Main Gone Horribly Right Discussion

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SeptimusHeap MOD (Edited uphill both ways)

Mar 22nd 2021 at 3:39:13 AM •••

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Gone Horribly Right vs. Careful What You Wish For, started by HiddenFacedMatt on Jan 4th 2012 at 11:04:45 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Hyperstrike Meat Shield Since: Apr, 2013

Meat Shield

May 15th 2019 at 2:01:52 PM •••

Maybe add a Real World section.

For things like 4Chan convincing all the idiots in the world that the "Okay" hand sign, milk, etc are secretly alt-right/nazi/KKK dog whistles?

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OptimumTaurus Since: Jun, 2010

Nov 9th 2019 at 5:11:44 AM •••

Milli Vanilli would be another real-life example.

wswordsmen Since: May, 2010

Dec 20th 2010 at 3:56:09 PM •••

Shouldn't this be a subtrope of Gone Horribly Wrong?

Edited by wswordsmen Hide / Show Replies

NNinja Since: Sep, 2015

Dec 22nd 2016 at 4:00:28 AM •••

Not really. Gone Horribly Wrong is when something in your plan went... well... wrong. This is when everything had gone exacly as planned... and that's why you're neck deep in trouble.

JurassicMosquito Since: Jan, 2001

Jun 26th 2012 at 7:24:30 AM •••

Was there some kind of discussion somewhere about cutting the Real Life section, or was that just a unilateral decision? In the meantime, I've fished the folder out of the history section and copied it here, should the group decide to want it back.

