Trope Talk: Tone Armor
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ธ.ค. 2023
- You've heard of Plot Armor, but is that the only convention that defines how messed up fictional characters can get? What we'll be discussing today is a very different animal! Let's talk about the invisible rules that shape fictional worlds and what dangers out heroes can realistically expect to encounter in them - and how a writer can weaponize those expectations against us!
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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this is a thing I heard Brennan Lee Mulligan bring up once. Something along the lines of: "If I am a child in a ghibli movie, I am invincible! However, if I am a child in a gritty noire setting, I am in very real danger at all times"
Unless the Ghibli movie is Grave of the Fireflies, of course.
He needs to rewatch Grave of the Fireflies. Miyazaki kids: safe. Takahata kids: worse than danger.
@@_kaliaah yes, GotF. The best movie I loved/hated and tell everyone they need to see, ONCE. Because I cannot expect anyone to survive emotionally watching that more than once. Especially if they have kids.
@@_kaliaThen the gritty setting rules take over!
Fucking mood
My disappointment when this video wasn't about when your abs are so rock hard that it makes you impervious to injury was immeasurable
And our day was ruined.
Couldn't this describe Tessa from Red's own webcomic, Aurora?
"My abs are so firm you could GRATE CHEESE ON THEM!!!!!"
Ring Fit Adventure
@@puffyhowler615 RED HAS A WEBCOMIC??? Where can I read this I must know immediately
12:35 One Punch Man is a perfect example of a series where the tone shifts as long as one character is on-screen. As long as Saitama is the one fighting, we know the villain is going to die and no one else will get hurt, but whenever he isn’t present for a battle, people can suffer as gruesome injuries as one can imagine, and heroes lose to monsters constantly.
Hmm.. didn't read the manga I presume
@@bruh_bruh_the_bruhest_bruh Genos doesn’t count
that’s the whole thing about the OPM fighting game too. you can select Saitama as a character, but your other two characters need to survive their fights long enough for him to actually get there, since his whole thing is he needs time to arrive and win for you
6:44 I had a similar experience when Dad watched The Accused.
@@sungod9797 wasn't referring to genos
I feel like Mulan is a huge example of this, from being a fun musical movie to walking over that hill and seeing the destroyed village, and seeing what is actually at stake if they don't succeed, then not having any songs after that. The tonal shift is such a huge hit and I live for it
Having them also stop mid-song to pan to the village makes it all the more effective.
Especially considering that it shows the horror of war, but without even showing a single dead body.
Just. A doll
What do we want? A girl worth fighting- ::deathly silence and a single abandoned doll::
Ironically, they did get a girl worth fighting for in that moment - an actual girl that died amidst Shang Yu’s horde and their assaults, as a reminder to not let such stuff happen again.
Always admirable how kids media manage to side step showing an actual person die with implications that are often far more haunting than showing a dead body.
The doll of the little girl in Mulan.
In Batman The Animated Series showing the shadow of the rope snap and the loose end hanging when Dick Grayson's parents fall to their deaths.
Bambi's mother not being there and not responding when he calls out for her after being chased by hunters.
"A girl worth fighting-"
Still one of the most expert tone breaks Disney has ever done.
Absolutely flawless diegetic tone break.
Where’s this from?
@@patrickma4220original animated Mulan
And it was PERFECT. One of the best moments in the movie tbh
There isn't a *single* song for the rest of the movie, aside from the background soundtrack. It's not just a break, it's a straight up redirection.
Anakin challenged me when I was on the High Ground because he mistakenly believed that he was protected by plot armor. Little did he know that by switching to the Dark Side, he lost his main character status. It was over Anakin. NOW I HAD THE PLOT ARMOR.
The thing is Villains also can have plot armor. If they don't you get what happened at the end of Naruto Shippuden and nobody liked the Kaguya twist
@@lucykitsune4619 Funny you mention the Kaguya twist... I thought it was, well, fine... not groundbreaking or anything, but good enough to handle a multi-billion corporation in a way that doesn't screw the couple over. It's clear Akasaka is not used to those kind of plots, and it definitely was a step down from the rest of the manga, but honestly? Apart from the whiplash we got from the tone shift, it was perfectly functionable, if a little too easy perhaps.
@@the_tactician9858 he didn't mean Kaguya love is war. He meant the Kaguya twist at the end of Naruto Shippuden where Madara, a much better and more them thematically fitting final boss got overthrone by Kaguya a generic bland villain "I'm god. Bow down before me puny mortals!! Blarrrgh!!!" that everyone who hates JRPG thinks the final boss is in all of them
Shhh nobody mention ANH
@@dillonpierce3537 Ah, makes sense. I'm not a Naruto fan, so that explains shit.
Okay, I could actually see a paper cut with a single drop of blood being really funny to a cartoon character (though the example still stands). I'm just imagining a scenario where a cartoon character narrowly avoids a bunch of super dangerous traps or attacks and then at the very end gets a single Paper Cut and, as a single drop of blood drops out, acts like this was the most painful thing that's ever happened.
Theres no way looney toons hasnt done a similar gag right?
I'm trying to decide if it would be more or less funny if they *didn't* dodge the traps, but had normal cartoon consequences until the papercut
@@kodaxmax old Looney Toons did it a bunch, the bigger/tougher characters (like the dog from Foghorn Leghorn) would get hurt by tiny stuff
Okay, I just remembered something. You know Girls und Panzer, that anime series about cute girls driving WW2 era tanks? They're all getting shot at with live ammunition. Tanks catching fire, getting rocked to the side in metal boxes, sometimes unbuttoned with the hatches open. And the only on-screen bloody injury to occur, is one of the girls cutting themselves on accident while cooking.
I would be
After watching this video I watched the Emperor's New Groove. Oh boy, what an example. The movie acknowledges breaks in logical consistency throughout and still maintains immersion, and I think it is all through tone armor. The movie lives by cartoon rules with characters who are slightly confused by that, but don't think about it too hard.
"Well you got me... by all accounts it doesn't make sense."
"Uh-oh..."
"Let me guess, we're about to go over a waterfall?"
"Yup."
"Sharp pointy rocks at the bottom?"
"Most likely."
*stoicly* "Bring it on"
@@josephperez2004 boooyahhaaaaaaa
"A llama?! He's supposed to be dead!!!"
"Yeah, weird..."
more so thru a mix of magic realist logic, 4th wall breaks and visual gags but thats a factor too
Tone armor is basicly what Roger Rabbit calls out in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and gets pretty well showcased in the OG Space Jam.
Eddy- You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?
Roger Rabbit: No, not at any time, only when it was funny."
That also explains what "toon force" is pretty neatly
Isn't that Toon Armor that you are taking about?
@@The0x6I think Toon Force/armor would be an example of tone armor, at least in this case.
I think “The mask” specifically the comics is genius for using toon force to its extremes and shows how terrifying an actual evil loony toons character would be in a world with no toon armor
@@The0x6 the difference between Toon armor/force and Tone armor would be, like the original comment, based on humour.
Toon force ignores anything natural if it means a punchline to a visual gag or a joke would be funnier, while tone armor alters the “intensity” of a story based on what kind of direction it has.
As someone else stated, this is also the reason why a character with Toon force would be terrifying in a different, less comical setting, because of the fact that they are entirely dependent on punchlines. A character with tone armor basically loses it outside of their original story, because the tone armor, like plot armor, is tied to the story itself, rather than the characters affected.
Tone armor is the reason why in ATLA, a world where the plot revolves around an army of soldiers with the power to shoot fire from their hands, Zuko is the only person on the planet to suffer an actual burn injury.
Tone armor is also what prevents Mai or Sokka from actually killing anyone with blades weapons
and Katara that one time.
well there's also that one chick zuko meets that one other time where she's burned on her legs or whatever I think too, right?
Tone armor is the only reason the finale of ATLA is able to work.
Since without Tone Armor, Aang has murdered dozens of nameless soldiers throughout the series. Blowing them off ledges, burying them alive, et cetera. Some of them in horrible ways. But we assume they survived....somehow....and that's the only reason it can matter at all whether or not he kills the Fire Lord.
(Side note- when I first watched Avatar I was a kid who didn't get this, and deeply hated the finale because it felt like Aang was a hypocritical monster who only cared about 'important' people's lives.)
@@234fddesa Yes, she's the main other one.
"Did Jet die?"
"Yaknow, they were really unclear about that."
I can't help but think of Sayori's death in DDLC as the perfect example of a story establishing a tone; then blowing it up and totally changing direction.
Granted, that story is supposed to be a perversion of visual novels, so most accept the jarring tone shift.
And even given that, some say the story should have just been about the four people with mental problems who you witness and partially help them improve, so even then some people wanted the original tone.
@@iantaakalla8180 i think you bring up a really good point about the risk/consequences of shifting the tone mid story, part of the audience might not like the new tone that is established while if your a writer you want to write your creative vision of the story. Unfortunately for the viewer/reader this may end up being a massive disappointment since if they liked the tone as it was and actively don't like the new tone it might feel like they just had the rug pulled out from under them.
Actually you mention that one but there is another tone break a bit earlier, where sayori mentions she is depressed and has been fighting it for a while and her poems are all sweet and childish not because she is like that (despite the fact everyone treats her like that) but because she wants to make others happy to distract herself from how sad she feels. That feels like a "regular" tone shift. It looks like the game is gearing up to go from a carefree dating game with four steretypical anime characters to a more real and emotionally complex experience where you are talking to these four like they are real people with personalities and problems and flaws. Then sayori hangs herself and the horror and meta elements start popping up, which is a much bigger tone break.
I haven’t played, but I have heard Yahtzee’s take: he could actually relax when it went from an uncomfortably realistic exploration of depression to blatant creepypasta shenanigans.
