"This is bowling. There are rules."
"It's no game, it's a sport. Games are for people who don't care enough. In sports, you compete to win."
— Kazuma Ikezawa, Summer Wars
Serious Business is when a story revolves around an activity where a sizable portion of the In-Universe population takes it far more seriously than they should. If the popularity of some mundane object rivals that of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson combined, or if there are mainstream schools devoted to it instead of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, then it's Serious Businessnote .
It's often a Silly Reason for War, or can lead to someone being Disappointed by the Motive, and can turn a casual conversation into a heated "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate. Someone who just can't let it go may become a Single-Issue Wonk. If competition is involved, you can almost guarantee that Second Place Is for Losers. Frequently "opposed" by the Cavalier Competitor. Compare "Stop Having Fun" Guys. In musicals, it's often demonstrated that Dancing Is Serious Business. Thanks to psychology
, we also know that The Internet Is Serious Business. Related to I'm Not Here to Make Friends. Not to be confused with Mundane Made Awesome, though the two tropes overlap plenty.
Compare Duels Decide Everything, Overly Ambitious Goal and Comical Overreacting. When a relatively minor crime is treated as Serious Business, that's Felony Misdemeanor. Contrast Not a Game and Matter of Life and Death. A Super-Trope to Overdramatic Dating Commotion, where dating or the mistaken thought of it is treated like it's a huge deal.
Example subpages:
- Advertising
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Western Animation
Other examples:
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Art
- Beast Fables: Were-birds place a great deal of importance on art and self-expression and will dedicate everything they have to their chosen artform. They also consider nearly anything as an art, even completely mundane professions such as repair or accounting.
Asian Animation
- Lamput:
- In "Boss'stache", the Boss is genuinely sad over his mustache being shaved, and it's shown why: the Boss's family gave undue attention to having mustaches when he was younger, with his dad giving him less positive attention than his siblings simply because he didn't have one.
- In "Power of Moustache", the city folk only give the docs the same attention celebrities would when they have moustaches.
- Would you believe noodles? In the European/Korean animated series Pucca, the noodles made at the local Chinese restaurant are such Serious Business that in one episode, when the chefs believe themselves disgraced because of a just-barely-unfinished bowl of noodles, they go to a death course to redeem themselves, while in another, when they split up into three separate restaurants over a fight, it causes a sort of Zombie Apocalypse, with most of the inhabitants of the village wandering as an aimless, lifeless, pathetic mob, mumbling and moaning about the lack of noodles until they reunite. And God help you if you run out of chopsticks. The world will scream.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- In one strip, Calvin throws an enormous hissy fit after losing a game of checkers to Hobbes, culminating in him passing out in exhaustion. When Hobbes points out that it's just a game, Calvin cheerfully replies: "I know! You should see how I act when I lose in real life!"
- Chewing gum is Serious Business in this universe. Calvin is an enthusiastic reader of a magazine called "Chewing" which is dedicated to it and informs an incredulous Hobbes that as many as twelve such publications exist. He names two others, Chewers Illustrated and Gum Action.
- So is a Snowball Fight.
- And he treats his snowman creations like modern art. Though he certainly puts more thought into them than most kids. This is Calvin. Everything comes to life, and most of it tries to kill him.
- This◊ Dilbert strip illustrates how to apply the principles of Serious Business in the workplace. This comic was based on one of Scott Adams' coworkers, who actually said "I will fight you to the end of the earth!" To him, it was serious business.
- In Doonesbury, the frenzy over Beanie Babies (see the Real Life section) was mocked in a storyline that saw Uncle Duke steal Alex Doonesbury's collection and hold them for ransom. The whole thing is treated as seriously as an actual kidnapping.
- The Far Side once had a Showdown at High Noon having ended in defeat for the older cowboy, treating it with all the gravity you'd expect... except it was at ping-pong.
Older gunslinger: Well, you won. Now every player in the world will come after you, looking to make a name for himself... Welcome to Hell, kid.
- FoxTrot: Thanksgiving is a big deal for resident Big Eaters Roger and Peter. There have been several week-long arcs over the years of them preparing to eat as much food as possible when the day comes.
- Knights of the Dinner Table has roleplaying games as serious business. "You don't understand man. He TOUCHED my dice!"note
- Peanuts:
- An early strip had Lucy repeatedly shouting "OLEE-OLEE-OLSEN-FREE-O!" Violet came by and pointedly told her that the expression was "Ollie-Ollie-Oxen-Free." This left Lucy more thoroughly humiliated than she'd ever been in her life.
- Once, when Lucy caught Linus about to throw a snowball at her, she angrily demanded that he take that very snowball apart snowflake by snowflake. ("No pieces! No chunks! One snowflake at a time!") Poor Linus was out in the snow until nightfall.
- Linus and his blanket. When he had to go without it for a couple of weeks, he fainted several times...in a single day.
- Linus also had a pretty intense crush on his teacher, Ms. Othmar. When she was fired for going on strike, he threw an enormous tantrum and vowed to turn the whole matter into a federal case. He also snottily told his substitute teacher that, sure, he'd learn the lessons the way she taught them, but she still wasn't Ms. Othmar.
- Schroeder. How dare you mock Beethoven in his presence!
- Board games are apparently serious business to Rat in Pearls Before Swine.
- Sherman's Lagoon: One storyline has Megan become addicted to Sudoku and treating it as such. Sherman makes the mistake of telling her that it's "just Sudoku."
- Garfield:
- Triple-Coupon Day (September 15, 1985). It's almost like a deranged Supermarket Sweep.
- In the September 08, 2023 strip, Garfield decided to re-evaluate his relationship with Arlene because she likes pineapple on pizza.
Films — Animation
- In The Bad Guys 2, Marmalade challenges Diane to a game of Connect Four from his prison cell, which he takes way too seriously.
Marmalade: This is a game of subtle strategy and psychological endurance, mastered only by the most cunning and sophisticated minds!
