never heard of The Dark Side Will Make You Forget though
I was in the same boat. When I saw the post about that, I was pretty surprised because I thought I was at least passably familiar with most of the major entries on TVTropes, which Jerry is obviously referencing here. I figured, if this was really "the worst trope in existence" I feel like he woulda...mentioned it, once, in the years we've been archiving his posts? So I looked it up, and it's as stupid as it sounds.
"The Dark Side Will Make You Forget" is a TVTropes page describing exactly what it sounds like. Someone does something bad in the interest of the greater good (say, they rob a rich asshole to give the money to charity), then it works great so they do it again, and eventually they define themselves by the bad thing and forget the good thing. As the name suggests, it is derived from the Star Wars lore where evil is a defined force that inherently corrupts and turns you into the exact same power-obsessed maniac as every other dark side user.
It is also...pretty much a trope exclusive to Star Wars. I checked the examples, the discussion thread, there's basically nobody who cares about this trope. Seriously, I kept checking more pages to find anything that mattered, and kept finding basically nothing to talk about. There's like one edit a month, and most of the examples barely count, or are aversions or something. How did Jerry even find this? And, more importantly, why is he suddenly claiming this single trope is a huge deal that needs a video to deconstruct it? The only franchises that have any significant examples are...oh, Star Wars, World of Warcraft, and Kingdom Hearts. So, basically every franchise, according to Jerry.
Yes, I see now. Jerry was watching Star Wars again, and getting mad that literally every piece of the lore, from the first frame of the first movie, has universally claimed that the sith are unambiguously evil and the dark side is inherently evil no matter how good your intentions, and every single Star Wars fan knows this is the entire purpose of the dark side, so he decided to find the nearest TVTropes page like a child, and then demands everyone treat it like a big deal. 90% of people have never even thought about this trope, this is not an example of "all the bad writers keep doing this and I'm offended" it's
literally just a fantasy Star Wars corruption thing. It really cannot be emphasized enough how
not a big deal this trope is.
