What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: Difference between revisions

That candy bar you shoplifted? Those 50 cents it cost will land you about 50 years in prison! You're scum! How could you! The store owners will starve because of you! I hope you can live with yourself!

 

# '''Writers believe this is as wrong as they are showing it.''' In this case, the "What do you mean," part is from the writer, so this overlaps with [[Values Dissonance]]. [[Straw Character]]s and [[Digital Piracy Is Evil]] are the most common forms of this. A prime source of [[Narm]].

# '''Writers think this isn't that bad, but exaggerate for effect.''' So this isn't moral dissonance, it's just [[Anvilicious]]. Even if the thing is wrong, presenting it as something magnitudes worse usually makes it a [[Clueless Aesop]]. [[Can't Get Away with Nuthin']] uses this a lot.

# '''Writers use [[Values Dissonance]] for [[Played for Drama|dramatic effect]].''' This is common in [[Dystopia]]s, police states, histories, and cults. But it can also be used to make organizations look like this when they aren't, like with [[Straw Dystopia]]s. But thanks to [[Values Dissonance]], this is often about [[Truth in Television|real cultures]] from the past or present.

 

Since laws all over the world are rife with [[Values Dissonance]], things that are misdemeanors or not even illegal in one country but treated as serious crimes in others can seem like this.

 

'''Compare with:'''

 

'''Contrast with:'''

* Gamefly commercials. Various gamers having [[Freak-Out|epic-level temper tantrums]] over a bad game they purchased, complete with screaming, destruction of personal property, and even chucking televisions off their roofs.

* Subway has a line of commercials best paraphrased as "Fast food will ruin your life." Someone ordering a fairly normal fast food meal is told things like they'll instantly get fat, be abandoned by their significant other, and need therapy.

* A commercial for the sweetener Truvia shows a woman committing a particular act. After she completes this act, the shame and self-loathing on her face is glaring. Her SO walks up and looks down at her with a look of absolute disgust. The heinous act this woman committed? Eating a tiny piece of cheesecake, which could have led to her getting fat.

** Yay eating disorders!

* A laundry detergent commercial directed by [[Rob Zombie]] portrays some of the less favorable outcomes of a wash cycle (stretching, shrinking and fading) in the style of cold-blooded torture.

* One credit card commercial showed people streaming through a checkout counter with astounding speed, swiping their cards with mechanical precision. Then one guy pauses for a moment to pull out cash. The line comes to a halt, and ''every single person there'' gives him a very nasty look for not being a credit-card-using speed demon.

* You don't give your children All-Natural Organic <Insert brand specifics here> snacks? Well, enjoy eating your pesticide-coated cardboard.

* [[Johnny Turbo]] fights tooth and nail against the evil Feka corporation for trying to make a profit with a competing product.

* Oak milk. One ad has a somewhat odd fellow walking through a near-deserted fairground at night rambling about a state of "hungrythirsty" before declaring:

{{quote|''I wish I'd given Oak to my son when he was a child, haha, just kidding, [[I Have No Son|I don't have a son]], well technically I do, but [[This Is Unforgivable!|he's in real estate...]]''}}

 

== Anime and Manga ==

{{quote|''I am not a vindictive man, but I felt, as anybody would have felt in my place, that if fellows like young Tuppy are allowed to get away with it the whole fabric of Society and Civilization must inevitably crumble.''}}

* Since ''[[Mommie Dearest]]'' is about growing up with an abusive mother, a lot of the things that set Joan off come off this way, including the infamous wire hanger scene from the film adaptation.

* ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' did the fourth kind quite a few times, satirizing the way British culture used to encourage the first kind. The page quote comes from their restaurant sketch, combining this with [[My Greatest Failure]].

* In the ''[[Seinfeld]]'' episode The Package, Jerry is interrogated by Newman for mail fraud... and let's just say Newman relishes in the thought of catching and fining Jerry, even if there wasn't much actual fraud going on. [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|He still gets fined, though.]]

** Another time Castle and Beckett find out that Ryan's fiance slept with another man while she was already dating Ryan. They fear that this information will destroy the relationship and angst over wheter to tell him. When they finally tell him, he reveals that he already knew and did not thik that it was a problem since they were only dating for a month at the time and were not yet exclusive.