[Diane reads the box]
Diane: [unamused] Ages six and up. - Foodfight! (2012): When Mr. Clipboard stomps on a bag of chips for no real good reason (declaring, "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, LEONAAAAAARD!"), Leonard the shopkeeper's reaction is utter heartbreak and horror, as though a soldier had just been gunned down in front of him.
Leonard: That was a perfectly good bag of chips! Never opened... never enjoyed...
- HUNTR/X from KPop Demon Hunters are deadly serious about their pre-show snacking. So much so that they swear bloody vengeance whenever someone interrupts them.
Mira: I didn't even get to finish my ramyeon!Rumi: Why do they always interrupt our snacking?!Zoey: (mouthful of chips) THEY WILL FEEL MY WRATH!
- While the plot of Monsters, Inc. 1 just happened to be about two monsters who worked for the eponymous company, Monsters University gives the impression that every course and program the school offers is related to the scaring industry in some way.
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: Pretty much everyone treats the Friendship Games like this, with Luna even name-dropping the trope and the Humane Five getting slightly offended when Sunset wonders what all the fuss is about, since it's not as important as, say, stopping the Sirens. Heck, Principal Cinch and the Shadowbolts even try to harness Equestrian magic — something they hardly understand — just to ensure they win the Games.
- My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Holidays Unwrapped: Played for Laughs with a gargantuan snowball fight outside Pinkie's home, which involves a huge number of characters from all corners of the series absolutely duking it out with massive snow fortresses. Anyone in range of a snowball is a target, regardless of whether they signed on to play, and the entire sequence is presented as a Faux Horrific parody of war films like Saving Private Ryan.
Sunset: Hold up everyone! Pinkie Pie and I aren't in the game!
Granny Smith: What game? This here's WAAAAARRRR!!!
- The Nightmare Before Christmas:
- Jack Skellington found out the hard way that impersonating Santa Claus is a major crime that amounts to being blasted out of the sky. Well, when it involves kidnapping, breaking and entering, and unknowingly terrorizing people with loathsome and occasionally lethal gifts, despite how good the intentions are.
- This also applies to Halloween, at least in Halloween Town. Since the city is a Planet of Hats with scaring people as its hat, the town council spends literally the entire year preparing for each Halloween, drawing up plans as early as November 1st. The Mayor actually has a minor panic attack when Jack is not at home to go over the plans with him. No wonder Jack had gotten sick of Halloween.
- Pastacolypse involves a worldwide ban on gluten that everyone takes seriously to the point that, among other things, there are entire clubs themed around a gluten-free lifestyle and illegally having possession of gluten is enough to be charged for a federal crime. Alfredo Manicotti sees the ban as an assault on his lifestyle and after turning into a man-pasta hybrid, decides to create pasta monsters made of gluten to unleash on the world and kill anyone associated with a living a gluten-free life.
- For most of Ratatouille, this is averted, with food only being given relatively reasonable import (it is a movie about chefs, after all, so a little of this is to be expected)... until the climax, when Remy's cooking — and the revelation of his role as the chef — are enough to induce a Heel–Face Turn in a stick-in-the-mud critic.
- The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: The opening sequence, where the Krusty Krab is surrounded by a paniced crowd baracaded by police, as if some serious crime had just happened at the place... which is soon revealed by Mr. Krabs to be a customer having order a Krabby Patty, but it had "NO CHEESE!" — this leaving Krabs in an emotional wreck, with SpongeBob handling the situation like a hardened professional. Justified, as its just a dream of SpongeBob's own creation, who would take such a situation that seriously with his passion for fry-cooking.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie: Francis, the dog owned by the Mario Brothers' first plumbing customers, takes it very personally when Luigi breaks his favorite bone toy by accident, enough that he haunts the brothers during their plumbing job and ultimately ends up sabotaging it.
- Trolls World Tour:
- Music. The Trolls split into groups to protect the music they liked.
- Pinky promises. When Poppy promises Biggie that she'll protect him, it causes them to levitate toward each other and unleash a Planar Shockwave seen for miles when they connect.
Cooper: (after he feels the shockwave) A pinky promise. Dang...
- Wallace & Gromit:
- From the short A Grand Day Out: "No crackers, Gromit! We've forgotten the crackers!" Cue dramatic music and a frantic race against time.
- The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is what the writers call "perhaps the first vegetarian horror movie." To keep some kind of tension, given that the monster is no threat to people, it turns out that everyone in town is insanely protective of their vegetables. For them, country fairs are serious business. "We're simple folk! It's all we have!" NB: In real life, competitive growing is sometimes taken quite seriously, and incidents of sabotage and theft are not unknown.
Manhua
- Bowling is apparently a huge deal in Bowling King. No, seriously. Professional bowlers are all either incredibly badass or Bishōnen prettyboys. Oh, and then there's how main character Shautieh Ley's ultimate goal seems to involve taking over the world with bowling somehow; while this isn't explicitly stated, chapter opening pages tend to feature things like a Rushmore Refacement where all of the faces are Shautieh (and similar ones with the Sphinx, etc.) and Shautieh disrupting other sports events.
Manhwa
- Yureka: comes up from time to time since the setting is in an MMORPG. Notable with Myriah who holds a grudge against Lotto and his friends for killing her tamed monsters for experience and loot. —Done well and within the realm of possibilities, thus barely noticed.
Podcasts
- Kingdom Smarts:
- The premise of the podcast is Kingdom Hearts fangirl Shannon Manor explains the series to KH-ignorant Jake Mason of Hey! Jake and Josh one half hour at a time. Because of this, they take keeping Jake as spoiler-free as possible very seriously. One episode during their Kingdom Hearts II episodes opens with Jake explaining that he literally yelled at a co-worker at his day job to not say anything about Kingdom Hearts III to avoid getting spoiled about the game.
- As the podcast's fan community has grown, keeping Jake in the dark has reached the point that the show's fans on Twitter use a specific hashtag which Jake keeps muted, "#KHFree", when discussing events the show has not yet reached. Later episodes also regularly end with a warning not to use KHFree in conjunction with other hashtags nor when sending tweets directly to the Kingdom Smarts Twitter, as doing so negates Jake's muting.
- Mike & Tom Eat Snacks: the Snack is very serious business. People's careers are made and destroyed by how Mike and Tom rate snacks (according to them), and often fans can get upset by their ratings.
- Mom Can't Cook! notes that several Disney Channel Original Movies seem to exaggerate how popular certain pursuits, such as magic, rollerblading, and coin collecting are, which is deemed to be because they were written by a bunch of middle-aged men.
- Mystery Show: Jake Gyllenhaal's height is Serious Business to the folks at celebheights.com. David mocks them while also becoming overly invested himself.
- The Puzzle In A Thunderstorm guys (Eli and Heath in particular) treat some of their running gags this way, especially getting to ask "What's.... [the thing being advertised]?".
- True Capitalist Radio: Ghost is convinced his show is this. Most of his audience (Read:Trolls) seems to think otherwise.
Professional Wrestling
- Professional Wrestling is very much Serious Business, as any issue, no matter how heinous, threatening, or illegal, can be settled by getting into the ring and fighting it out. In some of the more extreme cases, this can get handwaved, as the commentators will explicitly say that a wrestler "declined to press charges" in order to get his hands on the other wrestler at the Pay-Per-View this Sunday, only $34.95, call your cable or satellite provider to order now!
- In Mexico, Lucha Libre (as they call it) is more or less a religion.
- Oh yes. They actually have a wrestling "mafia" who ensure that match stipulations are enforced. For example, if you lose a "Loser Leaves Town" match, they will make sure that you never wrestle in that town again.
- This is referring to the athletic commission in Mexico City, which has retired wrestlers in major roles to help make sure that stipulations in what are essentially stage productions of professional fights are followed to the letter.
- The masks. Once a luchador has put on a mask, he NEVER takes it off. And if he's forced to take it off, he can NEVER put it on again. Just ask Rey Mysterio, who had to embark in a quite topsy-turvy quest to be allowed to wear one back in WWE after losing it in WCW.note
- The best example for the mask has got to be legendary Mexican wrestler El Santo, a massively popular guy who wrestled for nearly 50 years, stared in 52 films and had his own comic book, all with his mask on. He removed his mask publicly only once, a year after retirement. He died a week later at the age of 66, and was laid to rest wearing his mask.
- Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio once had a ladder match to determine which man would be granted custody of Rey's son, Dominik, whom Eddie claimed was biologically his. Oh yes. Dominik Mysterio (and not "Guerrero") now wrestles for WWE.
- Lampshaded when the social worker looking after Dominik in the storyline declared that they were both nuts for trying to settle the matter that way, and took Dominik into foster care until the situation was resolved.
- Kayfabe, at least until the late nineties, was Serious Business for wrestling promoters, many of whom would - as standard - forbid heels and faces from associating with each other in public. Some promoters and wrestlers have gone to insane lengths to keep kayfabe, believing that the industry would collapse if the illusion was broken. WCW was most infamous for its promoters going so far as to lie to their own wrestlers in order to get Enforced Method Acting.
- Here's one typical (but ultimately tragic) example of how far promoters would go to keep kayfabe in the early nineties: booker Kevin Sullivan had made his wife (Nancy Sullivan, then known under the ring name "Woman") the (fictional) manager of Chris Benoit. To keep the illusion of this partnership alive, he ordered Nancy and Benoit to travel everywhere together. While they were on the road, they fell in love and Woman left Sullivan for Benoit. Oops!
- Ever since then, it has been joked that Sullivan "booked his own divorce". Less funny when you realize that he ultimately also booked his own wife's death.
- And then there's the flip-side of that: when John Stossel started pestering wrestlers twice his size about their business possibly being fake and predetermined in the '80s, wrestler David Schultz roughed him up for real. This actually wound up with Schultz getting charged for battery and ultimately getting fired.
- In Mexico, Lucha Libre (as they call it) is more or less a religion.
- Triple H broke into Randy Orton's "home", scared a bunch of women (including Orton's "wife"), fought with Orton and caused a lot of destruction, tossed Orton through a window, beat him up some more, and ended the show by getting "arrested". Guess what happened the next week? Triple H was "out on bail", and Orton... declined to press charges in order to get his hands on the other wrestler at the Pay-Per-View in three weeks, only $49.95, call your cable or satellite provider to order now.
- This is hardly a brand-new trope.
- Back in the early 1980s, a wrestling promoter with Stampede Wrestling named J.R. Foley ran for mayor of Calgary as part of his shtick. He even took part in debates, making sure to wear cowboy clothes and not one of his usual Hirohito or Hitler costumes (he managed the Big Bad). He came in last.
- Abraham Lincoln was able to establish his political career with help from publicity gained in a wrestling match with Jack Armstrong.
- The Great Sasuke ran for, and won, an assembly seat in Japan's Iwata Prefecture, and caused quite a stir by attending legislature sessions while wearing his mask.
- The "I'm not pressing charges because I'd rather settle this on PPV," angle was also used to book the SummerSlam 2014 match between Brie Bella and Stephanie McMahon. Brie quits WWE after Stephanie won't stop giving Nikki a hard time, she shows up in the audience during an episode of RAW, provokes Stephanie, gets slapped, and Brie has Stephanie arrested. Later on, Stephanie gives Brie her job back, but Brie only agrees to completely drop the charge against Stephanie if she takes her up on a match at SummerSlam.
- There were the feuds between Big Bossman against both The Big Show and Al Snow respectively. In the latter, Boss Man killed Snow's dog and fed it to him as a "Pepper steak." In the former, he went through extreme lengths to ruin Show's life. He mocked him on his father's death, destroyed his father's pocket watch, showed up at his father's funeral, ran the Big Show over, hooked the casket up to the back of his car, and drove off with it with Big Show latched onto it while riding it like a sled. He went on to interrogate his mother to admit that Show was "a bastard and his momma said so", and then caved Show's head in with a hammer. Both of these were settled with a single match in the ring, and just accepted that victory as being better than having not had their lives ruined.
- Kane
- Kane TWICE got into a feud with someone because they ACCIDENTALLY SPILLED COFFEE ON HIM.
