BRUTALLY Subverted

Brutally, astonishingly, hilariously, amazingly, it doesn't matter. 95% of the time, adverbs are cruft when applied to one of the ways of Playing With a trope.

Could make a great addition to the TV Tropes Wiki Drinking Game... actually, it's already there. Woot!

edited 13th Feb '11 9:48:07 AM by Fighteer

Also, 95% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Anyways, based on my personal browsing experience, I would say only about 10-15% of the cases of using, "brutally", and 35-40% of all other "ADVERBLY played with" wordings are used as Word Cruft.

edited 13th Feb '11 9:57:47 AM by EternalSeptember

They are unsupported personal opinions that invite Natter; extra words that add no meaningful additional information. Word Cruft.

I'm lost.

Is [adverbially] subverted really a meme?

I write about media for a living. In my experience, reviewers and media theorists are as interested in how things are subverted as they are in what's being subverted. Also, occasionally throwing an adverb in front of a frequently used verb seems like a natural thing to do when told to write in an informal style.

If the problem is misuse, by all means we should nuke the misuses. If the problem is words expressing something subjective, then maybe we want to talk about an NPOV policy, or something. But the English language has always had words and phrases chiefly used to moderate the pace of a sentence, and writers use them because while economy of language is great, so is variety in sentence length, sentence structure, meter, and timing. Even Hemingway used adverbs, and Hemingway was rarely "breezy".

Our Word Cruft article discusses this subject thoroughly, Bailey.

There's no rule saying you can't add abverbs. But it gets missused to the point it lost all meaning. Let the reader decide wheather or not it was "odd" or "brutal".

edited 14th Feb '11 5:08:49 PM by DrStarky

Fighteer: That page describes itself as as a collection of guidelines that may be helpful for new Tropers who may be "unpracticed at economical writing". Which is awesome, but sometimes you're familiar with the principles of economical writing and you're using an extra word or two anyway because economy is only one of many factors in good writing.

I've never thought of that page as a policy saying we can never (for example) use words like "literally" or "basically". That would be strange to me, since we're supposed to be less formal than Wikipedia, but even Wikipedia doesn't ban individual words or phrases on the grounds that they never do anything useful.

edited 14th Feb '11 5:35:10 PM by Bailey

It's not banning anything. They're just guide lines.

edited 14th Feb '11 5:45:00 PM by DrStarky

Bailey, I'd venture to say that well over half of the wiki editing is done by "new" or at least non-veteran tropers, and even some of the old hands are very Word Crufty. New tropers tend to go an editing binge that frequently disregards many of the wiki guidelines. Sturgeon's Law applies to us as much as to anything else. It's far easier to operate from a default of "excise with prejudice" and judge the edge cases than to sit there and have a debate over each example.

Generally a well-curated page won't attract wholesale revision anyway because it's in good shape.

edited 14th Feb '11 6:12:26 PM by Fighteer

I'm certainly not saying we should debate every example. I just get nervous with "nuke on sight" judgments, and especially the mention of doing things related to style with a script.

As a person who tries to put some thought into their contributions, I heartily welcome others changing what I've written when they think there's something that could be made better (otherwise, what would I be doing on a wiki?) but I get bummed at the thought of certain words always being removed on sight by editors using a checklist or script and potentially giving the specific sentence less thought than I did in the first place. Not to say that anyone here in this thread was planning to edit thoughtlessly, but saying we should pull all uses of a phrase which isn't inherently wrong does seem problematic to me.

It of course makes sense to remove incorrect uses of this sort of phrase, but "[adverbially] subverted" isn't "so yeah", which came to be overused mostly because of its linkability. In the case of "brutally", misuses aside, I would assume that it's common on the wiki in part because it's sometimes a valid thing to say about a subversion: some subversions are merely there to be surprising or clever, while others are outwardly hostile to the trope they're subverting, or out to (mercilessly) challenge the viewer's expectation.

edited 14th Feb '11 7:10:53 PM by Bailey

Maybe we should make a proper example test. It looks like we have significantly different experiences with how frequently the terms are misused. Some people say that its so bad that it isn't even worth salvaging the rare proper uses, while others say that it's just naturally misused a bit like everything else.

Maybe I will look into it tomorrow.

I say it's like natter. It will never be completely gone. You just have to use you use your best judgement when editing and hope to leave a good example for future tropers.

Most adverbs describing how a trope is played with are advertising anyway, like "look how special this example is! Read it read it!"

Well, this wiki is "By, for, and about fans", so you're obviously gonna see people trying to promote their interests. Of course, some of those adjectives could maybe work if they were describing things accurately. I don't really see anything wrong with deleting text based on it's (in)accuracy, but, not-quite-blatant advertising doesn't seem too bad, if it described things accurately. Then again, a wiki isn't supposed to be used for free advertising space. This wiki is to teach people what makes up works o fiction in a fun way, not directly) promote somebody's favourite show.

How is something "accurately" brutal, or awesome, or shocking? It's an opinion modifier. We aren't about opinions.

Again, if that's true, Played for Drama and Played for Laughs are also Word Cruft opinions. We have no tangible way to tell what something was intended to be funny or serious, so even if those pages claim that they are about author intention, they boil down to the editor's interpretation of that.

If brutality, or shockingness are things that we can't objectively talk about, most of the Horror Tropes need to be reworked, because they are all about how certain scenes are scary, shocking, brutal, or dark.

Out of the top of my head, maiming, cannibalism, child murder, rape, necrophilia, and genocide, are usually seen as pretty brutal. I don't think that if a normally peaceful trope would suddenly turn into one of these, anyone would complain that the editor is using needless Word Cruft to praise the work, it's more like categorizing it in a genre.

ES, it is usually quite clear from context whether the author or creator intended something to be treated as funny (Played for Laughs) or taken seriously (Played for Drama). They are not Word Cruft; they have a definite meaning, and you will note, a page for each of them explaining that meaning.

"Brutally subverted" (and the other "x-ly [played with]" phrases that are so popular) are audience reaction. You thought it was hilarious; I thought it was meh. I thought it was brilliant; you thought is was lame. Opinion.

As these terms aren't even tropes, they don't have definitions to prove when are they used as audience reactions, and when as styles, but I saw several examples that use these as the subversion of the "played for" variations, but for subversions.

For example, someone tries to use Tap on the Head, and the subject dies. It's a dramatic scene.

It's not Played for Drama, because the Tap on the Head trope isn't really played at all. The latter part, about the subject falling unconscious, fails to appear. It's a subversion.

So, the best way to categorize it as that, and keep the style-defining term "drama", is to phrase that by saying it was "dramatically subverted".

Now, suddenly it's just an audience reaction, because it's used as an adverb, and adverbs are only opinions?

And if Tap on the Head would be played straight, and dramatic events would rise from that, that would be an objective situation, just because we have a page for Played for Drama, that defines that it is an author intention, but if drama rises from a subversion, it is an opinion? How does that make sense?

Why are we categorizing subversions? A trope is subverted or it isn't. It isn't "X-ly" subverted.

I agree. Subversions and Aversions are a boolean thing. They are or they aren't. All the adverbs are doing is attaching YMMV to an otherwise good example.

The "legitimate" use of "brutally subverted" (to me) is when a trope that would be fine if played straight is instead subverted, with brutal results.

The only problem with that (again, IMO) is that either the outcome is brutal (in which case it's redundant and therefore Word Cruft) or it's not (in which case the adverb is incorrect). And all the more so because brutalness is subjective.

So, am I just flat out wrong?

'Cause, if so, I'd like to know where I'm going off course here.

Why are we having trope entry descriptions?

If tropes are just "either used, or not used", why does it matter whether a trope example was Played for Laughs or Played for Drama, if it happened between Alice and Bob or between Bob and Carol, if it was a plot-defining moment or an off-handed comment, if it was only implied, or spelled out?

And guess what? Tropers like to categorize things. That's why we are here. After we listed a trope as something that is present in a work, all that is left to do is to categorize how the work used it.

If we would hold subversions to different standards, and we aren't alowed to describe how something is subverted, that would logically mean only noting that it was "Subverted in show x" and end the entry there, because anything more would be useless Word Cruft.

and You're strawmanning my argument, deliberately. I love when people pull that, as if it helps them win a debate via Chewbacca Defense. Let me make it very clear. The only difference between the following examples is that it takes longer for the second to get to the point.

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted — the "rogue AI" turns out to be a harvested human brain wired into a computer.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Brutally subverted — the "rogue AI" turns out to be a harvested human brain wired into a computer.

"Brutally" is a value judgement that does not exist within the work itself. The reader can and should be allowed to draw their own conclusions in the matter. (Incidentally, I myself have been guilty of doing it, so I understand the temptation.)