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Glurge
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Glurge is the catch-all term for "inspirational" tales which purport to offer uplifting and timeless truths, but for various reasons — they carry Unfortunate Implications, they don't make sense once you've thought about them, or the medium is a poor fit for the message — they are just a bit too hard to swallow, and can be aggressively Anvilicious. (The word "glurge" was initially coined by a reader of Snopes and derives from the sound of someone throwing up). These stories are presented as modern-day parables, meant to touch hearts and change minds. Unfortunately, they do so by simplifying their message to the point of complete uselessness to any reader who thinks about it seriously. All shades of nuance between good and evil are wholly overlooked in the rush to present a universe in which everything happens for a satisfying reason, meaning that valuable lessons about hard work, understanding, personal growth and sacrifice are left by the wayside. Like pornography, glurge is easier to recognize than to describe. This being a super-trope, it typically involves some combination of the following: Aesop Collateral Damage: Glurge often relies upon the suffering of a secondary character to drive home the lesson. This gives the protagonist an opportunity to realize his mistake and choose to follow the lesson after all — sometimes he might even reason that God (or whatever Powers That Be) caused this suffering to show him the "right way". All That Glitters: The protagonist learns that money isn't everything. He then goes to the complete opposite extreme, becoming The Hermit and renouncing even more things that actually are important, like his own health and the people close to him. Alternatively, Glurge may teach "be content with what you have" through a character who doesn't 'have' anything. …And That Little Girl Was Me: If the story is being related by a third party, there is a near 100% chance that the person in the story will turn out to be the Narrator All Along. Angst? What Angst?: A character who suffers trauma or loss will react in whichever way is most convenient for the narrative — up to and including bouncing right back without a second thought. Modeling this as the 'right' way to react is unhelpful, to say the least. Beauty Equals Goodness: The sympathetic characters will be attractive. Even when the message is Beauty Is Bad, the focus characters will be cute, while the characters considered attractive in-universe will not be depicted as attractive to the audience. Be Yourself: The glurge version of this moral gives vague definitions of what 'being oneself' entails, discourages personal growth, or glorifies holding on to toxic traits. Black-and-White Morality: Glurge leaves no doubt as to who is right and who is wrong. The sympathetic side will be entirely good, while the other side will be actively hostile to truth and goodness. Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Every mistake or transgression results in disaster; conversely, every disaster is the direct result of a character's error (which can be corrected by coming around to the 'right' line of thinking). Captain Obvious Aesop: The moral lessons (when they're coherent) tend to be very basic ones, such as "be kind to everybody," "don't look down on the less fortunate," "don't give up when things are tough," and "love your family." These are of course treated by the story as deep and profound revelations. Character Shilling: It's common for glurge to include a secondary character who serves as the protagonist's cheering section. If the central message is put into the mouth of a teacher or preacher, there will be at least one person on hand to say, "You're right", "So true!", etc. Children Are Innocent: Kids generally come across as wiser or more capable than adults. In stories that involve spiritual or supernatural forces, children can see and/or interact with them, while adults and teens cannot. Designated Hero/Designated Villain: Glurge treats the characters who agree with its message as good persons, even if their actual behavior suggests otherwise. Those who don't comply with the message are treated as the scum of the earth, even if they haven't done anything particularly scummy. Disproportionate Retribution/Disproportionate Reward: Glurge is there to teach a lesson, so it will reward the characters who agree with the message and heap abuse and suffering on those who disagree, making them examples to the others (see Aesop Collateral Damage above). Easy Evangelism: The character who speaks the work's message will effortlessly win over all the sympathetic characters. Those who ignore or reject him will be portrayed as stupid, in denial, or evil. In addition, any character who "thinks things through" and concludes that the central message is correct will be depicted as insightful and logical even if their reasoning is a hot mess. Glurge promoting a religion almost always includes this one. Esoteric Happy Ending: These stories often have 'happy' endings that give a thinking reader pause. Falsely Advertised Accuracy: Glurge is often presented to the reader as a "true story". Poke it for details, however, and most of it can't be confirmed. For Happiness: When used in a glurge way, this is known as toxic positivity — the belief that everyone can and should be happy at all times regardless of their circumstances, and that if they're not, it's their fault for not thinking positively enough. The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Religious glurge tends to stress that the sinners it depicts may be fictional but the sins and punishments are real, and you will suffer too if you don't repent. Historical Person Punchline: The main character or alleged author in the story will sometimes turn out to be (an Urban Legend version of) a notable historical figure to drive home the impact of the Aesop. Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln are common offenders, for whatever reason. Hitler Ate Sugar: Any character connected, even slightly, to something the work condemns will suffer just as much (and just as deservedly) as the actual perpetrators. Hollywood Autism: Autism in glurge is portrayed as a tragedy for the autistic person and their family, robbing everyone involved of the chance at a meaningful life. Alternatively, autism is depicted as wonderful and autistic people are depicted as inherently innocent and pure, like children. Ice-Cream Koan: A statement that sounds insightful and deep but is actually meaningless (e.g. "Time is the world's love shining down on us like the sun.") Inspirationally Disadvantaged: This trope not only ignores the real limitations a disability imposes, it makes disabled persons seem lesser or "lazy" (or just not worth writing about) if they haven't developed some sort of Disability Superpower. Littlest Cancer Patient: Glurge often makes the terminally-ill character a child. Apparently a dying middle-aged man just wouldn't pull the right heartstrings. Misery Builds Character: When done badly, this trope becomes abuse apologia by implying that it's good to put people through trauma and tragedy, and that kindness is useless. The fact that the opposite outcome is just as likely tends to get glossed over. Mood Dissonance: Glurge often has unintentional tone problems. If the central theme is a Captain Obvious Aesop, it will be treated with more reverence and solemnity than it deserves; if a character's death furthers the narrative, it will be treated as anything but a tragedy (see Angst? What Angst? above). Narm: The story undermines its own message because its efforts to be 'dramatic' or 'insightful' come off as unintentionally humourous. Posthumous Narration: Some glurge is presented as the words of someone who is dead, telling their story as a lesson or warning to others. Purity Sue: The characters depicted as good in glurge are often impossibly sweet, wise, self-sacrificial, or innocent. Space Whale Aesop: Glurge supports the lesson of the story by having characters meet extremely unlikely consequences (both good and bad). They often imply that if the same will befall the reader if they accept/reject the message. Stalking is Love: Many "romantic" glurge stories feature this trope. It's a particularly dangerous phenomenon; in real life, stalking is demonstrably not love, but rather a compulsion arising from social phobia or mental illness. And works have a distinct Double Standard for this trope; shady-looking stalkers are evil and the victim is in real danger, good-looking stalkers are romantic and sympathetic, and nerdy, unpopular stalkers are just pathetic. Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Usually ties in to Aesop Collateral Damage. It also has the effect of suggesting that living in general is terrible, and there's no point in being good because you'll wind up dead! Urban Legends: Glurge overlaps enough to almost be considered a subgenere, with many such stories having allegedly really happened to some person on the internet's mother's cousin's relative. The main distinction is that glurge is a more consciously literary work. Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Glurge often distorts and fabricates historical fact in the guise of offering "true stories". This way, they can add some extra heft to the story by claiming that it portrays "real life" (but only the authors' conception of it). What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Similar to the way it treats children, glurge only feature 'cute' animals. While this certainly does arouse the audience's sympathy — who doesn't like puppies more than naked mole rats? — it also suggests that the suffering of non-cute animals doesn't matter... or that suffering that produces more cute animals, like a puppy mill, isn't wrong. Wheelchair Woobie: Glurge that includes a physically disabled person typically uses them as a plot device instead of a character, often with at least a tinge of Condescending Compassion. There's also a fair chance they'll be dead by the end of the story. White Man's Burden: Stories where a white protagonist helps non-white persons tend to go glurge-y because of the Unfortunate Implications they introduce: most significantly that minorities need white people in order to accomplish anything meaningful. Whoopi Epiphany Speech: A poor, ethnic minority, disabled, illiterate, or ill-educated character (ideally all of the above) makes a wise and insightful speech to the white, able-bodied, richer, better-educated protagonist. If the epiphany-giving character isn't sufficiently well-developed in their own right, they can seem like a mere plot device to spur the protagonist — who really matters — to take constructive action. This reinforces the belief that minorities are helpless in a similar manner to White Man's Burden. You Know Who Said That?: A character makes a statement and then tells us that those words came from a particular historical figure. Such quotes are often mined, misattributed, or taken out of context (sometimes deliberately). The reader is meant to immediately accept or reject the words based on who said them, which is just sloppy — many admirable persons have said unfortunate things; many wretches have been right once or twice. Tropes Are Tools: a work can use any number of these tropes without being glurge. The hallmarks of glurge are 1) a questionable message 2) conveyed through a manipulative delivery, which is 3) meant to arouse strong emotions in the reader but 4) fails to withstand scrutiny afterwards (though the reader is supposed to be so stirred that looking at the message dispassionately seems cold-hearted or downright amoral). Not to be confused with Anvilicious: a work can be unsubtle in its messaging without being glurge. Often invokes Sweetness Aversion. See also Unfortunate Implications, which has more to do with subtext (and isn't clearly stated at the end). Glurge often crosses over with Values Dissonance, as things that seem heartwarming according to the values of one setting might seem offensive in another. Oscar Bait often has similarities with Glurge. Believe it or not, some people have the taste for this stuff and are Glurge Addicts. Can cause a Don't Shoot the Message reaction from viewers who agree with the moral but can't stand the delivery. The examples have been arranged alphabetically. Please put your examples in the proper place. |
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Patch Adams is supposedly Based on a True Story, but it throws away much of the real Patch Adams' philosophy note such as that alternative and traditional treatment methods should be integrated in favor of Glurge. Though it keeps Dr. Adams' idea that medicine should be available to everyone who needs it... by having the title character steal supplies from a hospital to run his unlicensed clinic. It even changes a real-life medical student and friend of Dr. Adams into a female love interest with an implied Rape as Backstory who ends up killed by a patient, all for cheap drama. The real Dr. Adams hates the movie for this reason. | |
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Being an anthology manga channel, Manga Soprano features several instances of glurge: Most stories tend to have overtones of joshiryokunote 女å�力, lit. "girl power," only it refers to performative femininity and women's adherence to gender roles in Japanese society. While the antagonist makes herself appealing to men and brags about how pretty she is while insinuating the protagonist is "throwing away her worth as a woman" for not being as vain as she is, at the end it's the protagonist that has more "worth as a woman" than the antagonist because of lacking the latter's "unwomanly" traits (sexually active, seductive, egotistical, vain, and/or lazy) and leaving things to her Love Interest and/or (convenient) chance, especially when the antagonist tries (and fails) to seduce him. The protagonists, especially the female ones, are always conventionally attractive and are almost always pitted against ugly antagonists. In the case where the (female) antagonist is equally pretty as they are, they will be depicted as vain bullies who gloat about being prettier than the FMC until she's punished and/or corrected for her mistakes. If a story features a swimming pool as a setting or plot point and has an attractive antagonist, she will constantly mock the FMC for being "plain" while trying to steal the latter's Love Interest. However, it's guaranteed Rule of Pool will reveal the antagonist's "beauty" was all fake, either with her makeup washing away or revealing she wore breast padding all along while the humble, "ugly duckling" protagonist is revealed to be even prettier than her because she doesn't brag about how pretty she is. Most episodes that have Be Yourself as a moral consist of the female antagonist acting the part of a "goofy girl" to get guys' attention and compliments until a real "goofy girl" (usually Kanade) appears and gains the guys' friendship far easier than her, threatening the antagonist's "position" and leads her to double down in order to "dethrone" her. Said episodes end in the antagonist's facade being exposed and/or her giving up after failing so often, and may eventually become friends with the real deal. In office stories, the antagonist more often than not will be a vain, lazy coworker who dumps her workload on the FMC while gloating that the latter is "throwing away her worth as a woman." Moreover, she will take advantage of her looks and adopt a burikko persona to charm male coworkers and use Crocodile Tears to sic them on whoever "made her cry." However, her luck will run out when she makes the moves on the FMC's love interest, which results in the man telling her off and her reputation ruined while the FMC comes out on top because of her hard work and humility. If the FMC has kids from the get-go, mostly from a previous marriage the female antagonist broke up, their innocence will allow them to see through her facade whenever she asks them about their mother's new fiancé to steal him, tricking the antagonist into screwing herself over instead. It doesn't help that the antagonist, hellbent on ruining the FMC's happiness, falls for it and ends up scammed, poor, or even raped. Female antagonists in later stories tend to have petty motivations to ruin the FMC's happiness, which boils down to jealousy and/or entitlement stemming from feelings of inferiority, yet they're played more dramatically than they really are. The female antagonist often acts like a Card-Carrying Villain, occasionally breaking into evil laughs, and indulging in overwrought Evil Gloating after she seemingly succeeded before the story reveals she not only failed but also screwed herself over instead. Moreover, the stuck-up antagonist will always be punished or corrected for their misdeeds, occasionally ending in them changing their hearts after realizing their wrongdoings after being corrected by the protagonists and ending up Easily Forgiven, despite the antagonist having a history of doing them on purpose to screw people over. Episodes featuring disabled characters as protagonists will depict them as innocent and saintly, sometimes being able to overcome their limitations despite all the odds and often rely on able-bodied characters to defend themselves from the antagonists. For a glaring example of this, the Japanese version of 'Because I was visually impaired,My mother said "You're a child I don't want."' [sic] goes as far as to not only have its blind protagonist Sae refer to herself in the third person but also add a -chan honorific (which is as babyish as one can get) to emphasize her innocence. |
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Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) suffered a lot of this from its rot period of 1999-2005, where the focus shifted from an adventure-comedy to a relationship drama straight out of the Hallmark Channel. There are two stories in particular that push the boundaries of Glurge to their fullest. StH #134 — "Home: Epilogue". Sonic, after recovering from a near-death experience against Dr. Robotnik's latest creation named Mecha, is asked to be a guest of honor at Knothole's royal celebration, where he reunites with Sally. She implores Sonic to give up his life of action to settle down with her, claiming that the Royal Agency is enough to take on Robotnik. Sonic declines, saying that he's the only one who could stop Eggman after finishing off the Xorda invasion a year ago. This leads to Sally lashing out at Sonic and breaking up with him for claiming he's selfish, despite the fact that she's disregarding Sonic's feats of heroism throughout the years and only focusing on themselves. StH #155-156 — "Line of Succession". Sonic, having given up on Sally when the announcement that she's marrying Antoine arrived, has settled with dating Fiona Fox, which causes his best friend/honorary brother, Tails, to lash out at him for dating the girl he loved himself, even though he had fallen in love with a robot duplicate created by Robotnik made to look his age instead of her actual age. In addition, thanks to Creative Differences between the writers, what was originally intended to be a war-scarred Antoine was rewritten to be his previously-established Evil Counterpart intent on assassinating King Acorn before his son, Elias, arrives out of nowhere to stop him. The icing on the Glurge-y cake is the cover of #155, which was so melodramatically narmy that Sega issued a mandate that prevented Sonic from showing any extreme sadness. |
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Boyfriends.: Part of the comic's negative reputation comes from the fact that it's mostly 100+ chapters of four men being Sickeningly Sweethearts and going on dates. This isn't an inherently bad thing in moderation, and there are a few semi-dramatic turns of events, but reading so much of it nonstop with zero breaks makes the work feel like a Romantic Plot Tumor that mutated into its own story. | |
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In one episode of BoJack Horseman, Diane and Guy are tasked with filming a feel-good story about two women making dolls...who were recently bought out by Whitewhale. Diane laments afterwards that there's nothing "feel-good" about small, independent businesses being bought out by large corporations. | |
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The Secret is infamous for claiming that good things happen only if you really, really visualize them enough, and that if they don't happen to you, you just didn't want them badly enough. | |
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Each Zen Pencils comic is a Framing Device for a famous quote — and it falls into all the pitfalls of You Know Who Said That?, with many quotes being hypocritical or out of context. A surprising number of comics also encourage readers to quit their jobs and pursue their passion (even if it's obsessively binge-watching Game of Thrones, abandoning everyone you know, and wasting your money to become a character from the show).note Though admittedly, this message softened over time into, "If you must have an unfulfilling job, be sure to do something fulfilling on the side." Its attempt at an original story arc is a Glurge-y attempt to paint art critics as hateful trolls who are defeated by The Power of Art. | |
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YouTuber Dhar Mann's "inspirational" videos are largely this. Despite being extremely popular with a young fanbase, the morals of his videos are often cases of Moral Sociopathy or Black-and-White Insanity. There is no nuance to any of the stories, and the "villain" always gets some sort of punishment (which often contradicts the message of the video). | |
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While Whatever Happened To Baby Jane wouldn't qualify, the song "I've Written a Letter To Daddy" sure would, if it weren't staged rather creepily. | |
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To Sir, with Love avoids this — possibly because it's a true story — but it still makes it clear that Sir and his students' success was only possible because of lowered expectations. | |
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Reddit coined the term "Orphan-crushing Machine" to refer to glurgey news stories that seem uplifting at first glance but quickly reveal disturbing implications when held up to any serious scrutiny. The origin of the meme is a post parodying such stories, about a generous philanthropist who rescues children from the eponymous bit of murderous machinery — the unspoken-but-obvious disturbing implication thus being why a device for pulverizing small children exists in the first place. It's often used to mock such things as news items that applaud wealthy celebrities for donating the bare minimum to charitable causes. | |
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Snopes is the Trope Namer and has a category for Glurge, which is usually inspirational-sounding urban legends involving hospital patients, animals, religion, etc. Most of the stories are rated false due to being implausible in real life and not holding any water. | |
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This happens on Tumblr a lot whenever someone doesn't do the proper research: An infamous post of a long black object with pink on it was claimed to be a black man's burnt arm, and it was called "tragically beautiful". Then it turned out to actually be a picture of a Chance the Stallion dildo. A common GIF image purports to depict someone dying in the middle of an MRI scan. The original poster claimed that death causes the brain to release "tons and tons of endorphins that make you feel a range of emotions. Tragically beautiful." After being reblogged as "deep" and "beautiful", someone pointed out that it actually depicted someone turning into a zombie in The Walking Dead (2010) — with the AMC logo not even removed from the corner. Someone posted a picture◊ of a police officer with scars on the side of his face, calling it "Joker without makeup". Some users were sufficiently saddened, others visibly offended, before someone pointed out that it was actually a screencap from The Dark Knight where The Joker was hiding out among a group of policemen. There was a heated argument about a photoset of a bird covered in chocolate, calling it animal cruelty and saying that the bird probably died from interacting with the chocolate. Then it was pointed out that the photos were fake and came from this scene in Jack and Jill. The whole ordeal went memetic rather quickly. Another Tumblr post◊ featured an image of a machine pouring a strange pink goop into a bowl, claiming that this was "mechanically separated chicken" and detailing the excruciating process chickens go through to create it. It got a few disgusted and horrified reactions until someone recognized it for what it really was... There was for a long time an infamous post circulated on Tumblr, depicting an animated GIF of an oncoming train in black and white, with the claim that if the viewer closes their eyes at the moment the train "hits", they will immediately feel relaxed, because their brain will momentarily be tricked into thinking they have died. A lot of people have spoken out against the post's apparent glorification of suicide to an audience of mostly teenagers and young adults, and taken great pains to point out that suicide is no laughing matter. A very controversial Tumblr post once said: "I think suicidal people are just angels that want to go home." While a few users reblogged it as "poetic" and tragic", it was met with a lot more anger from people who actually were suicidal from mental illness, saying that romanticizing suicide is never a good thing. One picture that still shows up occasionally is a group of African teenage boys with one who appears to be crying in the middle. According to the caption, it's a ritual where a boy who commits some delinquency or other is surrounded by friends and loved ones telling him all the good things he's done to make him feel better about himself. Heartwarming to some (though a bit cheesy, not to mention nonsensical), but the photo is actually a soccer team celebrating after a win. One picture still floating around is two wolves facing each other with fangs bared, while a third looks scared ducked under one of their heads. The caption claims that the ducking wolf is pretending to be scared while really defending her mate's throat. The caption turned out to be complete fiction; all three are male, the smallest of the group just happened to accidentally back into another while submissively ducking out of a dominance display. There's also Fridge Logic as to how guarding another wolf's throat with their head in a fight would even work. |
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The Mystical Laws is, apart from the claims that Earth is a "planet of love", an anti-Chinese propaganda screed that not only compares the country to Nazis but calls for abolishing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution so that the JSDF can fight China and prevent the movie's scenario from happening in Real Life. Moreover, it also engages in denialism about Japan's war crimes as the main villain's policies include teaching about them in schools. | |
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Airplane! viciously parodies many Glurge clichés common to Disaster Movies especially, such as having an adorable Littlest Cancer Patient (who gets comically abused) and Ted's "moving" romance with Elaine (which is portrayed as incredibly shallow and stupid). The script is a direct adaptation of a real movie, Zero Hour!, which played all the cliches and Glurge completely straight; the Littlest Cancer Patient spoof is pulled from a subplot of the second film of the Airport series (yes, even the singing nun). | |
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"The Little Girl", sung by John Michael Montgomery, is based upon a religiously-themed urban legend. Songwriter Harley Allen, when asked about the song's origin, stated that "if it ain't true, it ought to be," which has Unfortunate Implications: the eponymous "little girl" witnesses the brutal murder-suicide of her parents. | |
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Issue 40 features the story of Twilight Sparkle's first days of magic school, with Princess Celestia asking her to help look after baby Spike. Cut to Twilight desperately juggling school and baby care like so many teenage mothers, except she wasn't even a teenager at the time. Just as Twilight starts to crack under the pressure, she realizes that Celestia trying to give her her first friend, not a responsibility. This is supposed to be heartwarming, but: That Spike wasn't meant to be a responsibility for Twilight doesn't change the fact that he was a responsibility — a far greater responsibility than anyone Twilight's age has any business being saddled with. Celestia is right there when Twilight breaks down and rants about how she is struggling in school on account of having to care for Spike, yet there is no evidence that she ever properly addressed that. If Celestia thinks that taking care of a baby is an acceptable substitute for socializing with others one's own age, then it's no wonder Twilight's social skills are still minimal when the series begins. Combine that with Twilight likely having little time to make non-baby friends as a result of what she is going through, and it appears that Celestia wound up exacerbating the problem she was trying to solve. |
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The Polar Express frames belief in Santa Claus as something important that needs to be learned, on par with the value of leadership, and only those who believe in him can hear his sleighbells. The side character Billy also has never had a happy Christmas before, and it's implied to be because his family can't afford dinner, but then when he gets the present he's always wanted, it's portrayed as a sign he'll have a happy Christmas this year after all — yet receiving a gift won't make his family able to afford dinner. | |
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The Merchant of Venice: Much has been said about William Shakespeare's morality tale that pandered to the Christian audience of its time. The message of the play if taken at face value is that all Christians are good honest men who are the innocent victims of avaricious, bloodthirsty, downright evil Hand Rubbing Jews, but will ultimately triumph over them. Many modern interpretations however, paint the story as a deliberate Satire of the anti-semitic tales of the age; they argue that it appears utterly contrived when viewed critically, and it is often interpreted to be a harsh criticism of Christianity in disguise. | |
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Not Without My Daughter: The film's mostly negative reviews upon its release were credited to this — it's an inspirational story about a brave, resourceful woman who is determined to free herself and her daughter from involuntary captivity, but the story is ridden with unrelated unsavory assertions about a foreign culture. As Roger Ebert put it in his review: | |
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Various Cracked articles of his such as "4 Unintentionally Depressing Self-Help Books on Happiness" have him poking fun at books which deliver shamelessly saccharine attempts at advice for life. Some notably Glurge-y examples include "The Simply Romantic Wife", a book of romance tips which advises women to be subservient to their husbands, and "1001 Ways to Celebrate America", which was published in 2001: | |
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Parodied in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In one episode, this is how Mac is able to tell which of the Bloos is his true best friend. The one that made the heartfelt speech at the end wasn't the real one, since Bloo would never say or admit something like that. | |
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One particularly chilling example of this sort of thing in music is Neil Sedaka's "Next Door to an Angel", in which he delights in describing his young neighbour's physical development ("She used to be such a skinny little girl/But all of a sudden, she's out of this world!") and plans to "make that angel mine"; while the girl next door is explicitly identified as 16, the narrator is suspiciously not. And yet, it's all cheerfully sung to the most cheesy, goofy rhythm imaginable. It was probably intended to be from the viewpoint of one teen singing about another a la Paul Anka's "Puppy Love", but "Right Next Door" was released when Neil Sedaka was 23, so in real life a 23-year-old singing those lyrics about his 16-year-old neighbor is still pretty creepy. The same viewpoint and depiction also applies to "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen", also by Sedaka. That song was released in 1961, one year prior to "Right Next Door". | |
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King of the Hill: Hank's mom Tilly collects cutesy figurines, and Hank utterly despises them because of how much she loves them and how they seem to control her life. Then Hank realizes those figurines were the only things that kept her going while she was trapped in her marriage to Hank's Jerkass father Cotton. In the episode "Husky Bobby", Bobby begins modeling as a plus sized child. Hank is extremely embarrassed about this, as he is prejudiced against overweight people. The whole episode centers around Hank trying to get Bobby to quit. He finally succeeds before a fashion show for plus-sized males, which ends with the children who were not dragged out by their dads getting pelted with donuts. Nobody does anything to stop it, it ends with a heartwarming moment between Bobby and Hank, and nobody is punished for their actions. A Weighty Aesop at its worst. |
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Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country is quite Glurge-y, much as it tries to pretend to be a manly man's story set among the men of the Navy. The moral lesson is: love your country dammit, because if you don't have a country your life is worthless and you dwindle into a pathetic loner obsessed with the whole notion of "country." Never mind that patriotism for the sake of patriotism is naive at best, or that what happened in the story was a form of low-key brainwashing, making the man's life revolve around the lack of the United States — it's really nauseating. | |
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The Babe Ruth Story gives such a Historical Hero Upgrade to its subject that the film comes across as a propaganda film. Ruth is depicted as a Kindhearted Simpleton and Friend to All Children that also happens to be a literal miracle worker (e.g. magically healing a sick boy by saying hi to him, as well as curing another kid of his cancer by hitting a home run during the 1932 World Series, and his famous called shot, no less), while the real Ruth's vices such as his penchant for drinking and womanizing are completely glossed over. | |
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MADtv (1995)'s parody skit "Nice White Lady" subverts the "inspirational teacher saves inner-city students" story that shows up in so many movies by pointing out the racism underlying many such stories. MADtv's inspirational teacher doesn't do much to inspire her black, Latino and Asian students except make random speeches and utter platitudes — but she doesn't have to, because, as the title says, she's a nice white lady. | |
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Pay It Forward was criticised upon release for being a movie that has pretences of "inspirational" but just comes across as shameless emotional manipulation. The worst part comes in the ending, where the protagonist is completely needlessly killed, making it seem like being kind to others is too dangerous to be worth it. Per Lisa Schwartzbaum in Entertainment Weekly: | |
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War Room, ostensibly about a couple turning to faith during a rough patch in their marriage, imparts the message that Satan is responsible for a verbally abusive and adulterous husband's behavior, and all his wife needs to do is pray for him. This is particularly dangerous, as many abuse victims stay with their partners precisely because they believe it's their responsibility to "save" their abusers. A subplot of the film has the husband, Tony, making thousands of dollars by stealing and selling his company's drugs. After he finds the Lord, he takes the stolen goods back to his boss, all but insuring major prosecution. The boss is so moved, he lets the whole thing slide — imparting the message that being sufficiently Christian will spare one from real world consequences of actions; even a cursory reading of The Bible will not support such a moral. |
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Death Clown has the baby smashing PSA which exploits glurge tropes for dark humour. | |
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Lincoln is Done is meant to be a Tear Jerker and Lincoln finally arriving home is meant to be heartwarming. However, the whole reason he ran away is because he dreamt his sisters hated him, and his sisters crying their eyes out and (in Lynn, Luna, and Lola's cases) trying to kill themselves just seems narmy because they know where he is and that he's okay. In addition, the plot was resolved with an exorcism-like ritual. | |
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The Rebirth of Buddha is an anti-suicide tract, depicting suicide victims in an unflattering light as evil spirits who seek to wreak havoc on Earth for the time they're supposed to have left while alive, rejected by both Heaven and Hell. Moreover, these spirits also kill living people in the same ways they took their own lives. Moreover, it's also a treatise that denounces Aum Shinrikyo and its leader, Shoko Asahara, as deceivers by having the Asahara stand-in be a fraud in cahoots with demons. | |
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The Christmas Tree: The special is already on one of the lowest budgets imaginable with directionless acting, Limited Animation, and a story that doesn't understand the necessity of plot progression, but then it goes through with one of the most blatant cases of Black-and-White Morality in its moral presented in the last few seconds. | |
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The Chicken Soup for the Soul series is devoted entirely to glurge, being compilations of "feel-good" stories which as supposed to warm the reader like, well, a bowl of chicken soup. People down on their luck and coping with drug abuse, angry elders whose perspectives are turned around by the birth of a child or adoption of a pet, the works. Later publications are themed to a specific topic, and they proved popular enough to spawn a television series. | |
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Parodied in The Middle. In the first Mother's Day episode, Sue Heck, who often tries out for things that she never makes it into, finds an inspirational fridge magnet with a dolphin flying a kite that says "Think of the thing you can not do and then do it." However, since her father Mike doesn't buy the fridge magnet for her (since Frankie may not have wanted it for Mother's Day), Sue steals it, which is contrary to her nature and makes her feel very guilty. So much for the inspirational message. | |
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Heidi: The eponymous girl is happy living in the mountains, and becomes miserable when she's sent to her cousin Klara's house to get an education, so she gets sent back to the mountains and Klara comes with her. They manage to get educated in a way that keeps them happy, meaning that the book doesn't end up with an anti-education message, but the Glurge comes from the fact that Klara is initially in a wheelchair but the disability somehow goes away once she moves to the mountains. | |
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In Dream Daddy, for fans who didn't consider Joseph's Good Ending a good ending in its own right, or an Esoteric Happy Ending at worst, it's almost always considered this instead. The fact that the devs gave an interview that explained they chose not to give Joseph a "Good Ending" because they didn't want to give the impression of breaking up marriages as a good thing really didn't help some fans see Joseph's Good Ending in any better terms. | |
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MySpace had a rash of people spreading religious chain letters that had a subject line like "Party" and a message that read (paraphrasing) "You opened it because it said 'Party', but would you open it if it said 'Jesus' instead? Now repost this with the same subject line if you love Jesus!" Never mind that lying is against the Ten Commandments. More malicious versions of this would encourage the reader to post it with something along the lines of "I hate (best friend)." | |
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The Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Faith" is a look at the darker side of glurge: the Victim of the Week is a benefactor who planned to stop supporting a girl who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease and survived abuse to write an inspiring book about her experiences. He planned to stop because he found out she isn't real, and her "foster parents" are con artists. And this is actually inspired by Anthony Godby Johnson, supposed "author" of A Rock and a Hard Place. | |
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The Nostalgia Critic has a tendency to choose really sappy music for rousing speeches delivered to straw villains. He has mocked this a few times, like in We Wish You A Turtles Christmas, where he's spewing about Christmas but Tamara is getting gored by zombie Malcolm behind him. | |
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The children's OVA Shiawasette Naani, in its 15-minute duration, teaches kids that smiling and being cheerful will bring joy to others. While such a lesson isn't bad in and of itself, the way it's handled borders on teaching spiritual bypassing, which is related to the concept of toxic positivity. Demonstrating this is that Alto, who may not be older than six, has an out-of-body experience with Tenshi-san, but then falls into Hell for thinking he was dead upon discovering the latter was an angel. After running around and crying for help, Alto only gets out of there by expressing joy, which calls upon Tenshi-san to escort him out of the Spirit World. | |
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Facebook has its own brand of chain letters, which often include pictures and added emotional blackmail along the lines of "only 3% of your friends will be brave enough to share this!". | |
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Songdrops has "All I Want for Christmas is to Spend All of My Christmases with You", which is meant to be a fun Christmas song about a man wanting to spend Christmas with his crush. However, the crush hates his guts, to the point of apparently "going ballistic" every time they talk to each other, and he insists she loves him after all but is hiding her attraction, making the song seem very creepy. | |
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Old Fashioned, marketed as The Moral Substitute to Fifty Shades of Grey, showing a love story based on romance and courtship rather than sex, but the way it's shown makes Fifty Shades of Grey seem less abusive. Our hero, Clay Walsh, is so disgusted by the possibility of giving into his base desires, he refuses to be in the same room as his Love Interest Amber, and much of their so-called romance is actually him molding her to his ideal of a properly submissive wife and mother, even making her cut up food for a friend's baby. In one scene, he shames a sex worker to her face (all in the name of "treating women with respect") and almost gets to a fight with her driver when he correctly points out that Clay just cost her a night's worth of pay. There's also the fact that Clay refuses to be alone with any woman who is not his wife. It's supposed to make him seem celibate and respectful to his woman, however, it comes across as sexist in of itself by implying that women by themselves tempt men into sex, and not to mention what The Cinema Snob has to say about this attitude: | |
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Hetty Feather: Conversed when Hetty reads a book titled Little Elsa's Last Good Deed, in which a Nice Girl named Elsa does many humanitarian acts but then dies in a hospital. Hetty finds the protagonist dull as she's too good to be realistic. | |
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The Laws of the Sun teaches that without faith and El Cantare's teachings, people will become nihilistic atheists and immediately indulge in all kinds of vices in droves and destroy the faithful. When the vicious fall into Hell upon dying, those condemned souls repeat the process by possessing other people in the same state as them, exacerbating such vices. Every time this happens, Earth will cause cataclysms and sink entire continents underwater to purify itself. Moreover, the cult teaches that The Power of Love can ward off evil spirits and even extraterrestrial beings hellbent on harming humans. | |
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Life Itself (not to be confused with the 2014 documentary of the same name) is a Generational Saga Hyperlink Story about a young couple waiting for the birth of their child, a moment that reverberates across two continents and takes place over the course of around six decades. While it's a not a bad premise, it has a questionable way of handling it. The young couple in question, Will and Abby, go through a lot of suffering, and the first twenty-one years of their daughter Dylan's life is one long Trauma Conga Line, and their future son-in-law Rodrigo goes through his fair share of suffering too. However, at the end, the narrator, revealed to be Will and Abby's granddaughter, decides it was all worth it because Dylan and her kids eventually led happy lives. This is supposed to be an Earn Your Happy Ending, just gives off the message that a person needlessly suffering is okay because there's a chance that their descendants might end up better off. This, along with some other factors (the constant shilling of Bob Dylan, its overly sentimental tone, and the overall pretentiousness of the script) meant that it was lambasted by both critics and audiences and ended up on several "Worst Movies of 2018" lists. | |
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Kaguya-sama: Love Is War has an in-universe example with Show Within a Show Today Will Be Sweet, a tear-jerking manga the cast becomes hooked on. According to the brief plot summary, the male lead is Delicate and Sickly with a terminal disease while the heroine lives in an abusive household and suffered from isolation and anorexia before the Manic Pixie Dream Girl male lead breaks her out of her shell. She also hasn't eaten decent food in a while, and the one decent meal she gets is a curry dish made by her love interest before he kicks the bucket. | |
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Parodied in Tropic Thunder: Actor Tugg Speedman, in a blatant bid to win an Oscar, played a mentally-disabled farmhand in the film-within-a-film Simple Jack. He didn't win anything, and the film was a total bomb. Kirk Lazarus explains to Tugg that this is because he went "full retard", and he goes on to show how the actors who did win (or come close to winning) Oscars didn't actually portray mental disability accurately — like Dustin Hoffman playing an Idiot Savant in Rain Mannote whose portrayal of ASD was highly accurate for its time and was based on real-life interactions with people with the condition, but has become a much less accurate portrayal twenty years later in the face of improved research and diagnostic criteria covering a much broader and less pigeonholed range of symptoms, Tom Hanks playing The Fool in Forrest Gump, or Peter Sellers playing a Seemingly Profound Fool in Being There. The only one he says actually played an accurate "full retard" was Sean Penn in i am sam, who "went full retard and went home empty-handed." On a larger scale, Tropic Thunder is a Deconstructive Parody of Glurge-heavy Oscar Bait movies (especially epic war films), calling them out as shallow, inaccurate, self-righteous, exploitative, hypocritical, and all-around clueless. Nobody involved in the film seriously believes in its messages — treating it as either a paycheck or an easy Oscar win — but most have deluded themselves into thinking they're deeply knowledgeable artistic geniuses. The Troubled Production is wracked by unprofessionalism and incompetence, with the movie itself being Based on a Great Big Lie (the man whose story it's supposedly adapting is a Phony Veteran). Ben Stiller has noted that much of the inspiration for the film came from various actor friends of his who did Glurgey Vietnam War films back in the The '80s and wouldn't shut up about how deeply spiritual the pre-production boot camp sessions supposedly were, making it out as if they were on the same level as real soldiers because they did some token research for their roles. |
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Mass Effect 2 has a hilarious parody of glurgy chain e-mails called "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!" It involves a terminally-ill drell (desert-dwelling green-skinned humanoid) lying in the ocean, praying to the Enkindlers, and being told that it wasn't the water but the Enkindlers who were keeping him afloat, then waking to find himself cured. It also makes no sense in the context of the Enkindler religion, which is essentially deist. The religion actually knows the Protheans are precursor aliens, it just chooses to revere them for uplifting the Hanar. | |
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Reality talent shows' sob stories that show up, with the general thumb rule of sadder = more successful and long-lasting in the competition. Expect them to be more favored for opportunities. America's Got Talent is notorious for this. | |
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Music (2021) tells the story of a recovering alcoholic learning to be responsible by caring for Music, her autistic sister. Said sister serves mostly as a means to further the neurotypical main character's story and Character Development, and the depiction of autism has been criticized as inaccurate and problematic. Music is portrayed as Inspirationally Disadvantaged to the hilt; she's a cheerful and purehearted girl who views the world as a big, bright-hued, literal musical, and the only downsides to her autism are occasionally having meltdowns (glossing over all the difficulties that can arise with autism such as financial instability and social isolation, and the fact her guardian struggles to provide her with proper care). | |
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Dangerous Minds is a good example of how such films are implicitly racist; only the white teacher can get through to the students, and not her non-white fellow faculty members. | |
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The Boy Who Could Fly has an uplifting message about autism, but the protagonist's behaviors are not even close to how a regular autistic person acts. Being a popular classroom movie at the time, it may have given lots of students the wrong impression of how autistic people behave and look. | |
