The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''We are [[Trope Namer|The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything]].<br />
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''[[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|"We don't do anything!"]]| '''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaWU1CmrJNc The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything]'''|''[[Veggie Tales]]''}}
They don't pillage. They don't plunder. They ''[[Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil|certainly]]'' [[Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil|don't rape]]. They don't invade [[Port Town
In general, a member of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything is any character who, despite having a certain [[
This may be because writers and fans are in love with the romanticism implied in a life of adventure and crime, but don't want to actually show the characters doing any of the myriad of things that makes thieves, assassins, mercenaries, [[Bounty Hunter|bounty hunters]], and other unsavory types pariahs in [[Real Life]]. This can result in a strange dissonance where the friendly, [[The Messiah|messianic]] nature of the characters is at odds with the [[Offstage Villainy|openly predatory nature of the professions]] they claim to engage in. May bring [[A Million Is a Statistic]] into play.
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* The Straw Hat Pirates from ''[[One Piece]]'' don't pillage or plunder. The crew's illegal activities are more in the nature of battling with various corrupt governmental ruling forces. But if any other pirates try to test their crew...
** The only time they act like pirates is when they loot Skypeia's gold. However, the Skypeians don't value gold, and in gratitude would have given the Straw Hats more than they stole, so that barely counts.
** In fact, the series seems to make the point that pirates who do act like pirates are at best [[Jerkass
** In the manga, it's been explained in ''Romance Dawn, Version 1'' that in ''One Piece'', there are two types of pirates: Morgania, who pillage and plunder, and Peace Main, who hunt the Morgania. Luffy resembles a Peace Main and not one who does nothing at that. The distinction is briefly touched upon near the end of the Kuro arc, in which Luffy complains that Kuro and his men weren't "real" pirates. Nami responds that most pirates are like them, an opinion he is unwilling to accept.
* The Vongola family from ''[[Katekyo Hitman Reborn]]'' have yet to do anything terribly illegal despite being [[The Mafia]]. Even Reborn, the teeny-tiny assassin, never manages to ''kill'' anyone with his array of magic bullets. They do engage in mob wars (mostly in self-defense) later on. This is mainly due to [[Kid Hero|Tsuna]] being a [[Reluctant Warrior|pacifist]] and not ''wanting'' anyone to die. In the past the Vongola were known to be fiercer and much more violent. [[Blood Knight|Xanxus]] and [[Career Killers|the Varia]] live up to this.
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* The vast majority of Shinigami in ''[[Bleach]]'' never seem to do any Shinigami duties like hunting hollows or cleansing souls; instead, they hang around the Seiretei all day and pop up whenever Ichigo is in need of reluctant allies or enemies. Apparently, making officer rank means you get delegated to a desk job... much like in most real-life armies, except that these don't run on [[Authority Equals Asskicking]] like the afterlife does. (But when they do do something, it counts.)
* The main cast of ''[[Cromartie High School]]'' are "The World's Best Behaved [[Japanese Delinquents]]". They constantly talk about how tough they are, but the only fighting between school is [[Butt Monkey|Maeda]] constantly being kidnapped. [[No Smoking|They don't smoke]] and never do anything illegal on purpose.
* [[Space Pirate]] ''[[Captain Harlock]]''. He once robbed a ship and threw the valuables into space. He has claimed that pirates who steal are dishonoring the name of pirates. [[Lampshaded]] in ''Captain Harlock: Endless Odyssey'', when Tadashi Daiba lambasts the good Captain for his reluctance to give orders and keep discipline onboard the ''Arcadia.'' ''[[Cosmo Warrior Zero]]'', however, does portray him as a legitimate and somewhat bloodthirsty
* In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]'', the main characters are all supposed to be in school, but they sometimes spend days or weeks at a time out of school to participate in card tournaments - even the characters who don't duel. Even when they're at school, they are never shown doing work. Most of the time, they sit around playing Duel Monsters or developing the plot in non-school-related ways.
** It's not as bad as it looks, though, as far as the tournaments go. The Duelist Kingdom took place in the span of three days, which is basically a weekend plus one day of school-skipping. The Battle City took two days, then Noa kidnaps them on the morning of the third day, and they seem to get to Alcatraz by that evening (though how exactly Kaiba's zeppelin reached an island outside of Japan in such a short time is anyone's guess). The Memory World arc is a little harder to justify, since it involves traveling to Egypt and all, but it could've happened while they were on school break. Not counting fillers here, what with they traveling to America and all, but all in all, school could be [[Hand Wave|handwaved]] with a "it takes place offscreen" excuse.