- MAY NINETEENTH!
- His 2012 feud with John Cena, as it boils down to Kane hating the message behind Cena's t-shirt ("Rise Above Hate").
- His next feud with Randy Orton, as it boils down to Kane hating Randy Orton for shaking Kane's hand after a match and stopping Kane from becoming The Devil's Favourite Demon once again. Or something.
- There must be a honourable Shout-Out to the traditional British form of the sport, which was a cheap and cheerful form of the game as far removed from the glitzy razamattaz of the American version as it is possible to get. British pro wrestling usually took place on a Saturday afternoon and was screened just before the football results on the Saturday sports show. It was hosted in exotic locations like Batley Town Hall in Yorkshire, and wrestlers with names like Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy, and Kendo Nagasaki would pound and pummel each other in front of an audience largely composed of old grannies, possibly the most vicious audience known to man. Kendo Nagasaki, a masked villain, would dread being thrown out of the ring, as the grannies were lethal, kicking, pinching, bruising and bashing, and some going to the lengths of sharpening a ferrule on their umbrellas so as to draw blood when they poked him with it. A long-time star of British wrestling, Mick McManus, belonged to a hardcore tendency who even scorned stage-names and personas, deeming them poncey affectations, preferring to fight with the names that God and their parents gave them. The name of Kent Walton, ITV's legendary wrestling commentator, will bring back memories of those long-gone 1970's Saturday afternoons to British people of the right age...
- Another British association with the game: Louis Theroux, a long thin geeky reporter sent out to investigate all things weird and American in order to decode them for British TV viewers, once covered pro wrestling. Although blessed with exactly the wrong sort of body for pro wrestling, as well as nerdy glasses, Louis signed on at a "boot camp" for aspiring talent run at the WCW 'Power Plant' (this was c.1999), their base for training up-and-coming wrestlers – the only one immediately recognizable among the group seen there was future WCW and WWF/E midcarder and tag-team specialist Chuck Palumbo. Louis' decision was brave particularly because he'd already encountered and tried to interview chief trainer 'Sarge' (DeWayne Bruce, better known as Sgt. Buddy Lee Parker of the State Patrol tag team) at a WCW show, where he tentatively raised the topic of match-fixing – which can be a Berserk Button for old-school wrestling insiders. At the time, Sarge merely looked extremely uncomfortable and quickly retreated from the interview, but when Theroux showed up at the Power Plant, he was putting himself in Sarge's hands. This resulted in a Drill Sergeant Nasty session of severe verbal abuse and punishing physical exercises that left him exhausted, humiliated, and constantly wanting to throw up, with an incensed Sarge demanding that he retract his alleged suggestion that the sport was not athletic – though he'd actually explicitly acknowledged the athletic ability of the wrestlers, despite querying the nature of the match outcomes. A purple-faced Theroux then dropped that line of investigation, but gained some genuine respect from the pros for sticking with the course. Hilariously, someone has since made a video starring computer-game avatars of Theroux and Sarge, in which Louis belatedly takes his revenge...
- Another British association with the game: Louis Theroux, a long thin geeky reporter sent out to investigate all things weird and American in order to decode them for British TV viewers, once covered pro wrestling. Although blessed with exactly the wrong sort of body for pro wrestling, as well as nerdy glasses, Louis signed on at a "boot camp" for aspiring talent run at the WCW 'Power Plant' (this was c.1999), their base for training up-and-coming wrestlers – the only one immediately recognizable among the group seen there was future WCW and WWF/E midcarder and tag-team specialist Chuck Palumbo. Louis' decision was brave particularly because he'd already encountered and tried to interview chief trainer 'Sarge' (DeWayne Bruce, better known as Sgt. Buddy Lee Parker of the State Patrol tag team) at a WCW show, where he tentatively raised the topic of match-fixing – which can be a Berserk Button for old-school wrestling insiders. At the time, Sarge merely looked extremely uncomfortable and quickly retreated from the interview, but when Theroux showed up at the Power Plant, he was putting himself in Sarge's hands. This resulted in a Drill Sergeant Nasty session of severe verbal abuse and punishing physical exercises that left him exhausted, humiliated, and constantly wanting to throw up, with an incensed Sarge demanding that he retract his alleged suggestion that the sport was not athletic – though he'd actually explicitly acknowledged the athletic ability of the wrestlers, despite querying the nature of the match outcomes. A purple-faced Theroux then dropped that line of investigation, but gained some genuine respect from the pros for sticking with the course. Hilariously, someone has since made a video
- The reason for the Edge vs. Booker T match at WrestleMania X-8? Edge took Booker's role in a shampoo commercial (a commercial that only exists in Kayfabe, no less).
- Kurt Angle and Jeff Jarrett had matches with the custody of Kurt's children on the line (Jarrett is married to Kurt's ex-wife Karen in real life) and a match where the loser had to move to Mexico.
- Said pretty succinctly in this WrestleCrap induction:
Angle still insisted that Sharmell wanted him bad, and it would take yet another victory by Booker T to finally vanquish Kurt. It’s amazing the kinds of problems that can be resolved by pinning someone’s shoulders down for three seconds.
- Pro wrestling can be Serious Business for the fans as well, and when this mixes with Powder Keg Crowds, the results are not nice. In Mexico, crowds were tense after beloved wrestler El Santo was beaten and humiliated by three rudos, but when his own son El Hijo del Santo betrayed him and joined his enemies, shit hit the fan in the stadium. The crowd went nuts and started throwing beer bottles and whatever they could get their hands on, not only at the wrestlers but also at other fans, all while women cried and frenzied men jumped the barricades to dismantle the ring. The wrestlers and ring crew had to fly away while the entire arena was ravaged, and mass hysteria spread throughout the city to the point that it took eight days to contain the riots.
- A similar riot happened in the Sumo Hall in Tokyo when Big Van Vader debuted. Antonio Inoki had just ended his match against Riki Choshu when guest host Takeshi Kitano presented Vader and ordered him to crush Inoki, which he did thoroughly. The fans were infuriated and a riot rose in the arena, where the crowd threw garbage, chairs, and pieces of barricade into the ring, and even set the stadium on fire. It caused such an incident that New Japan Pro-Wrestling were forbidden to use the Sumo Hall for years.
