Stop Helping Me!

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MUST...RESIST...URGE TO KILL...

Phileas Fogg: Watch out on the right! (Passepartout turns around to find nothing) ...No, no, my right.
(Passepartout gets ganged up on)
Passepartout: STOP HELPING ME!

—Around the World in Eighty Days (2004)

Sometimes, "help" can be more trouble than it's worth.

Every gamer knows the scenario: It's taken you the best part of three hours to get to this stage of the game. Your mission involves skill and dexterity, but that's all right—you're a professional by now. A few more seconds and you're home free. Sneak behind the guard... good, he didn't see you. Now go left... move forward... you're almost safe...

"BE CAREFUL!!!"

Bang goes your concentration. You were so focused that the whiny voice that just screeched from the screen made you jump five feet in the air. Worse, you dropped the controller and made your character bolt from his hiding place and fire the gun. Now every guard in the vicinity is beating you to a pulp. Game Over.

Who was responsible for your last nanosecond failure? Was it The Dragon? A cunning mole? An agent of the Big Bad, programmed by the AI to be unbelievably skillful, with flawless timing? Nope, it was your Exposition Fairy, and it just couldn't keep its damned mouth shut for two more seconds.

It can't be simple coincidence that so many characters that are meant to "help" you sport irritating voices, social ineptitude and the worst sense of timing on the planet. It has to be a conspiracy. It's also sadistic -- in the game manual, it says that this character is a loyal best friend or devoted assistant. He's there to help you. You wish he wouldn't.

The character that has you screaming "Stop helping me!" is usually an Exposition Fairy who either has an attitude problem or interrupts when you really wish they wouldn't. Sometimes it's a party member who's a master of the Useless Useful Spell—or who keeps getting overexcited and killing you with friendly fire. In extreme cases, it's the character the player is controlling, if they're annoying/inept enough; stupid catchphrases and idiotic behavior during cutscenes have resulted in many a player wasting a life by directing their playing character off a cliff, just for revenge.

Unfortunately, these annoyances are never disposable characters. You're stuck with them for the entirety of the game. The best you can hope for is that they do a Face Heel Turn and become the bad guy's problem. In fact, sending them to the opposite faction might be a good tactical maneuver on your part. However, in that instance, Murphy's Law will kick in and they'll be just as effective fighting against you as they were ineffective fighting for you. C'est la vie. At least you don't have to listen to their voice constantly and you finally have that excuse to kill them that you've been waiting all game for.

In fact, most "guide" characters will try the player's patience if they've played the game through a couple of times—like the tutorial levels, they're not really needed after the first play through. And maybe not even then.

This should go without saying, but try to avoid sticking AI sidekicks in here that are simply not perfect. If they can pull their own weight in a fight, but have different priorities and thresholds for doing things than a player might, then they probably don't belong here. (Complaining that the computer is trying to use its healing items on you earlier than you necessarily want it to, for example, does not put them in Stop Helping Me! territory—especially in a game without a Hyperspace Arsenal.)

Compare Escort Mission, Offending the Creator's Own, Worst Aid. Compare Mission Control Is Off Its Meds, where the voice is intentionally designed to be unhelpful or confusing. Related to For Your Own Good and Don't Shoot the Message. When it happens regardless of what is happening, it's Continue Your Mission, Dammit!


Examples of Stop Helping Me! are listed on these subpages:
Examples of Stop Helping Me! include:

New Media

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  • Clippit (a.k.a. Clippy), the animated paper clip "assistant" in Microsoft Office. Clippy is just one of several assistants (including a dog and a wizard) which differ from him by animations and little else—i.e., they're equal on annoyance level. Clippy just gets all the sass because he's the default one.
    • Parodied on an episode of The Simpsons: A python attacks a Springfield school computer, and Clippy springs up to say, "You look like you're trying to eat me. Need some help?"
    • Parodied again in another Simpsons episode. "It looks like you're trying to blow up the computer. Mind if I hug my kids?"
    • Also parodied on an episode of Family Guy. "It looks like you're trying to take over the world. Do you need some help?" Stewie's response: "Go away, you paper clip! No one likes you!"
    • Also parodied in a small spoof "advert" for Windows RG ("Really Good"), where typing anything causes Clippy to appear.

