Dead Trope Cleanup Thread (Dead Horse, Discredited, Unicorn, etc.)

FirstAidRules First Aid Rules from House Since: Sep, 2020 Relationship Status: Singularity

First Aid Rules

#26: Dec 2nd 2021 at 1:16:56 PM

Returning the Handkerchief is stated to be discredited even on its own page, but there are examples where its played straight ([1] Serena) or partially lampshaded (Keith in [[My Next Life As A Villainess All Routes Lead To Doom My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! returns Maria's handkerchief because Katarina turned him into a gentleman instead of a playboy). I believe these are exceptions to the rule, but I would like to make note of this in some fashion.

Hi!

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

#27: Dec 3rd 2021 at 10:01:39 PM

Agreed.

Black-and-White Morality was never discredited in the first place (except among a certain demographic).

Kirby is awesome.

RustBeard Since: Sep, 2016

#28: Mar 5th 2022 at 10:03:09 AM

This was on Discredited Trope:

Five-Man Band: Straight examples of this trope today look rather outdated and raise a few Unfortunate Implications about sexism in regards to the role of The Chick. If any work of fiction focuses on a group of people working together, many of the roles of a Five-Man Band are usually loosely assigned, especially if the team has more than five members.

The thing is the TRS discussion on Five-Man Band concluded that the Five Man Band Classic configuration (The Hero, The Lancer, The Big Guy, The Smart Guy, and The Chick) doesn't really exist and was created by tropers to have a trope with five characters in it. Furthermore, the last sentence is questionable. If a group has more than five members, it's not a Five-Man Band (unless those additional members are Sixth Rangers).

WarJay77 Discarded and Feeling Blue (Troper Knight)

Discarded and Feeling Blue

#29: Mar 5th 2022 at 10:04:14 AM

Yeah, just yoink it. It has an unsourced UI link as well.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

RustBeard Since: Sep, 2016

#30: Mar 7th 2022 at 7:28:12 PM

Here's another entry under Discredited Trope:

Breaking and Bloodsucking: While a hallmark of the Classical Movie Vampire, it's fallen out of favor in modern times, as vampires are now far too hip and sexy to waste time skulking outside windows.

I don't think a trope being used less counts as it being discredited.

PlasmaPower Since: Jan, 2015

#31: Mar 31st 2022 at 11:34:13 PM

I found this in Discredited Trope:

Smoking Is Cool: Changing attitudes towards smoking have deemed these tropes in bad taste, if not outright dangerous for the impressionable. Modern examples that play these straight are met with fierce criticism.

But this paragraph in the trope's page suggests this is an Undead Horse Trope:

While this trope is dying away as smoking becomes less socially acceptable, it's notable enough in older media. Interestingly, shows aimed at younger audiences don't seem allowed to smoke. Since smoking in Japan hardly even raises an eyebrow (that culture has smoking strongly associated with hard work, among other things), this trope is also common in anime and manga.

Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!

themayorofsimpleton Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him from Elsewhere (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded) Relationship Status: Abstaining

Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him

#32: Apr 1st 2022 at 10:28:45 AM

A while back I asked the formatting cleanup thread I created about this, but I'll ask here since this probably fits better now:

Dead Horse Genre is formatted with exclamation marks (!!s) rather than bullet points. What should be done?

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Synchronicity (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)

#33: May 1st 2022 at 2:11:23 PM

^ You can bulletify it.

I'd like to argue against Scales of Justice being a Forgotten Trope.

The page image is from an active franchise that uses it liberally — the game the pic is taken from was released in 2015, and entries more recent than that◊ still use it.
I added a page quote about using the scale motif to someone's morality from Moon Knight (2022), a popular ongoing show.
These examples on the page are definitely from at least 2015 (I didn't check comprehensively so there are likely more):
- Simple Samosa (Courtroom Episode)
- Gods of Egypt (Egyptian myth, like the quote)
- The Good Fight 2018 (legal drama)
- Better Call Saul (about a lawyer)
- Splatoon
- DC Super Hero Girls (Lady Justice)
- Teen Titans Go! (Lady Justice)

It seems like it shows up still, especially in works about courtrooms and works involving the mythical figures who hold the scales. That doesn't mean it's forgotten; whoever wrote it probably just doesn't dabble in such works all that much.