I.e. closer to the “jarringly hilarious” side than “effective subversion of audience expectations.”
@@Tortferngatr The suicide itself is incredibly effective and utterly disturbing. The next few scenes are really tense when you don't know where the game is actually going.
**Then** it shifts into silly horror and all of the tension is gone.
My friends and I used to note the cartoon armor. Back in highschool, we were running an RPG where one of us made an antagonist that was essentially a daffy duck character - chaotic, insane, and invincible. The character was not evil (being a cartoon), but was essentially causing havoc and his actions would cause damage to the none-cartoon players of our campaign. So, whenever someone tried to kill the character my friend would think of a loony tunes result, which he would then say 'cut away, cut back -- he's normal'. We finally beat him by getting him to swear, it cause him to lose his cartoon armor, signaled by a painful growth of a fifth finger on each of his hands.
This is so beautiful and genius. I'll probably think about it for the next 10 years thank you
that RULES. also reminds me a lot of my OC stephan, who is a terrible moral-less man w/Narrative Rules-based superpowers. He's so sweet and cute and likable on the surface that it lets him cartoon physics his way around, and like your villain, if he swears, he loses it, although instead of losing his cartoon powers altogether he just changes genres for a while.
this is so great
If he didn’t go out flipping the bird you did it wrong
that's so awesome! I wish I could have played that game!
I'm probably going to steal that idea at some point
I think one story that does a tone armor break from dark to light is Kung Fu Panda. Tai Lung is this tough kung fu master that very easily takes down all the serious kung fu fighters in scenes that feel very dark and scary, but then Po comes in and his wow impact moment is the fact that he works on cartoony slapstick logic and Tai Lung can't beat that. All the other characters lacked tone armor because they and the scenes they were in approached everything seriously, but because Po is so much goofier, he completely broke the established tone and used it to save the day fantastically
The entire final fight between Po and Tai Lung is straight up a Jack Chan movie in cartoony form, i love it. God, Kung Fu Panda is such a great movie
That’s not a break in tone though? Po had tone armour from the beginning (main character, kids’ movie, “rags to riches trope”), there was a difference between Po’s tone and the other martial arts masters, but Po was always expected to win at the end of the day, beating serious martial arts masters with a goofy innovative way. So this juxtaposition /is/ the tone that was set from the very beginning.
@@guanxin1603 Eh, after his training montage the movie seemed to be setting up that Po would win with actual traditional skill/techniques in a dramatic final battle. It then subverted it by going with the way he did win in a more lighthearted/comedic manner.
@@gzwiceskoski3421 I love Kung Fu Panda for this, because from the poster it looks like junk (funny animals voiced by random celebrities) but somehow it's one of the best animated films ever made.
@@guanxin1603 I consider it a tone break because the scene change is a break in tone. Immediately before Po shows up we have an emotionally charged and violent battle between Tai Lung and Shifu where we are legitimately worried Shifu might die, and him dying is something we might believe because mentors dying is such a common trope. But then Po comes in after this dark dramatic Kung Fu battle and breaks built up tension with his awesome slapstick. Yeah, Po had been built up on the contrast between his silly and their serious, but even then we had no idea the degree to which his silliness would save the day. We thought Po would have to learn to be a serious Kung Fu fighter like them, but he broke the rules, and we didn't know how much he would until the very end.
The thing I love about trope talks is you'll say a phrase like "Tone Armor" that I've never heard before and yet I instantly know exactly what you're getting at. Like "OH YEAH! That absolutely is a thing!" Its fun!
I'm glad you put a name to this idea. I see it come up in D&D a lot: with some dungeon masters "I cobble together a disguise out of a mop and cardboard to impersonate the king" has a chance of working, with other groups that idea will get a laugh but everybody intrinsically knows not to attempt it because the campaigns tone guarantees it will fail.
I'm classically bad at judging that sort of thing, and at determining which tactics are the sort of thing that everyone else at the table knows obviously won't work. One of my earliest rogues got killed because she was sneaking into a back room to distract the cultists and thought it would be a great distraction if she lit one of their robes on fire.
She got sacrificed to the god they were summoning, and the next session was the team fleeing the town after the god's arrival. (During that flight, my new character got eaten by a tree. Twice.)
If you can manipulate the numbers to make it work, and then you roll a die and the numbers equal or exceed what is required for it to work, then it WORKS, end of discussion.
If people don't like that then too bad, shoulda played a game designed by people smart enough to crunch their own numbers and think further ahead than the players.
@@MisterZimbabwe What is the objectively correct, universally agreed-upon DC for doing what I described?
@MisterZimbabwe assuming the DM even let's you roll for it.
Three words: hit point damage.
DnD has high-fantasy tone armor with a hit point system. Characters almost never suffer permanent injury or death. Their meteoric rise to insane power and eventual victory over a world-ending threat are assured. Creatures like goblins exist to make the players feel badass as the characters stomp their way through armies of the little buggers. PCs fight all the time. Violence is usually the first answer. And it can be their first answer, because it would be extremely jarring if a PC lost a limb or his life. Injuries are highly abstracted and easily fixable. There's healing magic on every street corner, and probably two people in the party who can use it. High-level PCs can return from death _in the middle of a fight_ like nothing even happened.
Riddle of Steel has gritty, low-fantasy tone armor without hit points. You get hit by a sword, you roll on a table with gruesome, long-lasting results like "lose left eye" or "arm severed." Magicians use their own lifeforce to power their spells and literally grow permanently older if they screw up. The game feels much more violent, even though it is actually less so. Violence is often the _last_ answer, and then with very careful preparation, because players know they're one bad roll away from having to retire the character. It would be extremely bizarre for someone to be set on fire or run through with a spear, only to be fine a few moments later.
8:11 I'd like to say that Avatar: The Last Airbender avoided saying the word "kill" by coming up with clever euphemisms. My personal favourite is Azula's "I'm about to become an only child!" line.
True, and they hit way harder, possibly even are objectively better. Toph's "he's lying" will never not give me chills with a simultaneous pang in the chest.
Check it off from your bingo cards
They did say kill a few times though
@@dynawesome i think they were only allowed to say it when referring to adults and not the kids which compose our main cast
@@Echo-pz5mi that does make sense
Hero: I have plot armour!
*The evening turns rainy and slow piano music begins to play*
Villain: What you have, is tone armour and the hope that the author is not inspired by George RR Martin.
> Thunder rolls long and low in the distance, as the gust front rattles slowly through the treetops like a rising tide of sound
While the hero might have plot armor...
Their friends and family do not.
@@gramferohilariously, I can think of exactly one series where villains actually realise this and take advantages of it.
The Pre-Reboot Archie Sonic Comics.
Or you played by Sean Bean, that man tone is always dies or goes to prison but just that one time.
@@SpottedHares exept of it's greek mythology themed, then he lives
I lovingly refer to the inverse of plot armor as "plot arthritis"
plot "kick me" sign
As an English major I like your definition that tone is sort of a "soft-edged probability map." I also generally equate tone to emotion or temperature.
I think the "emotion or temperature" thought process is why Bathos and/or lampshading can be so disruptive if not done properly. Tone and sincerity in a story go hand in hand, and a tone break is so impactful if it is treated with all the sincerity inherent in such a moment. But bathos and lampshading, if not done well, come off as insincere or insecure about the tone of a scene.
“I’m about to celebrate becoming an only child!” From Azula is my favorite death threat without saying kill
It's honestly pretty up there in terms of villain one-liners.
I love that Azula relishes that much in the consequences of Zuko’s death that she can say that and it can still be menacing.
That's my favorite thing about family-friendly restrictions. It forces the writers to come up with some really creative and/or funny lines 😂
To be honest It's so much better then saying kill, even in a different tone i think I'd prefer it. It's just such a better way of saying it for her cuz the sort of dignity it carries with it it calls back to her central theme of being more scary then just a murderous psychopath, but also reminding the audience that her family is NUTS.
"He was given a tiny box" in Pokemon X and Y is another of my favourite examples where skirting around saying kill/die makes a moment MORE powerful.
A tangent: Many believe that before the Author’s death, *Berserk* of all things was actually undergoing Inverse-Cerberus-Syndrome.
The story at the beginning is legendarily dark, but is notable for getting *less* dark and more high fantasy as time goes by. The main character goes from an angsty Loner hell-bent on revenge to a stoic leader with a found family. Story elements have progressed from “We cannot go four chapters without someone trying to sexually assault someone” to “A magical witch healed my love interest’s PTSD!” Not to say there isn’t still a whole lotta murder, but there’s definitely a feeling of burgeoning optimism rising from a story that started so stereotypically Nihilistic.
It’s an interesting meta-arc for a story about trying to overcome trauma and getting out of a dark place. Shame it will never really be finished.
They are finishing it. Miuras assistant confirmed it
You're absolutely right. The story opens with horrific violence, and while it stays violent, it eventually graduates into a lighter, less horrific level of violence. The crew Guts assembles ends up capable of handling groups of monsters with a sense of swagger.
And, to me, the whole thing works.
As spoiler free as possible, I think the author died right before he could really explore how much of that was going to stick (see: the major emotional sucker-punch from the very next chapter after he died)
@@sladewilson2753 I think he means with the original plan intact. Since it's highly possible that the people taking over completing it don't know the exact direction it was intended to go and might just go with what the series is better known for.
@@Fanatic_Foremem According to them, Miura left extensive notes.
Greatest example of tone armour ever was probably one of the first times it was purposefully shattered and I’m amazed that it wasn’t discussed in this vid: Bambi’s Mom
I don't think that would be one of the first times it was broken, purposefully or not, but it was certainly a major one in recent memory.
What about Loss?
Probably. Although it was kinda foreshadowed the first time 'Man' (hunters) appeared in the forest. Every single animal ran in a panic, and Bambi also almost died if his father hadn't found him. No one said it explicitly, but the entire scene implied Man would return again later in the film.