Real Life

TV Tropes was designed to give people something to do with their spare time when they are bored. It...succeeded, to say the least.
Conscription. It began in The French Revolution as means of quickly raising armies with impressive numbers, and combined with suitable mindset and proper tactics these newly raised bigger battalions managed to beat the best professional armies in the Europe. So successfully that the means of raising an emergency army became the norm of raising armies in the whole world for the next two centuries. Without conscription, waging two world wars would not have been possible. The direct results of conscription has been 100 million deaths in combat and stagnation in evolution of tactics for almost 150 years. Most countries outside the Western world, like China and Russia, still today cling on conscription.
- Officially, China has a conscription system. However, in practice, there are already more than enough volunteers to the point where the Army started finding ways to reduce the size of the army. Conscription has not been enforced in decades.
China's one-child policy has probably been the most successful endeavour in curbing population growth in human history. But there's one thing they didn't consider in prospect: the hugely disproportionate gender ratio in the coming generations. The far greater number of young males than females will cause a much sharper drop in population over the next few decades than they would have accounted for. Another frightening consequence is that every young man and woman is likely to end up with parents and grandparents reliant solely on them.
- Not to mention that having a lot of restive and sexually frustrated young men in your population and not enough women tends to go badly.
  - New reports find a rising trend of young men in China simply choosing to marry foreigners. Considering how, in the world, there are more women than men in all age groups anyways, it might not be as big of a problem as imagined.
    - Which in an odd way, is going to end up with a huge influx of foreign influences in China without the disadvantages of unwashed masses approach of old America.
The Manhattan Project, the project that created the first atomic bomb.
"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."
— J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director, Manhattan Project
- Or, more succinctly:
  "Now we're all sons of bitches."
  — Kenneth Bainbridge, Director of the Trinity Test, Manhattan Project
- While the scientists involved knew that they were making an extremely powerful bomb (excluding those who thought it would set off a reaction that would set the entire sky on fire), it wasn't expected to be as powerful as it was. To wit, there was a betting pool as to the bomb's blast radius. The person who won it was a visiting official, who picked a high number to flatter the scientists, and it still well exceeded his bet. This alone might be bad enough, but things like fallout or the full ramifications of big radiation still weren't readily apprehended either.
- Since they didn't know how powerful the bomb would be, as part of the secrecy operation they had a set of press releases prepared to explain away various sizes of mysterious explosion in the desert. The one they ended up using was "an ammunition dump exploded".
Castle Bravo, a nuclear test that went a little too well. Unexpectedly, stuff blew up to Eleven. They wanted a six megaton explosion; they got a fifteen. It wiped out the test gear meant to measure and record the explosion, and irradiated some islanders and a fishing boat, killing one outright.
- Not to mention vaporizing part of the atoll they tested it on - Google Map of the test site
The extraordinary success of the Japanese fleet over the Russian fleet in the Battle of Tsushima convinced the political and military establishment of Japan that military power was the universal medicine, which solves everything by itself. In the words of Geoffrey Regan: "Looking at Tōgō's victory over one of the world's great powers convinced some Japanese military men that with more ships, and bigger and better ones, similar victories could be won throughout the Pacific. Perhaps no power could resist the Japanese navy, not even Britain and the United States?"
The Davy Lamp had been designed as a fireproof oil lamp to protect the life of the coal miners from the explosions of the flammable gases. Short after its introduction, accident rate increased ...because the lamp encouraged working mining tunnels that had previously been closed for safety reasons, and also work in unsafe conditions due to the presence of methane gas.
- Many safety devices share the same problem: Serious accidents aren't reduced, or are even increased, because the added safety tends to encourage many people to be less safe in their actions.
  - Viktor Suvorov lampshaded this in his semi-autobiographic book where his teacher in the Spy School tells all the students to forget their fighting skills. James Bond skills may be cool, but they give a false sense of security, and once they make you slip up...well, in real life, it's much harder to fight off a regiment of troops backed up by two dozen helicopters.
The breeding of the Africanized Killer Bee. They wanted a better, more robust bee and ended up with hyper aggressive Ax-Crazy bees.
- Cracked said it best:
"Warwick E. Kerr created them in Brazil during the 1950s by crossing a European bee with an African bee. He wanted a bee that could live in the jungle. He got a bee that swarms by the hundreds of millions, is insanely territorial, mindlessly aggressive, has killed anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand people. And, can live in the jungle."
Cracked.com, The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World
- It turns out they do fine in the desert, too.
- It seems this accident is slowly producing positive results. Those Africanized honeybees which have migrated southwards have turned out to have lost a lot of their original aggression and pugnaciousness, and produce approximately one and half times more honey than ordinary bees. It has become the choice of the beekeepers in Brazil and Argentine. Likewise, when mating with European drones, the Africanized bee tends to become tamer and less vicious yet maintaining its ability to produce more honey than other bees.