Synchronicity (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)

#34: May 6th 2022 at 4:39:35 PM

Bump, thoughts? ^

TheLivingDrawing Lucas the Dreamer from The Town of Clayton Since: Apr, 2019 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free

Lucas the Dreamer

#35: May 6th 2022 at 5:16:16 PM

I don’t know if this trope is discredited since this type of critique is still quite common and people still enjoy really bad media being made fun of.

* Caustic Critic: This trope was at its prominence throughout the New Hollywood era and experienced a revival in the 2000s with internet critics, though it began to die out in the mid-2010s (even The Nostalgia Critic, a well-known example of this trope, has begun to shy away from indulging in it) as online critics began to use other, more fair & kinder forms of critiquing media, and many are seeing the further usage of this trope as overly nitpicky. Though it's still alive and well as a Grandfather Clause for longer-running internet reviewers (for example The Angry Video Game Nerd) and certain film critics such as The BBC's Mark Kermode. Newer attempts at playing it straight online tend to be met with scorn, with the infamous Looney Tunes Critic review of "Wet Cement" causing a storm of outright hostility on Twitter.

The angry reviewer archetype is (thankfully) dying and Condemned by History but people who make fun of bad media are still quite popular.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on May 6th 2022 at 8:18:05 AM

Why waste time when you can see the last sunset last?

WarJay77 Discarded and Feeling Blue (Troper Knight)

Discarded and Feeling Blue

#36: May 6th 2022 at 5:20:11 PM

Right, the main difference is that newer reviewers and commentators are a lot more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek, and don't outright trash the work in most cases, they just poke fun at it and riff. More like an MST 3 K thing than a Nostalgia Critic thing.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

TheLivingDrawing Lucas the Dreamer from The Town of Clayton Since: Apr, 2019 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free

Lucas the Dreamer

#37: May 6th 2022 at 5:39:24 PM

If we allow subtropes, then the angry reviewer definitely qualifies.

Why waste time when you can see the last sunset last?

TheRandomSurfboard from Earth Since: Apr, 2020 Relationship Status: Is that a kind of food?

#38: Jul 1st 2022 at 7:30:36 AM

Does Anal Probing count for Discredited Trope or should it be on something else?

VerySunshine Since: May, 2016 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)

#39: Jul 1st 2022 at 4:06:26 PM

It's currently on Dead Unicorn Trope. Few of the examples are played seriously.

molokai198 Since: Oct, 2012

#40: Jul 2nd 2022 at 12:46:09 PM

The rationale for Real Men Love Jesus being a discredited trope because religion isn't popular anymore seems a little fishy to me. Like 70% of the USA (which produces a lot of media) is still Christian and lots of people in lots of other countries are Christian or Muslim besides, the idea of religion being portrayed as "cool" and sympathetic is hardly discredited even if the amount of non-religious people has risen in recent decades.

Edited by molokai198 on Jul 2nd 2022 at 3:49:32 PM

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

#41: Jul 2nd 2022 at 1:03:36 PM

It could be an Undead Horse Trope instead as it's often mocked yet often played straight.

Likewise, The Moral Substitute should also be added to Undead Horse Trope for the same reasons.

Kirby is awesome.

TheLivingDrawing Lucas the Dreamer from The Town of Clayton Since: Apr, 2019 Relationship Status: Yes, I'm alone, but I'm alone and free

Lucas the Dreamer

#42: Jul 3rd 2022 at 6:31:28 AM

Does All Gays Are Pedophiles count as an Evolving Trope? It seems to have evolved into people calling any LGBT representation or pro-LGBT messages in works aimed at kids “grooming”, meaning the attitude is still there but it’s far more implicit.

Why waste time when you can see the last sunset last?

nrjxll Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Not war

#43: Jul 3rd 2022 at 10:20:39 AM

I'd say no, because that's pretty much exclusively media criticism coming from dog-whistling (or open) homophobes, whereas All Gays Are Pedophiles being a trope meant it was actually present in media.