The Hunters were this almost lovecraftian horror in that film by never showing up on screen, but when they were there, everyone ran in a huge panic and you'd hear the gun shoots that make someone drop dead in an instant. There was even a scene in the sequel where hunters use a deer call to lure Bambi and he hears it as his mother calling out to him in a strange etherial voice.
@@jykatyk567that's a perfect example of a tone break going too far and being jarringly hilarious
This is probably why the direct to tv movie Scooby Doo on Zombie Island scared me so much as a kid, it wasn't because the zombies ended up being real, it's because the zombies ended up being real *in Scooby Doo*
Please do the obviously evil trope! When the audience can absolutely tell that someone’s evil or possessed, and the characters are like, “naw man, he’s just prickly”
obligatory Lysanderoth reference
My machinations have gone undetected for years!
Wilson from bendy and the dark revival, it’s treated like some kind of twist at the beginning but just by looking at his design you come to the conclusion he spends his free time tying orphan puppies to train tracks that are surrounded by a volcano while twisting a fake mustache
Playing Final Fantasy X recently, so Seymour is exactly like this. Between his visual design, theme and even his voice acting it is soooo godamn obvious he's the villain, but we have to shmuck around for another 8 hours or so until that's finally revealed.
Sultan: "Ah, Jafar, my most trusted advisor." And even without the introductory scene, he's just standing there shadowed with a clearly evil smile.
Red is like Shakespeare for tropes, pretty sure she is making up whole new phrases that will live on in trope discussions bc we're like "YUP MAKES SENSE"
TvTropes credited Lindsay Ellis for "Big Lipped Alligator Moment"
I have absolutely used her terms before in literature discussions just bc of how accessible they can be for ppl who arent super well-versed
you gotta call that shit something. If Red makes up a good sounding word for a trope i already knew subconsciously and spreads it to thousands i sure as hell am not gonna complain, im gonna thank her for expanding my vocabulary.
I remember in the Five Man Band she renamed "The Chick" into "The Heart" as it more accurately portrays that character role's purpose in the story, and the TvTrope page now reflects that. I don't know if Red coined the namechange or if there was push for that change beforehand.
@@junjunjamore7735 Also for a phrase that I think arguably will be Lindsay Ellis's greatest contribution to the English language: "Thanks, I Hate It"
Gwen Stacy's death in Spiderman felt really unreal because of tone armour. They added a big hitting sound to say she hit her head, but the mouvement of her spine breaking and not being able to get her with the spiderweb until it's too late felt weird because there were dozens of people saved in that exact same way and who didn't have a scratch... Either people have a breakable spine in that universe, either they don't
You're talking about Andrew Garfield Spiderman right? She fell down a massive distance and hit the ground, when did that happen prior or afterwards in-universe? it wasn't the whiplash, it was, y'know, hitting the ground? It was a break in tone, but not a bad one, the subversion of "he'll save her last second" with the fact that instead he was a second too late was powerful, and pretty shocking for young me when I first saw it
@@canadiangopnik7007 Pretty sure it's a reference to the *original* death of Gwen Stacy in the comic books, an event which is retrospectively said to have ended the Silver Age of comics.
@@TheKazragore did they take the movie scene from the comics? because that description matches it perfectly
@@canadiangopnik7007 Inspired by, but not replicated. It was the Green Goblin who threw her off a bridge in the comics and Spider-Man caught her by her legs, not midriff.
@@canadiangopnik7007With a small difference.
In the comics she dies from whiplash. Spider-Man catches her by but the sudden stop of falling makes her neck snap.
In the film, they tried to fix it by having her head hit the ground full force.
The comic example comes off as weird because Spider-Man has caught people like that in a similar fashion all the time and it never was a problem. Its strange to acknowledge that spine's work that way in real life when they ignored it all the time in ficiton.
I love the "One does not simply walk into f***ing Mordor!"
😢
Honestly could have worked if they had made the guy say it in the middle of being super pissed
One VERY impactful tone break I can think of is from Avatar : The Last Air Bender. Specifically s2ep15 Tales of Ba Sing Se and The Tale of Iroh. It starts light and comedic, as Iroh prepares for a "picnic". It's only at the end when the true nature of the picnic is revealed that the tone shifts hard. This is one of the rare times where a tone shift is this impactful without killing a main character. It only kills the audience. 😭😭
Adds the fact we have a really badass but chill mentor character breaking into tears. And no one but us is there to see that. He is still the same for other characters, but for the audience....
Dammit man, why did you have to go and remind me of that? I was having a good day today!
And now I got chills just remembering Iroh's singing...
Now all I can hear is "brave little soilder boy" and the sound of me crying again. 😢
Oh man why'd you have to do me like that. :)
"Pocket Eldritch Abomination" is such a perfect way to describe Alucard that I chuckled when Red said it
It's so accurate, I love it
I've only ever seen Hellsing Abridged, and "PEA" still makes perfect sense to me.
I thought it was funny yet completely accurate.
He's literally a trump card, if the card would flip the table and kill the other player.
@@jasontankable The actual series is great. Though Alucard in the proper series is much more serious, but those faces just make it easy to take it in such a direction as the Abridge.
@@saltyk9869 In the actual series, Alucard is a weird character, because he's more serious, but he's also a troll, like when going to Brazil, and he sticks Seras in a box, while he's sitting in first class, by himself.
Re: 'Anyone Can Die' and Sacrificial Lions: The webnovel Worm handled this in a very interesting way: in each of the fights against an Endbringer (city-destroying kaiju), which have an in-universe 1/4 fatality rate, the author literally rolled dice to decide who lived and died - up to and potentially including the main character. This did, in fact, result in quite a few dangling plot threads! But it also resulted in an Anyone Can Die where /anyone really can die/.
Worm has consistently remained one of my absolute favorite pieces of literature, and it's a great example of how to skillfully both use and break a whole mess of tropes.
Only in the first Endbringer fight. But agreed, it was a really good way of breaking tone armour impactfully. He also made it so the fighters had armbands that reported the monster's location, but also says when omseone is dead or down. So throughout the chapter, every few paragraphs there's a "so-and-so down" or "so-and-so dead." Really gets through the horror. And some of them are characters that you'd really think would have more to their story.
worm is actually really interesting tonally, because the heroes are inherently paradoxical. they have terrifying and deadly powers, they beat up or kill troublesome villains, and are slaughtered in droves against the endbringers. but they're also celebrities with branded products and TV appearances. there's a massive coordinated PR effort to making sure the public perceives heroes as friendly and PG, and a significant theme is that if people got to see the truth of what heroes do, they'd lose faith in them. everyone in-setting is aware of the jarring tonal mismatch, but they do their best to cover it up or ignore it in order to prop up a slowly failing system.
Thumbs up for referencing Worm!
Where could I read that webnovel?
One of my favourite examples of this is Codename: Kids Next Door. We start off with a bunch of kids in their treehouse stealing birthday cake, eating candy and hating going to the dentist. But as the show progresses it turns out these kids are just one team in a global (and as it is revealed latter possibly universal) organization dedicated to protecting kids from evil adults. The standout villain Grandfather is a dark wizard who conquers the world and turns the entire humanrace into his zombified slaves. He then gives one of the coldest villain lines to his own son: "Monty...Monty...Monty. Did you honestly believe a mere 39 gazillion tons of red hot metal and duct tape would crush me?!" And this is an entire moonbase dropped directly on top of him. No wonder the show has stuck with me for so many years.
Youth liberation is a based and important goal.
18:20 I love the idea of tone armor so strong not even the *villain* knows they're allowed to hurt people and that revelation is so surprising to them
@ Megamind
(Even if it turns out not to be true, that whole movie turns on his shock at the idea that he might actually be able to kill and how not ok he is with actually doing that)
Right to the top of my list of favorite Red key images!
Transformers Armada's Megatron
Robot Chicken has a whole He-Man skit about this. He-Man is fighting Skeletor and his minions before Beast Man buries an axe in his back, and all the villains are freaking out because that just doesn't happen. They're screaming at each other about how Beast Man thought He-Man would've blocked it, and that they're going to be charged with murder.
anyway isnt he-man basically invulnerable ? unless beast man is using a cursed axe he would never be able to hurt he-man even if the cartoon allowed that level of violence@@cybertramon0012
That 'Gargoyles' episode you showed a clip of is honestly so important to me and the show as a whole.
Broadway never forgets that, he hates guns after it to the point that be immediately breaks all guns he gets his hands on. It's such a important moment for him to realise what it actually means to be surrounded by creatures that do not heal in their sleep. He learns how fragile his human friends are and wants to protect them even more because of it.
On a meta point it is the perfect "guns can be dangerous" episode for kids. He plays around with Eliza's gun because he just watched a western and thought they were cool. And, because he doesn't know anything about guns, he hurts and nearly kills his friend. The tone needs to be serious and the stakes need to be high because it shows any kids watching, who may also want to play guns, that these things are ACTUALLY DANGEROUS and NOT TOYS.
Man the first season of 'Gargoyles' was so good
*Edited because I got the Gargoyle's name wrong😂
I’ve never really watched Gargoyles, and the silent clip in this video coaxed a “Holy Shit!” reaction out of me. It must be even more intense when you’re invested in the series.
@@MoneyDonGrowOnTrees the first 2 seasons are super good. I highly recommend them. Had a surprising number of good lessons for kids. One has a character learning that the people in a TV show you like aren't necessarily good and friendly people.
@@jackiewagner3690
Yeah, and one of them married Xanatos...
And turned into a were-beast.
@@jackiewagner3690a , I'm assuming TV show, digging at other TV shows? It's just well interesting to me, cant that same bit apply to this show too?