- Matt Hardy implied that he was the one who caused the fire that killed his brother Jeff's dog during their feud in 2009. That fire wasn't in kayfabe — that was an actual fire that actually killed Jeff's dog and destroyed his home. Out of character Matt expressed nothing but concern but in-universe? Yeah, arson's on the table as long as you're able to make it to a wrestling ring to sort it out.
- Jim Cornette has been on record dozens of times stating that he would like to kill Vince Russo over how the latter does not take the wrestling business seriously and dismisses it as just entertainment. Given that Cornette blames Russo for the disastrous Brawl For All that resulted in multiple injuries and a failed push for a potential star, and also blames him for the death of Owen Hart, he certainly feels justified in his hatred.
Vince Russo: And I'm just like, bro, this is wrestling. Like, are you serious? Like, y-you're gonna kill me over professional wrestling?Jim Cornette: (mockingly) "Why is he doing this to me? Just over wrestling? Just over wrestling??" That's what it's always been, because he just... "I can't believe that he would do this to me, just over wrestling!" Wrestling has been the most important thing in my life.
Roleplay
- In the Final Battle of Dino Attack RPG, when a large number of Dino Attack agents used the comm chatter to crack jokes or make silly references, one Dino Attack agent attempted to Shoo Out the Clowns by telling them to stop making jokes and references and start concentrating on the battle, using the comm chatter only for coordinating attacks and strategies. This example is largely Played for Laughs, since this one Dino Attack agent is apparently the only one trying to use the comm chatter for its intended purpose in the battle, yet everyone completely ignores him (or, in one agent's case, openly mocks him with a quote from Monty Python's Flying Circus) and continues using the comm chatter for less-than-serious commentary.
- On LiveJournal and its spinoffs, roleplay is very serious business, as evidenced by the "Roleplay Secrets" community, a daily post of (usually) nasty things anonymous roleplayers have to say about other roleplayers, allowed to rag on anything from their characterizations to the size of their avatars. Similar is the "RP Anon Meme", which started as a bi-monthly explosion of hateful anonymous discussion and eventually became a constantly-running community of (slightly less hateful, slightly more spammy) anonymous discussion. People have actually made death threats over pretendy funtime games on the internet.
Theater
- Chess:
- The Arbiter in this musical not only takes his job of refereeing a chess championship incredibly seriously, he also seems to think it makes him a badass. "I'm on the case, can't be fooled/ any objection is overruled/ I'm the Arbiter, I know the score/ from square one/ I'll be watching all sixty-four..."
- Not to mention The Russian in "Argument". His first priority is to win a game of Chess. Once he has won, he can attend to the secondary things in life, such as his love affair, which is falling apart at that moment.
- Given that the play is set during the Cold War, everyone treats the game as an extension of it, to the point the idea of Russia's player defecting is considered a possible incitement to war.
- The play Teh Internet Is Serious Business by Tim Price, staged by the Royal Court Theatre in London, autumn 2014. It is about the "hacktivist" groups Anonymous and LulzSec.
- Oedipus the King: The sphinx that troubles Thebes treats her riddles like Serious Business. When Oedipus figured out the answer, she actually committed suicide,making the trope Older Than Feudalism. Even before that, she'd only eat people once they'd actually made an attempt to answer the riddle, and gotten it wrong.
- In the storylines of many ballets, Dancing Is Serious Business. The hero of Swan Lake dooms his beloved to spend eternity as a swan because he mistakenly dances with the wrong woman at a ball. The titular heroine of Giselle dances herself to death, and later spares the man she loves from the same fate by offering to dance in his place to appease an evil ghost queen who is forcing him to dance again and again. In The Sleeping Beauty, Aurora pricks her finger not from spinning, but from dancing with the spindle despite her mother's warnings that doing so would be dangerous.
Visual Novels
- While court trials are Serious Business in real life, the Ace Attorney games elevate this to a new level with how over the top their cases get. And while being a lawyer is quite a respectable career in real life, they're practically superstars in the gameverse.
- The hotbed of murder and intrigue that is the children's television industry of Phoenix Wright. Deadly serious business.
- Spirit Mediums, too, seem to take it a little too far. But what mother wouldn't be an accomplice in a murder framing her niece just so her daughter can be the family's successor?
- Phoenix's assistant/sidekick Maya considers anything she's interested in to be Serious Business. The sad part is, she usually finds at least one other person who wholeheartedly agrees with her, leaving Phoenix to wonder if he's the Only Sane Man.
- In Apollo Justice, stage magic. To the point that one whole case gets derailed because the Judge wants to know how a trick was done. And the people who do know refuse to tell, because it's against the magician's code to reveal secrets. And if Apollo doesn't figure the trick out, the judge declares the defendant guilty of murder!
- Also, Apollo tends to be tired in the morning because he was up all night shouting at the top of his lungs so that his OBJECTIONS are extra impressive. That's dedication, man.
- Manfred von Karma takes the serious business of being a prosecutor to its limit. He is so obsessed with having and maintaining a perfect record (i.e. a 100% conviction rate, regardless of whether any of them were actually guilty or not) that he murders a defense attorney over a penalty. And in case that wasn't enough, he also took the man's son under his wing and trained him to be a prosecutor every bit as cold and obsessed with winning as he was.
- Everyone in the courtroom (including the main character) react to holes in their story being pointed out as if they had been physically struck.
- Miles Edgeworth takes his love for the Steel Samurai series very seriously, to the point where, after seeing a Steel Samurai theatre performance and finding out that the titular hero was played by Larry Butz, he acts like Larry just murdered his dog.
- Downplayed in Melody (2019). The title character mentions learning how to modify social media passwords in a college computer class. Why on earth would a Gen-Z college student need a computer class to teach her how to use a social media website?
- In Misericorde, most of the nuns of Linbarrow Abbey love a good game of chess, but Sister Adela is very passionate about the game and has strong opinions about how it ought to be played. When Sister Moira beats her using an aggressive strategy which Adela views as an affront to the game, Adela angrily flips the table over, goes on a heated rant about why that strategy is bad, and challenges Moira to a rematch using "the rules of real chess". The exasperated reactions of the other nuns indicate that this isn't the first time she's done this.
Web Animation
- The Andrés Guerrero cartoon about itemLabel's Dinkle depicts him as taking the art of chiptunes so seriously that he goes completely overboard responding to critics saying that his music doesn't qualify as chiptune.
- In Animator vs. Animation, in the VS Minecraft shorts, apparently building is this. TNT throwing during building contests is a regular occurrence, and in "PvP", Green starts a brawl over a conflict in building space.
- The classic Flash film Craziest is about someone who considers Scrabble a religion.
- DEATH BATTLE!: This happens in Johnny Cage vs. Captain Falcon. Captain Falcon won't let Johnny star as him in a movie unless he beats him in a fight to the death. Johnny even comments at one point that "you sports types really take auditions seriously!"
- DigitalPh33r regularly parodies the concept in his Halo movies with unnamed characters brutalizing things in game and/or shouting to the heavens "THIS IS SUCH A BIG DEAL!!!"
- Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures:
- "The Night Librarian", aka Kuromi, calls out Badtz-Maru for failing to return books to the library, and Keropi for reshelving a book in the wrong place.
- My Melody really hates messes, to the point that she stresses when Pompompurin starts consuming messy tacos without a plate. Kuromi gently tells her it's important to set boundaries with your friends.
- If UNO Was an Anime does this with UNO, based on the .emcee comic.
- Landon's Animation Wheelhouse: The conflict to the short "Mildly Absurd Car Chase" is instigated by one driver refusing to use their turn signal.
- Meta Runner takes place in a world where video games are extremely important, to the point that Artificial Limbs have been developed and nobody seems to have considered using them for anything other than playing video games better, and the plot revolves around a gaming MegaCorp having performed a massively unethical science experiment that led to the apparent death of its subject and scientist, all for the sake of producing the ultimate gamer.
- Paranormal High School: A common episodic video that tends to get made are the main cast or anyone else in the world getting involved in minor activities or games and treating them with the utmost seriousness (barring Hikaru), using their powers in very over the top fashions, such as when the entire school got into a snowball fight.
- Paula Peroff: Godot despises the practice of putting milk in coffee ("even a single drop would ruin the entire brew") and throws a cup at Phoenix's face when Maya mentions it.
- Red vs. Blue, which started out as the continuing story of a battle fought over a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, although only Sarge seemed to take victory in Blood Gulch that seriously. Or beating the Blues in whatever confrontation they had later.
- In one PSA, Grif states that "some games are serious business." Apparently, he once "played Donkey Kong so well that he cured kidneyism. It was the best day ever. The End."
- In RWBY Chibi, Lie Ren, usually The Stoic and The Quiet One, will take certain things a little overboard — he has a Training Montage for playing tag, scoffs at how Team RWBY pillow fights and blows up at his own team for their inability to dance correctly.
Websites
- This happens on the internet so often, they have a sarcastic meme just for it: "THE INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS"
- SCP Foundation:
- There's SCP-514, a flock of doves that disables all weaponry in its area of effect and nullifies violent tendencies in everyone around it. This results in teams from rival organizations who are trying to take control of the SCP to use....alternate methods of conflict resolution. Like rock-paper-scissors, riddles, or card games. This has led to the Foundation's commanding officers commenting on how off-putting it is to see two grown men in full tactical gear taking a children's card game so seriously.
- The SPC (Shark Punching Center) takes punching sharks as seriously as the Foundation takes containing anomalies.
- TV Tropes:
- In general, this whole site is serious business. When you think about it, this site's entire premise takes fiction as Serious Business. Let us please leave it at that. Taking irony to new levels of meta, this entry has become Serious Business.
- Amongst the many tropes featured, there is the Complete Monster trope that can't be edited willy nilly and requires a thorough discussion and proposal within the forum in order to even add an entry in the page or other corresponding YMMV pages when every other tropes can be added with ease. There is a good reason for this though: As the trope is about the most heinous kind of character, anyone can easily pick characters who they think are evil (or just simply don't like and wants to spite on them) and 'convincingly' portray them as the worst of the worst that everyone should hate, even from minimum available information, which will inevitably cause judgmental misinformation. Therefore, a discussion and voting phase to see if the character fits is an absolute necessity for this one trope. Other sites like the Villains Wiki or Pure Evil Wiki have their own entry rules different from TV Tropes to show just how severe this issue is. This kind of treatment eventually also spreads into the trope Magnificent Bastard as well.
- Wikipedia, naturally.
- Kobe's career summary is also serious business..
- Once in a while, certain changes to Wikipedia or references prove how MUCH of a Serious Business Wikipedia is. A recent example - look up "Malamanteau" on Wikipedia and go to its Talk page. It's incredible how a single joke can provoke a reaction of such scope.
- Also, certain data being on the article is serious business to some people, as the Lamest edit wars page shows.
- Perhaps the most famous example of such a war is whether the I in Star Trek Into Darkness should be capitalized. The debate was so intense that it got a page of its own.
- Perhaps the most famous example of such a war is whether the I in Star Trek Into Darkness should be capitalized. The debate was so intense that it got a page of its own
- Certain celebrities and politicians have regarded the wiki as significant enough to embellish their own entries or create and maintain their own pages in defiance of the editing policy. To their credit, the administrators tend to snuff out such shenanigans quickly enough.
- If the topic is of the serious business type (sciences and such), you can use it as a source hub.
- Kobe's career summary is also serious business.
- In GameFAQs, the Contests are serious enough for the board that discusses them to create a wiki. Also, in that board, "Most Powerful Character" discussions might get a little heated.
- Three words. Character. Battle. Nine. (The 2013 edition of said contests, which a mass of Redditors brought Off the Rails to the point of Hostile Show Takeover.)
- DeviantArt is taken very seriously at times. Granted some of it is over important stuff like art thievery, but then things just go a little nutty over other topics, such as whether one should comment on a piece before faving it or if the favorite is a comment by itself.
- Heaven help you if you submit a piece in the wrong category.
- Heaven help you
- Rules one and two on the internet: Do not talk about /b/. Whenever a famous enough piece of work mentions it, 4chan will cause a hell of a ruckus over it.
- One particular hot-button issue is whether "Do not talk about /b/" is a general rule or applies only during raids (which are typically blamed on some other online community).
- Gaia Online - people's avatars are most definitely Serious Business.
- The IMDb Top 250. That is all. Sometimes it even gets rigged to help certain movies. Voters have admitted to giving certain movies a "1" or a "10" just so they can bring the average score closer to their desired number.
- Facebook. Your parents and grandparents will know everything you do and will get offended at you. Employers will check your facebook first before anything else. And heaven help you if you ever defriend someone.
- Any website with user-generated content and a point system to reward those who contribute the most has the potential to turn a fairly meaningless number that is only occationally noticed by a handful of people into Serious Business.
- Rotten Tomatoes / Metacritic / Game Rankings scores, as discussed in other places.
- ScrewAttack's Mario Party After Dark will usually (very quickly) escalate into all-out war between the guys. They even have a saying regarding it: "Check your friendships at the door."
- On My Anime List, reviews are serious business. Write a one-paragraph review for the anime with nothing but praise? Get ready for a few new comments on your profile. Write a one-paragraph review that does make great points despite the length? You'll still be told to make it longer. Mention a spoiler, even if you wrote a warning? You're in trouble. Poor spelling and grammar? Even bigger trouble. Write a review of an anime that you haven't finished yet (especially one that is still airing)? God help you. Most people will leave a stern, but polite comment with a link to the review guidelines, but others will flame you.
- VS Debating online can become this in a heartbeat. Just look at The Outskirts Battledome.
- The Onion regularly runs news stories about events whose only implausible aspect is that they're considered news stories, e.g. "Whaler Sandwich 'Not Sitting Too Good' With Area Man".
- The Law of the Playground illustrates the sheer, incredible, mind-boggling seriousness of the correct nonsense phrase to say when crossing your fingers to avoid playground mischief.
Web Videos
- American High Digital:
- "Hydroflask Drill" has the sound of someone dropping a metal bottle treated as an event serious (and loud) enough to warrant having school drills about.
- In the world of "Teachers After The School Day Ends", being seen out in public as a teacher is a crime worthy of police tackling.
- "Olympics of Kids Who Walk The Mile In PE" has kids moseying their way through the mile run represented as a high-level sports event.
- "Analyzing Situationships 101" has mundane text messages being analyzed like classical books in English class.
- "Settling Roommate Expenses" has a quibble over who pays for what treated like a wrestling match complete with announcers.
- "Dads When You Don't Play Well But It's Larping" suggests a universe where live-action roleplaying is considered a serious sport.
- Bart Baker: In Bart's parody of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, there is a hashtag cop who comes up to stop the hashtag abuse.
Hashtag Cop: OK, that's enough. Everyone freeze
(everyone puts their hands up)
Pharrell Williams: Who the hell is this schmuck?
Hashtag Cop: I'm a hashtag cop (#BUSTED)
This hashtag abuse is against the law
I'm not kidding (#THICKE)
Robin Thicke: Someone turn that shit off
Hashtag Cop: I am warning you (#GOAT)
Stop or I will shoot (#LOSER)
OK, that's it, dude! (The Hashtag cop then proceeds to shoot Robin Thicke in the knee)
(everyone puts their hands up)
Pharrell Williams: Who the hell is this schmuck?
Hashtag Cop: I'm a hashtag cop (#BUSTED)
This hashtag abuse is against the law
I'm not kidding (#THICKE)
Robin Thicke: Someone turn that shit off
Hashtag Cop: I am warning you (#GOAT)
Stop or I will shoot (#LOSER)
OK, that's it, dude! (The Hashtag cop then proceeds to shoot Robin Thicke in the knee)
- This is part of the indicative behind Caustic Critic shows like The Angry Video Game Nerd, The Nostalgia Critic and The Spoony Experiment. Reviewers on Channel Awesome treat most anything they review as Serious Business, Played for Laughs. Deconstructed in Atop the Fourth Wall when Holokara takes things a step further and plans to threaten a Death from Above against Marvel over the handling of Spider-Man, which is NOT played for laughs.
- CollegeHumor: For the Nazi Party, grammatical correctness is apparently very serious business:
Monsieur La Padite: I swear, I do not know where Mademoiselle Dreyfuss is at.
Hans Landa: ...Did you just end a sentence with a preposition? - In the YouTube series The Guild, playing an MMORPG is very serious business. More serious, apparently, than parenting or social interaction. It's based on Felicia Day's two-year addiction to World of Warcraft, so it's definitely Truth in Television.
- The premise behind many Hitler Rants parodies, where Hitler melts down over anything from getting his Xbox Live Arcade account banned, getting a Wii instead of a PS3 for Christmas, and so on.
- Jayuzumi tends to run into these players a lot when playing video games and using soundboards to prank others. This happens mostly in Call of Duty, and to a lesser extent in Battlefield.
- In Dominic Fear's Kenny Bassender (Full Title: Kenny Bassender's Quest for Greatness with the Underground Association of Puppydog Racers) movie, Kenny Bassender is a normal person who isn't special. Until he starts playing a game called Puppdog Races, where he is flawless. So great, that the other members of the Association try to kill him. Not the whole society (it still is in normal present-day America), but very serious.
- The League of Extraordinary Industrial Retards go on a quest to kill Trent Reznor and Ronan Harris and prove to the world that Industrial music is serious business.
- In Let's Drown Out Night Shift, Ben Yahtzee Croshaw and Gabriel Mortom admitted that the things they said over the weeks have been awful but the ones that seem to get the most attention is that Yahtzee mentioned that 30 fps looks the same or better than 60 fps, causing an outrage in the comments section.