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Netflix's A Christmas Prince falls into the typical trappings of Hallmark Presentations, if not even worse. Amber and Prince Richard of Aldovia are presented as the main protagonists, but their actions are noticeably selfish and scummy. In the first movie, Amber ends up with Richard after a series of events where she uncovers that he was adopted, while Richard is seen shirking his responsibilities as prince to be a people's person, in the second movie, Richard only cares about his presentation while Aldovia plummets into bankruptcy, and unknowingly sided with the person who caused said bankruptcy, and in the third movie, Amber and Richard are only concerned with their baby while Aldovia is on the brink of warfare, and Amber only gets involved once a supposed curse is fated to hit her child, which is disproven as a myth by multiple characters. It doesn't help that Simon, Richard's cousin, has multiple propositions that would seriously help Aldovia, and also wants the throne when Richard doesn't, and yet he's constantly belittled and seen as selfish until he's left with nothing. The film wants its audience to see Amber and Richard in a cutesy and sympathetic light, but all they ever do is cause problems for others. | |
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A Troll in Central Park is so saccharine it will give you insulin shock. A particularly broken scene has Stanley the troll show the kids his vision of a perfect world — a Sugar Bowl filled with trolls that all look and act exactly like him. | |
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Ghosts was something of a response to accusations that his affection for children hid unsavory motives. It uses the framework of a black-and-white horror movie. An evil white mayor (played by Jackson) leads a Torches and Pitchforks mob on the supernatural Michael, just because he was sharing ghost stories with some local boys. | |
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A common GIF image purports to depict someone dying in the middle of an MRI scan. The original poster claimed that death causes the brain to release "tons and tons of endorphins that make you feel a range of emotions. Tragically beautiful." After being reblogged as "deep" and "beautiful", someone pointed out that it actually depicted someone turning into a zombie in The Walking Dead (2010) — with the AMC logo not even removed from the corner. | |
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FernGully: The Last Rainforest is about as black-and-white as environmental movies get. The movie goes out of its way to offer the age-old message of "nature — good; humans — bad", but does very little to elaborate on such a concept besides a straw villain made of polluted, dark gas, making the main leads feel unsympathetic in their endeavors. It really says something when the two most likable characters are the Plucky Comic Relief, who has a backstory that actually shows a wrongdoing of mankind, and the aforementioned main villain, being suave and charismatic. (It also helps that the two of them are voiced by Robin Williams and Tim Curry respectively.) | |
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The Loud House fanfic: Easily Broken involves Lincoln's sisters putting an embarrassing video of him kissing his crush Ronnie Anne online, which causes him to run away to New York and his family tries to get him back. It's meant to be a heartwarming story about family, but the story flip-flops between portraying it as the family actually hating him and Lincoln just overreacting. He also becomes suicidal at one point but perks right up again after a good night's sleep, develops powers which are said to come from him being "pure of heart", and there's a recurring threat of his emotional wounds damaging his physical heart. Lincoln is Done is meant to be a Tear Jerker and Lincoln finally arriving home is meant to be heartwarming. However, the whole reason he ran away is because he dreamt his sisters hated him, and his sisters crying their eyes out and (in Lynn, Luna, and Lola's cases) trying to kill themselves just seems narmy because they know where he is and that he's okay. In addition, the plot was resolved with an exorcism-like ritual. |
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The Odd Life of Timothy Green involves an infertile couple who somehow grows a child in their garden (It Makes Sense in Context). | |
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"Run For Your Life" by The Beatles is so chockfull of Lyrical Dissonance and Unfortunate Implications, one can't help but wonder whether or not it was intentional. On its surface, the song seems like a peppy love song, not unlike the kinds seen in The '60s (and done so gracefully earlier on in Rubber Soul with "In My Life"), but one look at the lyrics tells it all. The song is about a man who threatens his loved one with violence if she ever thinks about leaving him. For what it's worth, John Lennon eventually regretted making the song, but this only pushes the Glurge-y narrative that this song was meant to be seen as romantic. | |
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The Book of Henry can come off as extremely contrived and overly sentimental for all the wrong reasons. The main protagonist is a young boy with an unspecified mental disorder who pays his family's bills, because his mother would rather play video games. His main love interest is physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, despite showing no physical evidence of said abuse. Said main protagonist suddenly dies of a brain tumor halfway through the movie... but not before creating a series of instructions on how to kill his love interest's abusive stepfather and get away with it. His mother follows the instructions until the last minute (as in standing in front of the stepfather with a sniper rifle), when she realizes her dead son was just a kid, and maybe she shouldn't listen to him. In the Midnight Screenings review of the film, Brad Jones compares the movie to films such as Jack the Bear and Radio Flyer mentioned below. Nathan Rabin subsequently discovered The Book of Henry's older Distaff Counterpart in 1982's Six Weeks: A precocious 12-year-old figure skater/ballerina who has voluntarily given up her leukemia treatments befriends a politician who helps her and her wealthy mother realize the girl's bucket list dreams within the titular time frame, which is how long she has to live. One of her dreams is getting her single mom and the politician together...even though he is already married and has a child. Beyond the sentimentality, both Rabin and the hosts at the '80s All Over podcast were seriously creeped out by the implications of the relationships, especially as the one between the adults comes solely through their respective relationships with the child. (For those wondering how it plays out, while the girl mock-marries them by the time she dies, they do not end up together.) |
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The Dreamstone, especially in early episodes, concerns a Serious Business feud about spreading dreams and nightmares. The Big Bad's minions, the Urpneys, were sympathetic Punch Clock Villains who got beaten up and sent to face their murderous Bad Boss whenever they tried to ruin the heroes' dreams, all still depicted in a sickly sweet and righteous tone. | |
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Invoked in The Fountainhead: Alvah Scarrett's career is built on writing glurge-filled newspaper editorials. | |
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The Ultimate Gift. A sinful jerkass who disregards his father must go through a series of trials that improve him in order to get the titular "ultimate gift." He falls in love with the single mother of the Littlest Cancer Patient, who, of course, dies. The part where all this starts to go off the rails is the ending, where Jason receives two billion dollars for his efforts, implying that the "ultimate gift" is just money. | |
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Parodied in the Regular Show episode "Temp Check". When the park crew determine who they believe is the real Rigby after Doug disguises himself as him, Mordecai pulls Rigby in for a hug. ...Only for it to be revealed that the Rigby who hugged him is the imposter, since Rigby would never actually hug Mordecai, as established earlier in the episode. | |
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The Shack is meant to be an uplifting story where the main character, Mackenzie, meets with the Holy Trinity and learns to move on from his daughter's murder. It completely ignores the fact that he, as a thirteen year old boy, poisoned his father and got away with it, not to mention that his daughter's killer is never caught and possibly slaughtering more children. | |
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Bubbles gives a sad backstory to the Memetic Bystander Derpy Hooves, here portrayed as an Inspirationally Disadvantaged foal who has a loving father but an abusive mother. The wording of the story is childish and cutesy, focusing on Derpy's innocence and ignorance. The climax of Bubbles has Derpy's mother trying to poison her daughter (or at least that's what's heavily implied). After that fails she abandons Derpy in the forest, where the story ends. | |
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A subplot of the film has the husband, Tony, making thousands of dollars by stealing and selling his company's drugs. After he finds the Lord, he takes the stolen goods back to his boss, all but insuring major prosecution. The boss is so moved, he lets the whole thing slide — imparting the message that being sufficiently Christian will spare one from real world consequences of actions; even a cursory reading of The Bible will not support such a moral. | |
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Glurge | |
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Ghostbusters: A Christmas Spirit involves everyone discovering that Egon doesn't celebrate Christmas, and then he has to learn to find his "Christmas spirit" to save his kidnapped friends. This would be a bit culturally insensitive no matter which character they picked, but especially since they picked Egon as the character in that role, who's Ambiguously Jewish. | |
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Glurge | |
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Jack Chick and his notorious Chick Tracts are full of Glurge. However, they're even better examples of Scare 'Em Straight; anyone who rejects his very specific brand of Protestant Christianity has to answer to Giant Faceless God and his Pointing Finger of Doom. | |
