Desperately needs some sort of repair:: Deadpan Snarker

Something which has been bothering me for a while regarding the majority of Deadpan Snarker examples: the characters in question are snarkers, but they simply aren't deadpan. These characters do not affect a "[d]eliberately impassive or expressionless" face (to quote Wiktionary), and their delivery is frequently acerbic, not neutral.

Take as an example the page image on DeadpanSnarker.Web Comics, which suggests Aeris (image of two cats; the cat on the right) as an example — but the contempt is utterly searing in Aeris's face. By contrast, in the example on the main page (two ladies, lady on the right), the lady in green delivers the remark as mildly as if she were commenting on the weather. Deadpan Snarker is a trope, no question. Jeeves is a famous example, Elizabeth Bennett scarcely less so. But a lot of the characters mentioned are just wiseasses.

edited 4th Aug '11 1:32:05 PM by RobinZimm

A clean-up would be a good idea. Would the first frame of this Holiday Wars be a better page image for the webcomics page?

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Is that actually deadpan?

Is there an important difference between Deadpan Snarker and Caustic Snarker? I don't particularly think so, but either way the latter shouldn't just be deleted. "Snarky character" is very much a trope, I'm just not sure if how they snark really matters.

I'm pretty sure the idea is that deadpan is important, but that in practice the trope is used for "this person has said something sarcastic at some point in time, even if only once in many thousands of opportunities" though I haven't checked in a while.

Someone like Black Adder would be the perfect example of a Caustic Snarker if they are to be split; he's so incredibly sneering about it, and in one series is quite clearly a Villain Protagonist. As it stands, he's a textbook Deadpan Snarker...only he isn't deadpan.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

All the That Guy With The Glasses people could fit in Caustic Snarker if we're going to make that trope.

I cut up one dozen new men and you will die somewhat, again and again.

I feel as if Deadpan Snarker vs. Caustic Snarker is a valid distinction, but if it isn't, then the trope needs to be renamed.

We have a lot of problem with personality tropes like this being overused. In this case, "character said something snarky one time" examples should be zapped. But that's a general problem.

Well, there's Servile Snarker, Deadpan Snarker, Gentleman Snarker or something like that, The Gadfly (sort of related) and a proposed split off of Deadpan Snarker into Caustic Snarker or whatever.

edited 4th Aug '11 2:31:04 PM by Arha

That would certainly seem to suggest a need for some organization. The divisions don't seem to be either exhaustive or exclusive.

I forgot Stepford Snarker. That's enough tropes to have some sort of organization for sarcasm/snark based tropes, no?

edited 4th Aug '11 3:15:25 PM by Arha

Snark is certainly a broad enough concept that there are sub-tropes of certain types or instances, some of which owe as much to other tropes as this. Stepford Snarker for example is a very new trope, but certainly a viable variation on Stepford Smiler. I know this for a fact because I'm both tropes (which depends on the circumstances - I'm not a snidey little bastard to my employer, but I am to most people outwith such formal confines).

A deadpan/caustic split may well be viable. Certainly, this is as good a time as any to clean up non-examples in a big way.

My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

As far as organization goes, we already have Oh Great, a Snark Index.

edited 4th Aug '11 6:52:24 PM by nrjxll

I'm glad someone else picked up on this. However, there's a problem with splitting Deadpan Snarker and Caustic Snarker. The sheer work of cleaning up the article would require great knowledge of whatever series said character is from, and a lot of these are rather obscure. I think a better attempt to fix this would be to make two "types" in the description (like the Tsundere page), one for the true Deadpan Snarkers and one for Caustic Snarkers.

I admit that we couldn't fix them all in one go (although with Web Original examples we could catch quite a few just by checking the cited examples) but that doesn't mean splitting the page is a better solution — in fact, splitting the examples on the page has exactly the same problems with half the benefits.

Yeah, it's typically associated with wisecracking characters in general, hence the overlap with Large Ham. (See also Scar and Joker.)

If we're to make this about deadpan snarkers in particular... well, easier said than done. I suggest we just rename the current page and example sections The Snarker, and clear Deadpan Snarker, and add only examples that are clearly deadpan to the latter. We might have to limit Deadpan Snarker editing to mods then, though.

edited 8th Aug '11 5:14:01 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Couldn't we do a global replace substituting The Snarker for Deadpan Snarker on pages? I think that would get the message out pretty effectively.

Reading the page, it seems like this applies to alivepan snarkers as well as deadpan ones.

edited 3rd Sep '11 4:57:55 PM by ading

I'm a Troper!!!

If you mean using the title customizer to make "DeadpanSnarker" display as "The Snarker", we could do that but we don't like it. If you mean an automated global search-and-replace, that puts too much of a strain on the server to use more than once in a blue moon. A bit ago, Fast Eddie used it to help with the rename of Nakama to True Companions; he had to make the entire site unavailable for either viewing or editing while the search-and-replace ran.

I didn't write any of that.

Wait, I thought he never got around to running it? At least, the related to page still says Nakama is everywhere.

Maybe so. The larger point stands: the global article text search-and-replace can't be used without completely shutting the wiki down while it runs, so we're not going to use it to fix anything that's less than a Nakama-level project.

edited 3rd Sep '11 9:19:16 PM by MetaFour

I didn't write any of that.

I'm all for renaming this as The Snarker. If there are two main subpoints (Deadpan and Caustic) then replacement wouldn't be needed. Deadpan Snarker would still accurately redirect, here. Then it's just a matter of people who know the various examples to go through and change individual characters manually. Even if that doesn't happen en masse, I don't think it would be a travesty.

I assume you mean "replacing Deadpan Snarker with The Snarker," though your wording seemed a little vague on which was to be replaced with which.

Anyway, should I start a rename thread, or should we just use this one?

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

The deadpan version is extremely common, as it tends to make snarking all that much more effective.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Trouble is, the phrase Deadpan Snarker has become too associated with snarkiness in general to be brought back from it.

Anyway, I've since created a separate thread for the option of renaming this.

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart