Does That Sound Like Fun to You?

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Kid: How'd you get the metal parts, mister? I want some! Lothar: Oh, you do, do you? Let me tell you a story. I was kidnapped, drugged and tortured as a group of scientists wanted to see what would happen if my genetically modified body was combined with bionics. So I was strapped down and injected with a chemical cocktail that caused horrific pain and pemanently bonded me to cold, unfeeling metal. The next thing I know I wake up in a blood rage and slaughtered my way through dozens of armed guards to emerge in the middle of nowhere, alone and half dead. Does that sound like fun? Kid: Oh, so like the opening of Guyver then? I love that anime! —Exterminatus Now

Yes.

A younger, more naive, or just plain stupid character says something would be cool to a more experienced character who may or may not have been through the experience. The more experienced character then goes to lengths to explain just how not cool that experience would actually be. He or she then asks the Naive Newcomer if they still think it would be cool. Unless it's a subversion, the answer is generally a resounding "no". (And contexts in which it the answer would be yes would be a Blunt Yes by their very nature.)

Useful in many functions of drama. For one, it immediately shows the more experienced character to be the older and wiser of the two. It may be used in a Deconstruction to show just how awful a seemingly incredibly cool thing would be in real life. And of course, it can actually be quite funny to see the more experienced character completely terrify the younger one with a horrifically descriptive summary of the activity as the younger one desperately tries to backpedal on their stance.

Of course, frequently it's subverted as the younger character places a rebuttal on exactly why it is still cool.

Also see Wasn't That Fun?

Examples of Does That Sound Like Fun to You? include:

Film

• One of the plots in The Wild Life concerns a twelve year old who is obsessed with the Vietnam war and hangs out with a Vietnam veteran. Finally the vet snaps when the youngster talks about wishing he had been there.
• Half Baked:

Mary Jane Potman: My father's a drug dealer. Thurgood Jenkins: Wow, that must've been the shit. Mary Jane Potman: It ruined his life. Thurgood Jenkins: That must've been shitty.

• Riddick gives this sort of speech to Jack in Pitch Black when she asks him how she can get cool eyes like that.
  • It ultimately gets subverted in the sequel as Jack goes off to do exactly what Riddick says... and finds out that he had been pulling her leg.
    • The Escape from Butcher Bay game shows exactly how he got the eyes. It had nothing to do with any surgeon. However, the following games also suggest that he remembers it the way he does in the film as a sort of repressed memory, to explain the differing memory explanation.
• Shrek:

Donkey: I don't get it, Shrek. Why didn't you just pull some of that ogre stuff on him? You know, throttle him, lay siege to his fortress, grind his bones to make your bread? You know, the whole ogre trip. Shrek: Oh, I know. Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village, put their heads on a pike, grab a knife, cut open their spleen and drink their fluids. Does that sound good to you? Donkey: Uh, no, not really, no.

• Men in Black:

Kay: Imagine a giant cockroach, with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex, and a real short temper, is tear-assing around Manhattan Island in a brand-new Edgar suit. That sound like fun?

• Independence Day: The president delivers one to the head scientist of Area 51 when the latter comments that the last 24 hours have been really exciting. The president doesn't believe the destruction of every major American city and the deaths of millions of people world-wide is "exciting". Possibly justified in that the scientist has been so caught up in everything going on with the captured spaceship and didn't know about the slaughtering of humans by the alien forces. He's also probably a little bit mad.

Live Action TV

• Teal'c explaining to a civilian how he got the brand on his forehead in Stargate SG-1. It involves a sharp knife and molten gold.
• Kamen Rider Ryuki has a particularly pointed example. After seeing one of the Riders transform, a young boy thinks it would be cool to become a Rider himself. Ren responds by letting the boy watch him fight a monster... and allowing it to beat the crap out of him (Ren).
• Londo Mollari from Babylon5 provides a lighter example when talking to Lennier about the rebirth ceremony and prayer:

Londo: Ah, for a moment I was thinking women, drinking and debauchery. I forgot I was speaking to a Minbari. This, by you, is a good time, is it? What else? Lennier: You must tell someone a secret that you have never told anyone else before. And you must give away something that is of great value to you. Londo: Ah, how positively festive!

• A dark version comes up in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when Derek Reese, a man from a Bad Future who has been fighting homicidal robots his entire life, acts as a sub for an ROTC camp. All the cadets know is that he's a veteran.

Cadet: Did you get many kills? Derek: Excuse me? Cadet: Did you get many kills, sir? Derek: ...is that what you think it is? Swigging beer, counting kills with your buddies, like its some kind of game? Like it's fun? I remember a particularly fun day. Couple friends and I got ambushed when we were on patrol. Most of them died pretty quick... but my buddy, he got his guts blasted open. We were too far from a med station, so he had to try and shove his intestines back in. This isn't a game. This isn't fun. You're not fighting for points, you're fighting for the survival of the goddamned human race.

Literature

• In the Wolfhound by Maria Semenova the titular hero gets to listen to his little highlander travle companion boasting about how much fun will it be to finally slaughter the rival tribe. Sick of this, Wolfhound enquires if the kid had ever actually seen a settlement slaughtered to the last man. Unlike the kid, he had and then proceeds to share his memory thereof.

Wolfhound: "Flies. Huge blue flies. The didn't even always lift off the bodies when we lifted them to carry to the grave."

• Hermione says she wishes she could see thestrals. Harry says he's not so sure about that.

Music

• Subverted in "Alice's Restaurant":

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy." ... Didn't feel too good about it.

Tabletop Games

• Sometimes asked in Paranoia. Of course, there the only proper answer is that yes, it does sound fun to you - after all, Happiness Is Mandatory.

Video Games

• One of the conversations in Poker Night At the Inventory has Strong Bad ask Heavy Weapons Guy for "the most awesome story [he has] with plenty of super cool senseless violence," with Max listening in glee. Heavy tells them a depressing story about a sparrow a young boy killed in his assassination camp, and how he heard its last breath before burying it in the snow. After hearing that, the two seemed to no longer see the Heavy's profession as cool, and Tycho, usually being a sociopath himself, was brought to tears.
• In Mass Effect, Commander Shepard can ask this of their Loony Fan Conrad Verner after he asks to become a Spectre. You do this while shoving a gun in his face.

Shepard: This is what the Blitz felt like, Conrad! You like it?

Web Comics

• Lothar Hex of Exterminatus Now, the Trope Namer, is shown giving a fairly horrific one to a panda kid in the above quote. Subverted in that the kid is as enthusiastic about bionics as ever, leading to Lothar kicking yet another innocent creature into oncoming traffic. Kick The Panda, anyone?
  • Happens earlier with Jamilla chewing the gang out for calling the Exterminatus "cool" rather than her definition of it, "horrifying".

Jamilla: "How can you all be so flippant? You think Exterminatus is "cool"? All that terrible destructive power hanging over us in the sky. The power to reduce cities to ashes, mountains to dust. To annihilate entire populations in an eyeblink. The power of Gods in the hands of mortals. It's terrifying. How can you possibly consider that cool?" Rogue: "We're guys?" Virus: "Yeah, how can we not?" Eastwood: "We just saw a really big explosion while riding in a flashy, high-performance aircraft- If you got your boobs out, we could all die happy right now." Lothar: "So this is what it feels like to be Jeremy Clarkson..."

• • The comic seems fond of subverting this one.
• Penny Arcade's view on the Deck of Many Things.
• Subverted in this strip of Fanboys.

Web Original

• In the second season of the After Hours series, Spider-Man is a Hero Worshipper to Batman. Bats eventually gets frustrated with it and demands to know why Parker has been "following me around like a lost puppy for the last few months" and Spidey gushes about how cool Batman is and how he wants to be friends with Bats. Batman launches into a speech about how he's a Broken Ace crossed with Knight in Sour Armor, emotionally stunted, and will probably Die Alone. At the end he asks if that sounds "cool" to Spidey. Spidey thinks it's the coolest thing that Batman has ever said to him.

Western Animation

• In South Park episode "Starvin' Marvin In Space", the boys are taken for questioning by a pair of The Men in Black in regards to Starvin' Marvin obtaining an alien spacecraft.

Fed: Earlier this morning, an ethnic child was seen piloting an alien spacecraft over Chinese airspace. Cartman: Cool! Fed: Cool?! That ship has enough plutonium on board to vaporize a small city. Is that "cool"? Stan: Yeah!

• Subverted in Futurama when Bender threatens to hug all the orphans he has adopted "to see how they like it".
  • Also subverted in that "Futurama does not advocate the cool crime of shoplifting."

Real Life

• Truth in Television: Those privates in Basic Training who claim they wanna join the Army to kill people and shoot guns have a very rude awakening coming if a Drill Sergeant actually gets to hear him say so in his presence.
  • If you understand spoken French, this guy is an example, only nothing could cure him.

I said, I want to kill. Kill, kill, kill.... I want to be the killer, the number one killer, the best killer, to kill all the time. Send me anywhere, I'll kill everyone.... I spent fifteen days in the military hospital, in the mental ward, because apparently, the army isn't for killing, it's for peeling potatoes...