Clippy: Hey! It looks like you're writing a letter! And if you're not, you should. Letters are neat!

    • Yet another parody on 2DTV: during a sketch in which Matrix characters end up inside the Windows system, Clippy turns up with a cheery "Hey, you look like you're trying to write a letter -- want some help?" only to be smited away. Later, she reappears with a "Hey, you look like you're trying to beat up Bill Gates, want some help?", only this time she is left alone as she kicks the dustbin Bill Gates is currently sticking out of.
    • I believe this story is appropriate here. And also cathartic.
    • As is this. Corruption blackmail, suicide attempts, Cthulhu... this story has it all!
    • From Mass Effect 1 "It looks like you are trying to restore the station. Would you like assistance?" "Oh crap. A pop-up."
    • And to drive the point home, Microsoft cast Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of Clippy in a series of Flash shorts that were part of an advertising campaign for Office XP promoting the fact that he finally bit the dust.
      • Though despite this, Office Assistants were still there; they were just disabled by default. They were completely removed in Office 2007.
      • Arguably, Office 2007 was the only one that needed the Assistants there. Microsoft completely redesigned Word, which was amazingly unhelpful, something they apparently realized. When they released Office 2008, they went back to the classic format (sans Assistants), with everybody breathing a sigh of relief.
    • Parodied in several freeware games, such as a Clippy Blaster shoot-em-up, as well as an intentionally-unhelpful assistent for Unix editor VI, called VIgor. This was first suggested as a joke in webcomic User Friendly, but the internet being the internet, somebody actually created it, sporting such gems as "You seem to be trying to move the cursor to the left. Are you sure you want to do that?"
    • Also, the assistant Cuppit from adventure game spoof META.
    • Clippy's "assistance" methods have since spread to Hotmail and Windows Vista, which will block various things without allowing you the option to manually override the block. To add to the problem, the false positive rate is astounding, to the point where the majority of positives will be false positives.
    • Clippy is seen when The Matrix Runs on Windows:

"Looks like you're trying to free humanity. Want some help?"

    • Comedian Demetri Martin once did a joke about Clippy helping to write a ransom letter. "You should use stronger language, you'll get more money!"
    • The guys at Red vs. Blue created an episode in which the character of Sarge (stereotypical Texan Turned Up to Eleven) reminisced about being "next in line to be one of those little Office Assistant thingies." It then had a shot of Sarge being an Office Assitant - popping up on page and screaming "WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY DIRTBAG!) which was Crowning Moment of Funny. Crowning Moment of Awesome came when mere hours after the episode was released a Red Vs Blue fan actually created a Sarge Office Assistant that popped up and scream at you "WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY DIRTBAG"
    • In 2005, when Microsoft ("a company with a doubly un-erotic name") backed out of supporting a gay rights bill in Washington because of threats of a boycott, The Daily Show showed the explanatory company-wide email as it would have been typed into Microsoft Outlook: "I don't want the company to be in the position of appearing to dismiss the deeply held beliefs of any employee by picking sides on a..." Up pops Clippy: "You seem to be composing a lame cop-out. Need help?"
    • A Captain Ersatz of Clippy appears in the first issue of IDW's Eleventh Doctor comic series. When the TARDIS lands on a planet that is essentially a halfway home for holographic spam email, one of the holograms is a talking stapler that offers advice at the most inopportune moments (sample dialogue: "You appear to be about to be disemboweled by a monster. Would you like any assistance?") Subverted in that the stapler proves in the end to be genuinely helpful and resolves the "B" plot—which is Amy and Rory about to be disemboweled by two monsters.
  • Automatic spelling correction—it often a) corrects a word that isn't wrong, or b) picks the wrong correction. Bonus points for correcting into the wrong language, e.g. a name of an English book in a bulk of Czech text. (Infamously, the Czech edition of one version of MS Word corrected "n" [as a single-letter word] to "a". Woe to you if you want to use the letter N as an abbreviation or a symbol for something.)
    • The English version also "corrects" lower case i to upper case I.
  • Any internet search engine that tries to predict what you're going to type before you type it by offering up a list of suggestions, especially if that list covers up or moves the "search" button so that you try to click on "search" and end up hitting the suggestion instead, as seen here. Especially when you copy something, paste it into the search engine, and go to click "search."
    • Google is always VERY helpful, as seen here. You type something in, and it searches for something else under the assumption that you're too stupid to type in what you want.
      • Not to mention the highly distracting "instant search" which looks for things as you type them, and often searches for all the wrong things until you're done typing completely. But for every letter you type, it seems to find something drastically different, combined with the previously-mentioned "covering of the Search button". To use Google with instant search on, I have to look at the keyboard as I type, because looking at the screen messes with my mind. Luckily, this can easily be turned off.
  • YouTube now offers helpful suggestions in case you spell something correctly, as seen here.
    • Which became especially stupid when searching for The iDOLM@STER when it would replace the a with @ and then FAIL TO FIND ANYTHING because it couldn't recognize the @ symbol.
  • Yahoo Answers seems to panic if one uses proper punctuation, as seen here.
  • The imageboard 4chan briefly gained a Clippy-inspired "helper" one April first. Asking Sticky the 4chan Assistant for help with "trolling" emptied your post and name fields, and replaced it all with the words "DICK BUTT".
  • Bonzi Buddy.
  • Rogue security programs. They're not even really trying to help you (quite the opposite, actually), but that's how they try to come off.

