TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life

The Reality Subtext extends past the Fourth Wall to issues surrounding the production itself or on an even larger scale.

During the creation of a work, the rest of the world and its struggles go on. Maybe the author or actor is having relationship issues, drug issues, got pregnant, or someone close to them died. Or something major happened in the world: a disaster, a war, the death or birth of a public figure, a chaotic political climate, what have you.

Often these events have an effect on the work, but not one that is visible to the viewer or reader unless they are privy to that outside knowledge. Some subtext is only speculative, and some comes from first hand sources such as interviews and DVD Commentary. Either way, it is either not intentionally called out within the work, or the reference is oblique except to those who are ‘in on it’.

In order to show the world that minority characters are not bad people, one will step forward to help a “normal” person, with their pure heart and folksy wisdom. They are usually black and/or poor, but may come from another oppressed minority. They step (often clad in a clean, white suit) into the life of the much more privileged (and, in particular, almost always white) central character and, in some way, enrich that central character’s life. If the Magical Negro (also known as Magic Negro or Mystical Negro) is from a society of Noble Savages, expect an Anvilicious Aesop about the failings of the protagonist’s society — which usually leads to the protagonist “going native”.

With such deep spiritual wisdom (and sometimes — though not always — actual supernatural powers), you might wonder why the Magical Negro doesn’t step up and save the day himself. This will never happen. So enlightened and selfless is he that he has no desire to gain glory for himself; he only wants to help those who need guidance…which just happens to mean those who are traditionally viewed by Hollywood as better suited for protagonist roles, not, say, his own oppressed people. In fact, the Magical Negro really seems to have no goal in life other than helping white people achieve their fullest potential; he may even be ditched or killed outright once he’s served that purpose. If he does express any selfish desires, it will only be in the context of helping the white protagonists realize their own racism and thereby become better people.

This can work somewhat as An Aesop about tolerance and not dismissing individuals from underprivileged groups, and it’s certainly an improvement on earlier tendencies to either never depict minority characters at all or make them all villains. However, ultimately it’s usually a moral and artistic shortcut, replacing a genuine moral message with a well-intentioned but patronizing homage to the special gifts of the meek. Minority characters still all too often aren’t portrayed as the heroes of their own stories, but as helpers of standard white, able-bodied, middle-class heroes, and they aren’t depicted as, you know, actual people with their own desires, flaws and character arcs, but as mystical, Closer to Earth plot devices.

When exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, some people will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account.

This might lead to people acting on preconceptions about unfamiliar matters even in a life-or-death situation, or cause viewers to cry foul when things on a show work out in a way that actually is realistic, but contrary to “what everybody knows”, like complaining of the “fake Scottish accent” of a real Scottish actor or about a character’s death from a bullet “merely” to the shoulder.

One day, you are surfing the interwebs, and you find a fanfic. This one seems to be about… the characters discovering fanfiction being written about themselves. What is this? Has The Masquerade been snapped in two? Has a hero’s Secret Identity been leaked?

This is largely a fanfiction trope (yeah, a bit ironic), but can occur in original works. This is partially a comedy trope, expect much Squick, raging, and consumption of cleaning products to try to blot out the horrible images wrought by the worst of fics — Rule 34 in particular stands out. Most often becomes a Revenge Fic type 2, with the characters trying to kill bad fanfiction characters.

Food porn is two things:

• Food artfully portrayed in a manner reminiscent of the way one would show porn, and/or
• Food given exceptional focus in any manner which causes the audience to drool over it and lust for it as if it were porn.

The second has probably existed forever, but the first is a trope primarily popularized by the modern Cooking Show, advertising, and other visual media where the food is the main focus. In visual media, the presentation goes beyond edutainment or straightforward depictions of the food and tantalizes the viewer with careful close-up shots of artfully arranged dishes or the pristine appearance of their raw ingredients, choreographed action shots of its preparation and accompanying moans of pleasure produced by the people eating them. In written media, the same can be accomplished by writing at great length about the food in a similar manner.

The production of professional, high-octane food porn is an involved process. These articles go into detail of the technique and principles. The camera operators borrow a lot of techniques from the conventions of actual porn: “pornographic gaze”, extreme close-ups with shallow depth of field, careful cropping and lighting, soft focus, even shapes and arrangement vaguely resembling parts of anatomy. Erotic Eating isn’t this trope, but may be employed in it. The fact that the perfect food presented to the camera will be unobtainable to most people only adds to the porn appeal. Like real porn, there are also thousands of amateur examples, as plugging the term into a Flickr search will quickly illustrate.

Alas, as in real porn, many of these orgasmic delights are photo shopped or faked. This is especially true in commercials*, but it is also necessary: under hot studio lights, frozen foods will melt, hot foods go cold, cereal gets soggy, veggies wilt. Cooking shows, cookbooks and food magazines, on the other hand, will generally show you the real deal, even though it has been gone over by a stylist to look as good as it can. If you’ve ever puzzled over the term “food stylist” in credits, that’s what this person does.

While food porn may be decadent, exotic or sinful, food porn by itself isn’t Not Safe for Work (Not Safe For Diets, on the other hand…), and doesn’t involve sex. This is not to say it can’t be combined or used in ways with actual sex appeal.

Tropes That The MythBusters Deem Busted

• Air Vent Passageway: Climbing through a metal venting system using magnets and/or suction cups in a stealthy manner was rather thoroughly busted. (“Why, Thor the God of Thunder is trying to enter my building!”) However, in another episode, Jamie and Adam did manage to escape Alcatraz by climbing through its ventilation system (which consisted of extremely large gaps between the walls).
• Banana In The Tailpipe: Shoving something in a car’s tailpipe will not cause it to explode, no matter what Axel Foley or Hollywood tells you. Nor will it cause the car to stall; the blockage will simply be ejected first.
• Brown Note: There is no sonic frequency that will cause involuntary bowel movements.
• Fruit Cart: While you can drive through one, the car is not driveable afterward.
• Improvised Zipline: Busted in the case of using your pants to zip down a ski lift: There’s too much friction, the angle of the lift isn’t steep enough, and either the pants or your grip will fail first.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Several myths about the almost supernatural superiority of the katana, especially against modern weapons, were shown to be completely false.
• Laser Hallway: No security system would be that poorly designed, and the dust trick might actually break the beam and trigger the alarm.
• 90% of Your Brain : Even at rest, over 15% of Tory’s brain was in use at one time. While actively thinking, this went up to 30%.
• Outrun the Fireball: Nope.
• Saint Bernard Rescue: For one, Saint Bernard rescuers of this type don’t exist. Two, drinking alcohol while your life is in danger from exposure to cold is a really, REALLY bad idea. This is because while it does warm you up, it does so because it allows blood to flow to the extremities more easily, thereby warming up your arms and legs at the cost of lowering your core body heat faster. Thus, your fingers and toes will warm up for a bit, but you’re going to freeze a lot faster in the end.
  • In fact, lowering blood flow to the arms and legs is exactly what your body does in the cold, because they act as radiators, bleeding off heat. In extreme circumstances, sacrificing a few fingers or toes to frostbite is better than freezing to death, and alcohol undoes this procedure. That said, alcohol is legitimately administered after a rescue once the victim is near a heat source, specifically to promote blood flow to the extremities to prevent or reduce frostbite.
• Shoot The Fuel Tank: Shooting the fuel tank will not cause a car to explode. Using tracer rounds, you might set the fuel on fire. (Which is still a dangerous situation, but not an instant explosion.)

Tropes That The MythBusters Deem Plausible

• Balloonacy: Okay, it’s technically possible to lift someone in the air with helium balloons. It just takes a hell of a lot of them and most certainly cannot be done by accident.
• Beating Lie Detectors: Grant was able to beat an MRI-based brain blood flow detector, albeit only making the operator conclude he had stolen the wrong thing. Kari and Tory weren’t. Tory and Grant couldn’t beat the current state-of-the-art lie detectors, either via physical (poking with a pin on truth questions) or mental (thinking happy thoughts when lying) means.
• Eek, a Mouse!!: (Sub-variety) Elephants, when suddenly confronted with a small animal such as a mouse, will apparently actively avoid it. However, unlike in media, they don’t run away in a frenzy, causing a deadly stampede.
• Eyepatch of Power: Specifically, wearing an eye-patch over a good eye improves its night vision, meaning there may have been pirates who wore them for this reason.
• Silver Bullet: Although lead bullets are cheaper and more effective, silver bullets work. However, their efficiency in neutralizing werewolves remains unproven.
• Trash Landing: With the caveat that the majority of dumpsters contain items that would be uncomfortable at best (fatal at worst) to land on; in a “best case” scenario (a dumpster filled with mattress foam), Adam pulled off the jump-and-run-away perfectly.
• Wall Crawl: Adam’s suction-cups-and-vacuum-pumps rig got him partway up the wall of a skyscraper, though he lacked the stamina to get much further.