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* The only thing ''[[Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei]]'''s Nozomu Itoshiki ever actually taught his class was that potato starch turns purple if you add iodine. No, rants on society don't count...
* Kuryugumi's Sandaime in ''[[Tokyo Crazy Paradise]]'' [[Even Evil Has Standards|forbids the Yakuza to take part in drug trafficking, human trafficking or underground fights]]. What they do take part in is never made clear.
** The only other options are extortion, blackmail, loansharking, money laundering, credit cards scams, arms smuggling, and
* All of San and Lunar's families in ''[[Seto no Hanayome]]'' are technically [[Yakuza]], but the only "work" related thing we see any of them do is run a home shopping channel for mermaids.
* In ''[[K-On!]]''!, despite all of the main characters being part of the light music club, they don't really play much and spend most of their time screwing around in the clubroom and eating cake.
* Kyouko in ''[[Working]]'' never really does her job as restaurant manager other than eating, and other characters notice this.
* The Akina Speed Stars of [[Initial D]].
* Though it happens occasionally, it's pretty rare to see the [[Haruhi Suzumiya|SOS Brigade]] actually hunt down any supernatural entities.
* The "[[Space Pirate]]" theme is roughly [[Deconstructed]] in ''[[Eureka Seven]]''. Renton, a little boy with a with for adventure and to get out of his boring town, is accepted to the famous battleship that fights against the government and has its own media franchise telling the world how cool they are and "exposing the truth". He expects all kind of cool things there, but discovered most of the crew is lazy and have no qualms in taunting and using a little boy to do all their job without thanking him, the ship is almost naked on the inside and they have little money and have to do odd jobs (usually amoral at best) to keep things going. To top it off, the captain is an [[Abusive Parent]] figure who turned slacker and scaredy-cat (to feelings at least) himself.
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* Even ''[[Captain Blood]]'', regarded as one of the greatest pirate movies of all time suffers from this. Blood is the greatest pirate in the world, but the only people he ever kills on screen are members of foreign armies and one perverted French captain. He's also never shown stealing or sinking other ships unless it's against enemies of England, and the other members of his crew are all rough, rougish, and jovial rather than a bunch of cutthroats. Even when the main villain, who abused them as slaves, is in their grasp, they happily just comically throw him overboard rather than kill him. The movie only barely glosses over his life as a pirate and thief, and it comes off as rather jarring when the love interest refuses to be with him because he's committed crimes we've never seen.
* In ''[[Stardust (film)|Stardust]]'' [[Robert De Niro]] portrays a pirate with a fearsome reputation... and nothing else. It is a fairly significant plot point that his reputation is really all he has, and he goes to such great length to maintain it that hilarity ensues.
** Captain Shakespeare's pirates are a counterexample in that they're simply ''misnamed''. Indeed ship and crew do plenty of ''poaching lightning'' and selling it on the black market, but ''lightning pirates'' sounds so much cooler.<ref>
* The eponymous bunny from ''[[Santa and The Ice Cream Bunny]]'' doesn't seem to have any ice cream with him.
* ''[[The Grapes of Wrath]]'' does not depict any peach picking.
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== Literature ==
* Several of the nobles and royalty of ''[[Discworld]]'' are trained as assassins (although many are not, since the assassin final exam is lethally off-putting), but that's more for the quality of the general education offered by the Assassins' Guild. They rarely kill anyone (largely because not many people can afford their services, and they ''never'' kill for free, except in self-defense). Of course, in the world of the nobility, knowledge of how assassins think is also a valuable life skill for anyone wanting to live past twenty.
** Vetinari in particular has never been known to actually kill anyone by any of the characters in the books.<ref>In fact he was a practicing Assassin in his younger days, as Night Watch reveals; his was even the hand that took out the mad Lord Winder, which made room for the not-yet-mad Lord Snapcase, who he would eventually succeed.</ref>
** Later books tend to suggest that the Guild's killings are mostly of (unnamed) venal nobles by other unnamed venal nobles, probably to skirt round the moral dissonance they'd otherwise bring to Watch books.
** The faculty at the Unseen University seem to avoid their students whenever possible, and are at one point described as running the other way or hiding behind doors whenever they see them. In fact, the only person in the entire place that seems to do any work at all is Ponder Stibbons (which has actually been [[Lampshaded]] in story.)
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** This trope is somewhat [[Lampshaded]] by the idiot sisters, Cora and Clarice, who are the highest ranking Groans after Sepulchrave, who do absolutely nothing at all except spend their time plotting revenge for losing "power" that they never actually had. When they are essentially kidnapped by Steerpike, ''nobody notices''.