Newspaper Comics

  • What's New with Phil and Dixie on helpful animal companions: "...These are worse."
  • There is a Closer to Home comic strip, where a plumber stuck a plunger onto the face of the woman whose toilet he was fixing. The caption said something along the lines of "Dispite (woman's name) helpful advice, (plumber's name) felt that he had a handle on the problem."


Theater


Theme Parks

  • In the T2 3-D: Battle Across Time show at Universal Studios, this is The Terminator's response to John Connor's repeatedly telling him how close the baddie was.


Video Games

  • In Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Mario and Luigi join Popple to fight a Wiggler (why they accept to help him in his schemes is a mystery), and Popple's "attacks" do absolutely nothing except make the Wiggler angrier and its next attack more dangerous. The player has the option to hit Popple with an attack every turn to make him begrudgingly back down.


Web Animation

  • In Red vs. Blue we have Caboose. The character that is so inept that other characters tell him that their enemies are on their side, just so Caboose will "teamkill" his enemies. They even have a macro on their keyboards at command to record Caboose's teamkills (Ctrl+F+U).
  • Private Partz in A Day in the Life of a Commissar, a Dawn of War Machinima, brings down all three Space Marine heroes on poor Commissar Steeve, by saying things like: "I bet he could take on all three of ya! even if you had, like, Psychic Powers!"


Web Comics

  • In The Order of the Stick, Elan's enthusiastic attempts to help his friends with his music are sometimes... less than useful.

Elan: ♪ Bluff, Bluff, Bluff, Bluff the stupid ogre! ♪

  • The sparks of Girl Genius often get a little carried away with having fun and forget they're supposed to actually, you know, be doing things.
    • Also, Moloch trying to argue with what was sadistically insane AI when it was functioning properly.
  • Happens all the time in Schlock Mercenary. One notable occasion is when Schlock accidentally lets slip to the clients they're planning to con that they made plans to... well, con them. Elf manages to explain it away as a security precaution.

Schlock: Nice cover.
Elf: Stop helping.

Mark: You're totally not allowed to rescue me any more.

Abbie: Never fear!! Twitch will come to the rescue!
GM: Heh. I don't even need to throw bad guys at you. I just have to give Twitch half a chance and you all go boom!

Web Original

  • In the webseries TotalBiscuit and the Yogscast 'play' Magicka, Simon is prone to this, though he is not the only one of the three. An incident caused by Lewis named the third episode Please Stop Healing Me.
  • The general premise of "Gandalf Goes to the World Cup." The new members of the Fellowship use vuvuzelas as their method of furthering the quest. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In There Will Be Brawl, Link finally says it: "SHUT THE FUCK UP, NAVI!", and throws his canteen at her.