The Chaser's APEC stunt. In early September, 2007, the APEC summit was being hosted in Australia. It's an incredibly important event that features 21 world leaders, and involved a part of the city being completely cordoned off and an inordinate amount of security. The Chasers had the idea of testing the security by sending a fake Canadian motorcade. The motorcade featured someone dressed as Osama Bin Laden, fake security passes with "JOKE" and "It's pretty obvious this isn't a real pass" clearly visible, and a man dressed as OSAMA BIN LADEN. Considering this, their lawyers said it would be fine, as APEC security would easily identify the motorcade as fake and turn them away before they got into any serious trouble. APEC security didn't identify the motorcade as fake. They were not turned away. They got into serious trouble. How far did they get? The Chasers reached the hotel George W. Bush was staying at, and realised that they had completely fooled APEC security.
Julian Morrow: The stunt that went horribly right.
When keepers at a Seattle aquarium moved a giant octopus into a larger tank with a more diverse population of predators, they figured its intelligence, stealth, and natural camouflage would keep it safe. They were right, but the sharks already in the tank weren't so fortunate.
Australian rabbits. Somebody at the end of the 19th century decided that it would be nice to have some European rabbits in Australia for hunting and released some pairs. The rabbit population, lacking proper competitors and predators, skyrocketed by the millions and became a problem for the native fauna and flora, as well as crops and livestock (since the rabbits ate their food). They tried to correct it releasing European foxes and it went even worse, as the foxes did not have competitors or predators either and found that hunting weaker and slower marsupials was actually easier than going after the rabbits at all. So in 1950 somebody developed the Myxomatosis virus, a form of an American disease found in cottontail rabbits. It worked fine, and rabbit population in Australia went from 600 million to 100 million in a couple of years. But then, a French farmer that was bothered by his neighbour's rabbits getting in his property everyday learned of the Myxomatosis success in Australia and decided to inoculate one of the rabbits with it. In the next years the Myxomatosis virus expanded like fire across Europe, and the rabbit population of the continent, which unlike in Australia did have real competitors and predators, plunged drastically and has not recovered to this day. Native predators that live mostly off eating rabbits like the Imperial Eagle and the Iberian Lynx have plunged as well and now are critically endangered (the latter being down to less than 200 living examples, and on the verge of being the first cat species to become extinct in over 10,000 years). All this because somebody wanted to hunt rabbits in Australia. It's getting worse - The Rabbits are slowly becoming immune to it. At least until the virus mutates.
- It's even worse than that. The government tried to put rewards for hunting rabbits, but that had little effect. In the end, they decided to create a huge fence spanning the entire country to keep the rabbits out. It failed, so they made a second fence. And then a third. Right now, there are three big fences (hundreds of miles long) to keep rabbits out from areas they never got into yet. Less that 10% of Australia was saved by these fences. There's even a movie, Rabbit-Proof Fence, about some lost Aborigine people who try to get back to their family by walking along the fence for DAYS.
This Cracked article, an excerpt from Robert Brockway's book Everything Is Going To Kill Everybody. A biotech company decided to genetically modify a plant bacterium to break down dead plant material into something useful to humans. The intended byproduct was an alcohol. It wasn't until its imminent release that it was actually tested on plants, and then only by an independent scientist. It was soon found that the bacteria got to work before the plant was actually dead and produced lethal levels of alcohol. Plants with the modified bacterium were dead in a week. The native bacterium is found in every root system of every land plant species that has ever been tested. Oh, Crap! indeed...
Kudzu was brought to the United States from Japan in 1876, mostly as an ornamental plant. And it does have very pretty purple flowers. However, being a creeper vine, from about 1935 to the early 1950s it was deliberately cultivated in the southeastern US. What they wanted was a plant to reduce soil erosion. What they got was a plant that readily grows in just about any conditions whatsoever, reacts to many herbicides like plant food, suffocates native plant life, and has no natural predators in the US. And it reduces erosion. Oops. The soil erosion they were trying to prevent? The bases of train tracks. Which means they deliberately planted it everywhere they could along rail lines. Which were the superhighways of the nineteenth century. As if that weren't enough, it also produces ground-level ozone.
- For perspective, kudzu can grow a foot a day. There are places in the South where you can still literally watch it completely take over buildings within a week. According to The Other Wiki, it spreads 150,000 acres a year and costs six million dollars in damages.
  - And it gets better: kudzu is edible, and rich in nutrients, and contains molecules beneficial for treatment of diabetes and Alzheimer's. It can be used both as human food and animal feedstock. It is considered in China as one of the 50 essential herbs.
In 1982, Commodore released the Commodore 64, a cheap computer that nearly everyone could afford and was great for gaming. It was so successful that they couldn't cancel it, even after the disk drive cost more to manufacture than the computer itself, which eventually contributed to Commodore going bankrupt.
The PC Engine, an 8-BIT MACHINE that held its own against SEGA and Nintendo's 16-bit machines and had the longest official life of any console (1987-1994). Thanks to dual 16-bit graphics processors, and an extremely well designed CD add-on (not to mention the card slot went directly into the motherboard, allowing NEC to continually expand the amount of system RAM available) the system was very popular in Japan. It was so popular, in fact, that NEC kept the system alive and kept pushing back the release of the system's replacement. This meant that when the replacement was released, it was horribly out the date. The PC-FX, which was sort-of a more powerful version of the Mega Drive, would have done extremely well in the 16-bit era that it was designed for; but its 32-bit competitors had all been designed to support polygon-based 3D graphics, making the system somewhat quaint.
In the 1980's, Osborne Computer Corporation released an announcement that a vastly more powerful model was going to be released in the near future. People were interested - but unfortunately for Osborne, this anticipation of an upcoming superior system caused a rapid decline in the sales of their existing models.