RustBeard Since: Sep, 2016

#44: Jul 3rd 2022 at 4:12:22 PM

I found this section on Dead Unicorn Trope:

Miscellaneous

Jelly bracelets, worn as a fashion item by teenage and preteen girls back in The '80s, and at the Turn of the Millennium. They were bands of jelly-rubber or silicone, often stacked like bangles or linked together to create a new look. Somewhere along the line, they attracted a rumor that they were a signal of what sex act(s) the wearer was willing to do, if someone were to break the bracelet, a different color for different types of sex acts from kissing to lap dances all the way up to anal sex. This rumor was especially troubling at the Turn of the Millennium, when they were adopted by preteens and even younger children. Although even to this day, they are referred to as "sex bracelets," and "everyone knows" that they signal availability for sex acts (and because of these rumors, they have been banned at some schools), no credible reports exist of people (of any age or sex) actually using them in this way. Indeed, jelly bracelets are nearly impossible to break with one's bare hands, a key component of this particular urban legend (the 2019 Short Film Shagbands got around this by having a boy use a switchblade to break the bracelet).
Rainbow parties, where girls wearing different colors of lipstick supposedly perform oral sex on boys to leave a "rainbow" on their penises, became a moral panic in the early 2000s. Despite there being no credible reports of actual rainbow parties ever happening, they turn up as plot devices in crime procedurals with some regularity.
Pregnancy pacts in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where groups of high school girls make a pact to intentionally get pregnant, perhaps "inspired" by films like Juno and Knocked Up. This was told about in movies and other works like the 2010 Lifetime movie The Pregnancy Pact. While there really was an unusually high amount of teenage pregnancies in Gloucester, Massachusetts (eighteen total in a single high school in 2010) which inspired the Lifetime movie, there was no pact between the pregnant girls and they had little to nothing to do with one another, and little of this pact existed elsewhere.^note
There have been rumors of female Olympic athletes intentionally getting pregnant, and then terminating the pregnancy about 2-3 months in, just to get a boost from the hormone surge caused by the pregnancy. What that hormone boost was supposed to do is to increase the volume of the athlete's blood, thus theoretically improving her athletic performance, similar to other methods of "blood doping," but more difficult to detect or prove. To date, there have been no credible instances of athletes doing this. It also might not be very practical, as pregnancy hormones cause side-effects like Morning Sickness and fatigue,^note neither of which are really conducive to athletic performance or endurance, even as they taper off when the pregnancy is terminated.
Jokes about hippies and other counterculture groups from The '60s burning everything, and we mean EVERYTHING. In many of these cases, none of them were:
- Straw Feminists burning bras at demonstrations. There have been no known, credible instances of this happening. The closest thing to this idea is the demonstrators in question tossing bras, corsets, high-heeled shoes, cosmetics, and other items they regarded as symbols of female oppression into a garbage can, and even that happened only a couple of times.
- Young men burning draft cards as a protest against The Vietnam War. How widespread this practice was remains a matter of dispute: some highly publicized cases occurred, particularly in early antiwar protests in 1966 and 1967, but it's thought that the symbolic value of the act (and the level of media coverage these cases received) outweighed the actual frequency of the burnings. Perhaps the most famous and widely publicized antidraft protest involved the Berrigan brothers, who poured blood on stolen draft records (not cards) in an October 1967 protest. The related Catonsville Nine protesters burned draft records (again, not cards) after dousing them in napalm.
- The related myth of soldiers being spat upon by protesters after returning from the war. Certainly the Vietnam War was deeply divisive and not all American servicemen received a warm homecoming, but accounts of this actually happening are anecdotal at best; historians have found few, if any verifiable contemporary accounts of protesters spitting on returning veterans. At most, this may conflate behavior by protesters in other contexts, like activists at the October 1967 Pentagon protests who were accused of spitting on on-duty military police and soldiers guarding the Pentagon, with the perceived mistreatment of Vietnam vets.^note While perhaps not without some basis in fact, if it happened it was far less frequent than media depictions like First Blood suggest.
The infamous "Tide Pod Challenge". In early 2018, after a few reports emerged about teenagers (often erroneously referred to as "millennials", despite the fact that most sources define that generation as old enough to be 2018 teenagers' parents) supposedly swallowing laundry detergent pods on a dare, jokes about the phenomenon suddenly became ubiquitous, and everyone from YouTubers to late-night talk show hosts got a good laugh mercilessly mocking the kids who were dumb enough to participate. It wasn't that long before jokes about the Tide Pod Challenge became far more common than documented cases of kids actually doing it. In fact, there's very little evidence that the Challenge was ever a widespread fad.^note When stories about the Challenge were at their height, The Washington Post could confirm less than 20 instances of teens intentionally ingesting the pods in early 2018, with around 55 intentionally ingesting them the previous year. Indeed, Tide Pods (and other detergent pods) pose a much greater risk to small children (who either are at the stage where they put everything in their mouths, or mistake the pods for candy with their wrappers and bright colors), or elderly people (in particular, visually-impaired and dementia patients) who mistake them for candy than they pose to teens and young adults. In fact, that's a theory as to why it became a meme: it's the most effective way to give it widespread attention so people would be aware that it would pose a threat to those groups. Another possible origin for the meme is old Tumblr shitposts by people who know full well they're toxic musing about how they still look tasty, calling them "forbidden snacks".