** The Countess Gertrude starts the story as an indolent weirdo who does nothing but tend her pets (she doesn't even talk to her own children except for a once-a-year ceremonial visit). She eventually becomes a force to be reckoned with, but not after an entire decade of plot has gone by.
* The [[Thieves' Guild]] in Jennifer Fallon's ''[[Demon Child]]'' and ''Hythrun Chronicles'' series is practically an official branch of the government, with high-ranking
* Tom and Joe decide to become this type of pirate in ''[[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]]'', because stealing is a sin. Huck isn't troubled, since he calls it "borrowing".
* Many of the officers in ''[[Catch-22]]'' don't actually perform their jobs. Major Major Major Major (not a typo) actually structured his entire day around avoiding people.
** Yossarian is trying very hard to be The Bombardier Who Doesn't Do Anything.
* The pirates in Gideon Defoe's ''The Pirates!'' series are a perfect example. In ''An Adventure With Whaling'', they actually realize
* The characters of ''[[The Three Musketeers (novel)|The Three Musketeers]]'' by [[Alexandre Dumas]] are rarely, if ever, actually depicted as using muskets. Though they do use muskets on the one occasion at which it would be appropriate to, when there's a war on. Using muskets when they're just wandering around Paris causing trouble would be unsporting. Plus the novels are set in the mid-1600s. At that point, muskets were still fairly clumsy, unreliable, inaccurate weapons that were painfully slow to reload; for close combat a sword and/or a brace of pistols were just ''better'' than long guns.
* [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Time Enough for Love]]'' features [[Single-Minded Twins]] [[Theme Twin Naming|Lapis Lazuli Long and Lorelei Lee Long]], who are [[Opposite Sex Clone
* In pastoral poetry and romances from antiquity to the Renaissance, shepherds and shepherdesses tend to just sit around looking pretty and having [[Love Dodecahedron
* The pirates in ''[[Peter Pan]]'' don't get up to any actual piracy within the story, they just seem to spend all their time trying to kill the Lost Boys and the Indians.
** In the Disney animated adaption, Hook's crew spend their first minutes on screen complaining on how Hook's feud with Peter Pan keeps them from normal pirating.
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* Daphne on [[Frasier]] is ostensibly Martin's full-time, live-in physical therapist, but at most her only real duties seem to entail leading Martin through brief exercise sessions once in a while. As the series progresses, she begins to perform some maid-like duties for the Cranes as well, though is often shown resenting this, weirdly, since she was hardly over-worked with her "real" job.
* See the ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' sketch [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7fsxnzZF9w Non-Illegal Robbery].
* Many [[Soap Opera
* [[House (TV series)|House]] although house's team work pretty hard during cases it's easy to forget those are weeks apart sometimes, his team are presumably doing what exactly in the mean time?
* ''[[Green Wing]]'' deliberately uses this: though set in a hospital, there are no medical storylines. Guy, Caroline and Mac do perform surgery from time to time but, naturally, the whole thing is played for laughs. On one occasion Dr. Statham burst in, had an argument with Mac about a parking space and attempted to eat the patient's gall bladder.
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== Mythology ==
* One of the key beliefs in [[Flying Spaghetti Monster|Pastafarianism]] is that Pirates are chosen people not unlike saints, and their main activity in the Golden Age of Piracy was peaceful exploration and delivering candy to children. Later they were slandered by rival faiths until their public image became as we know it today. So in a way, their position is that
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* The MMORPG ''[[EverQuest]]'' features gnome pirates who have to constantly remind each other to talk "piratey." They're bad at following through on the details, but they like the [[Rule of Cool|idea of being pirates]].
* Although Samus Aran from ''[[Metroid]]'' is described as being a [[Bounty Hunter]], she's usually never seen hunting bounties. She seems more like a kind of mercenary than anything. It's possible the definition has changed in the future, though; all of her jobs are given to her by the government.
** Not to mention her nemeses the [[Space Pirate
** In a few issues of ''Nintendo Power'' there was a tie-in comic series to ''Super Metroid''. A new character - a male bounty hunter - was added in as a sort of rival and irritant to Samus. While she continued blasting her way through the underground tunnels, he would stop to pick up the space pirates' "ears" or claws or whatever alien body part they were. After he started going on about how rich he was going to be after turning these body parts in for the bounties, Samus actually expressed disgust at his mercenary ways.
* Captain Falcon from ''[[F-Zero]]'' falls into a similar rut, although the focus of his series is mainly on his side-business, racing. All of his Bounty Hunting is literally [[All There in the Manual]].