In 1971 the government of the Turkmen SSR (today Turkmenistan) was looking for deposits of natural gas. They found them - and the gas reserves are still burning today. Locals call it the Door to Hell.
In 2007, adult swim wanted to promote the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie by placing several signs depicting a Mooninite giving the finger in several major cities in North America. The campaign got a lot of attention...after someone in Boston thought one was a bomb. It could also count as such for the Boston Police, as they reacted swiftly to a terrorist threat that had the slight problem of not being a terrorist threat.
The Stanford Prison Experiment managed to become both this and Gone Horribly Wrong simultaneously. The foreground objective was to maintain order within a makeshift prison, and this absolutely went awry. But the actual objective was to see if that violence in prison results from system factors, not sadism of some people.
The breakup of the rigid system of rules organizing life in the Communist Soviet Union was supposed to allow common people to gain wealth, freedom, and a general improvement of personal life. For most, it ~~succeeded~~ failed more or less. For a few, it succeeded a little TOO well.
Speaking of Communism, Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to make the Soviet Union less repressive, and allowed for openness. What he didn't expect was people in the Soviet satellite states to be more open about the fact that communism sucked, all the Warsaw Pact governments to be overthrown within less than a YEAR, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself to fly apart.
HR Giger tried to implement some of his nightmares into his artwork. The rest is history.
A sadder example: Due to the stigma of depression and the notion that most people are just Wangsting (especially teens), sufferers often feel the need to prove that they're unhappy by doing something drastic—because only a really unhappy person would take their own lives. The "lucky" ones end up in emergency rooms. The unlucky ones end up in coffins.
- Chronic self-harming is another common result. The fact that much of the public considers even this to simply be attention seeking (rather than evidence of severe psychological problems) tends to lead to the conclusion that Humans Are Bastards.
- Part of the problem is that a not-insignificant portion of the people who do this are simply seeking attention. The fact that it's easier to dismiss this as such rather than take the time to actually investigate, though, still falls under Humans Are Bastards.
- To look at it another way, of course they're doing it "for attention". The point is that if you think the best way to get attention is self-harm, you need psychological help.
- To look at it yet another way, yes, they're doing it "for attention", but the "attention" they're looking for is psychological help.
- And to look at it still another way, one of both the causes and symptoms of depression in many cases is the sense that no one cares about you. So of course people who feel ignored and abandoned want attention. People say things like "oh, he's just looking for attention" as if that were some frivolous thing and not one of the most basic human emotional needs.
In typography, Helvetica was designed to be the 'perfect' typeface; meaning it could be used on almost any design or purpose. By the end of the 20th century, it and its clones has been overused by amateurs and professionals alike to the point that it's on the verge of becoming the most hated typeface alongside Comic Sans and Papyrus.
- Well, at least it's not Comic Sans.
In order to warm the Brazilian economy up, the government cut taxes on cars. It did warm up the economy quite well...but at the cost of making traffic issues worse than they used to be since many people which were used to public transportation were buying cars.
Acclaim tried to make a David Ferris game more controversial by adding in sex, nudity, and crude humor in an attempt to boost sales, resulting in BMX-XXX. They succeeded in creating controversy, all right, but it backfired when it became apparent that the controversy resulted in most outlet stores refusing to carry the game, resulting in Acclaim becoming bankrupt.
Humans in general. Our intellect made us great hunters, allowed us to use tools, allowed us to cultivate, we reproduced, and our population grew and we spread. Now each year our growth rate is bigger, each year we need more food, each year we need more space, the energy sources of which we depend to sustain our society are changing the weather, forests are disappearing in order to build homes or crops, each year the humans produce more waste, more contaminants, more species disappear, and so on. And the worst part is that if we can afford the changes, we can end up doomed by our own success.
- There's an argument (made by Matt Ridley, among others) that human intelligence is a runaway sexually selected trait, like the peacock's tail. In other words, human ancestors got smarter and smarter merely because smart proto-humans were better at flirting, getting mates, and sleeping around than their stupider brothers and sisters. It worked...to the extent that one species of African apes — Homo sapiens — are now flirting, getting mates, and sleeping around on seven continents.
  - Humans didn't just win the brain lottery. We won the whole damn genetic jackpot. We're #1 in intelligence, #2 in pound-for-pound strength, the second largest pack-hunting predator, have one of the most efficient digestive systems, can control our body temperature in ways that no other vertibrate can, and the only wild animal that can actually keep up with us over long distances (i.e. days of travel) is called a wolf. We can also strike from a distance, which is something that no other mammal can do.
- There is also the cultural-heritage thing to consider, though. Once we got language, genetic advantages stopped being the primary factor in our survival rates; instead it shifted to what sorts of ideas we'd inherited for things like agriculture and force-multipliers. The accumulation of brilliant not-dying ideas are what have made us go Horribly Right, rather than the genetically defined quality 'cleverness.' (Or at least, that's what the few raised-by-wolves cases science has had access to indicate.)
- More generally, the history of life on Earth is full of examples of species for which natural selection worked so well that they ended up becoming extinct for the sole reason that they were too good at hunting prey.
Overlapping with Gone Horribly Wrong, a big cornerstone of Donald Trump's presidential campaign attempt was getting Barack Obama's long form birth certificate released to the public, all the while getting big ratings for his show. Obama did just that. Now with the proof he asked for, Trump doesn't really have anything that makes him interesting, plummeting to fifth and screwing his ratings as well, not to mention the Humiliation Conga that ensued over the birth certificate itself.
- This can often be seen in politics in general: to use the American example, to get a Presidential nomination one has to appeal to the party's core constituency in order to secure the nomination. Unfortunately, the candidate who succeeds too well in appealing to the "base" can end up looking more unappealing to the majority of voters who are not party members.
- The reverse can be true as well. During the 2004 US Presidential Primary, researchers found that many of the people voting for John Kerry did so not because they saw him as the best candidate, but because they thought that swing voters would. So the Democrats wound up with a candiate that the party base didn't really believe in, and that in turn failed to convince swing voters to vote for him instead of Bush.
- Another example from recent US politics: Elizabeth Warren, currently running for the Senate in Massachusetts, is the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When Senatorial Republicans refused even to consider her nomination to head that agency, President Obama nominated a new person: Richard Cordray. Before this nomination, Cordray served the CFPB as the head of the enforcement division. Now, instead of just being chief enforcer, he may end up running the whole show. Nice job fixing it, Republicans!
  - To add salt in the wound (at least from the Republican point of view) Ms. Warren is now running (and polling well) for the US Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. A seat currently held by Republican Scott Brown.
Mr. Yuk commercials are a perfect example of this. The creators wanted to instill a fear of household chemicals so kids wouldn't get into stuff they shouldn't. It did that and more. Many reported nightmares over the commercials and some as adults still have a fear of the cabinets, the closets, the area underneath the sink, household chemicals, knives, electrical plugs, matches, you name it.
Singapore used to have a "Stop at two" policy that discouraged people from having more than two children due to fears of overpopulation. It worked very well. Now, with birth rates on the low and the government frantically throwing Baby Bonuses at the problem to little effect, some of the old guard are wondering if they shouldn't have instituted the policy, since even if the birth rate is proportionately low, having a higher base population to work with would still give more absolute births.
After winning the French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years' War), the British government in London was unhappy over how much it had spent, and was still spending, to defend its North American colonies, and wanted the colonies to assume a greater share of the financial burden of their own defense. Only a few years later, they were paying the entirety of the cost of their own defense.
To fight the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, liberal Spanish guerrillas met during the Cádiz Cortes to agree on a plan to defeat the French and restore deposed king Ferdinand VII to the throne. They achieved their goals and... well... let's say things went sooo right afterwards.
Winning the lottery is like this for a lot of people.
For years, in fact decades, the United States government interfered extensively in the housing market in order to make housing more affordable for more Americans. As a direct and entirely predictable result of these policies, in 2007 the price of housing dropped dramatically. We wanted to make houses cheaper, and we succeeded. And then everyone got upset.
In the late 1970s, the newly-elected Bloc Quebecois implemented Bill 101, or the Charter of the French Language, which made French the only official language of the Canadian province of Quebec. Though successful in rescuing French language out of limbo, it led to a lot of English-speakers and companies relocating to neighbouring Ontario. This proved to be a liability for Quebec, until the Supreme Court struck down Bill 101 as unconstitutional roughly 10 years after its passage.
Both this and Gone Horribly Wrong:Some Soviet guys simulated a coolant failure on a nuclear power plant. They ended up with the Chernobyl disaster.
In 1981, Australia launched its "Slip-Slop-Slap" campaign to encourage Australians to "slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, and slap on a hat" to reduce sun exposure, to great success. Since then, even though rates of the two most common forms skin cancer (basal-cell and squamous cell carcinoma) dropped, instances of melanoma (the deadliest form of skin cancer) have increased. Vitamin D deficiencies (from which UV rays are the best natural source) also increased with it.
Japan's (in)famous work ethic since World War II. On the one hand, a miraculous bounce back from losing the war to becoming an economic giant that scared the world (especially America) in believing they'd be running things and despite the bubble bursting, still remains the one of the top tech spots in the world mindset and home of, if not the most long-living people. However, this is at the cost of "Karoshi," a term that had to be invented for otherwise young, healthy men literally working themselves to death (without paid overtime,) a population with increasingly more retirees than actual workers, otherwise fertile husbands not being home enough to actually father children, women entering the work force with the same results of drinking all night and marrying later, if at all, "Herbivore Men" who're too lazy and selfish to bother with relationships and an infamous though subtle xenophobia that sees even Japanese-Brazilians as Gaijin, making immigration virtually impossible in a fading population that looks to lose a third of its population within 50 years, which will affect the future world economy.
Accidental Nightmare Fuel, right there in the name. They didn't mean to give you nightmares and shivers for all of your childhood! Honest, they didn't...
In 1890, New York pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin released 60 European Starlings in Central Park, part of a scheme to introduce to America all the birds mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. There are now estimated 150 million starlings in the United States.