- Mario Party TV: In the Trailer for "LP Every Mario Game", Steeler's biggest strength is stated to be that he takes Mario Party seriously. (It's also listed as his greatest weakness.)
- Movie Trivia Schmoedown is the most serious business movie trivia contest the internet has ever seen. There's championship belts. There's tournaments. There's wrestling-inspired storylines. Search around in the right places you'll find a list of statistics. Over Movie. Trivia.
- Noob takes the "MMORPG are serious business" route also, but is much more nuanced than The Guild due to them mostly showing up in reports about video game addiction in mainstream media in France. Skewed Priorities happen a lot and the top guilds ask for people joining them to have a lifestyle that can only happen if you're single and unemployed. At the same time, people that arrive at the top in the domain get enough recognition to appear in advertisements and live off it. Characters are also seen doing other stuff than playing, while a small portion of the cast is explicitly doing it for fun and being able to enjoy the company of their guildmates.
- The Nostalgia Critic: Cake is serious business!
- The Octopus Lady: Played for Laughs. One video has her tell other video makers she wants them to help her cancel TierZoo because he ranked cuttlefish as better than octopuses. They reply in unison "That's it?"
- Pittsburgh Dad and the Pittsburgh Steelers. God help you if you're a Ravens fan!
- Invoked in ProZD's "Chairem Anime" series, in the installment about anime timeskips and spinoffs.
Tomoko: Everything's changed. It's been three years since Refrigerator-senpai killed Lamp-senpai and left our village. My outfit is now black, because things are Serious Business now, in Chairem Anime: Sofaden.
- Project: Library has been described as "a Michael Bay movie with books", full of fight scenes and action clichés, but set in a library and whose plot revolves around an overdue book.
- Rhett & Link: Do not mess with the trail mix that Rhett's mom made!
- In Rosy The Rascal 15's Locos Doritos video, Jerry eventually goes ballistic over his bag of Doritos being stolen, including up to shooting Amy, who was trying to talk him down.
- This (subtitled) episode of the Québecquois series "Tom et ses chums" ("Tom and his pals") has the titular character playing a game of D&D with old friends. What he doesn't realize beforehand is that they've kept playing the same party every week during the years he hasn't seen them (meaning they have absurdly high-level characters), and for them (barring the GM), this is very serious business. When they demand that his new character start at level 1 (making him useless since the encounters are tailored for a high-level group), and then belittle him for being a peasant, he gives up and decides to be The Loonie.
- In TomSka's video "Writing A Horrific Kids Book", Tom and Eddie make up a nonsensical story about a creature called "The Flibbity-Jibber". Even though every part of the story was unplanned, Tom still demands that each page begin with "The Flibbity Jibber", and flips the table when Eddie tries to write something different.
- Freddie Wong's Video Game High School is set in a world where video games are Serious Business. Losing a game at the title school can get you expelled.
- This video. More specifically, at 1:30. "Being a lawyer, as the internet says... IS SERIOUS BUSINESS."
- Hiring a boat is Serious Business. Just ask Andy Samberg and his friends.
Web Originals
- Bright Lights is a short crime story about a Las Vegas tourist who sees a man gun down a guitar in broad daylight and decides to find out why. While no one besides the protagonist, from the cops who cart the guitar away on a stretcher to the city morgue that processes it, views the act as a legitimate murder, they are understandably wary of a person who would perform such a public display of brazen violence.
- My Life Is Average has a very dedicated group of people that hate on any story that isn't average or has words like "it made my day" or "Best. X. Ever."
- Halo 2 ARG I Love Bees had a player try to answer a live call in the middle of Hurricane Ivan. Someone actually had to break character to tell him to get to safety;
Dude, it's a hurricane. Put the phone down.
- If you ever say first on any forum topic whatsoever, you will be flamed to within an inch of your life.
- Usernames and handles, especially chat sites and in particular, RP chat sites. The amount of drama that happens because someone is hoarding a Pokemon name, for instance, rivals that of the US presidential election.
- The comments section for page 256 of Off-White was embroiled in an argument over whether the artists should have made their wolf characters... anatomically correct. It was exactly as stupid as it sounds.
Kitchi: Why is there a debate about wolf genitals in this comment section? Did I miss something? Why is that so important?
- For the longest time, the Closing Logos Group considered Scare Factors to be this, until a messy and explosive debate on the subject that ultimately led them to be replaced by Editor's Notes in November 2018.
- A meme on the Japanese Internet (a translated version of which is well-travelled on anonymous text boards) involves a somewhat lengthy rant about visits to Yoshinoya being really serious business. Just read it. Variations are popular for ranting about extremely petty things. The meme itself was actually referenced on Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, that's how widespread it is.
- On Barkwire, rating and reviewing the activities of local dogs is deadly serious.
- This parody of UNO as an anime. Complete with the Hot-Blooded shounen hero, the Obviously Evil Agent Peacock villain, The Smart Guy Narrating the Obvious, and so on. Yes, apparently UNO is a big deal to these people.
- Food is this to Achievement Hunter, as Chad James found out the hard way when his desk and everything on it was stolen by the division while he and most of his building's co-workers were executing their own heist for a microwave. All because he had declined a Michael-offered taco before then.
- John Oliver spent fifteen minutes talking about Air Bud, including the ethics of getting a dog to play basketball and whether you would be allowed to bring in an unsigned ringer in the middle of state.
- "Legitimate language in a multilingual school", an academic report by Monica Heller, describes a Canadian school in which French is the dominant language. Since many of the students are bilingual, speaking English has become an act of rebellion and something many students care about.
I have seen students calmly answer a teacher’s question in English, provoking anger, acquiescing by repeating themselves in French. I have heard them argue that the French-only rule doesn’t apply until the bell rings, carving out an autonomous space for themselves in the temporal organisation of the school day.
All of the talk between the teacher, Lise, and Mohamud surrounding this process was in French (...) one day the running disputes between Mohamud and Lise came to a head, and Lise decided she had to send Mohamud to the school office for discipline. Mohamud’s last rejoinder to Lise was suddenly in English, as he stormed out of the class, slamming the door behind him.