Every Halloween, some local law enforcement agency, news program, or newspaper will run a story about drug dealers handing out drugs in the guise of "candy" to children out trick-or-treating, and how parents need to beware that they could end up in trick-or-treat bags. First of all, as mentioned further above, edibles are much too expensive for anyone to just give away for free. And secondly, even if that were financially viable (and it's not), the kids would have no way of knowing who the dealer was—the only possible reason to be doing this would be to get a bunch of random kids high just for its own sake.
- The "drugs as candy" urban legend was mocked by Amy Alkon on her blog:
  Bullshit. Nobody gives away drugs instead of 10-cent mini candy bars. Same as nobody gives away gold nuggets.
- Similarly, stories of children being poisoned on Halloween, or given unwrapped treats with razor blades, needles, and the like inside by malicious adults. There have been no proven instances of random children being injured or killed in this way; most of the instances involved pranks Gone Horribly Wrong, or the use of an existing urban legend to cover up a parent (or someone else known to the child) harming or killing them.
- And for yet another Halloween-related urban legend, the one about Satanic cults using ritual abuse against black cats. Every year, pet owners are encouraged to keep cats indoors,^note and animal shelters sometimes restrict or completely veto adoptions of black cats during the month of October. Halloween can be a stressful time for cats, what with strangers coming to the house, loud noises and disruptions in their routines, and sometimes cats bolt out the door, which can cause them to get hurt by cars and/or predators. "Lost Cat" and "Lost Dog" flyers proliferate in the days following July 4 and December 31 as well as Halloween. There have not been any credible reports of any cults torturing or sacrificing cats on Halloween (though sometimes the cats fall victim to malicious people, usually teens). And the reason shelters limit black cat adoptions is a much more practical one: people sometimes "adopt" black cats as accessories to witch costumes or living "home décor," then dump the cats off (or bring them back to the shelter) after Halloween.
Reports of Satanic ritual abuse taking place at daycare centers and the like back in The '80s (known as the Satanic Panic). The idea was popularized in a "memoir" of a man who allegedly spent time in a Satanic cult... which he later admitted was pure fiction. Police claiming to be experts on identifying Satanism traveled all over the country giving lectures at police conferences and protective service organizations. That, combined with distrust of daycare centers (which were a relatively new thing, thanks to the rise of working mothers), led to a belief that these institutions were fronts for ritually abusing and sacrificing the children left there. Even worse, agencies such as the FBI actually believed these conspiracy theories, even after FBI special agent Ken Lanning, who had believed it as well, conducted a lengthy investigation and found no evidence of organized Satanic cults raping and murdering children. This, and the fact that the investigators were interviewing children who were terrified of them (not of their caretakers) and were being primed to say what these officials wanted to hear, led to many daycare centers being shut down, and daycare staff being imprisoned or shunned by their communities for things they did not do. Some of them are still incarcerated.
- Similarly, the idea of Heavy Metal bands worshipping Satan is another example. While many, dating back to Black Sabbath, the Trope Maker, and Iron Maiden, the Trope Codifer of metal from the 1980s onward, used iconography and mentioned Satan in their lyrics it was almost always used as a horror movie-style means to scare the listener, even Black Sabbath's Nativity In Black, which is told from Satan's perspective, is about him changing his ways and becoming a good person by way of experiencing love.
Opponents of Barack Obama like to claim he apologizes for America all the time. Yet when asked they usually can't provide a single example. A possible source for this is Mitt Romney's book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. This article has an extensive analysis of the claim, including direct quotes.
The "fall" of Gerald Ford. The stereotype of him being an absolute klutz was due to a single incident where he fell down the steps of Air Force One; he later said this was because the stairs were slick due to rain.^note He could Never Live It Down after the constant lampooning of him falling over on Saturday Night Live by Chevy Chase, which was made iconic after all the imitators ran with the joke afterward.
Contrary to popular belief, ancient people never believed Atlantis was a real place. It was actually an allegory thought of by Plato, possibly based on Santorini Atoll, and never intended to be taken literally. The books that serve as the source of the "legend" say this explicitly.
Christopher Columbus is often mocked and portrayed as an idiot who didn't discover America, thought the Earth is shaped like a pear, and drastically miscalculated his journey, ignoring everyone who told him he was wrong. Except he never thought any of this. While it's true that educated people of the time knew the Earth was round, nobody was certain exactly how large the continents were. Columbus charted his route according to a map made by Italian cartographer Toscanelli, which showed where most educated people at the time thought Japan was. When Columbus landed in the Caribbean, he thought he'd discovered a series of previously uncharted islands off the coast of Asia, not China or India. Likewise, he never claimed that the Earth was pear-shaped, but that it was a sphere with a protuberance, at the top of which was the terrestrial paradise, aka the Garden of Eden. None of this was unique to him; map makers across the centuries and other explorers thought this paradise was real and lay to the south of Asia. During his third voyage, Columbus landed in what's now the Gulf of Paria, and he began to wonder if this land - which he realized was not Asia - was actually the terrestrial paradise explorers had been searching for.
- Some people and many children's programs seem to think he was trying to prove the Earth was round. That was not the case, and as above, it was agreed upon by educated people of the time that the Earth was round. This bit of the Columbus story was tacked on centuries later as part of Historical Hero Upgrade, making him look like a proto-enlightenment Science Hero.
