many examples don't seem appropriate: Family Unfriendly Aesop

"Surprising and different" wouldn't make it any less subjective, since "surprising" and "different from accepted moral values" are both subjective.

"different" (where did the "..from accepted moral standards" stuff come from?) is not subjective. If something is X and then it is Y, it is different. If one thing is X and the other is not X, they are different. "surprising" is more of a problem.

If "surprising" is subjective, then Tomato Surprise, Daydream Surprise, and basically everything on the Surprise Tropes index is subjective.

They're intended as a surprise.

If the trope was for morals which are different to the norm, it would be necessary to prove which is the 'dominant' moral.

edited 21st Feb '11 3:35:18 PM by halfmillennium

An Aesop is also intended, unless it was an Accidental Aesop as well.

The aesop is intended, the surprise is not necessarily.

Those aren't the same kind of surprises; they're intentionally concealed, and then revealed. An Aesop that's surprising like that would be an Aesop that comes straight out of left field, like, "Woah, where did that come from?" Which has nothing to do with the current definition. We're talking more The Un-Twist-style here.

"Different" is subjective because different from what? Values Dissonance exists.

edited 21st Feb '11 3:41:11 PM by troacctid

Wait, I'm getting lost... is this trope "the aesop was made intended to be as such (surprising, different, warped, whatever)" or "people think this aesop was intended as such (parenthesis as above)"? One of those is clarly objective.

If the audience reacts that way, and there is no good reason to assume that the writer intended something else, we normally assume that tropes were intentional.

The two are the same.

edited 21st Feb '11 3:42:41 PM by EternalSeptember

We assume! Great! Saves me having to explain futher.

And they're not the same. The latter requires people to make an assumption; the former doesn't.

edited 21st Feb '11 3:43:20 PM by halfmillennium

There is no way to confirm if any trope ever was intentional, without Word of God confirmation.

edited 21st Feb '11 3:43:59 PM by EternalSeptember

We have another trope for Aesops that are warped intentionally for ironic purposes: Spoof Aesop.

Eternal September: how are those two the same? Are you saying You Gotta Have Blue Hair is subjective? Or YMMV, for that matter?

Tropes are things that authors intentionally use to convey a meaning.

You Gotta Have Blue Hair on it's own is borderline PSOC, with no meaning or meassage, just the fact that a color appears. Shy Blue-Haired Girl works better as a subtrope. Here, we just assume that the author is familiar with what the color is associated with, and used it for that and didn't just coincidentally use blue color for a shy girl.

When you see a Kubrick Stare, you just make an assumption that it was intended to be evil, and not an accidental position of the actor's head.

With an Ominous Fog, you just assume that the director wanted to make the scene more ominous, like in many other movies, and it wasn't just a bad weather on the shooting day.

They are all based on a certain level of benefit of doubt.

We can't just randomly pick on this one trope, and decide that "author intention must be proven, otherwise it's just an YMMV audienc reaction"!

edited 21st Feb '11 3:56:01 PM by EternalSeptember

You know, it's lovely debating existentialism with you, but with a lot of tropes, we don't assume what the author thought; we make a decision based on the effect in the finished work.

If a work qualifies for Britain Is Only London, we don't assume the author was willingly ignorant of British geography and culture, do we? Or that they did do the research but then played it straight for the heck of it?

edited 21st Feb '11 4:01:45 PM by halfmillennium

Britain Is Only London isn't a Did Not Do The Research page, it is a part of Hollywood Atlas, that is about using symbolic, stereotypical parts of locations. So yes, we assume that it was intentionally used.

Please, can we not get derailed into yet another discussion about subjective tropes in general? Some tropes are subjective. That is the policy; that is a given. Family-Unfriendly Aesop falls into that category because it relies on a subjective interpretation of which Aesops are normal, common, and accepted.

ES, this is getting off-topic. If you think it's safe to assume that everyone who uses Britain Is Only London is doing it intentionally, that's your belief. I've said all I have to say; troacctid has more than adequately explained it.

edited 21st Feb '11 4:27:33 PM by halfmillennium

"Different" doesn't really seem subjective to me. As noted earlier, "there are 999 stories which teach not to be greedy and 1 story which teaches that greed is good" is not subjective.

Values Dissonance shouldn't be an issue since the trope definition already states "This list is for morals that were family unfriendly even for the culture that they were written in." (emphasis added)

Hey, if you don't believe me, go look at the examples. It's a natterfest down there.

Then the examples must be corrected. Examples make not the trope.

Natter is often an indicator of a YMMV-ness. Heavy natter in the examples is evidence that the trope is subjective.

We already know that there is natter, and it is currently subjective, and that's why we are trying to find a better trope definition.

I basically agree with arromdee, that YMMV shouldn't be defined as "anything that we can disagree about if we really try to", but as "a thing that people commonly disagree about". It's just used as an excuse to brand anything as a YMMV based on the fact that it has a TRS thread and there are people arguing in it.

Currently, there is natter because people have different expectations of "family friendly". "Different" and "surprising" are not inherently as subjective, because as we can see, there are tropes based around these concepts that are still functioning.

Basing this on societal conventions would be fine if there was any way to prove things. Can anyone honestly say whether any specific country is, mostly, secular or religious (and if so, which religion), pro-life or pro-choice, pro- or anti-gay marriage, pro- or anti-green movement, or conservative, liberal or somewhere which doesn't fit onto that graph? All of the above can be used for aesops.

I can say that, in my country at least, all of those positions are so common that seeing an Aesop espousing any of them wouldn't be surprising.

An odd Aesop wouldn't be "abortion is okay" or "abortion is bad"; it'd be something like "abortion is okay, but requires unanimous consent from both parents".