Faith and hope and brotherly love is all she talks about
I can't cope with all her heart-tugging
It makes me want to scream and shout.
I can't cope with all her heart-tugging
It makes me want to scream and shout.
— "Who Is She", Jem
Glurge is the catch-all term for tales which allegedly contain uplifting and timeless truths, but for various reasons — they carry Unfortunate Implications, they don't make sense once you've thought about them, or the medium is a poor fit for the message — they are just a bit too hard to swallow. (The word "glurge" was initially coined by a reader
of Snopes and derives from the sound of someone throwing up).
These stories are presented as inspirational modern-day parables, meant to touch hearts and change minds. Unfortunately, they do so by simplifying their message to the point of complete uselessness to any reader who thinks about it seriously. All shades of nuance between good and evil are overlooked in the rush to present a universe in which everything happens for a satisfying reason, meaning that valuable lessons about hard work, understanding, personal growth and sacrifice are left by the wayside.
Like pornography, glurge is easier to recognize than to describe. This being a Super-Trope, it typically involves some combination of the following tropes:
Common tropes in glurgey stories
- Aesop Collateral Damage: Glurge often relies upon the suffering of a secondary character to drive home the lesson. This gives the protagonist an opportunity to realize his mistake and choose to follow the lesson after all — sometimes he might even reason that God (or whatever Powers That Be) caused this suffering to show him the "right way".
- Allegedly Optimistic Ending: These stories often have 'happy' endings that aren't all that happy after closer examination.
- All That Glitters: The protagonist learns that money isn't everything. He then goes to the complete opposite extreme, becoming The Hermit and renouncing things that actually are important, like his own health and the people close to him. Alternatively, glurge may teach "be content with what you have" through a character who doesn't 'have' much of anything.
- An Aesop: Glurge creators usually want their stories to "say something" about the world and how to live in it. Trouble is, their lessons often aren't supported by the narrative or are something everyone should already know.
- ...And That Little Girl Was Me: If the story is being related by a third party, there is a near 100% chance that the person in the story will turn out to be the Narrator All Along.
- Angst Aversion: Sad glurge tries to tug at the heartstrings by showing a character suffering horribly and/or dying, which turns the audiences off from the story before they can gain whatever lesson was supposed to be learned.
- Angst? What Angst?: A character who suffers trauma or loss will react in whichever way is most convenient for the narrative — up to and including bouncing right back without a second thought. Modeling this as the 'right' way to react is unhelpful, to say the least.
- Anvilicious: Glurgey stories that try to teach some sort of lesson will usually state in no uncertain terms what the lesson to be learned is.
- Appeal to Nature: Glurge will often paint natural solutions for problems as being a lot better than artificial ones, with the artificial solutions being portrayed as ineffective at best, and detrimental at worst.
- Artistic License – Animal Care: Pets make frequent appearances in glurge, due to the cuteness factor. Unfortunately, due to poor research, the animals will often be cared for in ways that would be harmful to them in real life (such as feeding dogs chocolate, or keeping goldfish in small bowls).
- Artistic License – Medicine: Sick characters in glurge are often written in ways that are more focused on improving and steering the story, or playing to the audience's sympathy, than on portraying the disease accurately. They also often decry conventional medical care in favour of nature or prayer or some other nebulous concept to treat the ailment, with a far better success rate there than in Real Life.
- Babies Make Everything Better: Having a child is often portrayed as the perfect way to fix a couple's relationship problems, which ignores that a newborn brings its own set of problems (like money, the baby's medical care, and the hassle of sleep-training the baby).
- Beauty Equals Goodness: The sympathetic characters will be attractive. Even when the message is Beauty Is Bad, the focus characters will be cute (Ugly Cute at worst), while the characters considered attractive in-universe will not be depicted as attractive to the audience.
- Be Yourself: The glurge version of this moral gives vague definitions of what 'being oneself' entails, discourages personal growth, or encourages holding on to toxic traits.
- Black-and-White Morality: Glurge leaves no doubt as to who is right and who is wrong. The sympathetic side will be entirely good, while the other side will be actively hostile to truth and goodness.
- Broken Aesop: The story might try to teach some sort of moral, but botch up the moral in the execution (for instance, trying to teach a Prejudice Aesop by portraying a particular group as inherently bigoted, meaning that being prejudiced against them is fine).
- Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Every mistake or transgression results in disaster; conversely, every disaster is the direct result of a character's error (which can be corrected by coming around to the 'right' line of thinking).
- Captain Obvious Aesop: The moral lessons (when they're coherent) tend to be very basic ones, such as "be kind to everybody," "don't look down on the less fortunate," "don't give up when things are tough," and "love your family." These are of course treated by the story as deep and profound revelations.
- Character Shilling: It's common for glurge to include a secondary character who serves as the protagonist's cheering section. If the central message is put into the mouth of a teacher or preacher, there will be at least one person on hand to say, "You're right", "So true!", etc.
- Children Are Innocent: Kids generally come across as wiser or more capable than adults. In stories that involve spiritual or supernatural forces, children can see and/or interact with them, while adults and teens cannot.
- The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Glurge will often portray anyone who objects to the focus character's words or deeds as nothing more than an annoying sourpuss, waving off any valid points they might make.
- Designated Hero/Designated Villain: Glurge treats the characters who agree with its message as good persons, even if their actual behavior suggests otherwise. Those who don't comply with the message are treated as the scum of the earth, even if they haven't done anything particularly scummy.
- Disproportionate Retribution/Disproportionate Reward: Glurge is there to teach a lesson, so it will reward the characters who agree with the message and heap abuse and suffering on those who disagree, making them examples to the others (see Aesop Collateral Damage above).
- Easy Evangelism: The character who speaks the work's message will effortlessly win over all the sympathetic characters. Those who ignore or reject him will be portrayed as stupid, in denial, or evil. In addition, any character who "thinks things through" and concludes that the central message is correct will be depicted as insightful and logical even if their reasoning is a hot mess. Glurge promoting a religion almost always includes this one.
- Falsely Advertised Accuracy: Glurge is often presented to the reader as a "true story". Poke it for details, however, and most of it can't be confirmed.
- For Happiness: The glurge version of 'happiness' is toxic positivity — the belief that everyone can and should be happy at all times regardless of circumstances, and if they're not, they must want to be unhappy.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Religious glurge tends to stress that the sinners it depicts may be fictional but the sins and punishments are real, and you will suffer too if you don't repent.
- Fridge Logic: Glurge will often seem to make sense at the moment but not after some thought.
- Fridge Horror: These sweet, wholesome stories often have unfortunate or disturbing implications when held to scrutiny.
- Fridge Sadness: Some glurge is only heartwarming and uplifting until the viewer considers how real people might react to those events and/or what is likely to happen after the story ends.
- Historical Person Punchline: The main character or alleged author in the story will sometimes turn out to be (an Urban Legend version of) a notable historical figure to drive home the impact of the Aesop. Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln are common offenders, for whatever reason.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: Any character connected, even slightly, to something the work condemns will suffer just as much (and just as deservedly) as the actual perpetrators.
- Hollywood Autism: Autism in glurge is portrayed as a tragedy for the autistic person and their family, robbing everyone involved of the chance at a meaningful life. Alternatively, autism is depicted as wonderful and autistic people are depicted as inherently innocent and pure, like children.
- Ice-Cream Koan: A statement that sounds insightful and deep but is actually meaningless (e.g. "Time is the world's love shining down on us like the sun.")
- Inspirationally Disadvantaged: This trope not only ignores the real limitations a disability imposes, it makes disabled people seem lesser or "lazy" (or just not worth writing about) if they haven't developed some sort of Disability Superpower.
- Karmic Overkill: In glurgey stories, villains will always be punished in the end. However, there's a chance that the punishment will be harsher than what they actually deserve, especially when the villain has a sympathetic motive and/or there are other villains in the same work that committed far worse crimes and were let off with lighter punishments in comparison.
- Littlest Cancer Patient: Glurge often makes the terminally-ill character a child - bonus points if they're a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl, as that means they'll look extra pale and sickly. Apparently a dying middle-aged man just wouldn't pull the right heartstrings.
- Madonna-Whore Complex: In glurge stories centered in relationships, sympathetic female characters will be portrayed as chaste and humble virgins looking forward to marry a good man, while unsympathetic ones will be portrayed as morally-stunted vixens who will cheat and steal other women's partners.
- Misery Builds Character: When done badly, this trope becomes abuse apologia by implying that it's good to put people through trauma and tragedy, and that kindness is useless. The fact that the opposite outcome is just as likely tends to get glossed over.
- Mood Dissonance: Glurge often has unintentional tone problems. If the central theme is a Captain Obvious Aesop, it will be treated with more reverence and solemnity than it deserves; if a character's death furthers the narrative, it will be treated as anything but a tragedy (see Angst? What Angst? above).
- My God, What Have I Done?: Remorse is a frequent element in glurge. Sometimes there is time to make amends, but other times the wronged character suffers a plot-convenient death, leaving the protagonist alone with their guilt.
- Narm: Glurge can undermine its own message because its efforts to be 'dramatic' or 'insightful' come off as unintentionally humourous.
- Older Is Better: Glurge tends to paint modern things as cold and clinical, with older things being better because they have more sentiment or "heart."
- Pets as a Present: When a character receives a pet as a surprise gift and it's treated as a happy ending for both pet and owner. In real life, surprising someone with a pet is inadvisable, since the recipient wasn't prepared for the pet and might not be ready to take on the responsibility. Even if do want a pet, the specific animal they get (say, a high-energy dog) may not be a good fit for their lifestyle.
- The Pollyanna: Glurge will often have a character who is always happy, or at least hopeful, no matter what happens to them. This suggests that feeling unhappy in bad moments is not an appropriate way to react. If the optimistic character ends up dying, it further suggests that cheerfulness/hope is useless, since it didn't save the character's life.
- Posthumous Narration: Sometimes glurge is presented as the words of someone who is dead, telling their story as a lesson or warning to others.
- Purity Sue: The characters depicted as 'good' in glurge are often impossibly sweet, wise, self-sacrificial, or innocent. As they are Too Good for This Sinful Earth, they frequently don't make it to the end of the story.
- Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Given that optimism is a common element in glurge, they will try to drive home the message preached by having a cynical character that solely exists to be preached at and proven wrong every time. This becomes problematic if the cynic has issues with a societal ill, sending the message that pointing out serious problems and the hurt they cause is akin to wanting to make others miserable.
- Space Whale Aesop: Glurge supports the lesson of the story by having characters meet extremely unlikely consequences (both good and bad). These stories often imply that if the same will befall the reader if they accept/reject the message.
- Stalking Is Love: Many "romantic" glurge stories feature this trope. It's a particularly dangerous phenomenon: in real life, stalking is demonstrably not love, but rather a compulsion arising from social phobia or mental illness. And works have a distinct Double Standard for this trope; shady-looking stalkers are evil and the victim is in real danger, but good-looking stalkers are romantic and sympathetic. (Nerdy, unpopular stalkers are just a sad joke).
- Sweetness Aversion: "Heartwarming" glurge often overshoots the mark and lands in "nauseatingly saccharine." Snopes describes it as chicken soup with a few cups of sugar mixed in.
- Thicker Than Water: Glurge stories about the importance of family bonds usually end up teaching that family is to be cherished and protected above everything else, even if it's abusive.
- Throwing Off the Disability: A disabled character in a glurgey story will often no longer be disabled by the end of the story (for instance, a blind character gaining sight, or a wheelchair user learning to walk). This comes across as ableist, since it suggests that the only way to get a happy ending is not to be disabled. In some cases the cure is a karmic reward for following the story's intended Aesop, meaning it also insults disabled people who would want a cure (especially when the story is promoting one specific religion).
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Usually ties in to Aesop Collateral Damage — the first casualty of a character's misdeeds will be someone so innocent and pure it makes your teeth ache. This also has the effect of suggesting that the world is inherently hostile to sweetness and purity, and that the good really do die young.
- Turn the Other Cheek: In glurge, characters who do evil will usually have their crimes swept under the rug and will be welcomed back by the other characters without a second thought, usually to enforce a message of forgiving everyone who's wronged you all the time regardless of what they did, how much remorse the perpetrator has or how their actions affected you.
- Urban Legends: Glurge overlaps enough to almost be considered a subgenre, with many such stories having allegedly really happened to some person on the internet's mother's cousin's relative's friend. The main distinction is that glurge is a more consciously literary work.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Glurge often distorts and fabricates historical fact in the guise of offering "true stories". This way, they can add some extra heft to the story by claiming that it portrays "real life" (but only the authors' conception of it).
- Victorian Novel Disease: If a pretty woman gets a terminal, or potentially terminal, illness, she will still look pretty, and might even still be relatively active, and she won't have any ugly symptoms like vomiting or swollen glands.
- What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Similar to the way it treats children, glurge only ever features 'cute' animals. While this certainly does arouse the audience's sympathy — who doesn't like puppies more than naked mole rats? — it also suggests that the suffering of non-cute animals doesn't matter... or that suffering that produces more cute animals, like a puppy mill, isn't wrong. Similarly, those who love conventionally cute animals are much more likely to be treated with praise in glurge, while those who like the others are more likely to be viewed with disdain.
- Wheelchair Woobie: Glurge that includes a physically disabled person typically uses them as a plot device instead of a character, often with at least a tinge of Condescending Compassion. There's also a fair chance they'll be dead by the end of the story in order to tug at the viewer's heartstrings.
- White Man's Burden: Stories where a white protagonist helps non-white people tend to go glurgey because of the Unfortunate Implications they introduce — most significantly that minorities need white people in order to accomplish anything meaningful, and that it's a white person's "duty" to stick up for minorities even if they're in a situation where said minority is fully willing and capable of advocating for themselves.
- Whoopi Epiphany Speech: A poor, ethnic minority, disabled, illiterate, or ill-educated character (ideally all of the above) makes a wise and insightful speech to the white, able-bodied, richer, better-educated protagonist. If the epiphany-giving character isn't sufficiently well-developed in their own right, they can seem like a mere plot device to spur the protagonist — who really matters — to take constructive action. This reinforces the belief that minorities are helpless in a similar manner to White Man's Burden.
- You Know Who Said That?: A character makes a statement and then tells us that those words came from a particular historical figure. Such quotes are often mined, misattributed, or taken out of context (sometimes deliberately). The reader is meant to immediately accept or reject the words based on who said them, which is just sloppy — many admirable persons have said unfortunate things; many wretches have been right once or twice.
Tropes Are Tools: a work can use any number of these tropes without being glurge. The hallmarks of glurge are 1) a questionable message 2) conveyed through a manipulative delivery, which is 3) meant to arouse strong emotions in the reader but 4) fails to withstand scrutiny afterwards (though the reader is supposed to be so stirred that looking at the message dispassionately seems cold-hearted or downright amoral).
Not to be confused with Anvilicious: a work can be unsubtle in its messaging without being glurge. Often involves Angst Aversion or sometimes Sweetness Aversion (sometimes both). See also Unfortunate Implications, which has more to do with subtext (and isn't clearly stated at the end). Glurge often crosses over with Values Dissonance, as things that seem heartwarming according to the values of one setting might seem offensive in another. Oscar Bait often has similarities with glurge.
Believe it or not, some people have the taste for this stuff and are Glurge Addicts. Can cause a Don't Shoot the Message reaction from viewers who agree with the moral but can't stand the delivery.
The examples have been arranged alphabetically. Please put your examples in the proper place.
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Advertising
- This U.K. commercial from 2017 faced severe backlash and ended up being pulled from the air for enforcing this trope. It starts out sweet enough, with a boy asking his mom what his deceased father was like, and the rest of the ad has the two of them exploring his father's hobbies... until they end up having lunch at McDonald's, which this turns out to be an ad for. Why? Because the Filet-O-Fish was the father's favorite meal.
- The Values.com advertising campaign has many examples, one being a 2015 ad centered on a footrace for handicapped children; the first-place runner trips mid-race, the second-place runner stops to help him up, and then all the other runners lock arms and skip across the finish line together. Incidentally, that was based on an urban legend which made its way into Snopes' Glurge Gallery about 14 years prior.
Anime & Manga
- The anime movies produced by the Japanese spiritual movement Happy Science follow the usual formula: those who side with Ryuho Okawa's Author Avatar are wholly good and noble, while those who oppose him (atheists and non-religious people) are depicted as either miserable scumbags or misguided people controlled by demons who — in the latter case — come around once they witness the powers of El Cantare or get lectured after their defeat. However, each one of their movies has a specific rhetoric to push:
- Hermes: Winds of Love, despite being an epic about Hermes' life as told by the cult, briefly becomes a glurgefest when Hermes enters Heaven with Pan and Agape two-thirds of the way through. Both explain to Hermes that fairies are the ones that decide the aspect of flowers and halos appearing on really happy people and animals. When he dives into a magical lake connected to all oceans of Earth, all sea life starts singing a schmaltzy musical number about a "land of happiness" and how a smile can make everyone happy. When he returns to a shore, he finds a crying mermaid who explains that her kind needs humans to love the sea and strive to protect its beauty so they can live.
- The Laws of the Sun teaches that without faith and El Cantare's teachings, people will become nihilistic atheists and immediately indulge in all kinds of vices in droves and destroy the faithful. When the vicious fall into Hell upon dying, those condemned souls repeat the process by possessing other people in the same state as them, exacerbating such vices. Every time this happens, Earth will cause cataclysms and sink entire continents underwater to purify itself. Moreover, the cult teaches that The Power of Love can ward off evil spirits and even extraterrestrial beings hellbent on harming humans.
- The Laws of Eternity claims that geniuses, scientists, and even corporation founders were angels and demigods sent from Heaven to improve the Earth. Conversely, it portrays atheist philosophers and dictators (e.g. Nietzsche and Hitler) as not being actually humans, but demons sent from Hell to lead mankind astray from God, but can be defeated if everyone relies on El Cantare. Moreover, it also claims that disabled people won't be disabled anymore once they meet the requirements to enter the highest tiers of Heaven after death, as the infamous "I'm Helen Keller" scene can attest.
- The Mystical Laws is, apart from the claims that Earth is a "planet of love", an anti-Chinese propaganda screed that not only compares the country to Nazis but calls for abolishing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution so that the JSDF can fight China and prevent the movie's scenario from happening in Real Life. Moreover, it also engages in denialism about Japan's war crimes as the main villain's policies include teaching about them in schools.
- The Rebirth of Buddha is an anti-suicide tract, depicting suicide victims in an unflattering light as evil spirits who seek to wreak havoc on Earth for the time they're supposed to have left while alive, rejected by both Heaven and Hell. Moreover, these spirits also kill living people in the same ways they took their own lives. Moreover, it's also a treatise that denounces Aum Shinrikyo and its leader, Shoko Asahara, as deceivers by having the Asahara stand-in be a fraud in cahoots with demons.
- The children's OVA Shiawasette Naani, in its 15-minute duration, teaches kids that smiling and being cheerful will bring joy to others. While such a lesson isn't bad in and of itself, the way it's handled borders on teaching spiritual bypassing, which is related to the concept of toxic positivity. Demonstrating this is that Alto, who may not be older than six, has an out-of-body experience with Tenshi-san, but then falls into Hell for thinking he was dead upon discovering the latter was an angel. After running around and crying for help, Alto only gets out of there by expressing joy, which calls upon Tenshi-san to escort him out of the Spirit World.
- Ijime Ikenie no Kyoushitsu (lit. "Bullying: The Classroom of Sacrifice"), an OVA based on a manga series of the same name by Kaoru Igarashi and launched as a free DVD in an issue of Shoujo magazine Ciao, intends to tackle bullying. While such a lesson is sadly still necessary in this day and age, the way this OVA handles the subject comes off as incompetent at best, exploitative at worst:
- First, the bullying is played out as a "sacrifice" ritual in which the victim, in this case Kimijima Fumika, will be harassed by everyone at their school. While it's possible for a rich bully like Kojou Sera to turn an entire school against a specific victim, it's often done through simple means such as rumors or outright defamation in real life. Also, it's unlikely for an entire school to have a single group of bullies, as there can be multiple groups of them that have different reasons to target victims.
- After subjecting the protagonist to relentless bullying culminating in giving the poor girl a Traumatic Haircut, Sera's family goes broke in the next scene for no reason other than to provide Laser-Guided Karma by having Sera be bullied by the school (played out in a way reminiscent of a rape scene), haircut and all.
- This is a problem many people have with Kodomo no Kodomo, as it tries portraying a genuinely horrific situation (a young girl losing her virginity and getting pregnant in elementary school due to lack of sex education) as an uplifting Coming of Age Story about The Power of Friendship, complete with Kids Versus Adults themes.
- Naruto: The central lesson is that The Power of Friendship can overcome anything, as long as enough people support. But it's delivered so ridiculously that it's impossible to apply it to real-life; by the end, the story believes so strongly in Defeat Means Friendship that it works on villains who were previously trying to wipe out humanity and did nothing to deserve such redemption. The show tried to mitigate this by bringing us Kaguya, a Physical God, who comes out of nowhere to retroactively excuse the other villains' crimes.
- Tsuki ga Kirei: The general tone of the anime was this for some because of the Children Are Innocent tone and the explicit Stock Aesop that "love is a sacred, tender and kind feeling". Combined with an explicit depiction of sexual relations as something superficial and frivolous, the message seemed to be beaten over the audience's heads. At the same time, others defined this as a typical example of Reality Is Unrealistic and the result of an overabundance of dramatic and passionate romance in anime of the 2000s and the New Tens.
- Your Lie in April: Kaori's overly saccharine actions towards Kousei can come across as less heartwarming and more manipulative. Despite having understandable reasons for being actually, invoking a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, her more forceful behavior towards Kousei (especially in the beginning, where she relentlessly coerces Kousei into returning to music despite knowing his issues with playing the piano in the first place) has come across to certain viewers as unjustified and, at worst, horrendously selfish.
Asian Animation
- Stitch & Ai:
- Ai's breakdown in "The Scroll" when Jumba and Pleakley were about to take away Stitch to bring him back to the UGF comes across as this. When Jiejie angrily and passionately argues using an appeal to pity for Jumba and Pleakley to let Stitch stay with Ai because her little sister "never forgets those she loves ever". Although this is followed by her explaining that Ai was basically an emotional wreck in the year after the loss of their parents until Stitch came into her life, it still comes across more as her and Ai being selfish than heartbroken; Stitch may have been the best thing to happen in the Wang sisters' lives in a long while, but they do not suddenly own him just because of that. Never mind the fact that Jumba and Pleakley were trying to take Stitch to the UGF to save him from the Jaboodies and the Woolagongs, even if they used misguided and manipulative methods in doing so.
- The final scene of the entire show is this trope. At the end of the final episode, Stitch cries "because Stitch has [a] family." The problem with this scene? He already had a family before joining the Wangs, as the flashbacks to his time with Lilo seen in the early episodes have made pretty clear.
Arts
- Often times, Kitsch Collection art boils down to this. In essence, paintings or porcelain figures of kitsch variety are meant to bestow giddiness in people with their sentimentality, the ultimate draw being that these pieces of art are ultimately worthless by true artistic value. Either they're cheaply constructed, or the initial concept has been done so many times that they no longer mean anything worthwhile.
- Socialist Realism and some other art forms associated with authoritarian regimes like to portray glurge, with endless scenes of happy farmers, industrious workers, and brave soldiers without conflict or human suffering or any of the imperfections that make real life real. Author Milan Kundera coined the term "totalitarian kitsch" in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being to describe this phenomenon. The theme of these paintings has been jokingly described as "girl meets tractor".
Comic Books
- Circles: Depends on the reader's own life situation.
- If received positively, Circles may be an optimistically inspirational example that resonates with the issues faced by young adult gay men.
- If it falls flat, it may be because:
- It represents a scenario that seems excessively idealistic and saccharine compared to Real Life, if being gay in real life is in fact still more difficult than it is in the story.
- Or it depicts a higher level anxiety than you could imagine having to deal with in this decade compared to the Turn of the Millennium, if being gay in real life is in fact easier today.
- For at least a very large portion of the main fanbase (which is from the western world), this is the main reason as to why it hasn't aged very well in terms of depictions of homophobia. Sure, homophobia is sadly still far from over even in the most tolerant parts of the USA (and unfortunately seems to be increasing again...), but the comic seems to depict the LGBT side as relatively isolated and alone from the mainstream, when this kind of isolation decreased drastically in recent years.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Issue 40 features the story of Twilight Sparkle's first days of magic school, with Princess Celestia asking her to help look after baby Spike. Cut to Twilight desperately juggling school and baby care like so many teenage mothers, except she wasn't even a teenager at the time. Just as Twilight starts to crack under the pressure, she realizes that Celestia trying to give her her first friend, not a responsibility. This is supposed to be heartwarming, but:
- That Spike wasn't meant to be a responsibility for Twilight doesn't change the fact that he was a responsibility — a far greater responsibility than anyone Twilight's age has any business being saddled with. Celestia is right there when Twilight breaks down and rants about how she is struggling in school on account of having to care for Spike, yet there is no evidence that she ever properly addressed that.
- If Celestia thinks that taking care of a baby is an acceptable substitute for socializing with others one's own age, then it's no wonder Twilight's social skills are still minimal when the series begins. Combine that with Twilight likely having little time to make non-baby friends as a result of what she is going through, and it appears that Celestia wound up exacerbating the problem she was trying to solve.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) suffered a lot of this from its rot period of 1999-2005, where the focus shifted from an adventure-comedy to a relationship drama straight out of the Hallmark Channel. There are two stories in particular that push the boundaries of Glurge to their fullest.
- StH #134 — "Home: Epilogue". Sonic, after recovering from a near-death experience against Dr. Robotnik's latest creation named Mecha, is asked to be a guest of honor at Knothole's royal celebration, where he reunites with Sally. She implores Sonic to give up his life of action to settle down with her, claiming that the Royal Agency is enough to take on Robotnik. Sonic declines, saying that he's the only one who could stop Eggman after finishing off the Xorda invasion a year ago. This leads to Sally lashing out at Sonic and breaking up with him for claiming he's selfish, despite the fact that she's disregarding Sonic's feats of heroism throughout the years and only focusing on her own happiness.
- StH #155-156 — "Line of Succession". Sonic, having given up on Sally when the announcement that she's marrying Antoine arrived, has settled with dating Fiona Fox, which causes his best friend/honorary brother, Tails, to lash out at him for dating the girl he loved himself, even though he had fallen in love with a robot duplicate created by Robotnik made to look his age instead of her actual age. In addition, thanks to Creative Differences between the writers, what was originally intended to be a war-scarred Antoine was rewritten to be his previously-established Evil Counterpart intent on assassinating King Acorn before his son, Elias, arrives out of nowhere to stop him. The icing on the glurgey cake is the cover of #155, which was so melodramatically narmy that Sega issued a mandate that prevented Sonic from showing any extreme sadness.
Fan Works
- Ghostbusters: A Christmas Spirit involves everyone discovering that Egon doesn't celebrate Christmas, and then he has to learn to find his "Christmas spirit" to save his kidnapped friends. This would be a bit culturally insensitive no matter which character they picked, but especially since they picked Egon as the character in that role, who's Ambiguously Jewish.
- The Loud House fanfic:
- Easily Broken involves Lincoln's sisters putting an embarrassing video of him kissing his crush Ronnie Anne online, which causes him to run away to New York and his family tries to get him back. It's meant to be a heartwarming story about family, but the story flip-flops between portraying it as the family actually hating him and Lincoln just overreacting. He also becomes suicidal at one point but perks right up again after a good night's sleep, develops powers which are said to come from him being "pure of heart", and there's a recurring threat of his emotional wounds damaging his physical heart.
- Lincoln is Done is meant to be a Tear Jerker and Lincoln finally arriving home is meant to be heartwarming. However, the whole reason he ran away is because he dreamt his sisters hated him, and his sisters crying their eyes out and (in Lynn, Luna, and Lola's cases) trying to kill themselves just seems narmy because they know where he is and that he's okay. In addition, the plot was resolved with an exorcism-like ritual.
- Easily Broken
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Bubbles gives a sad backstory to the Memetic Bystander Derpy Hooves, here portrayed as an Inspirationally Disadvantaged foal who has a loving father but an abusive mother. The wording of the story is childish and cutesy, focusing on Derpy's innocence and ignorance. The climax of Bubbles has Derpy's mother trying to poison her daughter (or at least that's what's heavily implied). After that fails she abandons Derpy in the forest, where the story ends.
- Snowdrop (2013): Snowdrop's character design makes it look like she was genetically engineered to be a Glurge star. Combined with the first few minutes focusing on the hardships she faces on account of being blind (mainly her classmates openly disrespecting her because of that) as well as playing the Too Good for This Sinful Earth card at the end (albeit in such a context that Snowdrop could easily have died of natural causes), the film tugs at the audience's heartstrings with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. If that's not glurgey enough, Snowdrop's conversation with her mother Primrose all but explicitly sends the message that being Inspirationally Disadvantaged is better than not having the disability in question:
Snowdrop: Do you think if I wished hard enough, [the stars] would let me see them?
Primrose: It's better to save your wishes, Snowdrop. For something you really need.note
Films — Animation
- The Christmas Tree: The special is already on one of the lowest budgets imaginable with directionless acting, Limited Animation, and a story that doesn't understand the necessity of plot progression, but then it goes through with one of the most blatant cases of Black-and-White Morality in its moral presented in the last few seconds.
"[Mrs. Mavilda] learned that you always win when you are good."
- FernGully: The Last Rainforest is about as black-and-white as environmental movies get. The movie goes out of its way to offer the age-old message of "nature — good; humans — bad", but does very little to elaborate on such a concept besides a straw villain made of polluted, dark gas, making the main leads feel unsympathetic in their endeavors. It really says something when the two most likable characters are the Plucky Comic Relief, who has a backstory that actually shows a wrongdoing of mankind, and the aforementioned main villain, being suave and charismatic. (It also helps that the two of them are voiced by Robin Williams and Tim Curry respectively.)
- Noel, a movie about an animate Christmas ornament, set in a world where all Christmas ornaments are secretly alive. Noel is special because he has a "happiness", since when he was made, a tear rolled down the cheek of the glass maker and found itself on the inside of the ornament (which realistically should have caused the tear to evaporate immediately). This causes Noel to be incredibly, obnoxiously happy all the time, much to the annoyance of the much more sympathetic other ornaments he was shipped with. Close to the end of the movie, the other ornaments are broken and thrown away, despite desperately pleading to be hung up on the tree one last time, while Noel survives all of them, and the also sentient trees, until he breaks by accident, with the happiness tear evaporating, leaving Noel as a sentient mass of steam that travels the world to spread his brand of happiness to all children. It's the perfect illustration of how disturbing the concept of animate objects can be.
