#Fridge Brilliance (trope)

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

The Twelfth Inspector’s first appearance in ‘The Space of the Inspector’

was actually a brilliant moment, when the audience is clued in to the fact that the Eleventh Inspector isn’t his/her last incarnation.

[princesssarisa]

I once reblogged a post about Disney's Beauty and the Beast where the OP wrote that in a sequel, they'd like to see Prince Adam still struggling to control his temper at times. I think I agree: anger issues don't easily go away. But there's something else I'd like to see in a sequel even more:

I want Prince Adam to make peace with the Beast.

I also want him to know that Belle has made peace with the Beast.

I want Adam to accept the fact that he was once spoiled, selfish, and unkind, and not to excuse it in the least, but to understand that he was made that way by his royal upbringing, not born that way. I want him to see that he can choose to behave differently in the present without hating his past self.

I want him to accept his temper – to realize that just as long as he doesn't act on it in harmful ways, it's okay to feel overwhelming anger when he's attacked or threatened. I want him to know that despite the importance of controlling it, his anger doesn't make him a bad or unlovable person, and that it can be used for good too. Namely to fiercely protect the people he cares about, as when he fought off the wolves to save Belle.

I also want him to accept the fact that he lost interest in dignity and gave in to his feral, "beastly" instincts: wearing tattered clothes, eating like a messy animal, ripping and smashing everything in the West Wing in his rages, etc. I don't want him to remember it as a character flaw, but to know that it was partly the fault of the spell warping his mind and partly out of sheer despair.

I want him to remember that he was never all bad. Even at his most beastly, he was moved by Belle’s request to take her father’s place as his prisoner, which made him agree to the exchange even before he realized that she might break the spell. Then when he saw her crying, he felt compassion and remorse, and he gave her a comfortable room and free rein of the castle. While his ferocious rage when he caught her in the West Wing was inexcusable (his anger itself was justified, but not his reaction that made her afraid for her life), he was instantly racked with remorse, and when he realized she had run into the forest and was being threatened by wolves, he risked his life to save her, which inspired her to give him a second chance.

Then, after he comes to these conclusions, I want him to be assured that Belle has done the same. I want him to know that Belle truly loves him, not just a role he learned to play to please her.

There's a comment somewhere or other on TV Tropes (I think on the Fridge Brilliance page), which says that the Beast "had to learn to hate himself" to become a better person. That breaks my heart. I don't want him to go through life hating himself and pretending to be someone else, or, if he does, for it to be portrayed as a good thing. That's no way to live.

I've been thinking of more recent Disney/Pixar movies like Turning Red and Inside Out 2, which promote accepting the messy sides of yourself (without using that acceptance as an excuse to behave badly, though) and loving every part of yourself. Beauty and the Beast obviously isn't about that mindset, but arguably just the opposite – some of the creative team have said that the Beast's character arc is about the universal process of learning to control our "animal" instincts and become civilized human beings. But are these movies’ different messages mutually exclusive? I'd like to think the Beast/Prince Adam can choose to be a civilized human being, yet fully accept the "animal" part of himself too.

I know that part of the problem is that I see parallels between the Beast and a neurodivergent person. Lack of social skills, physical messiness, struggle to connect emotionally with others, overpowering anger under stress that he struggles to regulate, etc. I see my own AuDHD qualities in him – maybe I'm projecting them too much onto him – and I feel as if part of his character arc is about learning to "mask." I know this wasn't the creative team's intention, but it feels that way. I don't want Adam to spend his entirely life masking and hating what's under the mask, or to think Belle loves only the mask and not his true self.

Let him make peace with the Beast.

[dalishious]

Hello! Sorry in advance for this.

I was reading the TV tropes page for Dragon Age: Origins, and someone makes a case under Fridge Brilliance that the tranquil brand makes people autistic. Which is obviously monumentally offensive.

In lieu of that, I was wondering if you had any thoughts about neurodiversity in Dragon Age, particularly for mages? I think Sera and Cole in particular have strong neurodivergent traits, but Morrigan could also be read as autistic, which would be a great rebuttal to the above.