People saying, "check, please" in movies and TV is common enough it could be a Stock Phrase, yet it's pretty rare for people to say this exact phrase in real life (unless they are deliberately imitating a movie or being facetious), usually it's something more like "May we please have the check". And in a lot of places, you don't get a check, you pay at the front.
The question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" has never been the subject of serious theological debate. The first known mentions are from 17th-century Protestant writers who used it as an example of medieval scholastic theologians pondering absurd and useless questions. Basically, it started as anti-Catholic propaganda. There are somewhat similar real cases, such as Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae asking and answering whether several angels can be in the same physical space at the same time.
People sometimes jokingly claim that masturbation causes hair to grow on your palms. While it's an indisputable fact that people in the 19th century thought masturbation caused a lot of weird health problems, there is little evidence to suggest they ever believed it caused this specific ailment. Most likely it was made up after the fact in order to mock the stupidity of people who believe masturbation was harmful, similar to the "Medieval people thought the Earth was flat" misconception above. It may also have been used as a threat to children who didn't know any better in order to discourage this behavior; similar to telling a child their face will "stick that way" if they keep making a funny face, no full-grown adult ever believed it.
Many parents as of the late 2010s worry that their kids will fall victim to the "Momo Challenge", which is allegedly a scary character named Momo on social media or YouTube threatening the kids into doing dangerous, potentially lethal, things. However, while people have put inappropriate stuff into kids' videos before, the Momo Challenge is likely a hoax: a twelve-year-old did kill herself and say that it was because of the "Momo Game", but there the prime suspect was someone she met on social media. There have also been a sixteen-year-old and another twelve-year-old who killed themselves and two young Indian men who died of unknown causes that have been linked to the challenge, but there was no solid evidence. In addition, no one has been able to get a screenshot of Momo in action and the face that people claim is being used as "Momo" is actually a sculpture.
As personal remote control drones became cheaper, easier to fly, and gained increased range in the late 2000s/early 2010s, significant concerns were raised that they would be used for spying and peeping. Sitcoms made it seem like the skies would be inundated with drones (for example, this was explored in an episode of South Park, a B-plot in an episode of Community, and a background joke in the 20 Minutes into the Future final season of Parks and Recreation) while more serious media examined the ethics around these activities. Ultimately, genuine issues were rare while personal drones themselves have since become mainstream enough to no longer be controversial. As a number of jurisdictions ease restrictions around delivery drones early in The New '20s, this idea has found a small amount of new life with the focus shifting to the potential dangers caused by both more drones in the sky and them landing near private residences.
People being burned for supposedly being witches wasn't nearly as common in Real Life as in fiction. While it's an indisputable fact that numerous people were killed for supposedly being witches, said people being killed by burning was a lot more rare than people think. In the Salem Witch Trials (probably the best-known example), all of the "witches" were killed by hanging except for one who was crushed to death with stones (and that was technically for refusing to enter a plea). And while there are some completely straight examples (such as Marigje Arriens or John Fian), most people will have never heard of them. Part of this may be due to conflating witch hunts with the burning of heretics, as the two are usually taught about around the same time in school.
- Similarly, portraying the witch hunts as a crime against women, with some works of fiction claiming only women were ever accused. In reality, not only are there plenty of cases when men were accused and executed...witchcraft was considered a men's crime in quite a few countries: Normandy, Estonia, Burgundy, Russia and Iceland.
- Another aspect of witch trials that is easily overlooked is that the vast majority of them were not conducted under church authorities but in secular courts. In fact, church investigations were in many areas considered to be more thorough and fair than secular ones. There are known instances of people trying hard to get their cases to be shifted to become a church matter by doing things such as loudly shouting blasphemies while detained in their cell.
It's become a cliché/joke in sci-fi stories for government agents trying to cover up UFO sightings to claim the object in question was really just a weather balloon, with the implication being such a statement is patently false and something only an idiot would actually fall for. In reality some weather balloons really do look rather like the stereotypical "flying saucer" (the one involved in the "Balloon Boy" incident is an example). This whole cliché comes from the Roswell incident where the Roswell personnel said what they found resembled a weather balloon. However, the suspiciousness of the statement comes not from the fact that they said it looked like a weather balloon, but that they changed their statement so soon after saying it was something else.
Chastity belts, at least in the common conception (i.e a metal belt a man forces his wife to wear while he's away) were never a real thing. The reason for this is (seemingly) obvious - how would the wearer go to the bathroom? Unless they opened at the back, which would defeat the purpose, at least in some cases. The closest real examples are belt-like devices invented in the late 19th/early 20th century in order to prevent masturbation, which most people thought was dangerous at the time. There's also some evidence around the same time of women intentionally putting on similar devices to protect themselves from being raped, although they would obviously have means to remove it once out of danger. They are also sometimes used as a bondage thing today, but again, the wearer can just ask to take them off. Well, we hope.^note
There's a common "meme" that states that Fred Rogers (of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood fame) was not an army sniper in Vietnam (or Korea), however there's no source that actually tried to claim that he was.^note