* [[Saved by the Bell|Jessie's]] (in)famous addiction to caffeine pills. This was the extremely common [[The Nineties|1990's]] [[Very Special Episode]] about otherwise [[Lawful Stupid]] overachievers using stimulants to get better grades. [[Family Ties|Alex P. Keaton]] and [[The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air|Carlton Banks]] played this straight by actually getting addicted to prescription drugs, with [[Anvilicious]] results, but, because [[Can't Get Away with Nuthin'|the show was expressly aimed at kids,]] the producers refused to reference or even imply illegal drug use in a [[Drugs Are Bad]] episode. The result is poor Elizabeth Berkley [[Chewing the Scenery]] over a bottle of no-doze as if it were Oxycontin.

{{quote|'''Buffy''': Oh. God. ([[Beat]]) He's ''really'' going to go through the whole speech, isn't he?}}

* ''[[Charmed]]'' reconstructed this in the episode "Morality Bites". The sisters use their powers to punish a man who lets his dog pee in their garden and Phoebe then sees a premonition of her own death in the future and the sisters travel there to find out that Phoebe used her powers to kill a man, got caught and was being burned at the stake while modern day witch trials were going on. When the sisters come back to their time, they discover that the man they punished at the start of the episode is the same man who was leading the witch trials in the future. Phoebe then suggests that them using their powers to punish the man starts them off using them for personal gain.

{{quote|'''Piper:''' But this is just a little thing.

* On a couple of episodes of [[Sports Night]], Bobbi Bernstein substitutes for Casey as anchor, which Dan has a problem with, since she claims he slept with her in Spain, and then never called. He swears not only has he never slept with her, he never even knew her back then, he's never been to Spain, and he wouldn't treat a woman like that. Whoever he tells this story to has the same response; "Oh, Dan. You never called?"

** Averted when he finds out that he had been to Spain and slept with Bobbi, he was just so drunk on the trip he forgot about it. Bobbi was also going by Roberta at the time and he didn't connect Bobbi with the name.

 

* The video to John Waite's "Missing You" uses type 3 because this is about his girlfriend suddenly leaving him for no reason. At one point, he ''breaks a phone booth phone'' out of anger and heartbreak.

* [["Weird Al" Yankovic]]'s "Don't Download This Song" mocks type 1 of the [[Digital Piracy Is Evil]] message (making it a type 4).

* [[They Might Be Giants|"Why did you grow a beard?]] Why did you grow a beard? I can't leave you alone for five minutes! What the Christ! What the Devil! Why did you grow a beard?!"

* Crime Spree by MC Frontalot. Front acts like a criminal mastermind, even though his crimes are petty at best.

== [[Real Life]] ==

* [[Grammar Nazi]]: HEIL SPELLCHECK!

* In his autobiography, ''The Confessions'', Saint Augustine wangsts at length over a monstrous sin he committed while he was a young man in Africa. What was the heinous crime, you ask? He ''stole some pears!'' Low quality ones! Which he threw away without eating! Okay, it was that he did it just [[For the Evulz]], but the degree still falls under this.

* In MK Gandhi's memoirs ''The Story of my Experiments With Truth'', he feels wretched with guilt over simply ''tasting'' meat when he was young.

* There are many people who consider it some kind of crime against nature to use the [[Useful Notes/Fonts|Comic Sans or Papyrus fonts]].

* Coding "grammar" is a hot topic of debate amongst even professional programmers. A group of people will lynch you if you fail to put the curly brace on the same line as the start of a new scope. Or if you CamelCase. Or you use Hungarian Notation. Or, if you do none of those things, [[Morton's Fork|a different group of people will lynch you]].

* Apparently cupcakes are a clear and present danger to airplanes and must be confiscated.

* Anti-drug propaganda, particularly that intended for minors, tends to drag this flailing into the deepest pits of Narm.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Morality Tropes]]

[[Category:Rule of Drama]]

[[Category:Character Flaw Index]]

[[Category:What Do You Mean It's Not an Index?]]

[[Category:This Index Asked You a Question]]