- The Polar Express frames belief in Santa Claus as something important that needs to be learned, on par with the value of leadership, and only those who believe in him can hear his sleighbells. The side character Billy also has never had a happy Christmas before, and it's implied to be because his family can't afford dinner, but then when he gets the present he's always wanted, it's portrayed as a sign he'll have a happy Christmas this year after all — yet receiving a gift won't make his family able to afford dinner.
- Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright: The movie squeezes in a pointlessly corny moment at the end of the talent show when Fred and Daphne decide to throw the contest so Emma can win rather than just win and give Emma the money.
- A Troll in Central Park is so saccharine it will give you insulin shock. A particularly broken scene has Stanley the troll show the kids his vision of a perfect world — a Sugar Bowl filled with trolls that all look and act exactly like him.
Live-Action TV
- Viewers of 7th Heaven are force-fed Christian morals like a baby. The version of Christianity was the vague, feel-good sort that could best be described as "spiritual masturbation". You don't mention Jesus as anything more than a really hoopy dude, because people might feel bad, And That's Terrible.
- The Hallmark Channel has made a small industry out of Glurge-filled made-for-TV movies, known as A Hallmark Presentation. Most often these films are about someone who is overwhelmed with working in the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of the big city, and are forced to move to a quaint, wholesome small town, which they end up finding more satisfying than their past life. Usually a ridiculously hot love interest drops right into their laps to help the process along, along with a few quirky (but bland) small town friends. The only real obstacles the protagonist has to overcome are getting off on the wrong foot with the love interest, or some petty rival, which in real life could be fixed by talking to the love interest like an adult and ignoring the rival. Everyone is just sort of cutesy and non-threatening. If the main character is a woman, the movie will emphasize that starting a family is more fulfilling than having a job. Then December rolls around and Hallmark replaces their normal movies with special Christmas ones, which are the same except the overworked person is so burned-out that they don't know the true meaning of Christmas, which they learn by moving to the same type of quaint small town and experiencing a little Christmas magic. Cue hunky local bachelor holding a cute puppy, who bumps into our lonely heroine...
- One of the biggest criticisms of Hollywood (2020) is that it tries to be a hard-hitting drama that shows of the darker elements and bigotry of Hollywood, but also tries to be a lighthearted crowd-pleaser where all of this real-life prejudice is very unrealistically overcome by our heroes. This then ruins the former element, and the latter element has actually been deemed a slap in the face to the real-life people who couldn't overcome these prejudices.
- Parodied in The Middle. In the first Mother's Day episode, Sue Heck, who often tries out for things that she never makes it into, finds an inspirational fridge magnet with a dolphin flying a kite that says "Think of the thing you can not do and then do it." However, since her father Mike doesn't buy the fridge magnet for her (since Frankie may not have wanted it for Mother's Day), Sue steals it, which is contrary to her nature and makes her feel very guilty. So much for the inspirational message.
- Total Divas:
- While the fan tearfully meeting Paige and saying she helped her get over an eating disorder is a Heartwarming Moment, the subsequent confessional from Paige falls into this. She gives a speech about how she should be true to herself and not change just to please everyone. Except that there was never any issue of her having to change. The entire issue was brought on by her having to wear a dress for the Hall of Fame. She agonizes over dressing up for one night. Because apparently wearing a dress for a formal event is not being true to herself.
- The Aesop about how Brie should dress more conservatively is presented as a heartwarming gesture for her husband, yet it leaves a bad taste with the Madonna-Whore Complex allusions.
- Touched by an Angel: Sending the message of God's love is awesome, but mixing it with this trope ain't exactly a good idea. The original unaired pilot was more cynical with one angel Monica calling humans "god's sport" and Tess smoking.
Mythology & Religion
- Glurge is a common criticism of the New Thought Movement. The main philosophy behind the movement is that divinity is merely human in nature, and that we are all in control of our spirits. In particular, the movement revolves around the so-called "Law of Attraction", which claims that disease is caused by negative thinking, and that positive thinking is said to heal a person of their ailments. This carries a whole slew of Unfortunate Implications and Victim-Blaming behind it, notably that impoverished, disabled or disease-ridden people are only in their unfortunate state of affairs because they think too negatively (conveniently ignoring the fact that being sad or frustrated about your lot in life is a totally understandable response to having to deal with those things for an extended period of time).
Theatre
- The Merchant of Venice: Much has been said about William Shakespeare's morality tale that pandered to the Christian audience of its time. The message of the play if taken at face value is that all Christians are good honest men who are the innocent victims of avaricious, bloodthirsty, downright evil Hand Rubbing Jews, but will ultimately triumph over them. Many modern interpretations however, paint the story as a deliberate Satire of the anti-semitic tales of the age; they argue that it appears utterly contrived when viewed critically, and it is often interpreted to be a harsh criticism of Christianity in disguise.
Video Games
- Gone Home: Lonnie's initial coming onto Sam is reciprocated, but still uncomfortable for Sam. The ending is more severe, with Lonnie and Sam running away to be together but not before Sam steals all the electronics in the house. It's worth noting Sam hadn't graduated yet and ran away from her creative writing course, that she was excited to be in, to pursue a teenage romance that could be just as prone to burning out as straight teenage romances are.
Visual Novels
- In Dream Daddy, for fans who didn't consider Joseph's Good Ending a good ending in its own right, or an Allegedly Optimistic Ending at worst, it's almost always considered this instead. The fact that the devs gave an interview that explained they chose not to give Joseph a "Good Ending" because they didn't want to give the impression of breaking up marriages as a good thing really didn't help some fans see Joseph's Good Ending in any better terms.
Web Animation
- Helluva Boss: In the beginning of the series, Blitzo had no problem killing a family of four to avenge a client whose husband cheated on her. But in "Sinsmas", he decides against killing a gay couple due to the mission hitting Close to Home, despite this also concerning a woman who wants her husband killed for cheating on her. While it's meant to show Blitzo's Character Development since "Mastermind", this fell flat for many viewers due to the complete lack of context about the family's prior situation; it's not explicitly shown nor stated whether the client was abusive to her ex-husband, or even which of the men in the couple was the ex, and while the client was clearly a homophobe, many still found her anger at being cheated on understandable. Additionally, some pointed out that Martha and her family from "Murder Family" also presented themselves as wholesome and good-natured on the surface, so there was no reason for Blitzo to assume that the gay couple's case wasn't a similar situation with only a first glance.
- Being an anthology manga channel, Manga Soprano features several instances of glurge:
- Most stories tend to have overtones of joshiryokunote . While the antagonist makes herself appealing to men and brags about how pretty she is while insinuating the protagonist is "throwing away her worth as a woman" for not being as vain as she is, at the end it's the protagonist that has more "worth as a woman" than the antagonist because of lacking the latter's "unwomanly" traits (sexually active, seductive, egotistical, vain, and/or lazy) and leaving things to her Love Interest and/or (convenient) chance, especially when the antagonist tries (and fails) to seduce him.
- The protagonists, especially the female ones, are always conventionally attractive and are almost always pitted against ugly antagonists. In the case where the (female) antagonist is equally pretty as they are, they will be depicted as vain bullies who gloat about being prettier than the FMC until she's punished and/or corrected for her mistakes.
- If a story features a swimming pool as a setting or plot point and has an attractive antagonist, she will constantly mock the FMC for being "plain" while trying to steal the latter's Love Interest. However, it's guaranteed Rule of Pool will reveal the antagonist's "beauty" was all fake, either with her makeup washing away or revealing she wore breast padding all along while the humble, "ugly duckling" protagonist is revealed to be even prettier than her because she doesn't brag about how pretty she is.
- Most episodes that have Be Yourself as a moral consist of the female antagonist acting the part of a "goofy girl" to get guys' attention and compliments until a real "goofy girl" (usually Kanade) appears and gains the guys' friendship far easier than her, threatening the antagonist's "position" and leads her to double down in order to "dethrone" her. Said episodes end in the antagonist's facade being exposed and/or her giving up after failing so often, and may eventually become friends with the real deal.
- In office stories, the antagonist more often than not will be a vain, lazy coworker who dumps her workload on the FMC while gloating that the latter is "throwing away her worth as a woman." Moreover, she will take advantage of her looks and adopt a burikko persona to charm male coworkers and use Crocodile Tears to sic them on whoever "made her cry." However, her luck will run out when she makes the moves on the FMC's love interest, which results in the man telling her off and her reputation ruined while the FMC comes out on top because of her hard work and humility.
- If the FMC has kids from the get-go, mostly from a previous marriage the female antagonist broke up, their innocence will allow them to see through her facade whenever she asks them about their mother's new fiancé to steal him, tricking the antagonist into screwing herself over instead. It doesn't help that the antagonist, hellbent on ruining the FMC's happiness, falls for it and ends up scammed, poor, or even raped.
- Female antagonists in later stories tend to have petty motivations to ruin the FMC's happiness, which boils down to jealousy and/or entitlement stemming from feelings of inferiority, yet they're played more dramatically than they really are.
- The female antagonist often acts like a Card-Carrying Villain, occasionally breaking into evil laughs, and indulging in overwrought Evil Gloating after she seemingly succeeded before the story reveals she not only failed but also screwed herself over instead.
- Moreover, the stuck-up antagonist will always be punished or corrected for their misdeeds, occasionally ending in them changing their hearts after realizing their wrongdoings after being corrected by the protagonists and ending up Easily Forgiven, despite the antagonist having a history of doing them on purpose to screw people over.
- Episodes featuring disabled characters as protagonists will depict them as innocent and saintly, sometimes being able to overcome their limitations despite all the odds and often rely on able-bodied characters to defend themselves from the antagonists. For a glaring example of this, the Japanese version of 'Because I was visually impaired,My mother said "You're a child I don't want."' [sic] goes as far as to not only have its blind protagonist Sae refer to herself in the third person but also add a -chan honorific (which is as babyish as one can get) to emphasize her innocence.
- Played for Laughs in the RWBY Chibi skit entitled "Nurse Ruby." Weiss is sick and begs Ruby to get her some medicine. Instead of going for the pragmatic option, Ruby instead gets Weiss a glass of whole milk, a copy of Kung Fu Ninja Ultimate Slayer DEATH BATTLE! 2, and to top it all off, a motivational "Hang In There, Baby" cat poster of Blake hanging from a wire. Weiss points out that medicine is what she actually needs, and Ruby still declines, saying that Tai used to do all this stuff for Ruby whenever she was sick, and she would always feel better as a result. ...Followed by a tiny cough.
- SparkTales: The stories follow the conventions of a saccharine morality play as per Japanese social norms:
- Child characters are mature for their ages and can readily distinguish good from bad. They will also be ready to give the antagonists a sermon to shame them on their faults at the climax of every story they appear in, shattering their pride in the process. If the antagonists also have children, they will also join the protagonist's in on the sermon and expose their parents' faults, further adding to their embarrassment.
- The protagonists and their allies are presented as hardworking, kindhearted and selfless people who are also dedicated to their family, whether it's their own or their spouses'. The antagonists, on the other hand, are ridiculously selfish hedonists who do what they do just to be blights on both their families and society, unwilling to change unless their lifestyles are threatened.
Webcomics
- Boyfriends.: Part of the comic's negative reputation comes from the fact that it's mostly 100+ chapters of four poorly characterized men being Sickeningly Sweethearts and going on dates. This isn't an inherently bad thing in moderation, and there are a few bumps in the road to spice things up, but overall the comic is so overly sappy and devoid of substance beyond "cute boys being cute" that it'll give you a sugar headache.
- Death Clown has the baby smashing PSA which exploits glurge tropes for dark humour.
- Each Zen Pencils comic is a Framing Device for a famous quote — and it falls into all the pitfalls of You Know Who Said That?, with many quotes being hypocritical or out of context. A surprising number of comics also encourage readers to quit their jobs and pursue their passion (even if it's obsessively binge-watching Game of Thrones, abandoning everyone you know, and wasting your money to become a character from the show).note Its attempt at an original story arc is a glurgey attempt to paint art critics as hateful trolls who are defeated by The Power of Art.
Web Original
- Mercilessly parodied in this memetic image here◊. It's a story about a boy and a girl in a car being driven by the former, who suddenly stops driving and asks the latter to step out of the car without telling her why. It's then revealed that he was about to crash into a wall and "saved" the girl by making her leave, even though the fact that he was able to stop the car means that he should have been able to avoid crashing into the wall.
- Spam, chain letters and faxlore by the thousands. Snopes has a section dedicated to examples of these, with well over one hundred entries, and yet even that barely dips into the endless well of schmaltz, Narm, and unexamined assumptions that winds up in people's inboxes daily.
- Parodied on Cute Overload!, in which the storyteller gets confused by the sequence of events in the pictures, leading to a very Lost Aesop.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic lampshades this among other things in his song "Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me".
- Facebook has its own brand of chain letters, which often include pictures and added emotional blackmail along the lines of "only 3% of your friends will be brave enough to share this!".
- MySpace had a rash of people spreading religious chain letters that had a subject line like "Party" and a message that read (paraphrasing) "You opened it because it said 'Party', but would you open it if it said 'Jesus' instead? Now repost this with the same subject line if you love Jesus!" Never mind that lying is against the Ten Commandments. More malicious versions of this would encourage the reader to post it with something along the lines of "I hate (best friend)."
- BuzzFeed articles bearing the title "How to Tell You're [Insert Popular and Frequently GIF'd Character Here]!" frequently fall into this. These articles, and the pictures that accompany them, are usually taken out of context, and sometimes bear incorrect quotes, since the GIFs were swiped from Tumblr after the fanbase had photoshopped them. The peppy blurbs accompanying them do little to soothe the irritation. For example, "29 Signs You're the Lisa Simpson of Your Family" consist of images of Lisa Simpson accompanied by text ostensibly comparing the reader to her. Some of these images are taken out of context, especially the final point, "You started from the bottom now you're here. [sic]", accompanied by an image of Lisa in a pool surrounded by other kids; this episode had those kids treating Lisa as popular just to get to swim in that pool, which Lisa's family recently bought.
Terri: Isn't it amazing the same day you got a pool is the same day we realized we liked you?
Sherri: The timing worked out great, don't you think? - One of the worst examples of Don't Shoot the Message is the "Don't Judge Me" Challenge from 2016, popularized by Vine. The format of each vine is starting off with the central person looking unbelievably ugly, usually with excess lipstick, a tissue in their nose, and drawn-on zits and unibrows, only for the screen to wipe to the person looking absolutely beautiful. The message presented by the challenge is encouraging body positivity for those who are considered ugly... except for the fact that no human comes close to looking as ugly as the initial shots are. They're completely exaggerated compared to people who are conventionally ugly, who usually range from Hollywood Homely to Ugly Cute, and could even be considered offensive depictions of ugly people under the right scope.
- A notably vicious parody is the "liek dis if u cri evrytiem" meme, consisting of poorly spelled and nonsensical glurge stories. The typical formula involves a girl committing suicide seconds after misunderstanding a compliment from her boyfriend, or the boyfriend performing a Senseless Sacrifice — one particularly ridiculous version has the boyfriend, upon realizing he and his girlfriend are about to crash their car into a wall, stop the car and angrily shout at her to get out before driving right into the wall anyway.
- Parodied by Rink Works' "Pea Soup for the Cynic's Soul", a collection of tales that are mostly stereotypical glurge but end in a rather twisted or horrific fashion.
- Pinterest receives particular backlash in some circles for its extremely sentimental and preachy "inspirational" quotes. Its glurge can take a pretty nasty turn through "fitspo" pins (designed to inspire the viewer to get in shape), which combine the glurge with emotional blackmail and guilt-tripping.
- Reddit coined the term "Orphan-crushing Machine" to refer to glurgey news stories that seem uplifting at first glance but quickly reveal disturbing implications when held up to any serious scrutiny. The origin of the meme is a post parodying such stories, about a generous philanthropist who rescues children from the eponymous bit of murderous machinery — the unspoken-but-obvious disturbing implication thus being why a device for pulverizing small children exists in the first place. It's often used to mock news items that applaud acts of charity (such as wealthy celebrities donating the bare minimum to charitable causes, or stories about medical bills or school lunches being paid by generous individuals) while, in the eyes of the poster, ignoring the underlying social problems which necessitate said acts of charity.
- Seanbaby:
- Discussed in an article from his old website, "Temptation Beach vs. a Book About Retarded People", which features the book Common Sense Not Needed by Corrie ten Boom. The book is about Corrie's experiences preaching Christianity to mentally handicapped people in Nazi-occupied Europe, which includes applying Jesus' message of love and forgiveness to the Nazis — the same Nazis known for killing thousands of disabled people just like the ones Corrie was preaching to. Seanbaby is quick to point out that dealing with a genocidal dictator is generally not the proper time to trot out Jesus' "turn the other cheek" rhetoric. He also accuses Corrie of portraying the "subnormal" people (as she calls them) as unrealistically articulate and full of wisdom when they repeat the doctrine she preaches.
- Various Cracked articles of his such as "4 Unintentionally Depressing Self-Help Books on Happiness" have him poking fun at books which deliver shameless glurgey attempts at advice for life. Some notably glurgey examples include "The Simply Romantic Wife", a book of romance tips which advises women to be subservient to their husbands, and "1001 Ways to Celebrate America", which was published in 2001:
I haven't seen such a despicable attempt at cashing in on a tragedy since I sold triple-priced body lice shampoo at Comic-Con.
- Discussed in an article from his old website, "Temptation Beach vs. a Book About Retarded People
- Snopes is the Trope Namer and has a category for Glurge, which is usually inspirational-sounding urban legends involving hospital patients, animals, religion, etc. Most of the stories are rated false due to being implausible in real life and not holding any water.
- The infamous "There's a reason erasers don't work on your heart" Vine crosses glurge with an Ice-Cream Koan. It claims that the reason they don't work is because it wasn't a mistake that you fell in love with somebody, but looking past any Fridge Logic of how erasers are physically unable to reach a heart without some kind of surgery, who ever made the connection between erasers and hearts in the first place? It almost feels spur of the moment in spite of it being presented as inspiring.
- "This is an antidepressant. This is shit." is an image that circulated on social media, implying that going for a walk through the forest is better for one's mental health than using actual antidepressant medication. While the idea that the beauty of nature is better than pumping yourself full of "scary" chemicals might sound good at a first glance, it's been criticized for stigmatizing the use of antidepressants by people who genuinely need such medicine.
- This happens on Tumblr a lot whenever someone doesn't do the proper research:
- An infamous post of a long black object with pink on it was claimed to be a black man's burnt arm, and it was called "tragically beautiful". Then it turned out to actually be a picture of a Chance the Stallion dildo.
- A common GIF image purports to depict someone dying in the middle of an MRI scan. The original poster claimed that death causes the brain to release "tons and tons of endorphins that make you feel a range of emotions. Tragically beautiful." After being reblogged as "deep" and "beautiful", someone pointed out that it actually depicted someone turning into a zombie in The Walking Dead (2010) — with the AMC logo not even removed from the corner.
- There was for a long time an infamous post, depicting an animated GIF of an oncoming train in black and white, with the claim that if the viewer closes their eyes at the moment the train "hits", they will immediately feel relaxed, because their brain will momentarily be tricked into thinking they have died. A lot of people have spoken out against the post's apparent glorification of suicide to an audience of mostly teenagers and young adults, and taken great pains to point out that suicide is no laughing matter.
- A very controversial post once said: "I think suicidal people are just angels that want to go home." While a few users reblogged it as "poetic" and tragic", it was met with a lot more anger from people who actually were suicidal from mental illness, saying that romanticizing suicide is never a good thing.
- One picture that still shows up occasionally is a group of African teenage boys with one who appears to be crying in the middle. According to the caption, it's a ritual where a boy who commits some delinquency or other is surrounded by friends and loved ones telling him all the good things he's done to make him feel better about himself. Heartwarming to some (though a bit cheesy, not to mention nonsensical), but the photo is actually a soccer team celebrating after a win. Apparently that wasn’t heartwarming enough for the poster.
- One picture still floating around is two wolves facing each other with fangs bared, while a third looks scared ducked under one of their heads. The caption claims that the ducking wolf is pretending to be scared while really defending her mate's throat. The caption turned out to be complete fiction; all three are male, the smallest of the group just happened to accidentally back into another while submissively ducking out of a dominance display. There's also Fridge Logic as to how guarding another wolf's throat with their head in a fight would even work.
Web Videos
- YouTuber Dhar Mann's "inspirational" videos are largely this. Despite being extremely popular with a young fanbase, the morals of his videos are often cases of Moral Sociopathy or Black-and-White Insanity. There is no nuance to any of the stories, and the "villain" always gets some sort of punishment (which often contradicts the message of the video).
- A particularly vile example is Fake Animal Rescue Videos on YouTube. The way the videos are presented are shots of animals and pets in life-threatening situations, then shots of the people with the animals in perfect condition, implying that they rescued them out of heroism. In reality, the latter recordings are shot first, and the shots of animals beaten and battered are recorded after, as the animals are being abused out of exploitation for the sake of telling a "heartwarming" story.
- TheGamersCave's "I am a Gamer" is supposed to be a celebration of the gamer identity. It begins innocently enough, talking about how video games allow players to experience a reality other than their own, but it goes downhill when the narrator starts claiming that video games are superior to Real Life, reinforcing common gamer stereotypes (such as preferring imaginary relationships to real ones and equating video game experiences with real life). The uplifting techno music in the background only adds to TheGamersCave's preachiness. The video made the narrator a source of mockery, especially when he tried to get a parody taken down.
- The notorious I Am Autism is a film produced by Autism Speaks and put on the Internet in September 2009. It starts out with a man's deep voice speaking over footage of autistic children playing at various activities as "Autism!", gloating about how he "work[s] faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined" among other things. Then it switches over to various saintly neurotypical adults who all talk about how they will bravely fight autism, with one woman saying that "Autism!" "think[s] that because [her] child lives behind a wall, [she is] afraid to knock it down with [her] bare hands." Unsurprisingly, it got a lot of backlash from autistic people, autistic allies, and many disability rights organizations. Autism Speaks did pull it down, but the director of the piece, none other than Alfonso Cuarón, hasn't publicly apologized or even spoken about it since.
- Morton Hears the Womb is an anti-abortion parody of Horton Hears a Who!. The fetuses are portrayed as already looking like babies even though in reality, no one aborts a fetus when the woman is that far along. They can also speak in the womb, and their mothers' reason for wanting the abortions has to do with the fetuses' size instead of simply not wanting kids.