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** Particularly glaring in ''NWN''', because the Pirate Who Doesn't Do Anything is a ''paladin''. After the first day or so of "pay that [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|malevolent]], [[Chaotic Evil]] [[8-Bit Theater|Black Mage]] [[Captain Ersatz|wannabe]] to hunt reagents for me"... well, Aribeth, there's this thing called "falling". It happens to paladins who act like you do. {{spoiler|Yes, it happened eventually, but that was an actual choice motivated by vengeance and grief, rather than a logical conclusion to using hired sociopaths as guided missiles}}.
** In ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'', you become a squire... which explicitly, as your knight tells you, doesn't require you to clean his stables and polish his armor, or really do anything at all expected of a squire. You don't even see him again are are perfectly free to continue adventuring with your own [[Ragtag Bunch of Misfits]]. This is justified, though, in that the sole reason for your promotion to squire was a legal technicality to let you face your court trial in Neverwinter rather than the [[Kangaroo Court]] of Luskan.
* The ''[[Baldur's Gate]]'' series at least tries to [[Justified Trope|justify]] the latter as much as it can manage (mostly that said adventurers have come into a situation they couldn't handle alone and need a group to help them with), but still lets in a few [[Fridge Logic]] [[NPC
** Subverted in the expansion, Throne Of Baal. You find some adventurers in a dungeon, and they ARE actually on an adventure. They start pestering you to give them a quest, but you are so far above their level that you give them busywork to get them out of your hair.
* The town of Rogueport in ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]'' is a parody of the ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]'' [[Vice City]]-style setting, and as such has several examples of rogues, bandits, and roughnecks who are rarely, if ever, seen stealing or doing other unsavory things. Goombella even remarks of one character: "At least he's supposed to be a thief, but I've never seen him steal anything."
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* Similar to other Pirate examples; the pirate crew in ''[[Fire Emblem]] Rekka No Ken'' doesn't seem to be, well, that piratey. They seem to be more Mercenaries/hirable ferry. However; they are a bit of an aversion of the pirate tropes - Lyn is very distrustful of them merely because pirates actually ''do'' pillage and plunder because [[Freudian Excuse|her parents and the rest of her tribesmates WERE killed by bandits]]...
* Remember all those mighty heroes of the first three ''[[Warcraft]]'' games? Well those who survived long enough to appear in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' apparently earned the privilege of sitting around getting [[Player Characters|other people]] to do all the heroing for them.
** Even lowly [[NPC
*** Other [[NPC
*** In ''[[Shamus Young|Shamus]] [[Let's Play|Plays]]'', this is often the reason why his heroes give up their attempts at being heroes or, [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/shamusplays in the World of Warcraft example], trigger his [[Face Heel Turn]]. The [[NPC
** This is sometimes averted, as your NPC quest givers may fight alongside you in a quest, or justified in that the NPCs' hands are tied (Drakuru is stuck in a cage after the player captures him, so while he knows what to do, he needs the player to do the legwork). Or even more if they maintain the base camp or ask you as a recon/private assassination team as they hold the fort outside.
** Largely changed in the Cataclysm patch, now each zone has a story and goal you're working towards (and generally a theme, like a murder mystery or an extended Rambo parody).
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{{quote|'''Bart:''' Do you even ''have'' a job any more?
'''Homer:''' I think it's pretty obvious that I don't. }}
** Earlier seasons did focus a lot on Mr. Burns and the Power Plant, but after that well ran dry, they [[Brother Chuck
** Also lampshaded when Homer becomes a police officer. He lists every single one of his previous jobs.
** The most obvious example is Captain McAllister: "Arrgh! I hate the sea and everythin' in it!"
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* [[Larry the Cable Guy|Larry the so-called Cable Guy]].
* According to ''Sax and Violins'', the band Talking Heads are "criminals that never broke no laws".
* [[Hot Scientist
* Douglas Adams wrote a radio sketch about The Kamikaze Pilot Who Doesn't Crash Into Ships. {{spoiler|Initially it seems like the guy is coming up with excuses (couldn't find target, vertigo, got lost) because he's unwilling to die, but he's actually [[Comically Missing the Point|confused about the difference]] between a kamikaze attack and seppuku, [[I Cannot Self-Terminate|and can't seem to fly close enough to cut out his stomach and drop it on the target ship's deck]].}}
** {{spoiler|That's in the original version Adams wrote for the stage whilst at university. In the version broadcast on radio, it's because "the war ended thirty-two years ago, sir!"}}
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