silver06
Since: Mar, 2012
Jun 24th 2014 at 1:40:10 PM
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Would the Pokémon games count? For one, the goal for most games is to become a Pokémon Master, but in every game, defeating the champion doesn't go towards this goal since he/she always returns to their position after the credits roll. Secondly, the overall point of the franchise, Gotta Catch Them All, could also be an example of this in the meta sense, since even if you catch every Pokémon and fill the entire Pokédex, you can expect to have to do it all over again when the next generation of Pokémon comes out, thus you can never really "Catch them all."
Edited by 24.137.104.27
OmegaMetroid
Since: May, 2009
Jan 5th 2014 at 12:53:14 AM
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Wondering something... does this fit?
- According to one of the Star Wars original trilogy's novelizations, Darth Vader is theoretically able to heal himself with The Dark Side of The Force. To do so, he needs to fill himself with anger and hatred so he has enough dark side power until he's fully healed, or the effects of the healing dissipate. Unfortunately, being able to breathe without his helmet gives him joy, disrupting his control over the dark side and thus preventing him from being able to make it permanent. The very act of succeeding quite literally causes any attempt to fail in and of itself.
Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 22nd 2010 at 1:57:08 AM
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The details of how Misfile could be resolved gave rise to a conversation on the main page: moved the conversation to discussion and replaced it with a generalised assertion about what cannot be resolved without ending the series.
- Since reversing the misfile will reset the memories of Ash and Emily to before the beginning of the comic, there would be little point in continuing the story afterward.
- Not until it ends anyway.
- Huh? Hang on. The initial misfile reset everyone's memories EXCEPT Ash's and Emily's. Why would reversing the misfile "fix" what was never broken? Also, Ash does not feel that "her" life has been noticeably improved by the change; besides forming a new relationship with "her" mom, Ash is always finding something new to complain about. To be fair, the misfile has cost Ash a lot of self-esteem, a good friend, the respect of most of the guys "she" knew, and of course "her" gender identity, so very important to "her" self-image.
- Fixing the misfile would fix Ash's "broken" memories of being a girl, because a properly functioning universe would not have a man with memories of having been a woman for a year of his life. Likewise, Emily cannot have two sets of memories from when she was sixteen, so it would probably destroy the "broken" set of memories that somehow took place after she turned eighteen.
- By now, it's even worse: Emily likes this version of the events. Meaning that unless Ash finally settles for being a girl (which is unlikely, since he was a boy when he started, has never had gender-identity-linked questions and the author is a firm believer in transsexualism which sorta means that you don't choose gender)... okay, parenthetical statement was too long... So if that doesn't happen, reversing the misfile will make Emily intensely unhappy (hey, past where I was things I now hate) or make Ash intensely unhappy (hey, future, with me living in a body I don't want to live in).
Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 22nd 2010 at 1:36:02 AM
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Dropped from Paranoia — GM's achieve this one all the time. This is more a matter of liberal use of the Reset Button — or simply getting fresh clones in next time around.
- GM's goal: get everyone to kill themselves and everyone else in as amusing and entertaining fashion as possible.
Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 22nd 2010 at 1:32:26 AM
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This seems too sweeping: all Neon Genesis Evangelion fan fiction does not have one goal. In any case the agregate isn't a unified fictional series that needs to keep its dramatic tension rubber band wound up.
- Any Eva fanfiction. Goal: give the story a happy ending without totally changing the characters personality, or killing off a love interest.
Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 22nd 2010 at 1:30:56 AM
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Drop this note from Looney Tunes entry: factually incorrect.
- There was a rumor for many years that a special Roadrunner cartoon was made to be shown to soldiers in WWII that ended with the coyote catching and eating the roadrunner. It was later proven that no such cartoon exists...
- ...because, as any good animation historian knows, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner were not created until 1949, four years after WWII ended!
Camacan
MOD
Since: Jan, 2001
Oct 22nd 2010 at 1:29:50 AM
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Drop the entire Real Life section to discussion: it has collected a lot of natter and several entries which use the name of the trope as an excuse of a Take That. As a fictional trope relating to ongoing fictional series that can't lose their underlying dramatic tension, a Real Life section is probably not appropriate.
Real Life
- The Game. Accoiding to XKCD there is a way to win
.