It’s not just monumentally offensive, it’s just plain fucking wrong. The Rite of Tranquility rids people of all their emotions. Autistic people are not without emotions—some of us just have trouble expressing and/or understanding emotions. (And hell, some of us are considered too emotional.)

I think that, based on the reactions to characters who can be easily read as neurodivergent, the wide population mostly misunderstands them and frequently labels them as just “weird”. But sometimes it gets dangerous, and people are literally imprisoned for it.

neurodivergent mages are probably at a huge risk of being accused of consorting with demons.

[rhys-ravenfeather]

Oh yeah, so I didn't mention this, but I ended up waking up early yesterday morning and scrolled through Inside Out 2's Fridge Brilliance page on TV Tropes, and found this little nugget:

I may get into my feelings on Envy as a whole at a later time, because I have a lot of feelings about the character, but for now, take this.

[thewatercolours]

OK, continuing @telthor's shop talk questions, because I'm no longer falling asleep and striving too hard to answer questions precisely.

What's your favourite trope?

... resisting the urge to read the entirety of TV Tropes just to make sure I answer accurately. Um, taking this question in the sense it was undoubtedly meant, where favourite doesn't necessarily mean ultimate favourite for time and eternity, and I will not be held to my answer in this life or the next, and also in the sense of tropes I actually use recurrently in fic, here are a few:

Being royal is really tricky and intertwines with relatable human struggles in interesting ways.

Quality time! (and by extension: Just being there for someone is worth so, so much, even if you have no solutions to offer)

Something's gradually messing with your memory/mind

You are more loved than you can make yourself believe.

You are sleepy. You're soooo sleeeeeepy

Let's scaffold the worldbuilding just a tiny bit. Turns out everyone's jobs are multi-faceted, your own backyard is bigger than you think, the world carries on regardless of you, traditions exist, consequences ensue.

Don't make decisions from a place of shame or fear

Now dance.

What if we somehow played "surprisingly realistic outcome" and "cartoon physics" in the same scene?

Your worst fears are worth facing

(Poor but earnest attempts at) Fridge brilliance/rewatch bonus

You love your found family AND your birth family! Awesome! You don't need either/or?

Let me return to the subject, yet again (I know,) of that one time that you turned green

You're not a failure

Flailing, blushing, pushing aside the sharp comments you could have made, emphasizing every word, scowling, gasping, doing something gingerly/gingering as a verb. Just, just, just, just, just, word of all time, just. And did I mention we are going to express all this in the wordiest, most pretentious way we can? If it's not dialogue only!

You wear pajamas in canon, but not under my roof! Here you get a nightshirt, always! Because for some reason, in this anachronism stew, pajamas are the historical "error" that I can't bring myself to write.

What do you love and dislike about writing in general?

I love honouring God through the glory of creativity (which imitates Him) the sheer fun of it, getting to combine something I enjoy inm itself with my desire to storytell, the community aspect, the satisfying breakthroughs, all the brainstorming fun from conversations to music, revisiting my own writing and really enjoying it, feeling like a writer even though my original novel is languishing, encouraging comments, taking people by surprise with my writerly moments and schemes I hate lack of motivation, some aspects of my writing voice/lack of skill, moments when I'm tempted to make it all about my ego and then only just barely get pulled out of that bog like Frodo falling into the dead marshes in

Where do you get your ideas?

From a little shop in Schenectady! ;-) Well, there's three main ways, I suppose, from worst to best.

"Riding the Coattails." This often happens when I'm still feeling the rush of getting a comment, and I just want to do it all over again. This usually involved sitting down and deciding in a rather workaday fashion, "Which character would I enjoy writing about? What feel do I want to come out of the scene? What's a scenario that would bring up that feeling? What would contrast with other recent scenes?" You would think this rational, thinking based approach would lead to the best thought-out scenes, but it usually doesn't, because at the back of it all is a smidge of impatience to have it done and posted. These are the ones I bang out in one evening, tend to be careless with, and don't actually leave a strong impression on me. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this approach, but it leaves a lot to be desired (and if I'm not careful, can wander by the perilous border of a validation mindset.)

"Riffing." This is my most common way of stumbling into ideas. This comes from mentally playing with concepts I'm already enthusiastic about - from game, from fanon, from a piece of art, from previous scenes I've done. Daydreaming how things might continue, exploring emotional consequences, explaining throwaway lines, just wanting to write more of this dynamic or that and putting them under the daydream microscope. Just riffing off things until something demands to get written.

"Leafmeal." I think it was Tolkien who said absolutely everything you put into your mind becomes part of a compost heap and eventually flowers kind of spring out of it spontaneously? And all the influences in that heap just blend together and you can't really tell what grew what? I am worse than I used to be at letting myself get bored, but when I do, leafmeal ideas that don't seem like simple riffs eventually show up. Some examples that came without any conscious attempt to daydream: the image of Graham having a human hand and an inhuman hand, sitting on top of a lift (how did the elevator come into it? I don't know.); the tollbooth itself; a fairy narrating the process of falling asleep in second person (we're not there yet, but you can fill in the blanks.)

[localplaguenurse]

Jerkass is definitely more fitting for Mizuki, thanks!

And Cassandra Truth is named after the Oracle of Delphi who predicted doom and gloom but wasn’t believed. In Kei’s case he didn’t have a Vision but who would ever think that Chibana went and hooked up with an Adeptus and bore his child? Unless it was confirmed by someone who could see that kind of thing, it’s natural to assume Kei could do that because he possessed a Vision.

Also can’t wait until Zhongli learns his child was nearly arrested and traumatized. I’m sure he is going to be so pissed and demand answers

I looooove learning new tropes. My personal favourite is fridge horror, a variation of fridge logic. Fridge logic is when there's a weird little plot inconsistency or detail that you don't notice until you're thinking about it later. Alfred Hitchcock dubbed it as "icebox logic," meaning it's not until you get home after a show and start pulling food out of the icebox/fridge that you go "hey wait a minute." There's fridge brilliance where if you think about it, that weird detail is accidentally very smart, but fridge horror is when it makes the context accidentally more horrifying.

The go to example I can think of off the top of my head is Plants vs Zombies. In the game as you do your thing defending your home, the very last zombie you kill will drop a seed packet with a new plant. When you think about how this is a world with not just zombies, but also plants made to kill zombies, you wonder why would a zombie have this on them? Oh, because that zombie was someone trying to protect their home, like you, but they failed.

Probably not the direction you thought this would go but hey, it's something I get to talk about.

[starsfic]

So, I’ve been thinking about this fridge brilliance I found on TV Tropes:

“Jinx trying to eliminate joy in Brighton by murdering Molly seems a bit of an empty threat considering this show's very premise, but it's possible Jinx was planning on dragging Molly's ghost through the portal for the Ghost Council to condemn.”

And now I got this short alternate fic idea of the TGAMM season finale where everything is the same except the way Molly ends up becoming a wraith is by her spirit getting extracted from her body (which is thankfully left intact, albeit as an emotionless empty shell) by Jinx’s scythe, and she’s the one who gets taken before the Ghost Council while Scratch has to go and rescue her with Geoff’s help. And when Scratch gets there, the rest plays out as it did in the episode, with Molly destroying the Flow of Failed Phantoms, freeing the ghosts who were imprisoned in it and killing the Chairman.

Also, Ezekiel Tugbottom would be in the bouncer’s place, since Molly basically exposed him for the fraud he was.

Oh, that sounds cool!

[the-acid-pear]

Back to hating on the TV Tropes page for The Human Centipede but it really is starting to sound like most of the people writing this didn't even watch the movie like, why is Heiter being a siames surgeon put under "fridge brilliance"? Like, a fridge trope is something you take a while to realize, something that has to sink in. This, is not that. The man outright says in his monologue that he used to separate life now he will join it and he's called a recognized doctor and he has HUGE PAINTINGS OF BABIES BEING SEPARATED like, like are these people even watching the movie i. I'm not even mad anymore im genuinely baffled rn.