@@battlion507 Lol!! I love Gargoyles but putting that so plainly made me laugh. It's all true. 😂
This is something that D&D players - DMs and otherwise - struggle with if they don't understand it. On the one hand, building deep and interesting characters who have plot threads rooted in the world, developing interests and connections, etc., is great for engrossing story. On the other, the struggle between plot armor and just letting the dice roll how they may leads to people thinking that running a meat grinder is "more honest" or somehow "better gaming," and then being very confused by the lack of investment they and their friends actually have in the story, let alone their characters (who really can die at any time).
It really does depend on the group. Some tables derive their investment through well characterized PCs with deep connections to the world and story. Others get their investment through PCs that manage to survive meat grinders and the organic suspense created through the genuine possibility of dying. The first group likes well constructed stories while the second prefer mechanical suspense. Just two different ways of garnering investment.
Best advice I can give on this is: Figure out a tone for a given campaign that the players like, stick to it. If something dice driven breaks that tone, offer an out but ask them "Sure we could dodge this, but are things more interesting if it goes through?"
And then sometimes it is Merilwen's meat grinder...
I'm of two minds on this one. First off, having a "session zero" where things like tone and stakes are discussed does put everyone on the same page. That said, some of my favorite campai guns came from the DM establishing a tonal expectation and then yanking it out from under us.
@AndrewJohnson-oy8oj "Your characters are in a desperate rebellion against a God-Empress who literally makes the sun rise every day, torments her subjects on any whim, and imprisons her political opponents for millennia." "Dude, I thought we were playing My Little Pony?" "We are."
I love that in jjk, not just the audience, but the characters also know that the entire balance (tone) of the world is being singlehandedly upheld by gojo. And as soon as he is sealed, everything goes to shit and everyone starts dropping like flies.
I was scrolling looking for the JJK comment, thank you. I also think Gojo's goofy nature helps mirror this well; when he's around in season 1, things do get dark at times, but overall the show feels happier. The only major charecter death is Junpei, arguably a sacrificial lion. Meanwhile, season 2 has seen quite a few major deaths
I also think the Shibuya arc is an example of how pushing the tone change too far can go wrong. I know this will be a hot take, but I've found it hard to keep engaged with the story by the end of this arc simply due to how many charecters have been taken out in one way or another. I expected significant people to die, season 1 gave me plenty of expectation this would happen. The mass murder of heros and villains alike however has simply left me unable to remain invested, as I don't know if investing myself in these charecters will be worth it in the long run. Should I bother following the few remaining of my favorites, or are they just going to die or be sidelined in the culling games arc?
dude i was thinking that as i watched this too since the anime has been hitting me hard. Gojo was a serious dude with real ambitions, but he was always so chill. and by extension, everyone else could be too. And now he's gone and like... the author knows what he's doing. All the major deaths before that point were tragic. but we hadn't yet gotten deaths that were shocking. People just die now. it isn't even that gojo is not there because deaths can still happen when he's out and about if he's not present, but they just dont. not as often, not like that. but that's because the author is less interested in that and moreso in the tonal impact of gojo. The author understands that thematically, the illusion of security is shattered.
SLIGHT MANGA SPOILER SLIGHT MANGA SPOILERS
MANGA SPOILERS
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Yeah, the story did the "no one is safe" really well at the beginning but it kept going in that direction to a point where a recent character death literally had zero reaction from me even tho I enjoyed the character very much. It's almost comedic at this point and I feel bad for saying it but I enjoy laughing with my brother at the chapter more than the chapter itself at this point. I think the author perfected the first half of telling a story (character introductions, world building, magic system basics, character motivations, etc) and fumbled the latter half.
Also why are deceased/absent characters not addressed? (Except Toji)
Haha…. was looking for this comment too
Thank you for specifically mentioning the ONE drop of blood shown in Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. That's the moment I knew the movie was not just messing around. It was REALLY impactful.
Pretty sure he mentioned in song that he's never been touched by a blade, then we get a scene where a "bounty hunter" almost splits his head open. Yeah, I'd be scared too.
Yeah, that was the point where I thought, "Okay, this movie is going to be as good as everyone says it is"
Honestly, that entire movie is basically "What are you going to do without tone armor" and then packages this as a story about accepting ageing and death
I don't know if I'd go that far, but it does a really good job of putting you in the same headspace as Puss. "This isn't supposed to happen. I didn't think this *could* happen." It doesn't make you think that he could actually die in this scene, but it really helps put the bounty hunter over as the most genuine threat in the movie. Even if it's only by a little, this is a character who plays by different rules from the rest of the story. Even if you know he won't kill Puss, suddenly it seems like he *could* if given the chance.
Also for One Piece, it actually also proves that point. Luffy is the load bearing weight. The world around him is violent and piratey but he brings bugs bunny energy to the room and everything becomes a lot lighter, nicer and funnier. If he's out of commission, everything goes south and quick
Look at Water 7 for example.
Funny because the two flashbacks that Luffy's actually in are some of the darkest, most depressing the series has to offer. Post-Marineford is entirely the grief-stricken memories of someone who just lost his brother and I don't even know where to begin with Kuma's.
Guess he grew into his role.
thriller bark the moment luffy loses consciousness actually becomes all of a sudden one of the most serious moments in the story, for example.
I find him insufferable the longer the story gets
@@gwenminor9244 that means the story is probably not for you.
I've never thought about this concept before but I immediately thought of Madoka Magica when it was being described. The story sets up as a cutesy magical girl story and then one of the main characters gets her head bitten off and it's all down hill from there.
That was my first thought as well
8:14 I still laugh at this in Avatar.
The lengths that show goes through to avoid words like "die" or "kill" or "murdered"
Katara never says "the fire nation killed my mom", for example
My favorite is when they refer to the earth queen as "dethroned" after Zaheer chokes her to death
She says that in Episode 3 on the way to the Southern Air Temple. And it's not like they never used "die" or "murdered," either. It's a mix of bluntness and subtlety.
Oh my god, you unlocked a childhood trauma with that “The Empty Child” panel. That episode scared the shit out of me as a kid, and I had no idea how much I needed the validation that other people were scared by it too
i don’t blame you. i started watching doctor who like. this year so it wasn’t quite as intense for me but i mean it was still Something to behold
me with blink as an eight year old
Oh my GOD me too, I had nightmares for WEEKS watching that episode and couldn't stand to hear the air raid siren for over a year afterward. I'm a grown ass woman now and I still refuse to watch it again.
@@nirhar-chen9565 I'm so glad I'm not the only one, angel statues still freak me out to this day
bro i searched it thinking "wait, is it that episode" and as a grown adult it gave me shivers, havent seen it for ages
Invincible is a very honorable mention for this trope.
Everyone and their mother has been spoiled about Omni-man’s true nature by now, but Episode 1 did a good job establishing the show’s world as largely bloodless and centered on the main character’s coming of age.
Only to have that all erupt from the bodies of the Guardians of the Globe at the end of the episode.
It goes without saying that the show’s intentional shattering of tone armor is the main thing that put it on the map back when it came out.
That's one of the few examples of that kind of thing working and being done well, most of the time it ends up going way too far to "enhance the narrative dissonance" like a certain anime that put itself on the map by presenting itself as semi lighthearted fantasy before transitioning into uber grimdark for the rest of the episode entirely for the shock factor.
I ran to the comments to talk about this moment too. Such a brilliant tonal shift and show in general
I think the trick is that it's not 100% bloodless. The show has an age rating at the beginning, if it was an episode of Justice League the whole way through you'd get suspicious. But there's a little bit of blood and swearing, and there are some things that are more mature than your average superhero cartoon. It's just enough to make you think, "Oh, it's not that much more than the average superhero show," and then WHAM head explosion.
Would you believe that it was that tonal shift that made me put down the comic for a long while?
Even when you're familiar with the tone of the show, there's something visceral about watching a superhero/villain get bodied and then hearing their dying gurgles off screen as their actual organs litter the ground that you never get used to.
05:00 My absolute favourite episode of Tom and Jerry was where Tom carried his wounds for the entire episode. An explosion went off on his head and they made the typical joke of it giving him a bald patch. Although, unlike every other cartoon he would show up in the next scene completely recovered, this time he showd up with an hilariously unconvincing ginger toupee, which he wears over the bald spot for the rest of the whole show.
One great example in superhero movies is how all the heroes are basically immortal and rarely get seriously injured but as soon as we go into another dimension like in the Flashpoint Paradox or Doctor Strange 2 the same heroes drop like flys
Something I'd like to add is that Tone Armor doesn't necessarily have to relate to physical damage in battle. It could also be applied to consequences in general.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is raunchy comedy show featuring characters who are all depraved, unhinged, selfish bastards who cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. As the show progresses, they go from jerkasses to committing serious crimes including but not limited to: usage and distribution of hard drugs, arson, public intoxication, various forms of fraud, prostitution from all sides of the transaction including pimping, impersonating police, breaking and entering, multiple kidnappings, actual torture, stalking, several unlawful discharges of a firearm, graverobbing, and littering.
Realistically, these people would and should be doing life in prison for the things they do on a typical Tuesday. If these character existed in Breaking Bad, for example, that show's more serious tone would naturally paint them as the villains they really are. They'll likely end up dead or incarcerated by the end of the story and have the audience rooting for every step of their demise.
But Always Sunny isn't trying to be a crime drama with a realistic, gritty tone because it's a raunchy comedy. The characters have Tone Armor that helps them avoid the very serious legal and social repercussions they would otherwise have coming to them if their story existed as anything other than a raunchy comedy.
