Evident rampant misuse...: Moral Event Horizon

No, the Draco in Leather Pants effect means that some members of the audience will always find the villain justified or redeemable, even if s/he eats babies for breakfast and blows up populated planets like it's going out of fashion.

edited 29th Jul '11 8:56:55 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

What is irredeemable to someone might not be for someone else and vice-versa.

Take the page image on draco, Sephy from Final Fantasy VII by his hand he created the saddest moment in video games by killing Aeris to me that's so far past the event horizon it's not funny but do you know how many people defend him to no end, or how many fanfics written where he is well "dreamy" and on the other side of the coin there are people who complain he wasn't evil enough to break the line.

edited 29th Jul '11 9:19:09 AM by Raso

And from the opposite side, there's the aforementioned Ron the Death Eater effect, where the audience dislikes a character for arbitrary reasons and proceeds to blow their bad deeds completely out of proportion, claiming that a Poke the Poodle incident was somehow a MEH crossing.

I think with ME Hs, we need to go with creator intent. Yes, this'll cause a "but who are you to say he DIDN'T mean this?", but a LOT of moral event horizons are clear cut in many media.

Maybe there's a need for tropes that cover the "moment when we realize character is evil" and "moment when character goes from likably evil to unlikably evil" usages.

For example, I remember the big furor in the Megatokyo fandom when Ed, an Ax-Crazy Psycho for Hire, stalked a distraught Ping through the Cave of Evil, with an intent to destroy her. It wasn't anything new for the character—he had been blowing things up and stalking Ping from almost the beginning. But the combination of his targeting Ping, the most beloved character, when she was already an emotional train wreck from dealing with the mysterious disappearance of her best friend, bullying from classmates, and being rejected as a "real" human being because of being a robot and the dark, sinister way in which it was portrayed took an Affably Evil (who had even teamed up with the heroic Largo on occasion) and Laughably Evil character and made him unlikeable.

That's clearly not crossing the Moral Event Horizon, but considering that nearly the entire fandom had a the same simultaneous reaction to it, it's something. Maybe creating a trope for examples like that would help reduce misuse of Moral Event Horizon.

This seems to be covered by the poorly-snowcloned Bait the Dog. I think. Actually, Bait the Dog may need a thread of its own.

From the beginning of MEH (back when it was called Rape the Dog) I've been using the trope as being a moment where the villain crosses a particular line and the heroes (or other villains) recognize that their view of the character has changed forever. That definition is completely objective as you can identify elements within the story where the "event horizon" changes the tone of the story.

In practice, people love putting down what they feel are horrific and evil acts regardless if the villain does the exact same thing every week. That's why it has become subjective, because there are varying degrees of "evil-ness" where different people draw the line (I am not kidding, I once removed an example that had to deal with stealing a couple dollars from a charity jar).

edited 1st Aug '11 8:26:56 PM by KJMackley

Ugh, talk about Trope Decay. That could have been handled if we had made sweeps like we did for I Am Not Making This Up and all other misuses.

Thread Hop: If the issue is "people aren't wording it properly," not "the trope is being (obviously and consistently) misused, since it's subjective," shouldn't we just Repair Dont Respond? I mean, it can be that hard to fix the... well, for all the examples, perhaps, but still, I would just argue that it's a matter of rewording the poorly-done examples.