashes the Read parents for putting Kate in D.W.'s room and making her miserable.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 25th 2023 at 7:20:45 AM

DW clearly isn't meant to be in the right and I'm pretty sure the second entry is exaggerating how bad it is for babies to share rooms in a house with presumably limited space, plus it contradicts the first entry by suggesting DW is sympathetic. Additionally, the reviewer it cites seems to be a guy doing Ron the Death Eater for laughs.