- The Second Polish Republic in the intermediary period between the First World War and the Second World War. It could either align itself with the Soviet Union - who had territorial claims on the whole of Poland and had previously invaded Poland in the 1920s - or with Nazi Germany - who had territorial claims on the Danzig Corridor. As it happened, Poland tried to Take a Third Option by allying itself with Great Britain and France, which just resulted in it being divided between its two neighbours.
There was a fourth option as well the Baltic Entante or the Small Entantewhere all the states of eastern Baltic coast would be in one alliance (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland) providing each other with military help. Unfortunately it never was made in the form it was intended as Poland had territorial disputes with Lithuania while Finland wanted a more Scandinavian oriented foreign policy.
- The lottery. Goal: Win enough money to save you from having to work for a living.
- Even if you win, that's just a season-ending plot twist, and things often get worse.
- It is possible to subvert this trope if the jackpot is big enough for you to buy every combination and still turn a profit. The logistics on the other hand are formidable, and you may discover a lot of long lost relatives you never knew existed.
- Debatable - even if the jackpot can cover all the expenses and provide you with money on top of it, it's not sure you will be the only one who wins it. You may need to share with another winner, thus bringing the net sum gained to a negative number ((jackpot/2) - price for all tickets).
- And of course, if you have enough money to buy every possible combination, (a tad under £14,000,000 in the UK lottery) you have enough money not to work again anyway, and there's no point playing.
- Wouldn't that in itself be a job worse than whatever job you have right now?
- Real life itself. Goal: not die.
- Only if that is your goal. Many people are content with the goal of "Find happiness". Some even succeed.
- Achieving immortality. A goal many people have tried to accomplish in the course of human history, all of them failures. If you manage to achieve it, come back in five hundred years and tell us about it. And none of that "living eternally through your friends/loved ones/work" crap.
- But you can live eternally through your work... or, at least, some days living through work feels like forever.
- True immortality takes an eternity to accomplish. If you extend your lifetime to a billion years you're still a mortal, just extremely long-lived.
- That actually makes no sense at all. Using the same logic: if you aren't dead yet, there's no way to be absolutely certain that you are mortal. You may be as well immortal - you'll never know.
- This seemed to be the case with Italy in World War 2, and most of its few successes during the war stemmed from German support.
- The universe. Goal: Overcome the expansion of space and achieve a balance between matter and energy so that in trillions of years from now, the universe won't become an infinite stretch of nothingness with all matter and energy spread out into a barely traceable amount of background radiation and perhaps a single elementary particle per cubic lightyear.
- Faced with this, dying is an incredibly underrated gift because you won't have to deal with it.
- Most researchers are once again starting to lean towards recursive universe models. Because there isn't such thing as true nothingness according to quantum physics, every point is a potential event horizon. Although it may take near-infinite timespan to happen, existence will expand again from the background radiation eventually. And that's not even getting into the more esoteric theories, such as that our universe is inside a wormhole, and that every forming wormhole produces a new universe inside it. In any case, we're only assuming that the universe as we know it is a closed system with no "outside"; we've been wrong about that before.
- The Chicago Cubs.
- Similarly, the Detroit Lions.
- The Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings might be worse. The Bills have been to four Super Bowls in a row. Didn't win one. The Vikings have 26 playoff appearances, 18 of them as a result of regular season divisional championships, have a high all time winning percentage, have been to four Super Bowls, and are still ringless. One wonders how Vikings fans stay sane.
- Every single on of the CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, from poisoned cold cream to exploding cigars, has failed. Every one. All 638 of them. He is now set to die a relatively peaceful death at home or perhaps in a hospital.
- Or from falling down the stairs [1]
- Or from falling down the stairs [1]
- Several racehorses ran over 100 times and never won. One of them, Zippy Chippy, actually became a minor celebrity and once outran a minor league baseball player in a publicity stunt.
- Cleveland Sports Teams
- Searching for the paranormal (ghosts/aliens/bigfoot/etc). No matter how hard you look or what methods you use, you'll never have proof hard enough to put away all doubts. And even if you do, your evidence will most likely be disregarded as fake.
- If only Steve Irwin were here. If he were dropped in the Pacific Northwest, he would've found and tagged Bigfoot in two hours.
Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused
, started by ZuTheSkunk on Jan 18th 2017 at 12:08:07 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman