Not opinion-related: Adaptation Decay

I think there are some doubts that Adaptation Decay was ever truly "value neutral."

Does anyone have the original YKTTW? I do remember there was a big harping about Adaptation Decay and Adaptation Distillation not being "bad" vs "good" mirror tropes.

No ykttw link on the archived discussion page; it's possible that Adaptation Decay predates ykttw.

This is the earliest version known to the Internet Archive, almost certainly before YKTTW existed in any form. The first two paragraphs haven't changed a word since then, and these imply the trope has always been about adaptations being "handled poorly".

Even without knowing this, a value-neutral original version wouldn't have been a good bet.

So it was misconceived from the start. How can we redefine it and expect people to stop misusing it at this point? Do we even want to keep a trope that is all about complaining, because I believe we have a rule against that somewhere. Even making in a no examples fan-speak page would be fairly pointless as Complaining About Shows You Dont Like already says it all, you'd only need to add one line saying it applies to adaptations as well.

The only thing I can think of is limiting it to in-story use and intentional cases like what Excel Saga or The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy did and moving the rest to Troper Tales (I'd be fine with axing them entirely too). That way we can make it more or less objective. Fixing the 2000+ examples on other pages and getting people to comply with the new use is going to be a chore though, but I really feel we need to do this sooner or later.

Another interesting thing to note from that archived page is that Pragmatic Adaptation was originally the elusive value neutral equivalent of Adaptation Decay (though basing an objective trope on a vaguely defined subjective one was probably not the best order to go about) before Adaptation Distillation took over that role, which explains why people have such trouble telling them apart and instead just use Decay / Pragmatic / Distillation as synonyms for Bad / Okay / Good adaptations. And That Is Terrible.

edited 14th Jan '11 4:26:35 AM by Killomatic

That's primarily the problem with Adaptation Decay, that it is essentially Complaining About Adaptations You Dont Like and the other tropes just confuse the situation.

Bump.

It seems we have more or less exhausted the topic, at least as far as Adaptation Decay goes. The next logical step is to set up a crowner and let people vote on the best course of action.

edited 18th Jan '11 8:13:04 AM by Killomatic

Okay, what are our options: "Leave as is", "Make the definition non-subjective and just refer to change"?

The ones I can think of are "Do nothing"; "Redefine to value-neutral (and change name)"; "Give it the flame bait banner and nuke all wicks"; and my previous suggestion "Keep the basic definition, but narrow it down to in-story use or parodies of the concept only".

Edit: Wrote this hours ago, but the god damn server wouldn't let me post it.

edited 18th Jan '11 12:47:46 PM by Killomatic

Apparently this isn't the first time Adaptation Decay was sent to Trope Repair. There was a crowner for a rename back in July with not too encouraging results. Hopefully this time things will turn out differently. Now, if we're all set... who knows how to make a new crowner?

I suggested before perhaps keeping Adaptation Decay as is since it appears to be in most troper's lingo as a 'bad adaptation' and that may be hard to shake... Then perhaps make a different, non-subjective trope for examples that are deliberately different from the source material though not necessarily making the changes just to suit the medium (Liberal Adaptation?).

The fact most people on the wiki are doing it does not make it okay, quite the opposite. Think about This Troper, I Am Not Making This Up, So Yeah, X Just X. Not to mention tropes that outright claim something sucks usually get cut or sent to Darth Wiki. That being said, I believe you can add any option you want once we have a crowner, so how about that?

Adaptation Decay is clearly meant to be an analogy to video or audio degradation, which is not subjective: in compression and decompression data is lost, which is not necessarily a bad thing (it's not data we can hear and see and it lets the song or movie fit on your iPod), but yeah — it's carried negative connotations for as long as I can remember and I've wasted years of my life on this site. <.< It's always been used for complaining about adaptations you don't like.

I'd say embrace the negative connotation, nuke all non-fictional examples — even a Troper Tales page would probably just turn into Flame Bait very quickly — and perhaps conflate Compressed Adaptation and Adaptation Distillation. I'm not sure we even need a value-neutral "this show was adapted" trope — QFT for whoever chairs'd that.

Can I mod make a crowner, I can't figure out how.

Probably, if you send them a PM. Is there someone in charge of crowners in particular, or can you just bug anybody about it? And do you have to give them all the options or just the thread name, trope name and crowner type? Seriously, has no one here done this before?

You can take an existing crowner and change the end of the URL to the new crowner type/trope name.

Okay, the basic stuff is done. Now how do you hook it to the thread exactly?

You need a mod to hook it. Holler a mod using the exclamation point button.

edited 19th Jan '11 3:26:19 PM by troacctid

I'm done with what I wanted to put, if anyone else wants to add more be my guest. And now we wait.

Edit: Okay, now I'm really done. Hope I didn't get carried away.

edited 19th Jan '11 3:53:22 PM by Killomatic

I'll help clean the wicks if the eventual outcome requires it.

Come on, tropers. There's no point in this unless more people vote.

Well only one option has positive votes. Let's see how this ends up after the weekend.

So, we have a clear lead and votes have stalled again. Do we call this one or give it a few more days?

edited 23rd Jan '11 4:22:25 PM by Killomatic