Judge: Jury will disregard what the defense counsel said. Please try to forget that the suspect committed an identical crime before, right down to stabbing a bank guard between the thumb and forefinger with a 15th century darning needle while screaming “Darn it, Dougie!”… even though it’s now indelibly inserted into your memory banks.
And by the way (speaking of the wrong ballet teaching), wouldn’t it make sense to call up someone who knows a profession if you’re going to use if for a main character?
“And our protagonist is a… chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring!”
“Ok, can we call up a chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring?”
“Why would we…?”
“So we get artificial banana flavoring chemistry right.”
[blank stare] “Wait, you’re proposing we literally call up a chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring? What for?”
"“Scuse me, sir. I know a chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring!”
“So?”
“Well, if our hero is a chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring…”
“That doesn’t mean we have to go through all the rigamarole of actually calling a chemist that makes artificial banana flavoring. That could take, well, not hours, but some amount of actual work.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I can write chemists that make artificial banana flavoring… I’ll just have lots of flasks bubbling and they’ll be wearing expensively-tailored lab coats with stethoscopes and pocket protectors and Italian shoes.”
“Ooh, can their dialog be full of long chemical names?”
“Sure, do they have to have anything to do with artificial banana flavoring?”
“Pfft, you kidding?”
Even if they did make that call, afterwards you would probably hear this:
“Gosh, the details of making artificial banana flavoring are pretty dull, aren’t they?”
“They sure are. That’s never going to make for good TV.”
“What was that you were saying earlier about the flasks and the lab coats and the Italian shoes? That sounded pretty good.”
“Sure, I can get an exciting scene out of that.”
God knows I would never want to see my job portrayed accurately on TV. My job is boring!
I’d say that just having the fat man be either a figure of fun, gluttony or incompetence is a trope I could entirely do without.
I mean I’d love to see a show where there’s a fat character who’s none of those three things- I can’t think of the last time I saw a show* where a fat man was a competent, serious character; they’re always some kind of comic relief or incompetent/flawed in some major way that’s implied to have to do with their fatness. I’d like to see a fat badass at some point!
(*actually I just remembered that McGee on NCIS was pretty pudgy early on, and it wasn’t played for anything other than the way he was, which was pretty unusual)
Eh, plenty of people are like that, like my former housemate; if he wasn’t in the house, he was more often than not at one particular pub. He was sufficient of a fixture there that when there was a house fire next door to the pub, which was reported on the local news, more people called my housemate to find out if the pub was damaged/closed than phoned the actual pub.
Not sure if it counts as a trope, but the filming technique commonly used with ‘dangerous’ animals, where they’ll have footage of a real animal happily noodling along, minding its own business, clearly totally unaggressive, then suddenly switch to a model/CG version of the animal attacking. Like every wild animal just sees a human and launches itself straight at them.
The holographic map that reveals the location of Pandora’s Box has been hidden in a temple, now underwater, for thousands of years. During all those millennia, given the nature of the region, there must have been dozens of earthquakes of varying intensity, yet the temple survived just fine. But then, just when Laura was acquiring the map, an earthquake completely destroys the temple. What are the odds? LOL
Detective Goran(played by Vincent D’Onofrio) on Law & Order: Criminal Intent was a competent, serious character; so was the detective played Anthony Anderson on the original Law & Order. They were both overweight; Goran only more towards the end of the series.
Haven’t read through the entire thread, but I’m annoyed by the trope that has the male and female protagonists meet and hate each other before they find common ground and fall in love (or lust). This is EVERYWHERE.
Now that would make me laugh like a loon–it’s almost as good as the guy who accidentally discovered his lady had included a squeaky toy in his codpiece because he honked it at a friend and really, really honked at his friend. Then he became delighted by his new toy and squeakied EVERYONE!
Sometimes it is a True Representation. Any Doper who has met my wife and I can attest to this fact.
The trope that always annoys me is someone walking into a bar and ordering “a beer.” When in the history of Mankind has a bar only had 1 selection of beer? Hell, I bet Ninkasi provided at least 2 recipes.
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