definition needs clarifying:: Intended Audience Reaction

(offshoot of a minor Special Efforts forum thread derail)

Not your typical Playing with a Trope title.

It's not an Audience Reaction, but the title is snowcloned from one. It's six words long when the rest of the ways of Playing with a Trope are at most three words long, and most of them one word long (subverted, inverted...).

Picking out some random wicks:

Black Dynamite: X Just X. Doesn't mention which trope this is subject to. From the description it looks like it ought to apply, though, and isn't misuse.
The Divine Comedy: Incorrect, as far as I can see. I very much doubt Dante or Beatrice were intentionally played as a Mary Sue type of character to get some sort of effect even while knowing the trope is Bad Writing.
Flower Sun And Rain: Correct. I'm not sure whether it's true, but at least if it's wrong it's not misuse-wrong.
Rashomon: Correct (hidden in pothole)
The Iron Dream: Correct
Total Drama Island: Incorrect, appears to be used for complaining.
Meganekko: Hidden in pothole. Incorrect as far as I can see, or at least makes no effort to justify itself.
Little Shop of Horrors: Correct
Dark Forces Saga: Correct
Glee: Incorrect. TPAPGW is about aiming for a bad trope to get a good storytelling effect- here they're aiming to make their work suck.

So all in all, out of 10 randomly picked wicks, 4 are misuse and 1 is X Just X. Not very good.

edited 10th Feb '11 12:12:21 AM by TripleElation

Awkward indeed. And I don't even get the joke. And why don't we have a generic Playing With for when a YMMV or Audience Reaction is intentionally placed into the work by the creator?

Name of this is awkward and it does encompass more than just audience reactions now.

I'm a little confused by the whole page, whatever its name is. It seems to be arguing against the Tropes Are Not Bad principle (or, like, at a 90 degree angle from it), like "Here are a bunch of Tropes That Are Usually Bad, and why they're not bad in this case, because they're Invoked Tropes?"

From what I can understand, it's purpose appears to be a sort of way of demonstrating how traditionally bad/poorly used tropes can be utilized in a positive manner.

It's not against Tropes Are Not Bad, quite so much as orthogonal to it.

It's about invoking a specific Audience Reaction or Unexpected Reactions.

The standard example I provide here is The Scrappy. In a movie where people are going to die, you want the audience to hate the early victims to get the right build up of dramatic tension (this is covered in some detail by Asshole Victim).

Invoked Trope doesn't quite cover this situation, since Invocation is done by in-universe characters, and They Plotted A Good Waste is done by the writers.

I can't do much about the misplaced Wicks, though.

Thanks
Luc "Explainer" French

Bump.

There is something that we need to have and that this is currently really close to. What we're missing is the form of Playing with a Trope where the author knowingly and intentionally attempts to achieve a given Audience Reaction or YMMV—the Intentional Trope or Intended Trope.

For example, if the writer says in an interview that the intent of the scene where Bob strangles a baby was to indicate to the audience that he is completely and unforgivably evil, that doesn't make it an objective example of Complete Monster. Your Mileage May Still Vary on how successful the attempt was. But it is objective that the author intended it because Word of God confirms such.

That's the role They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste should be filling, but currently, it's not. The description is hung up on Bad Writing and the clunky title reflects that as well. Can we make this into what it needs to be?

My impression of the page as it's written now is that it describes a very different thing from the Intentional Trope you described.

As it stands, it seems to be when a writer deliberately employs a trope that is considered bad, in the knowledge that it is bad, to convey something. So in American Psycho (the book) the writer deliberately uses a lot of shallow purple prose to show you how empty the people's lives are and how easy it is to miss a statement of murder amongst all that.

Whereas what you described, as I understand, is when a writer intends to put a trope into a work but YMMV if he succeeds in doing so.

I guess the discussion alone suggests this needs a new name. It's a good trope though (if a little YMMV) and should have quite a few subtropes, so I'm not sure if it'd be correct to turn it into an intended trope when (whatever the original purpose) it's nearly found itself a legitimate trope

edited 11th May '11 8:52:28 AM by Tomwithnonumbers

I think the name is excellent, very witty and potentially descriptive... but I'm not positive what the trope is supposed to be about, since audience reactions seems slightly too limited for what the concept appears like in my mind. There are other tropes that just are depicted as bad, no matter what Tropes Are Tools may say, like in so much as naming something "Chaotic Stupid" (which is what got me thinking about this). Sure, they're not always bad, but that sure seems to be the expectation, and when the expectation is not met, I think of this trope, except that I'm not sure if that's what it's supposed to be about exactly.

Let me get this straight, this trope is about a...trope that creators intended to inflict such as High Octane Nightmare Fuel and the like? Well how do we know all of these examples were intentional if there is no Word of God to prove it? I dunno, just the trope name itself seems like perfect fuel for bitching about things in shows that you don't like.

I think it's an awkward name and we should find a better one.

Bump, what makes this page necessary when we already have Tropes Are Just Tools?

I think we only use it when we already have Word of God backup.

I'm wondering if maybe this should be Trivia.

I think so too. I'm not really seeing a trope here. This just seems like a case where the creator of a work has explicitly stated that they intended a certain element of their work to be viewed in a negative light.

If I understand correctly, it's intentionally using a trope (or plot) normally considered bad or cliched, either for artistic effect or to make a point (or Rule of Funny).

For instance: Making your villain the equivalent of Snidely Whiplash and having him tie damsels in distress to train tracks and such in a modern work, either specifically to lampshade how ridiculous it is later or just to make the plot and jokes work. Black Dynamite, for instance, uses plot holes and stuff just as part of the work, even taking a moment to lampshade one (("I threw that before I walked into the room!"))

Never liked the name, I vaguely remember when the trope was made. But I do like the concept, it's mostly a companion to Invoked Trope. Invoked Trope is a Playing with a Trope type while They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste isn't necessarily tied to a particular trope. It's about using what appears to be cliche's and the poor use of a trope in order to properly subvert, deconstruct or otherwise play with the genre.

The best way I can think of describing it is going back to using The Scrappy as an example. You take a character and make them obnoxious and annoying so that they garner audience hatred, then you start to build upon their good qualities and possibly even make them Rescued from the Scrappy Heap. It may backfire as the audience may never grow to like the character, but it is still something of a technique a writer can use to better tell their story.

edited 15th Aug '11 11:45:27 PM by KJMackley

Pretty sure that Cliché is subjective and I'm not exactly sure how someone "poorly" uses a trope. It's either they used it or they didn't.

That title... it burns! We need a new, better title, but I'm not sure what to suggest.

First off, is that laconic an accurate description of what this is about?

In another thread about Stylistic Suck, I and some others questioned why it had to be In-Universe only, which didn't make a lot of sense to me. I was told that other examples would be They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste. Maybe we could do away with that distinction and just merge the two?

The Laconic is pretty accurate.

What is a "negative" trope?

The thing is, Stylistic Suck is confined to the Show Within a Show (or some other sub-narrative) or covers the entire work. They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste is usually more localized (to one character, frequently).

Further, Stylistic Suck covers a vast range of tropes, from Rouge Angels Of Satin to certain artistic fallacies to Beige Prose; They Plotted a Perfectly Good Waste covers only Unexpected Reactions.

The two can overlap when dealing with entire works attempting to be So Bad, It's Good, but otherwise, yeah, Audience Reactions only.

Thanks Luc "What Would 'Stylistic Blow' Be, Anyway?" French

^^A trope generally regarded as a bad thing.

Ass Pull, for example. Generally, throwing something completely unforeshadowed, unexpected, and nonsensical into a story just to solve some problem is considered to be a bad thing to do. Yet Douglas Adams used it deliberately and (in my opinion, magnificently) in the Dirk Gently stories.He used it in H 2 G 2 as well, but not quite as often.

edited 16th Aug '11 1:37:23 PM by Madrugada

Ok, but what would count as a Ass Pull is YMMV. So would that not require the creator flat out saying they used an Ass Pull in their work?