Trope Breaker: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

** [[Soap Opera]]s: In addition to its potential effects on [[Luke, You Are My Father]] and [[Mysterious Parent]] plots, it could be able to identify many [[Unknown Assailant]]s. Instead, it has spawned a wealth of [[Voodoo Shark|new justifying tropes]] such as the Laboratory Subversion, the Sample Subversion and the Concealed Test Result.

** The Scottish film "Young Adam". It was made in the early 21st century, but had to be set several decades earlier so that DNA testing would not be a plot option. When a drowned woman is discovered to have been pregnant when she died, the last man known to have dated her is charged with her murder (and unjustly convicted) on the grounds that he had impregnated her and didn't want to marry her. DNA testing would have established that he was not the child's father.

** Though more "advertisement of DNA testing" than reality.

* Less-lethal weapons are a Trope Breaker for police and crime dramas ''but not'' police documentaries. [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] by ''[[Police, Camera, Action!]]'' in the episode ''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Less Lethal Weapons]]'' in 2007. This is typically just plain ignored: When was the last time you saw anyone hit with a Taser or pepper spray on a cop show? It's still mostly guns and a few clubs in this world.

** It's also a point that in real life, police will ''never'' Taser a perp holding a gun (the twitching would cause them to pull the trigger), so more often than not, this is justified.

* Cell phones are a Trope Breaker for tropes involving [[Pay Phone]]s and [[Phone Booth]]s, as well as many other tropes. "I'm afraid Mr. Important is out of his office and can't be reached right now." There are also far more dead zones in fiction - especially in slasher films - than one would expect in the real world, as though the cellular phone is powered by [[Plot-Driven Breakdown|the same thing running the Millennium Falcon]]... (See [[Can You Hear Me Now?]].)

** Can possibly be justified when Mr. Important doesn't ''want'' to be reached.

** Cell phones have also seriously injured any trope that relies on a character being out of touch of friends, family or authorities for dramatic necessity. New tropes are evolving around the need to ''deprive'' a character of his cell phone in order to put him into some state of jeopardy that will last longer than it takes for him to call 911 or check Google Maps.

** So much for the sort of spy caper where the [[MacGuffin]] is "the negatives" of something incriminating (although this one got replaced by [[Enhance Button|"Zoom zoom enhance enhance."]])

** "Out of film" and "out of memory" are being replaced by "out of battery" which has the same effect and is more believable. However, with scientists having prototype batteries that can be charged in 10 seconds, this too may soon be broken.

** Several tabletop games involving vampires in the [[Urban Fantasy]] setting have had to make note that digital cameras don't work by way of reflections, and therefore will capture an image of a vampire. This presents many problems for game masters who place an emphasis on stories involving a [[Masquerade]], ''[[The World of Darkness]]'' in particular. This bleeds into Trope Breaker territory quite often, but just as often subverts it, since traditional cameras ''do'' work by way of reflection (as do some digital SLRs), and any [[Period Piece]] vampire campaign since digital media became the norm has had to pay more attention to the ''lack'' of digital photography. This may be one of the few cases of a Trope Breaker that operates solely on [[Fridge Logic]]. A few films have made note of this phenomenon, but the simple application of [[Our Vampires Are Different]] usually sweeps it under the rug.

** Similarly, any allegedly non-fiction work which relies on rare and fuzzy photographs of unconfirmed abnormal phenomena like UFOs or Bigfoot has to deal with (or suspiciously ignore) the frankly embarrassing admission that even with practically ''every person in the world carrying a high-resolution still and video camera at all times'', there are no more and no better photographs of their cryptid or alien of choice than there were when having a camera handy was a rare and special case.

* The increasing social awareness and acceptance of single mothers and out-of-wedlock births have made tropes like [[Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism]] acceptable and believable only when stories are set in the distant past, or under very restricting types of characters. This is more obvious in Soap Operas produced in South America, since single motherhood [[Disappeared Dad|and absent fathers]] are so widespread there that few people can understand the drama in that.

* The Civil Rights Movement can be credited with helping eliminate [[Egregious]] forms of the [[Ethnic Scrappy]], along with many other sad and offensive ethnic tropes. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that other less-offensive but still [[Unfortunate Implications|Unfortunately Implying]] tropes such as the [[Token Minority]] and [[Black Best Friend]] didn't come into play as the result of attempts to be politically correct.

* Certain [[Stock Shticks]] are rendered broken by technology, such as GPS doing away with the "man never asking for directions" shtick.

** Early commercials for Tom-Tom put a new spin on it, though, having guys ask "Mom-Mom" or "Doug-Doug" for directions instead of getting a Tom-Tom.

* Caller ID can break the stock plot of a person pretending to be calling from a place where he is not (though cell phones can sometimes help it work anyway). There are other ways to mask the number from which you're calling, but these never come up in the shows themselves.

** Also in ''[[Chopping Block]]'', where Butch's attempt to replicate ''When A Stranger Calls'' fails thanks to Caller ID.

** This is another case where [[Technology Marches On]] even further, driven by the needs of spammers and scam artists. As of the late 2010s, there are now ethically-dubious services which provide Caller ID spoofing to those whose business model and profit margins are driven by not being identifiable when they call you.

** Actually, many unbundled Voice-over-IP services let you send whatever you like as Caller ID, so sending spoofed or spurious info is trivial. Caller ID was good while it lasted...

* [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]] arguably broke the plausibility of the entire [[Spy Fiction]] genre, though it still hobbles along with [[The War on Terror]].

* Coeducational colleges and dorms killed off the [[College Widow]].

* Modern medical science in the developed world has, for the most part, done in the [[Incurable Cough of Death]], and [[Death by Childbirth]], or [[Undead Horse Trope|so one would think]].

** Probably because [[Rule of Funny|it just sounds funny]].

** Then again, the same jokes can be recycled for that other anachronism, the CD with a fingerprintintintintintintintintintint...

* More militaries have become professional volunteer forces doing away with [[Draft Dodging]].

* The feminist movement was a Trope Breaker for many tropes, including [[Damsel in Distress]], [[Screaming Woman]], [[Stay in the Kitchen]], [[Hysterical Woman]], and [[Monster Misogyny]]. Unfortunately, it also ''made'' the tropes [[Straw Feminist]] and [[Real Women Don't Wear Dresses]].

** The historic legend of ''St. Nicholas of Myra'' involves St. Nick secretly paying for the weddings of a poor man's three daughters, as somehow the only economic options for young women are presented as either marriage or prostitution.

** Then there are the endless fairy tales where [[Happily Ever After]] is blatantly and routinely defined as espousing someone whose parents own a government. Mind you, in real life, a floppy-eared prince is likely to cheat on you with Camilla, leading to an ugly divorce.

** The same could be said for many of the [[Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism|pregnancy tropes]] which involved women being forced to carry an accidental or unwanted pregnancy to term - although your mileage may vary as some régimes still hunt abortion doctors as criminals, depending on the country.

* Artificial insemination smashes a lot of [[Sex Tropes]] to little bits by making sex no longer necessary to produce kids. For instance, [[All Lesbians Want Kids]] and [[Only You Can Repopulate My Race]] no longer require [[IKEA Erotica|inserting tab A into slot B]] with all the potential angst this might involve. Of course, the suggestion almost never comes up except as [[Fridge Logic]].

** On the other hand, the man might have objections to making deposits at the sperm bank.

 

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{{Trope Life Cycle}}

[[Category:Trope Tropes]]

[[Category:Meta Concepts]]