Tropes That The MythBusters Deem Confirmed

• Beach Bury/Buried Alive: Tory took over 80 minutes to dig himself out of dry sand, Grant gave up after ten minutes in wet sand, and neither were tied up. If you’re buried like that and have no aid, you’re dead.
• Delicious Distraction: You can distract an Angry Guard Dog with a steak. Kari was able to walk in an enclosure, open a safe, take what was inside, and probably would have made it out if Tory didn’t throw the steak inside. They did advise against viewers repeating the stunt shortly afterward as dogs can be trained to ignore this sort of thing.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Urine from a female dog in heat works wonders on an Angry Guard Dog—so long as it’s male.
• Duct Tape For Everything: Two episodes to date devoted entirely to what they could do with duct tape, with a comment from Adam that they could do an entire season based on duct tape alone. So far, they’ve managed to lift a car, seal a potato cannon, provide backing for a steel cannon, build an entire black powder cannon, tape Adam to a board using just twenty pieces, plug a boat leak (but only dry, since taking on water would prevent the adhesive from working), build a boat (in that they made sheet layers of it and then formed it around a frame for the boat cover and sail), made a bridge, repaired a heavily damaged car, and also stopped a car from starting by duct-taping it to a telephone pole. They also tried to stop a car traveling at 60 miles per hour with a duct tape barrier, but that was busted. The original myth called for just a single roll of duct tape, but even when they ramped it up to around a hundred rolls, the barrier still would not hold.
  
  • Their newest feat was to repair a badly damaged airplane using duct tape. They then went one step further by building the skin of an airplane almost entirely out of duct tape
• Farts on Fire: Not to the extent of the large gouts of flame usually present in the trope, but they did confirm it for being possible at all. This segment was part of the episode on flatulence myths; Discovery execs would not permit the segment to air in the US until relenting for the 2010 “top 25 myths” special. This one got an extra big Don’t Try This at Home as the flames can potentially travel back up your body and scorch your insides.
• Jumping on a Grenade: This Heroic Sacrifice will significantly reduce the damage to everyone else.
• Spy Tux Reveal: Jamie was able to swim a fair distance in scuba gear, take it off, and look perfectly immaculate in the tuxedo he had worn underneath.

Animation Age Ghetto - My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic

Possibly the strangest subversion of this trope in existence. Despite the fact that its primary demographic is grade-school girls, the showrunner did everything she could to make it enjoyable for the parents of said grade-schoolers but thanks to a couple of blog posts condemning the show essentially sight unseen, it managed to catch the attention of 4Chan and later snowballed into the sub-cultural phenomenon that it is today. Many adults have taken a strong liking to the show, thanks to its fantastic writing and animation. The writing is a strong aversion of this trope, as the writers attempt to write the show in mostly an adult manner, making the characters, situations, and morals very relatable for adults in addition to its target audience. This show is a far cry from the previous My Little Pony series that play this trope straight as straight can be. So many adults like the show that the masses of males age 17-35 has become the show’s massive Periphery Demographic, so large that the staff of the show regularly listen to the fans or write things into the show or the advertisements directly aimed at them.

Animation Age Ghetto - Avatar: the Last Airbender

Despite being marketed as a kids’ show on a kids’ network, the show explores heavy themes including genocide, imperialism, child abuse, and is probably the best example of displaying how War Is Hell while still keeping it somewhat safe for kids. One character has a quarter of his face burned off, inflicted by his father, the Big Bad. References are constantly made to entire civilizations wiped out during the century-long war that is occurring during the series. It also has a strong narrative and is known for its incredibly rich character development, even winning a Peabody award (very unusual for a cartoon) for said character development and its respect for war’s consequences. These are only a few of the reasons why it’s so beloved by fans and critics, both kids and adults alike.