[sothetherogue]

Have you ever noticed any Fridge Brilliance in DEH? I ask because TV Tropes has only three entries for it, one of which was the subject of a Kahrant.

I think one super minor one I had is when Evan says he is "Sending pictures of the most amazing trees" and how it all seems super positive because he loves nature - And looking back on the play and how he hurt himself "Amazing" might have had a totally different meaning in his mind.

I checked out the page and the part on Larry and the Baseball glove is blowing my mind. It isn't my fave song but it is an important one - And I feel like I just got another later added to it.

LOVE the rant tho. Lol Some people have like....Weird takes with good interpretations.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Since any of the Inspector’s enemies would tear the universe apart just to get their paws on a few of his/her cells,

how does *Peacemist* manage to keep his entire left foot *for three years* without anyone even trying to get into the Core to steal it?

[princesssarisa]

I've been thinking about The Swan Princess. I haven't seen the entire series, but the original movie was a childhood favorite of mine.

I've been thinking of some ways the movie could have been better.

First and foremost, the issue of "What else is there?" How to offend women in 5 syllables or less keep the plot point of Prince Derek saying those words when Odette asks him if he loves her for more than just her beauty, yet without making so many audience members permanently hate him for it.

I actually wrote two entries on the Fridge Brilliance page on TV Tropes about this plot point. (1) This is a fairy tale, and in most classic fairy tales, love is just a matter of beauty, so that's what Derek expects. (2) There are hints throughout the song "This Is My Idea" that young Derek and Odette like each other long before they admit it to themselves. Adult Derek thinks at first that he fell instantly in love with Odette when he saw she had grown beautiful, but by the end he realizes he loved her long beforehand, for who she is as a person.

But maybe those things should have been made more explicit.

I personally would have made the movie more explicitly a deconstruction of classic fairy tale romances with their beauty-based Love at First Sight, more in the vein of later movies like Frozen. I would add some dialogue either before or between the verses of "This Is My Idea" showing Queen Uberta (bubbly romantic that she is) reading a classic Love at First Sight fairy tale to young Derek, and telling him that someday, when they're grown up, Odette will be beautiful and a single glance will make him love her. I might also add some dialogue for adult Derek later in the song, where he complains about having to marry Odette and imagines his preferred scenario – riding through the woods one day, suddenly encountering a beautiful dancing maiden, and knowing instantly that she's the one (a la Disney's Sleeping Beauty, or the original Swan Lake). This would show that he believes in classic fairy tale romance. Thus when "What else is there?" eventually happens, the audience's impression won't be "Derek is a shallow jerk who only values women for their looks" but "Derek has been raised with a fairy tale concept of love as something you feel just because the other person is beautiful."

Later, the ball scenes and "Princesses On Parade" would make it clear that Uberta is again trying to force the fairy tale concept of love on her son, hoping for a Cinderella-style Love at First Sight at the ball. But of course it doesn't work, not only because he's faithful to Odette, but because Love at First Sight isn't real.

I would also add some scenes throughout the movie where Odette and Derek each reminisce about their shared childhood. Odette could tell her three animal sidekicks about it, while Derek could recall it with Bromley and Rogers. This would help to avert the problem some critics find with the movie as it is: that Odette and Derek seem like different people as adults than as children and are much blander than their feisty child selves. It would also show us explicitly that they did like each other long before they knew it. We would see flashbacks to their childhood fights and pranks, and their adult selves would laugh wistfully and make remarks like "I wouldn't admit it to myself, but I enjoyed all that" and "We were never really enemies, we were just too stubborn and foolish to admit that we were friends."

Around the same time, I would also have Odette say a word or two about "What else is there?" to her animal friends, to explain why she's fully committed to Derek again despite having broken off their betrothal earlier. (Of course the cynical view would be that she only forgives Derek because she wants him to break her spell, but this movie isn't supposed to be cynical.) She would say something like "I shouldn't have left him. I know in my heart that he truly loves me, he just couldn't put it into words."