For God's sake, he bit Santa Claus' ear off in front of all of the kids in the mall. 😂
This reminds me of Crazy Ex Girlfriend, a great series deconstructing romantic tropes. For the first few episodes the main character and her friend play spies, engage in stalking, all while maintaining the usual light-hearted tone of a romantic comedy. But the deeper they go, the more the tone shifts, and the more real consequences become. The show has some gut-wrenching dramatic and tragic episodes and even a legal prosecution and prison subplot.
Didn't Seinfeld do something similar? And then notoriously break that tone during the series finale?
@@Landis963 yeah they all get arrested for standing by as someone got robbed. That of all things being the reason they got arrested is a little hard to believe but they do bring back a good majority of characters they’ve screwed over and they do end up being sent to jail.
Nah, it's plausible they get away with their crimes because Frank is obscenely wealthy. That's my head canon anyway
There's a bit in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure where a character has springy accordion cartoon legs, but it's depicted with the bones cracking and shattering each time he bounces.
It's disturbing as hell and I feel like its a good example of cartoon physics being depicted in a way where danger is still present.
Jojo's is great at this in a numerous set of ways. Notice in stardust crusaders or in golden wind, even stone ocean, no one *really* dies until the final stretch, there are always goofy "retired" situations where the bad guy of the day ends up in a hospital. But when the first secondary character dies, you don't know who's going to die next, the jokes are out, just one overwhelmingly dangerous threat that could kill anyone, maybe even everyone.
@@Silver_light77golden wind is a harsh exception to that, giorno and the gang kill pretty much everyone they come across or severely maim them far more viscerally than the other parts do.
Polpo is the tone setter because part 5 is about Italian gangsters so of course they'd go for the kill.
The funny thing about Polpo is that he could have been left alone. Yeah, Polpo is a perpetuator of cruelty, but Black Sabbath’s health is not linked to Polpo’s health. Giorno could have let him go to quietly establish himself. Instead, Polpo dies, to make clear that Bruno’s team will push for ideals, but also makes clear that people will die on this path to better ideals, and I guess also establishes this is a shake-up in the Italian mafia.
Also, other side note: no one on the Higashikata’s side dies until that arc in JoJolion. Despite the fact that Tamaki Damo had them all dead to rights. JoJo knows its tone.
Wait i don't remember this. Which part is it from?
The first thing that came to mind for me was Mercutio. It was just kind of a drama before that, but then, your comic relief dies in agony, I was supremely shocked and yeah, everything after that changes the whole tone.
Everybody knows Romeo and Juliet, but even then, I think everybody should watch it. It is trurly amazing.
One of my favorite examples of this sort of thing is Sonic Adventure 2 (spoilers ahead obviously):
For most of the game, particularly Hero Story, the tone occupies a "mostly serious, but for kids" space, where stakes exist and are taken seriously, but it's still mostly upbeat, occasional jokes, and you don't really expect any of the threats to ACTUALLY happen.
However, after one of the last few levels, Eggman successfully traps Sonic in a capsule that is then jettisoned out of a space station and explodes. Just before getting launched, he says goodbye to everyone and it segues into a boss fight with Tails determined not to let his sacrifice be in vain.
It's a fake death of course, they weren't REALLY going to kill Sonic. But they sell the moment so well you can almost believe it in the moment, especially in the historical context of being potentially the last Sonic game ever made. It makes Eggman appear to be genuinely competent and threatening in a way that's rare for the cartoon mad scientist archetype, and never really replicated for him again.
I believe Sonic Forces was attempting something similar, but... failed at actually making it feel meaningful and real. Partially due to the dissonance between the American and Japanese scripts, but even in Japanese it doesn't really hit.
Someone on OSP better get to writing that tv trope page asap.
Well there's, "amusing injuries" with the page quote being an exchange from Wandavision:
"Is it funny because of the grievous injuries that man just suffered?"
"Oh don't worry, he's not really injured"
"How do you know?"
"It's not that kind of show"
@@RorikH Lots of the things Red discusses are already named tropes. "Tone armor" would need to be a broad supertrope, or maybe even an index.
@@timothymclean this is sort of incidental to the whole tone armor thing but: everyone agrees that the concept of "death flags" exist, but a tvtropes page for it straight up doesn't exist because although it was in proposed and in discussion, the original contributor dropped off the face planet and the proposal ended up in limbo for over a decade despite the fact that anyone who's ever dabbled in media analysis knows that death flags are very much a thing.
the original proposal was also very much poorly written and no one wants to touch it, but nowadays it would definitely be what you said: an extremely broad supertrope/index
you forgot "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and how they flat out state that Roger can basically do what he wants as long as its funny, which leads back into its okay as long as you keep the tone
“Can do what he wants as long as it’s funny” makes me think of Fumihiko Takaba from Jujutsu Kaisen.
and then they introduced "The Dip" which was tone breaking and horrifying. Making the stakes life and death which is hard to do in most cartoons.
I have been looking for this argument for 4 years
@@zer0w0lf94 weird way to spell 🐐 but ill take it
Another example of doing it in-universe is how in Homestuck there becomes a rule that you can't be resurrected if your death was justified or heroic (iirc).
Then it gets into discussing who gets to decide what's justified and what's heroic, and idk what all else, but I remember really liking that idea
Two of the best examples of tone armor break I best remember come from the movie "Help, I'm a fish!".
It was basically a children's movie of three kids becoming fish and trying to return to normal. By the end, a group of marine life took the antidote, that made them more human-like, and wanted more. Fly, the energetic reckless kid, gets cornered and pinched by a crab, he gets hurt, bleeds and spends most of the rest of the movie basically down from the wound. That was the first time I saw a character get hurt and just stay hurt.
The second was the villain's, Joe, end. He was a fish becoming smarter and more human-like as he took the antidote. By the end the wounded Fly confronts Joe with increasingly harder questions, forcing Joe to drink more and more of the antidote, mutating more and more human, until his gills disappear and his body is carried by the current.
Tone Armour is the best way to explain One Piece.
People who aren't plot important can get shot, fall off a cliff, and be crushed by falling rocks in One Piece, only to miraculously be alive during the celebration at the end of the arc.
It even acts as reverse plot armour. Almost nobody ever dies in One Piece unless it's important to the plot that they do.
Not a critique, but an observation of how it really embodies the concept of Tone Armour.
Interesting that as the plot moves alone in the second half characters die more without coming back. The crew is still safe but important side characters less so.
A certain character's death almost seems like a direct subversion of Pell surviving that explosion early on.
An interesting example of Tone Armor that I enjoy is Spy x Family, because there's 2 different flavors: scenes where Anya is onscreen are typically going to be a lot lighter than those without. Even if she can read the minds of her spy dad and assassin mom and *knows* they get up to some dark stuff, it's a lot more comedic or harmless. Compare that with scenes of one of her parents doing their work *without* Anya present in the scene--e.g. Yor's brutal, bloody fights in the most recent arc of the anime, or Loid experiencing trauma from his childhood during the war. When the kids aren't onscreen, SxF can delve into some much darker themes (but even then, the *degree* of darkness has its own consistent tone). And of course, on occasions when Anya plots do get darker--not spoiling it for the anime-only crowd--it hits like a bus. I just think it's neat
Anya is the tone armour carrier. The safety net. The Gandalf of Spy x Family.
"hits like a bus" I saw what you did there
@@MrDragon7742 Ah yes, that thing where they were being subtle so has to not risk giving minor spoilers. The spoiler equivalent of a kids movie having a joke go over the kids heads, because it's just for the parents to enjoy. Which you decided to throw out the window for some reason by mentioning that's what it was -_-
@@maromania7 Why are you in the replies of a post alluding to anime spoilers if you're not okay seeing anime spoilers
@@MrDragon7742 ...you mean the comments of post that specifically said "not spoiling it"? I mean I knew the spoilers already, but rude as fuck to specifically point at a part someone went out of thier way to not spoil and point out that it was an allusion not just the common turn of phrase.
The empty child was intense. But I think the "Everybody Lives " scene makes up for it. The joy and catharsis match the horror beautifully.
Well, that also happens in "The Doctor Dances," the part 2, so watching just "The Empty Child" is very scarring.
Everybody lives might be my favourite Doctor quote.
"Just this one, Rose, everybody lives!" 😭😭💕🥲 it gets me every time!
@@emilyrlnI am still a sucker for Nine. They do say you never forget your first Doctor. :3
With the catharsis of 'the girl wasn't big-sis but actually mom'....
The 'everybody lives' balances/matches the 'set during the blitz' pretty well.
And the 'there are people with gas-masks on, which the story tells us they can't take off' is pretty doable
Doesn't change how creepy the 'face is literally transformed into a gasmask, onscreen'-visual is.
As far as an example of a reverse cerebus syndrome, supernatural does it quite a lot being a very dark show, that sometimes does a sitcom or a japanese game show with changed camera settings and everything
The season 3 tone shift in Reboot also works because that was exactly what trying to use your early Windows 95 computer was like once your antivirus program stopped working. Familiar places became dark and strange, spewing out waves upon waves of smiley faces or paint program cropped pictures of cats, it was unsettling.
"(Tone) is kinda like the temperature of a room; a lot of factors are influencing it but you're only really gonna notice it if it makes you uncomfortable or is changing rapidly", great quote there
One of the best examples is in the Re Creators anime, where the first time the “magical girl” fights in the real world, with real consequences of her power. Her enemy doesn’t just get hit with a cutesy heart, she bleeds.
Also her bombastic glittery attacks are actually WMDs. Which, going by size and impact in most cartoons of that sort, makes sense. No one is getting sent flying THAT far from an explosion THAT big unless it has some stupid power behind it. It just never happens cause of the tone.
ReCreators is so good, just wish that middle section was less exposition and more character dynamic exploration lol
YES. Referencing that show already earns you an A+, but Mamika is an excellent example regardless. A very thought-provoking take on cartoon violence.
I love re creators I just wish that they spent less of the show trying to explain them selves.
wich is ironic because magical girl shows having a tone shift a becoming super dark is a trope in itself
@@antoniogaravo9289 When I tried to get a friend into RE:Creators by using Mamika as a bridge from Madoka Magica, I accidentally convinced her RE: was a magical girl show. Managed to correct that mistake, but she would've had a slight shock if she'd watched it with that impression.
GREAT episode, and a great example of a tone break right there at the end! Red _never_ speaks after "so... yeah". But today she did. Well played.
I’m a bit surprised Madoka never came up considering the massive shift in tone after the third episode is one of the main draws of the story. It set its tone very clearly at first with typical magical girl shenanigans save darker manifestations of the threats (although that isn’t unusual for the genre). But with episode three it reveals very clearly the true stakes, the amount that Mami was protecting everything from falling apart, and the true horrors of its magic system.
I love the concept of load bearing characters, like they don’t do much but the plot falls apart without them
I mean the two biggest characters in anime, Goku and Luffy are literally the faces of this
Like Gojo
We need a Detail Diatribe just about Load Bearing Characters
In a Five-Man Band, there is... the Heart.
The ending caught me off guard because I was like "oh wow this trope talk was particularly good and clearly stated, good one Red!" Basically, yes, it did make sense, yes.
tone shift
The closest thing to a reverse Cerebus Syndrome I've read is Nagatoro. The series starts out bordering on horror but it gets to the point where the titular character's teasing is so light-hearted that she doesn't even qualify as a tsundere and is just openly flirting with the male lead.
Berserk is also Reverse Cerebus Syndrome incarnate - everyone knows it as the nihilistic manga with plenty of rape and the most justified brooding brutal protagonist, and yet in the later chapters there is plenty of hope and he is in comedic situations.
TMNT 2003 does this, too.
Tone armor is why in the horror game Gylt, Sally doesn't "die," but instead turns to stone. Which is worse. Especially since one diary entry indicates that the statues are alive, breathing, and in agony.
Great video! Since everyone is sharing their examples, here's a good one I think: Megamind. He's used to having Tone Armor, to engaging in some witty banter, getting defeated and sent to jail, escaping, and doing it all over again. Then he tries to replicate that with Titan, except Titan isn't having it. Megamind starts to realize his Tone Armor is gone, and suddenly he's terrified and the stakes are much more real.
....Huh. Thinking on it, Metro Man is the "Tone Bearing Character" in that movie. When he dies...that changes everything. Villains can *win* now and Megamind is just as freaked out as everyone else about it, even if he doesn't necessarily show it.
Spoilers
It's only later, when we find out what *actually happened* that we can get the original tone back and Megamind can become who he's always *wanted* to be, because Metro Man basically bequeaths the tone to Megamind.
This makes a lot of sense. I was honestly surprised when Red said no one talks about this trope. I saw the name she gave the trope in the title and my brain went "yep this is definitely and existing and previously named trope."
I even checked tv tropes for it
I actually needed a video like this for a recent d&d game that we had where we had a first time GM who did not understand the overall concept of tonal shift.
We went from comedy to outright visceral fights to a tpk in a ship crash. A lot of people did not like the overall session and the gym was trying to understand why.
Thank you so much for this video!
I had the complete opposite experience: our gm has utilized a tone shift pretty great to fix a previous, unintended tone shift (strap in, this is a long one)
So our campaign is pretty death heavy. People die, Bad guys die, PCs die (at this point in the campaign, I am the only one who‘se first character is still alive).
At one point, we‘re fighting a Zombie Dragon and it kills our Druid. About 5 turns of combat later my character has a wild magic surge. Our dm has a little rule that says every time I use wild magic, he picks a random wild magic table from the internet. I roll on this random table and it’s determined that the nearest corpse, which by coincidence is our Druid, is transformed into a zombie.
To give our Druid a “Last stand“, he allows him to control it and let‘s him use spells until his spell slots run out. During the last two rounds of combat, the Druid polymorphs into a giant ape and beats the dragon to death. After combat, we manage to convince our dm that, as a body is not damaged while polymorphed, it similarly does not decompose and enable us to cast revivify (which has a 1 minute limit). Problem was: no one had that spell prepared for the day. Then, one of us remembered that there was an Inn in town that our dm described earlier where time goes by at double speed. So we send our drow cleric in there, wait 2 hours and he can prepare rivivify in time. Later our DM told us that the Inn was a random feature from a ”How to make a town more interesting“ guide.
So (almost) none of this is his fault, fate had just determined that no one would die today.
The next couple of sessions were a (mostly) complete tonal shift. Everyone was happy, gleefully slaughtering anything our DM threw at us.
Then one of the BBEGs (with apparently the stats of baphomet) appeared to kidnap a friendly NPC. We beat him. This was NOT supposed to happen. The NPC was supposed to be taken away and rescuing her was supposed to be our main goal for the next 10 sessions or so.
We felt INVINCIBLE. When another one of the BBEGs showed up at the town gates on the next day to do the whole: “Oh, you beat that guy, interesting. Let me see where you go from here“-bit, half our party went up to him and basically told him “You ain‘t shit, go find someone else to bother before we annihilate you.“
He did not like that.
Before most of us could do a thing, he brings one of us to death‘s door. He then fucks off, having brutally reminded us of our own mortality.
We have not grown arrogant again.
I still ADORE that one little dribble of blood from Puss when he barely, *_barely_* dodges Death's sickle. The fact that the entire tone of the movie is instantly and irrevocably shifted is fantastic, especially since Puss instantly breaks from terror; him being afraid makes his final death a very real threat to the audience.
The funny thing with the tone shift in ReBoot is that you can partially blame it on Disney for it happening. Disney bought ABC and since they wanted to do their own shows for Saturday mornings (aka Disney's One Saturday Morning) they cancelled ReBoot (the season 2 finale even referenced this when they said "The ABCs have turned on us!"). However, ReBoot was created by a Canadian studio and thus the Canadian tv station YTV swooped in and said, hey we love to send you money to make another season (especially since Canadian have to have a specific amount of Canadian made content) so ReBoot season 3 was put into the works. Here's the kicker, the standards and practices in Canada aren't as strict as they are in the US so they were able to make season 3 a lot darker than they probably would have been allowed in the US. Insert dominio meme here.
The second season episode "Talent Night" was a concealed attack on ABC and their Broadcast Standards & Practices that kept hamstringing the writers.
Except for when we name things.The Mainframe Entertainment Transformers show you likely know as Beast Wars, was called Beasties here.
And now Disney has gone completely in the opposite direction and probably would have complained Reboot isn't harsh enough and needed more subversion. "We need more clickbait and reaction content!"
I like to think we had some busybodies who read the TV Guide but didn't actually watch anything they complained about. (Also the idea of the TV Guide seems so archaic now)@@ratchet1271
@@ratchet1271 That's because Canada doesn't use the term "war" lightly. Also, Canadians in general don't focus group well with frivolously calling something a war or calling something frivolous a war. It's a cultural thing.
The “anyone can die” trope applied to Attack on Titan is funny in hindsight with plot point “oh no we are about to get crushed. Good thing there is a previously unmentioned bottle of -plot armor- Titan armor to save us”
And everything with Reiner, no matter how much he wants to.
@felonyx5123 doesn't it get to the absolute extreme where Reiner reforms his own head after transferring his conciousness into his body or smth
Man, they really butchered season 4 :/
@@samt3412 He survives by transferring his consciousness into his Titan form's brain. Apparently he lost some memories from it but it's not bad enough to have a lasting impact on the story
@@YayaFeiLong i think the other guy was right. rewatched the show recently and he did transfer his consciousness into the rest of his real body not the titan one. unless you're talking about some other time outside of the one in s3
ace attorney is really interesting in this regard, because while it is lighthearted a lot, it also does get pretty dark at times (“farewell, my turnabout” is probably the best example of this in the original trilogy). the games stay pretty silly, but sometimes that silliness actually enhances the plot - think, “almost christmas means it wasn’t christmas”, or “i would like to cross-examine the witness’ pet parrot”, which are both incredibly silly out of context, but incredibly important moments in the actual game. but then, again, when it gets dark, it hits EXTREMELY hard. comparing 3-1 and 3-4, the difference is frankly fucking insane, and i honestly love the series for that. i mean hell, the investigations 2 game is considered one of the best and most well-written, darker games in the entire franchise, but then the most important cases are shit like “cupcake wars goes Very Wrong” and “a clown drops a balloon on a clone”. i can’t think of another series that does it like this, honestly.
…and, of course, there IS also the great ace attorney duology. which has a darker tone from the rest of the series in general, and in my opinion utilises tonal shifts EXTREMELY well, to the point i’d say it serves the narrative even more than mainline. when red talked about an important character being gone, i just immediately thought of 1-5 and sholmes/susato. tgaa is so underrated honestly
Honestly a great trope discussion, and an excellent choice for a thumbnail. I think even anyone with no concept of literary analysis would be able to see that thumbnail and title and immediately put together what you were talking about. Great choice!
Speaking of One Piece, there's a moment (don't worry it's not a spoiler) that's rather infamous for a death that completely breaks the tone of the story. Specifically, Zoro's backstory, where his childhood friend, who was also his rival in becoming the strongest swordsman in the world, dies... by tripping and falling down the stairs off-screen. Is that a thing that can kill you? Of course. But in an action shonen manga, a world where even civilians can take a house to the face or lose twenty gallons of blood and walk it off, it was _hilariously_ jarring.
The stairs have been memed as super-killers for decades, and the Netflix adaptation just went with "uuuuhhhh there's been an unspecified accident" instead.
I warned you about stairs bro
That was the earliest days of One Piece, and there is a tragic meaning to it. Sometimes, a person's dreams and potential can be cut short by random accidents.
That made it foundational for Zoro's character. He strives to be the greatest swordsman not just for his dream, but for Kuina's dream as well.
So here's the thing about ReBoot Season 3, and particularly about Megabyte almost winning: in early pitches for the series as a whole, that was how the story was going to _start._ Bob was supposed to be arriving in a dystopian nightmare city ruled by Megabyte, and joining this ragtag team of rebels trying to make things good again. And that dystopian nightmare would never have had half the impact of _returning_ to the original setting to find it all but destroyed. We needed those first two family-friendly seasons to make the darkness actually mean something.
Yeah, you get that from some time travel plots (Back to the Future 2) and the "It's a Wonderful Life"-type plots, too.
Here's the world, look around a bit, maybe even get comfy, cause we're about to do unfortunate things to it.
I think it’s also worth mentioning times when the “established tone” is very clearly a mask, like in the amazing digital circus. The established tone is wacky shenanigans, but it’s clear to the audience that the actual tone is existential trauma
Another great shift in tone and tone armor can be found in Young Justice. After the death at the end of season 2, the show was cancelled and later renewed under a new studio. With different standards and practices, the show went out of its way to show that death and trauma are extremely possible now, which forever broke the show's oroginal tone and robbed its characters of tone armor.
Red being 1 of the best reaserchers on literature despite being a math major is single handedly the most cool thing ever.
Mathematics is literally The Art of Learning.
(No, really, that's what the word means in the original Greek.)
@@CliffSedge-nu5fv I love math myself
She can definitely consider herself a polymath (Math, Literature, Art-both singing and drawing)
Red is a Math Major?
@@AlixL96 blue said so in 1 of the podcast type videos
This Trope Talk is helping me understand something that has been bugging me for so long that I haven't had the words for. When Tone Armor is broken badly in a way that hurts the story, it can sometimes instantly pull me out of the story and make me not finish something. Tone is such a delicate thing.
The tricky thing is that sometimes you don't know what's a dealbreaker until it breaks it. Both from a writing and reading perspective.
@@adamsbja That is very, very true!
I prefer when that happens early so I can make a decison. It happened in Goblin Slayer cause I thought it'd be a comedy but it got so dark after the stinger that I just couldn't.
Walter White continuously Getting Away With It to keep Breaking Bad going started to just feel stupid to me after a mere 3 seasons.
Tone is also something intrinsically tied to a specific story or setting. That's why most of the time when they make a dark, gritty reboot of a story, the darkness clashes with the setting. We already know what the tone should be, and the reboot is completely at the other end of the spectrum. Like that more adult Powerpuff Girls show.
Star Wars Rebels leaned into a tonal shift hard after the first season when they realized they could get away with some of the same leaps as Clone Wars without getting immediately shelved.
This video made me realise exactly why Doctor Who's Turn Left episode is so good. The Doctor is the character who, while having their dark moments, maintains a certain lightness throughout the show even in tense situations, both through humour and saving the day because without Donna saving him that day, everything essentially went to hell, giving the episode a dark, hopeless tone - it also shows just how crucial Donna's presence in the story was as well.
Hey FYI this series has been a huge factor inspiring me to take writing back up and over the last years I've woven hundreds of thousands of words together into various stories and I've had a blast, thank you so much for sharing your enthusiasm for storytelling with the world!
This is exactly how I feel. I’d been writing for years before I saw this channel and encountered Trope talks but this series is probably one of the three main reasons I’ve started to look at things, my own writing included, with a critical eye and I think my two recent projects are better because of it and by extension, Red.
being 100 this channel is a huge resource that helps me out with my creative writing (its such a shame that its just me this channel helps, no one else parasocially relates to red as much as i do /J)
Honestly this series has been super helpful in parsing what's wrong with some of my stories, too. I love it
Nice, congratulations! I didn't discover the series until after I'd already started writing, and the hobby has pretty much taken over my every thought. So I can't resist rambling how the episode relates to something in my work, every time. ^_^;;
It also helps me get clarity on things sometimes, there's been once or twice where I've had something in mind but couldn't figure out how I wanted to handle it, and then a Trope Talk touches on the topic, and it helps a lot. Like, "Ah, THAT'S why this one version of events felt weird! Well, I don't have a good reason to violate this trope and the expectations the audience has because of it, so I guess I'll go with the other branch."
(I just hope nobody's bothered by the walls of text I drop. I mostly assume they're lost in the flood and nobody reads them, though.)
This is why puss and boots 2 worked so well. Not only does it open with a death montage to completely reshape the tone of a series (shrek) to where only old men and bad guys can die to where a main character has died and is at risk of dying again. Puss also bleeds during one of the big fights.
Puss bleeding is even more meaningful as a few minutes ago he was just boasting about a blade never touching him
and they also mask it pretty well by disguising it as a dark joke montage when it's setting up the very much serious motive for the story
Also you from not even saying ‘die’ to having literal death be a character in the story
The thumbnail example chosen for this video is excellent. It made me understand immediatly the trope you were going to expand upon.
Oh Pyrrha... You'll always be in our hearts.
Bloodborne offers an interesting counter-example to tone armor.
Pretty early in the game, you meet a suspicious sludge-man in Oedon Chapel who begs you to bring any survivors to him. Seeing as this is a suspicious sludge-man in a game about soliciting involuntary blood donations, one would expect any survivors you send to him to be doomed. Around the same time, a friendly doctor lady asks you to bring any survivors to her so she can treat them. The game is presenting you with a choice that has a blatantly correct answer: do you send the survivors to the Bad Place or to the Good Place?
As it turns out, the sludge-man is the sweetest, purest soul in the whole world and he only wants to help people, and the doctor lady happens to be of the mad variety and turns people into small blue aliens.
The fact that this is a subversion of the most surface-level reading of each character fits perfectly within the treacherous tone of Bloodborne. However, because the tone-mandated switcheroo happens in the actual reveal/plot twist, the tone loses power over the friendly sludge-man, who becomes pretty much the only beacon of light in the entire story and actually has a pretty happy ending.
So yeah. Even an extreme tone has limited power, and if it plays its cards in one place, it might lose the ability to do so again without undermining the satisfactory nature of the story.
Still slightly surprised we end up back at the Hunter's Dream and not in his caring arms after the squid ending. Like, I get why. Eldrich life, different existential planes, etc. But it'd be so nice to basically become Bloodborne's version of Nyarlythotehp by being raised by a nice slug man. (The version of Nyarl that likes humans, I mean)
Honestly the sludge man sounded so genuine that I just sent people to him anyway - Iosefka also was genuine at first, but her being behind a door I could not get into and him being in an open chapel with some sort of magical protecting smoke let me think "okay I can see how he's helpful, plus, Yarnam's doctors have some wack ideas of treatment."
@@underdog353777 Yeah, there's definitely some nuance there. Especially with the Imposter Iosefka offering a reward, which is a red flag (probably because of the blood, if I had to guess). And the ability to actually keep an eye on the sludge man (goodness knows we have enough eyes to spare).
Most people I've seen do make the right decision, but almost all of them are really on the fence about it. Some automatically just send everyone to "Iosefka" and become the living embodiments of the surprised pikachu face when it turns out, in the words of Max0r, she is creating the blue man group.
It's multiple layers of design (dialogue, character design, the fact you were in the clinic once and turned out all right, level design, etc.) all working against each other to create compelling arguments both ways, and it's amazing.
@@clayxros576 you do end up being cared for by The Doll, she’s one of the only other characters in the game who is legitimately kind and cares for you.
Theres also the prostitue who nice and humble, juxtaposed with the Nunlike character whos an arrogant arse that ends up murdering the prostitue. and the well dressed freindly guy, who turns out to be a conspiracy theorist, whos theories are the exact opposite of what happens. Then as a double subversion the sketchy beggar actually does turn out to be a monstroush mass murderer and cannibal.
Ampibia's "This episode has some intense final scenes. It might be scary for younger viewers" and the way it was said by the ten-year-old frog character, Is burned into my brain.
I initially didn't care much for Amphibia, but I watched it with my younger cousin because she liked it. I liked Owl House and Gravity Falls, so I said, "Whatever, I'll watch it."
THIS SCENE SHOCKED ME. I was like, "How dark can a Disney show ge- oh. My God."
“I just need to-“
@@bongo9384wait what did they show? I’m curious
@@crocoboi7936 Mostly it was because one of the thirteen year old protagonists gets impaled by a flaming sword. After like a triple betrayal. At the very end of the episode when they show the theme song for the next season she's revealed to be in a life support tank of some sort. But it is shocking and very impactful that they just freaking stabbed her mid sentence and you see her body go limb. The episode is titled 'True Colors' if you're still curious.
@@ariloser13 that’s pretty crazy for a kids show.
Wow, that clicks a whole bunch of stuff into place. It helps me define where the difference between actually dark, and wanna be dark stories is. I think this way of looking at tone is an incredible tool in a storyteller's box
One Piece is possibly one of the best examples of how to utilize Tone armour to tell a deeper story without the tone becoming overtly dark
I will never forget when Alex Hirch released some of the notes from Standards and Practices. It really highlights the weirdness of those rules. Highly recommend people checking it out, there’s a video on TH-cam with them being read. Even if you haven’t seen Gravity Falls it gives lots of insight into Disney’s S&P. I’ll never forget the quote “”Not approved by S&P” has been approved by S&P”
Seriously though, the whole deciding of what’s allowed to be shown is baffling at times. The words “Spin the bottle” on a party flyer? Not in our kids show! Mounted animal heads bleeding from their eyes and mouths chanting “ancient sins”? Of course that’s kid friendly!
There is a sort of blue and orange logic to S&P. I believe it was explained as "any unsafe thing the kids can copy at home, don't show that thing." A kid can play spin the bottle in real life, but where are they going to see a taxidermy buck's head bleeding from its orifices? Now, showing blood coming out of a PERSON is too violent, but an arguably inanimate object? That's different. It might not make sense if you approach it like a normal person, but it makes perfect sense for a TV network.
@@KimballThoAlso to add to this, that's why death in kids/family shows are usually unrealistic, like being hit by a magic death beam or something instead of being stabbed. Being stabbed is a real threat and has more weight to it but it's unlikely that a person will encounter a magic death beam, despite the outcome being death in both situations
The "spin the bottle" thing is hilarious because the *one* birthday party I attended as a kid had that game. We were all *five.*
Granted, I don't think anyone there actually knew how the game was supposed to be played. Someone probably heard that it was played at parties and decided it had to be included. The result was more like true or dare.
S&P is better understood not through the lens of 'How will this affect children" and more though "What needs to be done to protect the studio from lawsuits or mass campaigns if a child were to be harmed in a way that could be blamed on the contents of the show."
@@gota7738 Or, more likely, "how to protect the studio from pearl-clutching parents and 'moral guardians.'"
An example of Reverse Ceberus Syndrome that comes to my mind is Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Acts 1-3 features stuff like angsty monologues about consuming jealousy, gods & prophecies, the persecution of a woman for infidelity who is proven innocent but then dies on the witness stand after learning about the death of her child. Then end the end of Act 3 has a harsh shift from a man wondering what to do with the child he's been instructed to kill into the famous "Exeunt pursued by bear" and then most of show from there on is wacky pastoral bumpkin hijinks.
Of course, for that precise reason, apparently some troupes did JUST Acts 4 & 5 as a short play about how a forbidden romance between a peasant and a noble can be true love, just make up some stuff about the peasant being a secret princess. Apparently some audiences didn't like the tough lesson of Acts 1-3 about sometimes rulers are just crazy and dumb sometimes.
Fleabag also has a kind of reverse tone shift, where the gandalf like tone setter arrives only on season 2
I love the Knight of Cerberus trope. And its big brother Vile Villain, Saccharine Show. They’re both so weirdly cathartic.
Running tone armor through a wringer is the bread and butter of Doctor Who. I was just remembering how gutted I was by Clara's first appearance. And at least in that case, she got better. A companion got *spaced* in the first series.
Thanks for bringing up the "any of the characters could die!" stories when it was logically impossible if you wanted a satisfying ending. I've been sitting on that one for a while myself.
If we're taking "anyone could die" literally, I'm not aware of any writer attempting to do that in earnest. So I'm not sure we can call it impossible. Challenging, yes. The idea implies an element of randomness in the plotting process. For, say, a slasher flick? It seems doable. The kinds of writing challenges that "anyone could die" poses wouldn't clash too much with the expectations of a genre like that, and might even complement them. For a long-running tale of political intrigue? It would be much harder to pull off, and probably not worth the effort. But I daresay it could still be done.
@@xx99Username99xx Yeah, I think you've probably hit on it. I mean, out side of tragedies where *everyone* dies, and that's sort of the point, the issue with a plot where *really* anyone dies, regardless of narrative logic, you're looking at a huge amount of investment on the part of the author in exchange for, frankly, very little payoff other than saying that you did it. The fact that tons of plot threads are left hanging basically becomes the point, your trophy wall to prove you "really did it", and it's going to take exceptional effort to make the story still feel good after doing that.
Well, it depends on what exactly we mean by 'could'. Let's say you have an already complete story - the only characters that can die during it are the ones that *do* die. What will happen is already determined, so if you are saying that anyone could die, you probably mean that it would be plausible in terms of the tone.
But let's say you are writing a story right now. You don't have the conclusion and all the events before it fully nailed down yet, but you've started. Maybe you are trying to nail down those details in a more or less chronological order. Thus you have a set of characters ready, but probably not a complete one. At this point it's still entirely possible that you don't know who is going to die. For that matter, it's possible you may not know who the main characters are, depending on what your creative process is like in this case.
I sometimes work in this way. Thus I do recall a case, where I was working on a story where the tone very much allowed for anyone at all to die, and I ended up realizing that one of the characters from the main cast that I was working with was going to die quite early on. Not because that was a planned part of her story arc. To the degree that I'd loosely planned it out previously, there would have been other things in store for her if she didn't end up dying. But because the events I was planning out in that progression logically led to her death.
That's how she became that cousin and best friend of a main character who dies a tragic death early on, thus in turn actually cementing her cousin as one of the actual main characters, rather than living on to become a main character in her own right. Actually, now that I think about it, that basically happened at least twice with this very same story. In another case someone, who became of one of the two main characters in the first book, was nonetheless doomed to die at the end of that book, with that circumstance leaving his girlfriend to actually become one of the main characters of the series as a whole. In both cases their deaths would become extremely central events to the plot and raw memories for those who lived on, but crucially they weren't planned from the start for the purpose of their death.
So at least when working with a large scale story with several different central characters, it's entirely possible to conduct at least a part of the planning process in a way where anyone is genuinely allowed to die. Once the overall progression becomes more nailed down though, and you have a clearer picture of who is needed as a main character until later in the story, it of course becomes much more difficult to say that they could die. But it's not necessary that they were main characters, and thus not allowed to die, from the start. It's always possible to conduct it the other way around, where by the virtue of happening to survive, and thus providing a stable perspective, they become the main characters.
My favorite moment of tonal shift is where a character begs, out loud, "kill me," while being influenced by a brain parasite in the later half of the first season of Clone Wars. Previously, the word "kill" was always replaced with "destroy," and the horror there was shockingly intense.
I agree, and I also think it's important that it was Barriss that said that because (spoiler) she commits a complete and ultimate betrayal of Ahsoka later in the series, causing her to leave the Jedi. It brings up retrospective questions of what if Ahsoka had mercy killed her, or freezing the brain worm didn't work and she died anyways? Would Ahsoka have still been betrayed by someone in the Order if Barriss was dead? Would the betrayal have worked if done by someone who didn't know Ahsoka well like Barriss? Fun stuff.
I think the reverse Cerebus syndrome might be present in Q Hayashida's stuff, where a nightmarish surreal body-horror dystopian setting and premise are established, and then used for a sitcom.
Taking away a valuable character to change the tone is especially powerful in video games. Think about how much scarier the boys of silence were in BioShock Infinite because Elizabeth wasn't there with you. Think about how much more frightening The Flood were in Halo CE because you didn't have Cortana with you when you first encountered them. Final Fantasy 15 had sections where eachn of the other three party members left the group & it made combat and the story feel very different.
I think Halo also brilliantly interwove the mechanical aspects with the tone shift that first time - the covenant are FUN to fight. They're also light hearted, sometimes comical, and brightly coloured. The Flood are a dark, gritty horor villain, but they also don't have the covenants fun combat AI, ditching it in favour of literally worse programming in which they just run right at you. It works because as soon as the tone shifts from 'fun time shooting comedy aliens' to 'horrible zombie plague', you, the player, are supposed to stop having fun and get all jumpy and stressed, which an enemy that can only be avoided by repeatedly backpedalling does to you.
It's also why it only really worked the first time, as the flood aren't much fun to fight.
A great example of a "tonal anchor" is Kamina in Gurren Lagann. The world the series created was so oppresive and honestly terrifying that if he wasn't there to push not just Simon but EVERYONE to rebel against the Spiral King, we wouldn't just not have the story, we wouldn't have its' central thesis and the best moments in it.
That's the example I thought of too. And when he dies, it's the "hero leaves" sort of tone shift from somewhat light hearted shonen, obviously the good guys will eventually win, sort of show to a mich darker one.
I think one of the best other examples of a Kamina-style tonal anchor death happened due to just a confluence of bad intel, bad decisions, and spectacularly shitty luck instead of authorial intent. Spoilers for something years-old at this point:
The death of Mollymauk Tealeaf of the Mighty Nein in Critical Role had such a major impact on the other characters and pushed them in such a different direction that it influenced basically the entire rest of the campaign. "Leave every place better than you found it" became the goal they strove for (even if they failed hilariously badly at it a couple of times) instead of just the philosophy of one person in a group mostly comprised of self-described assholes. It did also help that Taliesin's replacement character ended up as the group's moral compass ("Caduceus is the only one of us who's good at being good").
I know it's less common, but there's a character type I like that you didn't mention. Vash the Stampede in Trigun is adjacent to a tone shield, except he isn't perfect at it. His conflict is the struggle to keep things light, to hold back the slide into grimdark. He even tries to shake off grievous injury as IF it were a comedic moment because he's more durable than the average person. Then that struggle hits all the harder once we see him with his shirt off, covered in scars.
In the original anime, at least - my understanding of the manga is that it gets GORY, and slides down the grimdark slope pretty steadily
Vash is one of the few cases of Overpowered Character that really works, because no matter how insanely skilled he is, his pacifist desire to keep everyone safe, including people trying to kill him, is just too much for even him sometimes. Things happen too fast, and people get hurt and sometimes even die, despite his efforts. He's trying to win an unwinnable game, and no matter how good he is, people will die.
You explain this so well! And you touch on exactly why it fails sometimes when authors make the change too abrupt and it turns disengaging and comedic instead of switching the story into a different gear.
Makes TOTAL sense, and I think you deserve big kudos for coming up with it.
In my last novel, I *did* go the other way, from Armageddon dark-and-despair and people treating each other horribly (for plot-specific reasons germaine to the setting), to "the stakes are still high and possibly even higher, but also have cute romance and hopeful moments and hidden badasses they didn't know about who are way more helpful than anybody expected, and the early conflicts wind up giving rise to the macguffin allowing for an actual happy ending.
Jury's out whether it'll WORK (my stuff is out there and doesn't sell much), but it was a hell of a lot of fun to write.