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PsiBasilisk Since: Mar, 2012

Jun 28th 2012 at 5:21:33 AM •••

How does not being a relationship make someone lazy and selfish?

JurassicMosquito Since: Jan, 2001

Jul 7th 2012 at 10:22:44 AM •••

Er...what? I think this comment goes to another discussion. If it does not, could you perhaps spend some time defining the connection?

DialgaX Since: Jan, 2001

Jul 19th 2012 at 10:21:50 PM •••

I think we should just stick to machines and technology related examples so there's no debate there.

JurassicMosquito Since: Jan, 2001

Aug 7th 2012 at 9:53:12 AM •••

@Dialga X: I think there's more we could include than that (kudzu or killer bees aren't machines or technology, but I think they count), but I think we could definitely skip any political examples.

FelixMartinez Since: Sep, 2011

Dec 2nd 2012 at 8:35:51 AM •••

Taekwondo monkeys attack trainer.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6825449/Taekwondo-monkeys-attack-trainer.html

Dimension Lord and a lover of cats.

Thecommander236 Since: Aug, 2011

Mar 12th 2013 at 1:47:24 PM •••

I think that the invention of the nuclear bomb would be a perfect example of this. The guys working on the Manhattan Project were simultaneously pleased and disturbed by their results because they knew what it meant for the future.

Don't make me destroy you. @ Castle Series

Kagimizu Kagimizu Since: Jun, 2012

Kagimizu

Jul 9th 2012 at 4:59:06 PM •••

HOW is Chuggaa's "Steve" joke not on this page?

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Komodin Since: Jan, 2001

Jul 9th 2012 at 5:00:47 PM •••

Add it, then.

Edited by Komodin Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows.