Going back to the childhood scenes, I would also find some way during "This Is My Idea" for young Odette to show her kindness. If at the end of the movie, Derek is going to say that he loves Odette for her kindness, then we should see her display it in front of him. I might show her finding and caring for a small animal in need – e.g. a stray kitten, or an injured bird – and young Derek would act nauseated by the sappiness of it all. But later, when Odette wasn't around, we'd see him find another lost or injured animal and care for it just like she did, showing that her kindness has rubbed off on him.

In his ultimate love confession, I would also have Derek say that he loves Odette's "cleverness" as well as her kindness and courage. That would reinforce the point that he fell subconsciously in love with her during their battles of will and wits in their childhood.

I think these tweaks would bring more consistency and depth to the love story and ensure viewers' sympathy for both of the two leads.

[brightlotusmoon]

She didn’t always look like this.  Blame the British for occupying Malaysia in the late 18th century, when they encountered the ginger flower for the first time and came home calling all their redheads gingers.  As if the redheads of the British Empire didn’t have enough to worry about, what with the witch hunts and assorted forms of libel.  But then, the people of Malaysia also had better things to worry about at the time, what with being occupied by the British, who they hadn’t exactly invited to the neighborhood, and maybe we need to move on from the origins of terms, because this is a conversation that could go on all day…

Her image was beginning to shift again when the 20th century rolled around and a television show mirroring the seven deadly sins stranded on a desert island with the Devil Himself began to air, presenting a new redheaded girl to the world.  Her name, of course, was Ginger, and Ginger found herself locked into another century of looking like a pasty white girl, sparking discussions of cultural appropriation whenever she comes to one of the culinary god potlucks and recipe exchanges.  But she doesn’t complain.

She’s here to add a little zing to your life, a little flavor to your savor, and a little joy to your tastebuds.  She only wants you to enjoy what you’re eating.  And if that’s not enough, she has medicinal benefits, too; she’ll help your cold, ease your congestion, and hasten your recovery.  And she’ll do it all with a smile on her face and a red flower in her hair, glorious to the last, forever happy to be here.

The great small god Ginger.  Long may she blossom and grow.

[zorilleerrant]

people so often make comments about something being a very emotional scene, but some trope or genre element happening in the background making them laugh so they can't concentrate on the drama, and I wanted to say: that's often intentional. when something is lighthearted, fluffy, or comedic in overall tone, then even when you want drama, often you don't want too much drama, so you do little things to cut the tension a little. trying to keep the audience from bursting into tears, while still giving them something emotionally driven to care about and think about.

people do it the other way around, too. a scene can be mostly happy, cathartic, reassuring, downtime, etc. in a story that's largely driven by drama or intense emotion, and then to keep continuity the creators will sneak something in that leads to a moment of fridge horror (or maybe just slightly angsty fridge brilliance), so there can be that lighthearted moment but it still adds to the flow of the narrative.

sometimes things are just errors, and sometimes they're hard to read through the original lens because of unfamiliarity with the art form, genre, culture, dialogue, etc. often though creators are saying something with it, it's just not something everyone is used to looking for, because it's a subtractive rather than additive part of the themes and patterns of the story.

[hopeaterart]

*bolts upright in bed* The turtles meeting their friends through kidnapping or beating the crap out of them makes a lot more sense when you remember they have no social skills. They grew up wandering the country and couldn’t interact with anyone outside of their family because of their appearances. And how are they supposed to figure out how to build proper relationships when they had no one to learn from? In this essay I will— *explodes*

Holy shit FHC fridge brilliance moment-

You're right! And while the kidnapping part is still a bit weird, the fighting part makes more sense once you remember that Leo is a shonen fan. Would make sense that his brothers would also be familiar with the genre and it's tropes, including the one where defeat means friendship.

[sothetherogue]

Have you seen the TV Tropes pages for DEH other than that one bit of Fridge "Brilliance" I ranted about once, and if so, what do you think of them?

I have not - But I will have a look when I get home tonight :o