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Parodied in The Areas of My Expertise with The Six Oaths of the Virtuous Child, which are more creepy than inspiring. | |
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Glurge | |
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Snowdrop (2013): Snowdrop's character design makes it look like she was genetically engineered to be a Glurge star. Combined with the first few minutes focusing on the hardships she faces on account of being blind (mainly her classmates openly disrespecting her because of that) as well as playing the Too Good for This Sinful Earth card at the end (albeit in such a context that Snowdrop could easily have died of natural causes), the film tugs at the audience's heartstrings with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. If that's not Glurge-y enough, Snowdrop's conversation with her mother Primrose all but explicitly sends the message that being Inspirationally Disadvantaged is better than not having the disability in question: | |
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The Christmas Shoes, a 2002 Made-for-TV film, takes inspiration from the song of the same name, and like the song is infamous for having bleak implications. However, the movie goes a few steps further than the song by having a more elaborate and even glurgier story. The main character, Robert, is a lawyer who spends way too much time at work, to the expense of himself and his family, and he meets Nathan, a poor boy who wants to buy his terminally ill mother beautiful shoes to make her happy before she dies. At first, it seems evident that the movie will deliver a very basic Aesop about the dangers of valuing money and material possessions over other people, similar to A Christmas Carol, with Robert taking inspiration from Nathan and learning to be less self-centered. However, as one reviewer notes, this is not the case: rather, it is Nathan who starts overworking himself to be able to pay for the shoes, and the movie goes to show this as a noble and admirable sacrifice, which most viewers who see past the saccharine framing will find horrifying (and those who give it a moment's thought will notice that it's in direct opposition to any anti-materialism Aesop the film might have been trying for). | |
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Forrest Gump, as shown by Michael A. Novelli at The Agony Booth, is chock-full of Unfortunate Implications brought about by its Glurge; Forrest is only a good guy because it never occurs to him to do anything that falls outside a conservative American framework of morality. (The novel it's based on is much more nuanced, showing how Forrest struggles to apply his Black-and-White Morality to the crazy world around him.) A Cracked: After Hours video also comments on the problems with the love story between Forrest and Jenny, particularly the scene where Forrest — a confused, mentally handicapped man — shows up at Jenny's dorm room and she tries to have sex with him. Swapping the genders in that scene leads to a very sinister result. | |
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Touched by an Angel: Sending the message of God's love is awesome, but mixing it with this trope ain't exactly a good idea. The original unaired pilot was more cynical with one angel Monica calling humans "god's sport" and Tess smoking. | |
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The Laws of Eternity claims that geniuses, scientists, and even corporation founders were angels and demigods sent from Heaven to improve the Earth. Conversely, it portrays atheist philosophers and dictators (e.g. Nietzsche and Hitler) as not being actually humans, but demons sent from Hell to lead mankind astray from God, but can be defeated if everyone relies on El Cantare. Moreover, it also claims that disabled people won't be disabled anymore once they meet the requirements to enter the highest tiers of Heaven after death, as the infamous "I'm Helen Keller" scene can attest. | |
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FoxTrot has an In-Universe example. One of Jason's The Family Circus strips involves the father sparing the black widow that fatally poisoned Dolly, saying, "at least one will live." Paige doesn't get it, and walks off, at which point Jason protests that it's supposed to be heartwarming. | |
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North seems to think of itself as an uplifting morality tale of a kid who learns to appreciate his parents. Instead it comes off as a story of a raging egotist who abandons his parents but returns to them only because all the other ones he encountered were raging racial stereotypes. What's worse, the film tries to save itself by revealing it was All Just a Dream, but that just gives off the implication that North is a huge racist himself as well. | |
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Lean on Me avoids falling into the typical Glurge trap. Joe Clark stresses discipline and control as the only effective methods of instruction, he can only save the core student body rather than everyone, and the principal unceremoniously throws dozens of "troublemakers" out of the school, facing the issue head-on with brutal practicality. | |
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The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "All That Glitters" is a particularly notorious example of this. Through methods that come across as a Space Whale Aesop and turn SpongeBob into a Designated Villain for an undeserving amount of Aesop Collateral Damage, SpongeBob is taught a lesson that betraying your friends is wrong. ...Even though this friend is an inanimate spatula, has nothing to do with what the title implies, and SpongeBob is learning all this while spending almost the entire episode naked. | |
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Johnny Darrell's "Green, Green Grass of Home", popularized by singers such as Porter Wagoner and Tom Jones, is practically Angst? What Angst? incarnate. It at first seems to be a peaceful recount of a person's childhood memories in their luscious, green, country home, until it's then revealed that the person is an inmate on Death Row, about to be executed. Despite this, they still seem content with their memories of home, and is about to cherish the fact that after they're executed, they'll be buried underneath the titular green, green grass of home. Unless this person was convicted for a crime they didn't commit, it's really hard to take what they're saying seriously. | |
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My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Bubbles gives a sad backstory to the Memetic Bystander Derpy Hooves, here portrayed as an Inspirationally Disadvantaged foal who has a loving father but an abusive mother. The wording of the story is childish and cutesy, focusing on Derpy's innocence and ignorance. The climax of Bubbles has Derpy's mother trying to poison her daughter (or at least that's what's heavily implied). After that fails she abandons Derpy in the forest, where the story ends. Snowdrop (2013): Snowdrop's character design makes it look like she was genetically engineered to be a Glurge star. Combined with the first few minutes focusing on the hardships she faces on account of being blind (mainly her classmates openly disrespecting her because of that) as well as playing the Too Good for This Sinful Earth card at the end (albeit in such a context that Snowdrop could easily have died of natural causes), the film tugs at the audience's heartstrings with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. If that's not Glurge-y enough, Snowdrop's conversation with her mother Primrose all but explicitly sends the message that being Inspirationally Disadvantaged is better than not having the disability in question: |
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The film Soul Food is about a grandmother who shows her love for her family by cooking delicious but unhealthy "soul food". She dies of clogged arteries, and her family honors her by eating the same unhealthy food that killed her. The Boondocks pointed out how Glurge-y this is. | |
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Up the Down Staircase shows how this trope is used in school districts' "training" programs, which has the effect of blaming teachers for everything wrong with their schools — rather than overcrowding, lack of a consistent discipline policy, or other leadership failings at the government level. | |
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In Radio Flyer, a boy escapes his abusive stepfather by building an airplane out of a toy wagon and flying away in it, presumably to his death. Though it’s implied that the boy was actually beaten to death by the stepfather (hence the stepfather’s arrest), and the younger brother invents the story of him flying away in his wagon as a coping mechanism. |
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Viewers of 7th Heaven are force-fed Christian morals like a baby. The version of Christianity was the vague, feel-good sort that could best be described as "spiritual masturbation". You don't mention Jesus as anything more than a really hoopy dude, because people might feel bad, And That's Terrible. | |
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God's Not Dead is about a religious student clashing with his atheist teacher over God's existence. The glurge comes from the movie's badly-written Black-and-White Morality that says all Christians are good and all atheists and non-Christians are either evil or sad people who really do believe in God, but just pretend not to in response to a tragic backstory event. The film ends with the teacher getting hit by a car and accepting God just before he dies, with his death being painted as a cause for celebration simply because he converted before he died. Critics and general audiences were not pleased, but it was a massive hit with its target audience (as preaching to the converted tends to do). | |