Spitty Since: Jul, 2011

Mar 15th 2012 at 6:59:27 AM •••

Should the Mass Effect entry pertaining to the Rachni be here? The aim was to breed an army for Saren that they could control and, at the very least, point in the direction of Saren's enemies. What they got was a mountainside covered in psychotically aggressive insectoid berserkers. It went more wrong than right.

Also, the Halo entry right below the Mass Effect one is absolutely idiotic. "It succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. And they knew it would happen." First, it clearly wasn't beyond their imaginings if they knew it was going to happen. Second, it went EXACTLY according to plan. They intended the rings to be used as a last resort to kill all sentient life in the galaxy to starve the flood, and that is exactly what happened.

Edited by Spitty

hashsw Since: Dec, 1969

Feb 18th 2012 at 7:06:20 PM •••

Not sure how this works, but I think we should add a Literature example from Orson Scott Card called Heal Thyself, where the ultimate panacea of all diseases turns out to cure the particular Neanderthal "disease" called homo sapiens...

RTanker Since: Oct, 2010

Feb 7th 2012 at 10:50:31 AM •••

Cut this:

* Emperor Napoleon I decided that European Jews were ordinary citizens

, with full exercise of rights and responsibilities as any other citizen. What had started as a thoroughly humanistic idea infuriated the other European rulers so much

that any chances of Napoleon forging a truly lasting peace with them were forfeited, regardless of diplomacy or battlefield success.

Because it's not really an example of this trope, and it is highly dubious as an explanation for Napoleon's inability to make peace with his enemies. Firstly, it is not really an example because the emancipation itself was successful. The Jews in the territories Napoleon controlled became free and at least nominally equal citizens who paid taxes to Napoleon's government and were eligible for service—and many did serve—in Napoleon's armies. That went fine for Napoleon. The fact that it made some people angry does not mean that it went horribly right. It just went right but made some people angry.

Secondly, this is highly dubious as an explanation for why Napoleon was unable to make peace with his enemies. Napoleon actually did make peace with Russia, by far the most antisemitic European country at the time, and the one most angered over the emancipation, but then broke the peace by invading Russia. Meanwhile, Napoleon's most inveterate enemy, Britain, had already emancipated its own Jews, and only objected to Napoleon's efforts to restart the sanhedrin. The real reason Napoleon was unable to make peace with his enemies was that Napoleon was never satisfied and always wanted to conquer more.

SamMax Since: Sep, 2011

Feb 1st 2012 at 5:18:35 AM •••

Should Real Life examples be in the Trivia tab for individual works? It doesn't say...

Edited by SamMax

RTanker Since: Oct, 2010

Jun 26th 2011 at 12:58:03 AM •••

Cut this:

* An example from German history: conservatives and right wing politicians wanted to install Adolf Hitler as a puppet ruler and use his party and popularity to hold the communists at bay, which were deemed a bigger problem. Hitler proved to be stronger than expected and the rest is history.

Because its interpretation of the history of Hitler's rise to power is questionable at best, and because, even if it were completely accurate, it would still be an example of Gone Horribly Wrong: Hitler's reign ended with the entire eastern half of German under Communist rule.

Edited by RTanker

cynwakefield Since: Dec, 1969

Aug 7th 2010 at 5:30:22 PM •••

Xenovirus Takis-A, the Wild Card virus, was designed to infect and genetically enhance the recipients, making them recessive carriers of the virus for hereditary purposes. The ''Wild Cards'' series of books details the consequences when the test canister is opened in the Jet Stream over New York City just after World War II.

Not an example. Not only was the Xenovirus Takis-A experiment a failure — it causes too many deaths to use on their own people and creates too many superbeings to use on their enemies — but House Ilkazam's problems don't end up stemming from Wild Cards but from rogue Takisians.

About all that can be said is that Blaise would never have existed if Dr. Tachyon hadn't followed Xenovirus Takis-A to Earth. But that's pretty indirect, and not really this trope.

FastEddie MOD Since: Apr, 2004

Apr 8th 2010 at 4:34:03 PM •••

Bible bashing:

We're really not about bashing fandoms. If you've got something positive to say about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it would be funnier than bashing on the religion fans. Try that style.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

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