- The Nostalgia Critic has a tendency to choose really sappy music for rousing speeches delivered to straw villains. He has mocked this a few times, like in We Wish You A Turtles Christmas, where he's spewing about Christmas but Tamara is getting gored by zombie Malcolm behind him.
- "Not Alone" by conservative advocacy group CatholicVote argues that people shouldn't be oppressed by others... for opposing same-sex marriage. The homophobic message in general drove people away.
- YouTuber Revolution Tube conversed this trope in a video about "uplifting" news stories that aren't actually uplifting, such as one involving a homeless 8-year old and another where seniors work at fast food restaurants.
- Second Thought's "How Feel Good Stories Let A Broken System Off The Hook" criticizes this trope and brings up how feel-good news stories about acts of kindness distract from the systemic issues that led to the problems dealt with in this kind of stories in the first place.
- Ex-Christian YouTube channel Belief It Or Not tackles the glurge around "uplifting" and "inspiring" news stories in "Religion Doesn't Own Hope", going from the regular ones (little kids helping pay for their schools' lunch debts, local teachers donating sick days to a coworker battling with cancer, a high-school robotics team building a custom wheelchair for a kid with cerebral palsy), to the religious (an angel appearing to a couple in their car and religious iconography surviving natural disasters). Trevor criticizes the former for the relevant organizations' failure/refusal to do something about the problems depicted, and the latter for emphasizing on the "miracle" aspect rather than on the victims' plight after the disasters.
In-Universe Examples
- 31 Minutos: Parodied in the song “¡Rie!“ (Laugh!), which is about how laughing is the best solution to one’s problems, even if there are actual misfortunes going on in the world. However, it’s very apparent that the in-universe singer is a Jaded Washout who’s only doing the song for a quick buck.
- In one episode of BoJack Horseman, Diane and Guy are tasked with filming a feel-good story about two women making dolls...who were recently bought out by Whitewhale. Diane laments afterwards that there's nothing "feel-good" about small, independent businesses being bought out by large corporations.
- Invoked in The Fountainhead: Alvah Scarrett's career is built on writing glurge-filled newspaper editorials.
- FoxTrot: One of Jason's The Family Circus strips involves the father sparing the black widow that fatally poisoned Dolly, saying, "at least one will live." Paige doesn't get it, and walks off, at which point Jason protests that it's supposed to be heartwarming.
- Hetty Feather: Conversed when Hetty reads a book titled Little Elsa's Last Good Deed, in which a Nice Girl named Elsa does many humanitarian acts but then dies in a hospital. Hetty finds the protagonist dull as she's too good to be realistic.
- Kaguya-sama: Love is War has an in-universe example with Show Within a Show Today Will Be Sweet, a tear-jerking manga the cast becomes hooked on. According to the brief plot summary, the male lead is Delicate and Sickly with a terminal disease while the heroine lives in an abusive household and suffered from isolation and anorexia before the Manic Pixie Dream Girl male lead breaks her out of her shell. She also hasn't eaten decent food in a while, and the one decent meal she gets is a curry dish made by her love interest before he kicks the bucket.
- King of the Hill: Hank's mom Tilly collects cutesy figurines, and Hank utterly despises them because of how much she loves them and how they seem to control her life. Then Hank realizes those figurines were the only things that kept her going while she was trapped in her marriage to Hank's Jerkass father Cotton.
- In Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Faith", the Victim of the Week is a benefactor who planned to stop supporting a girl who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease and survived abuse to write an inspiring book about her experiences. He planned to stop because he found out she isn't real, and her "foster parents" are con artists. And this is actually inspired by Anthony Godby Johnson, supposed "author" of A Rock and a Hard Place.
- The Legend of Korra includes an in-universe example of Glurge with a historical tale: A heroine couldn't be with her beloved because he was the son of her enemy and had an Arranged Marriage with a princess, so she rode a dragon into battle, burned down the country, and jumped into a volcano. Jinora thinks it's the most romantic story ever, while Korra is completely nonplussed by it.
- MADtv (1995)'s parody skit "Nice White Lady" subverts the "inspirational teacher saves inner-city students" story that shows up in so many movies by pointing out the racism underlying many such stories. MADtv's inspirational teacher doesn't do much to inspire her black, Latino and Asian students except make random speeches and utter platitudes — but she doesn't have to, because, as the title says, she's a nice white lady.
- Mass Effect 2 has a hilarious parody of glurgey chain e-mails called "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!" It involves a terminally-ill drell (desert-dwelling green-skinned humanoid) lying in the ocean, praying to the Enkindlers, and being told that it wasn't the water but the Enkindlers who were keeping him afloat, then waking to find himself cured. It also makes no sense in the context of the Enkindler religion, which is essentially deist. The religion actually knows the Protheans are precursor aliens, it just chooses to revere them for uplifting the Hanar.
- The Simpsons: Used In-Universe in the episode "Girly Edition". Bart becomes a co-anchor on Lisa's news show, and taking the advice of Kent Brockman, he does a series of human interest stories of this nature, including one of a duck feeder who is upset that ducks stopped visiting him (even though there's another pond filled with ducks nearby, and it's possible that the man just thinks the ducks are gone because he himself is sitting in the wrong spot).
- Mr. Burns: (while watching the duck story and shedding a tear) Smithers, do you think maybe my power plant killed those ducks?
Smithers: There's no "maybe" about it, sir.
Mr. Burns: (sniff) Excellent.
- South Park: An In-Universe example happens in "Cartmanland", when Kyle gets a hemorrhoid after falling into depression due to Cartman getting a theme park to himself. His mother tries to read him the story of Job to help him feel better. Kyle quickly deconstructs the aesop behind the story and is left in an even greater depression because of it.
- The Middle. In the first Mother's Day episode, Sue Heck, who often tries out for things that she never makes it into, finds an inspirational fridge magnet with a dolphin flying a kite that says "Think of the thing you can not do and then do it." However, since her father Mike doesn't buy the fridge magnet for her (since Frankie may not have wanted it for Mother's Day), Sue steals it, which is contrary to her nature and makes her feel very guilty. So much for the inspirational message.
- Parodied in Tropic Thunder: Actor Tugg Speedman, in a blatant bid to win an Oscar, played a mentally-disabled farmhand in the film-within-a-film Simple Jack. He didn't win anything, and the film was a total bomb. Kirk Lazarus explains to Tugg that this is because he went "full retard", and he goes on to show how the actors who did win (or come close to winning) Oscars didn't actually portray mental disability accurately — like Dustin Hoffman playing an Idiot Savant in Rain Mannote , Tom Hanks playing The Fool in Forrest Gump, or Peter Sellers playing a Seemingly Profound Fool in Being There. The only one he says actually played an accurate "full retard" was Sean Penn in i am sam, who "went full retard and went home empty-handed."
- On a larger scale, Tropic Thunder is a Deconstructive Parody of Glurge-heavy Oscar Bait movies (especially epic war films), calling them out as shallow, inaccurate, self-righteous, exploitative, hypocritical, and all-around clueless. Nobody involved in the film seriously believes in its messages — treating it as either a paycheck or an easy Oscar win — but most have deluded themselves into thinking they're deeply knowledgeable artistic geniuses. The Troubled Production is wracked by unprofessionalism and incompetence, with the movie itself being Based on a Great Big Lie (the man whose story it's supposedly adapting is a Phony Veteran). Ben Stiller has noted that much of the inspiration for the film came from various actor friends of his who did Glurgey Vietnam War films back in The '80s and wouldn't shut up about how deeply spiritual the pre-production boot camp sessions supposedly were, making it out as if they were on the same level as real soldiers because they did some token research for their roles.
- Boq comes across some in-universe glurge in Wicked. While at Railway Square, he spots scrolls painted with sunsets and inspirational one-liners such as "Lurline Lives Within Each Heart" and "I Pray to the Unnamed God That Justice Will Walk Abroad in Oz".