This feels like one of those Fridge Logic tropes (Why don't the characters call Social Services?). The thing is, in the real world people often don't call social services in situations that often warrant it.
A lot of shows simply don't feature family interactions and stuff like that because it's out of focus for the series.
I also see a few examples from stories set in fantasy worlds or that otherwise don't run on real world logic. In which case Social Services Does Not Exist (literally), but for example being in a Crapsack World is a little different than what this trope should be about.
RJ Savoy
It seems to have become a catch-all for children either roaming free or being abused without help available, and both are common in fiction for obvious reasons. There may be some tropeable parts of this, but I can easily see this being disambiguated if it hits TRS.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
The concept of the trope is that several kinds of conflicts/drama would be prematurely solved by social services, so they are not shown to act in circumstances where they should.
I think the problem is that it requires a comparison with real world social services handling, and most people don't know how that works. The B&B example might be valid, but fantasy settings are questionable since in many cases you wouldn't expect social services to exist there.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
I think the actual problem is that it’s a trope defined by the LACK of something, and those have presented many problems in the past.
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
I am unsure if Pokémon counts as a fantasy world despite its modern technologies.
- Pokémon: The Series:
- You'd think that after Brock's father abandoned his family and his mother
diedleft, the social services would help look after his dozen siblings, rather than just letting the teenager who's also holding down a job as a gym leader do it all by himself. It's made worse when Brock leaves his dozen siblings with their newly found father, who is completely incompetent (come on, who would expect this guy to take care of 9 children?). And it's later revealed that their mother was alive all along and wandering around the world like her husband, and Lola even elopes with Flint leaving their remaining kids alone with their second oldest to look after them until Brock returns. It seems that leaving your children completely alone with just an older teenage brother in charge isn't considered a crime in the Pokémon world. In all of these cases, Brock is pretty angry to say the least. - Lillie and Gladion definitely could have used it as well — due to their neglectful mother being a Workaholic (leaving their butler to take care of the house), Lillie is nearly taken by an Ultra Beast due to one of Lusamine's own coworkers and develops a fear of Pokémon with Trauma-Induced Amnesia while the experience scars Gladion enough to not speak up in support of his sister. Thank goodness they had some True Companions to help her regain her love of Pokémon.
- You'd think that after Brock's father abandoned his family and his mother
Edited by Nen_desharu on Mar 6th 2024 at 11:51:23 AM
Kirby is awesome.
Can shapeshift (probably)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Yeah, that's my main concern too.
To elaborate on the opening post: tropes like, say, No Bisexuals have merit because it's defined by something that's otherwise universally recognizable both in terms of it existing across media and being in the public consciousness worldwide—any use of it, even if it's subtle, is enough to make it obvious to most viewers, but the writers choose to skip over that part so it can go either way. The reason I don't think SSDNE can be called a Trope in Aggregate is because it's focusing on the exact inverse: something that is very much a lack of something despite seeming like it's media-wide at first, and only going a single way. So if I go by Sep's reasoning about the use of social services in a work being big on prior knowledge (which is a good point that I hadn't considered in the OP), that implies that even some understanding of the process is enough; so even if there's something for the writers to skip over, no one can say for sure whether it should really be a part of the work.
Informed Judaism has a bit of a similar problem in terms of there being a lack of something. I think it's even more chairsy though since the viewer isn't necessarily expecting a character being Jewish to be brought up again anyway, and there's no "way" for it to go other than, well, being brought up again after it's brought up in the first place.
To answer your question, I think it's more of a non-interactive RPG where the titular Pokémon are more or less left to their own devices, technically speaking, than a fantasy (though the two aren't mutually exclusive). I'd say those examples are just complaining, though, and the entries even admit that these are easily mitigable consequences.
Silver and gold, silver and gold
So I was recently skimming through edits to YMMV.Beavis And Butt Head, and I came across an edit
that had removed Social Services Does Not Exist, as it isn't YMMV. The original entry said:
I had seen SSDNE potholed in a similar manner before (e.g. "Suffice to say, no one dares call social services on [X]'s parents for their abuse), but I don't think I've ever seen it listed as an isolated example, so I was curious how those compared to this one. The western animation subpage tends to zigzag between examples that are essentially just "The character's parents/guardians are neglectful", "The guardians are weird and they live in an apartment complex with other weird characters, but they seem to function fine", "The characters are Free-Range Children", and misc. Was this trope originally meant to be a supertrope to things like Adults Are Useless and Evil Matriarch, at least when Super-Trope became a thing (the YKTTW
is from barely over a year before ST was created), or is it just out-of-universe Fridge Logic? I could maybe see merit in the former, but I'm having trouble putting my finger on what really makes this tropeworthy as a whole in practice, even if it became YMMV.
An old TRS thread for There Are No Therapists had someone suggest
that it functions the same way as the former trope, in that it's a Trope in Aggregate, but given how inconsistently I'm seeing it be used I don't think things are quite that simple. Thoughts?
Silver and gold, silver and gold