The thing is, Dead Unicorn Trope is supposed to be for a trope that was commonly parodied, but never or rarely played straight. This section mostly appears to be about debunking urban legends.

molokai198 Since: Oct, 2012

#45: Jul 6th 2022 at 1:38:09 PM

The Undead Horse Trope page for Sympathetic Slave Owner seems to have a bad case of We All Live in America, talking about USA historical events as if they should have made the trope dead everywhere in the world.

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

#46: Jul 6th 2022 at 6:52:02 PM

The miscellaneous section should be cut.

Kirby is awesome.

TheRandomSurfboard from Earth Since: Apr, 2020 Relationship Status: Is that a kind of food?

#47: Jul 10th 2022 at 12:27:16 PM

This is on Discredited Trope:

The Real Heroes: Heightened awareness of constant, unchecked Police Brutality and incompetent law enforcement within the U.S during the The New '20s has pretty much killed any positive depictions of ordinary cops in most media nowadays. Regular citizens (and occasionally firefighters) are still usually presented as being good people however.

Is it really discredited to show competent cops? Also the reasoning seems like it would only apply to American works.

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

#48: Jul 10th 2022 at 3:00:20 PM

I find that Discredited Trope and similar also reek of Americentrism.

Kirby is awesome.

SharkToast Since: Mar, 2013

#49: Oct 27th 2022 at 4:29:14 AM

This is from Undead Horse Trope:

Take That!: Many people see this trope as being way too-mean spirited and its continued usage as being overly edgy, but it's still being used to this day. Even one of the most infamous forms of this trope, anti-Barney humor, has lost popularity and approval in recent years yet still rears it's ugly head occasionally.

I'm doubtful that there exist people who think making a joke at someone else's expense is inherently "way too-mean spirited" or "overly edgy."

Wyldchyld (Old as dirt)