It Didn't Help That X

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Revision as of 16:39, 25 March 2012

"It Didn't Help That ..." is a phrase similar to Nevermind That X. On TV Tropes, it's often Pot Hole'd as Understatement, as it seems to devalue the importance of the explanation after it, which in other contexts would be bigger.

It is often used as a Justification to a previous idea.

The Inversion is "It helps that", although more rarely used.

Another, more fade meaning, is that doing something literally didn't help, that is, made no difference. This meaning should not be described here because it generally is unfunny, or be split in another section if needed.

Examples

• Warhammer 40,000 novels dwelv into this:
  • In Soul Drinkers:

    No doubt it had been an artistic marvel in its day, but now it was dark and sinister. The way the mandrakes could occasionally be seen, bleeding from one shadow to the next, didn't help.

  • Horus Heresy book The First Heretic:

    The captain had never heard the layer of unease in Xaphen's voice before. It was not helping his own fragile calm.

• Doctor Jenner from The Walking Dead uses this line at the beginning of his introduction episode.
• Nice lines from Eyes Wide Shut:

  Dr. Bill Harford: Was it the second password? Is that what gave me away?

  Victor Ziegler: Yes, finally. But not because you didn't know it. It was because there was no second password. Of course it didn't help too much that those people were in limos, and you showed up in a taxi. Or that when they took your coat, they found the receipt to the costume from the rental house in your pocket made out to you know who.

• Lisa Kleypas' Sugar Daddy:

  • It didn't help matters that I was shy and wore glasses. I was never one to stand out in the crowd. I liked to stay in corners. And I was happiest when I was alone reading. [1]

• I ended up using Greg's sed solution, but had to modify it because of sed/windows bugs/features (it didn't help that it came with no documentation). [2]
• It didn’t help that linebacker Corey Ray and free safety Jason House, who were both responsible for making pre-snap calls and checks, went down with injuries in September. [3]
• At the end of this bash.org like site, there's a note saying "It didn't help that Eva had heart stickers on her face at the time."
• Seth Green is reported to have said "So not only was I the smallest, I was also the youngest. To the other kids, I also had a funny name. They'd call me Death instead of Seth. It didn't help that I didn't play athletics at school." [4]
• In Larry Niven's A Gift From Earth ch. 14 Balance of Power:

  Millard Parlette was near exhaustion. ... Sometimes it seemed to him, that he was at the end of his life, that he'd waited just long enough to meet this — the crisis he'd foreseen a hundred years ago. ... Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and no one could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn't help that the rumors were true.