Western Animation

  • ReBoot has several of these. In one episode, the people of Mainframe get dumbed down to the point of utter stupidity, and during a Game session, try to help Enzo by getting in the way. He only manages to save the day by convincing them to 'help' the User. In another episode, two binomes sneak into the Game and set off an explosion that blew up a planet to beat the User. Unfortunately, they were INSIDE the planet at the time and only escaped by the narrowest of margins. This prompts Bob to give an informational seminar on the nature of Games and why they should stay the hell out.
    • I am helping by making your boots go faster!
  • This is the entire premise of Best Ed.
  • In the episode of Sealab 2021 where the guys' evil twins show up, Bizarro Dr. Quinn "helps" out Bizarro Sparks, by shattering the jar that houses his disembodied head which is the only thing keeping him alive, then pouring salt on him while jumping up and down while shouting "I'm helping!"
  • Robin's doppelganger, Nosyarg KcidLarry, from an episode of Teen Titans, a parody of the aforementioned Bat-Mite.
  • From The Spectacular Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus should really think about kicking Electro out of the Sinister Six: in "Group Therapy" he (accidentally) electrocuted Doc Ock SEVERAL TIMES in his attempt to kill Spider-Man. Not happy with that, he, along with Shocker, knocked out Rhino, thanks to Spidey's Deadly Dodging. Then, in "Reinforcements" he tried to free the Vulture from Spidey's web... by, once again, electrocuting him. Oh, but that doesn't end here: in "Shear Strengh", Spider-Man intentionally presses his Berserk Button by calling him repeatedly Max (his real name), making him shoot lightning bolts everywhere. The result? The destruction of the Master Planner's base.
  • In Justice League, Flash, Batman and the Martian Manhunter defeat A Thannagarian scouting party on the lawn of Wayne Manor and attempt to hijack their ship without knowing how. Flash, being his usual self, ends up randomly pressing a button on the ship's control panel out of curiosity. The button turns out to be the "fire" button for the ship's armaments and promptly leads to a rather large hole in Wayne Manor.

Batman: That's. Not. Helping.

    • Lobo strong-arming himself into the Justice League following Superman's death in "Hereafter". It's clear the others only tolerate him because it's easier than not keeping him under their supervision, and when they finally get the impetus to kick him out in the end:

Lobo: Next time you lollipops need help, don't bother asking the Main Man!
J'honn: We didn't ask you this time!

  • One episode of Danny Phantom had Jazz fill this role for Danny, becoming his "sidekick" after finding out his secret identity. She not only refuses to listen to Danny's knowledge on ghosts, but also hacks into his computer to look at his ghost files, gives names to ghosts that Danny already knows, gets in Danny's way when he's trying to fight, and is generally unhelpful. This eventually leads to him screaming the trope name in a rather Punctuated! For! Emphasis! fashion.
  • From Krypto the Superdog ep. 47, "Bat Hound and the Robin", has Robbie the Robin wanting to becomes Ace's sidekick after he saves his life. Unfortunately, his attempts to "help" all end up getting worse and worse for the Bat Hound, to the point the usually Stoic dog flees Gotham City and the persistent Robin to hide into Krypto's spaceship.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender features an episode in Book 2 with this as the plot. An Earth Kingdom General tries to help Aang reach the Avatar State... by tormenting him. The fort where this happens gets smashed to pieces.
  • "Pepper! Stop Helping!!"
  • In My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, Rarity tends to react this way whenever her little sister tries to help her with things.
    • Also what happens whenever Derpy tries to help with setting up for a party.
  • One episode of Captain Planet had an annoying little boy who was obsessed with becoming a hero and constantly screwing up. When his school bus is caught in smog and everyone panics, he yells, "Turn on the headlights!" and tries to do it himself, but opens the door instead, letting in the smog and choking everyone. When Wheeler gets injured, he steals his ring and charges into battle, despite Wheeler warning him that only a chosen one can properly use the ring. Sure enough, when the kid tries to blast the villain, he can't control the fire and blows up random stuff.


Real Life

  • Anyone who has ever had a hypochondriac for a friend has probably felt this way at some point.
  • Many an EMT or firefighter has at least thought this when someone untrained, unfortunately frequently a cop, attempts to "help". No, grabbing the suspected spinal injury victim by the arm and trying to pull him to his feet to move him isn't optimal, thank you.
  • Backseat Drivers. Ironically, constantly needling the driver actually makes them so nervous they're more likely to be in an accident. You've had one. Panicky parents who are screaming at already-nervous teenagers are especially bad.
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