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This is why The Greatest Showman is an extremely divisive movie. It's an Oscar Bait, Very Loosely Based on a True Story pop musical about P.T. Barnum, whitewashing him into a Lovable Rogue who follows his dreams, celebrates diversity, and makes money by organizing a circus that toplines society's differently-abled and/or odd-looking outcasts. The antagonists range from a Straw Critic who accuses Barnum of being lowbrow and exploitative to dyed-in-the-wool bigots, but the lesson Barnum ends up learning is not to aim for "respectability" when he tries to break into upper-crust society by promoting an opera singer and forgets about the needs of his troupe and family. Those who like the movie (which was a slow-burning box-office hit) find it uplifting, inspirational, and joyous. Those who don't like the movie see it as phony and manipulative, particularly with its platitudes about acceptance and pride (best exemplified by the Signature Song "This Is Me") as they are undercut by the film not letting the audience get to know most of the circus performers (who sing said song) as individuals and instead focusing the bulk of the narrative on the White Male Lead and his redemption, and its use of the Straw Critic and bigots to shame the viewer into not questioning/analyzing what they're watching lest they be seen as enemies of joy and diversity. It's one of the few The Flop House subjects that technically doesn't qualify as a flop, simply because one of the hosts was that eager to analyze its failings. The episode points out that "This Is Me" begs the question "Who are you?". | |
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Seona Dancing's "More To Lose" is this trope combined with New Wave; the single is a Break Up Song, but its overtly sentimental composition (combining both a piano riff and cloying synthesised main melody line) & mawkish lyrics ("we tore our hearts with jagged truths") make it more sappy and narmy than the Tear Jerker it's supposed to be. Ricky Gervais's mediocre vocals (it sounds like he's just speaking, for crying out loud!) do not help matters. | |
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Boq comes across some in-universe glurge in Wicked. While at Railway Square, he spots scrolls painted with sunsets and inspirational one-liners such as "Lurline Lives Within Each Heart" and "I Pray to the Unnamed God That Justice Will Walk Abroad in Oz". | |
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South Park: The subplot of "Tweek vs. Craig" has the shop teacher Mr. Adler mourning the loss of his fiancée. The flashback sequences have him reminiscing with a live-action woman which manages to look worse than the standard animation. What tops it off is his girlfriend's final message: "Saying good-bye doesn't mean anything. It's the time that we spent together that really matters, not how we left it." An In-Universe example happens in "Cartmanland", when Kyle gets a hemorrhoid after falling into depression due to Cartman getting a theme park to himself. His mother tries to read him the story of Job to help him feel better. Kyle quickly deconstructs the aesop behind the story and is left in an even greater depression because of it. |
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The Legend of Korra includes an in-universe example of Glurge with a historical tale: A heroine couldn't be with her beloved because he was the son of her enemy and had an Arranged Marriage with a princess, so she rode a dragon into battle, burned down the country, and jumped into a volcano. Jinora thinks it's the most romantic story ever, while Korra is completely nonplussed by it. | |
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The Search for Santa Paws, a spinoff of Disney's Air Buddies film seriesnote specifically, it's a prequel the fourth Buddies film, Santa Buddies, and from the same studio as The Odd Life of Timothy Green, could be the most Glurge-y Christmas movie of all time. A deliberately cute Heartwarming Orphan, who lives in an Orphanage of Fear, comes across Santa's talking dog, who can only be understood by those who truly believe in the magic of Christmas. The dog's mere presence makes all the other orphans realize the meaning of Christmas (including the jaded older girl who's given up on ever being adopted). Santa himself has suffered Easy Amnesia and becomes a Mall Santa in a toy store; the (sadly infertile) couple who owns it has to help the orphans Race Against the Clock to find Santa's MacGuffin that will save his life, and in the end the couple adopts the aforementioned heartwarming orphan. It's played completely straight, and as a result it's completely ridiculous and implausible. | |
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In Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, the entire premise goes from heartwarming to horrific levels of Unfortunate Implications. The Japanese government creates a virtual reality video game designed to help mothers and their offspring reconcile. So far so good, if a bit strenuous. But then they make the mothers overpowered. This causes a power imbalance that the mothers can easily abuse and, considering the point of the game, means that the relationships of the mothers are either off-kilter at BEST or at worst abusive! This turns the game from a method of unconventional therapy to help mothers fix their relationship issues with their children, to a government sponsored version of Attachment Therapynote A now thankfully discredited quack therapy that involved physically abusing children until they break down into tears before lovebombing them. It ended up killing six children. | |
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The Secret Garden's moral is that gardens are good for you. The garden in the story makes the scrawny girl Mary gain weight and the disabled boy Colin learn how to walk, even though in real life gardens can't do those things. | |
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The Giving Tree is meant to be an inspirational story about unconditional love, but it's about a tree who "gives" her whole trunk to her friend the man, leaving only a stump, and he gives nothing in return. | |
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The end of Knowing was blatant Glurge. Earth fries, everybody dies. Except for some 30-odd kids who are saved by aliens, whose reason for being there is never explained, and taken to some alien garden, surprisingly nonchalant about everybody they know having been horribly killed. | |
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Family Guy: Deconstructed with an In-Universe example in "Quagmire's Mom": When Quagmire is on trial for statutory rape, it is revealed that his mother was as much of a sexual deviant as he is, playing a large part in making him the man he is today. And then when we're introduced to Quagmire's mother, she promotes herself as a born-again Christian and spouts stock Christian platitudes, expecting that Quagmire will forgive her. It completely fails — Quagmire chews her out for using religion to absolve herself of her past behavior instead of offering any real apology. | |
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Hermes: Winds of Love, despite being an epic about Hermes' life as told by the cult, briefly becomes a glurgefest when Hermes enters Heaven with Pan and Agape two-thirds of the way through. Both explain to Hermes that fairies are the ones that decide the aspect of flowers and halos appearing on really happy people and animals. When he dives into a magical lake connected to all oceans of Earth, all sea life starts singing a schmaltzy musical number about a "land of happiness" and how a smile can make everyone happy. When he returns to a shore, he finds a crying mermaid who explains that her kind needs humans to love the sea and strive to protect its beauty so they can live. | |
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Rock: It's Your Decision is supposed to be an educational and supportive movie about a Christian teen realizing that he must stop listening to sinful rock music (i.e. all of it). The narrative is trying to show a young man who, at first, listens to rock music, but eventually begins to see the evils of rock music and tries to convince his friends who refuse to listen and ultimately cuts ties with these bad people to better his life. This is the intention, but how it was portrayed is so baffling that it becomes the exact opposite. It seriously works better as a tract on the evils of fundamentalist Christianity than it does its actual subject. He starts off as a decent person and ends up as a ranting bigot who has turned on his friends and family. He denounces his mother for her love of soap operas, breaks all ties with his friends after forcibly trying to shut off the music at a party that he was invited to, and ends the story with him going on a rant at his church about how rock music controls people before shooting into a rant about gays being evil. As to the result: | |
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Despite being praised by the general public for its portrayal of autism, some autistic readers don't see it that way for many reasons. First of all, the author in 2009 has stated that he did no research on autism and said "imagination always trumps research", which didn't sit right with some autistic readers. Secondly, although the author stated that the message of this book is about understanding people who think differently, some autistic readers feel this book did the opposite by making Christopher come across as a problematic stereotype (i.e. math savant, lacking empathy, burden to others, etc.) due to the lack of research into understanding autism. And finally, every character in this book (except Siobhan and Mrs. Alexander) are verbally (and in a few occasions physically) abusive towards Christopher, including authority figures and even his parents. Christopher doesn't seem to be affected by any of this whatsoever, implying that autistic people don't feel abuse. The ending can come off as glurge-y for some readers. While the intention is for the father to give a dog to Christopher as an apology gift to show he's sorry, some readers find this hard to swallow. For one, the father was never punished for killing Wellington, and the violent behavior he's displayed were never addressed. And two, some felt the father's previous apologies came across as weak because at the same time, he acts like Christopher ignoring him hurts him and that Christopher is making this too difficult. |
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