Merge: Maybe Ever After

Thanks for taking the time to work on that, Arha. This is a good description of the different reasons why a work might lack full resolution. I actually do agree that we need a trope like this.

I think, though, that it also confirms my hesitancy about a merger. My main concern is that precisely because No Romantic Resolution is broader, it lacks some of the nuances of Maybe Ever After, which means it can't be used in quite the same way. This isn't a criticism of what you wrote; I don't think that a general trope COULD have the same specific nuances. Specifically, what might be lost if the tropes were merged is the way that Maybe Ever After can be used as shorthand for "hint of a romantic resolution" or even "hint of a happy ending."

You can see this meaning in some of the examples. As one of the examples on the trope page suggests, a Maybe Ever After ending can provide a "glimmer of hope" in what might otherwise be a Bitter Sweet Ending. A related issue can be seen on the Wrong Guy First page, where someone listed Great Expectations, ending the example by saying that Estella "reunites with Pip in a Maybe Ever After scene." You can't use the phrase No Romantic Resolution in the same way linguistically (I don't think it makes sense to refer to "a No Romantic Resolution scene"), but more importantly, I think it also wouldn't carry the same implication of "ambiguously romantic scene" or "ambiguously positive encounter" implied in that example.

Naturally, examples that use the phrase Maybe Ever After could be rewritten; I'm not saying it's somehow impossible to change those examples. Rather, my point is that Maybe Ever After already serves as shorthand for a kind of "vaguely positive" romantic ending (someone else's words, though I couldn't find the source). Those connotations of "vaguely positive" or "glimmer of hope" aren't implied by No Romantic Resolution, precisely because it has to cover several kinds of endings, not all of which necessarily hint at a positive ending.

Though both Maybe Ever After and the proposed No Romantic Resolution would refer to romantic endings with incomplete resolution, they don't really carry the same connotations and couldn't always be used interchangeably. Though they aren't the same, they are clearly related. I'd say that No Romantic Resolution is the supertrope of Maybe Ever After, so the argument would be over whether Maybe Ever After is sufficiently distinct to continue to exist as a subtrope.

Looking back at this, I'm not at all sure that I explained this well, so let me know if I'm not making any sense.

I do get your point and I don't totally disagree with you, but I'm not really sure that's distinct enough. We should probably get more opinions on whether or not it is.

Absolutely, more opinions are needed!

I agree that No Romantic Resolution is a supertrope to Maybe Ever After and that Maybe Ever After is a separate distinct type of ending that is ambiguous with positive undertones.

I'd support keeping the two separate. Basically, I agree with everything in that post.

Without agreeing or disagreeing, I will say that Maybe Ever After is a title that sounds like it might have positive overtones. If it weren't for that, I'd worry that the two tropes, if kept separate, would be too easy to confuse, which would inevitably lead to misuse of one or the other.

I can't say those concerns are gone, but I find the argument strong enough to require more thought.

They're seperate tropes. No Rommnatic Resolution is pretty much Status Quo Is God applied to a romance arc. Maybe Ever After is more positive. Its 'they're not a couple, but its extremely likely they will be'. Also, I've seen it used in non-harem shows, such as Full Metal Alchemist. NRR is just for harem since it is being split off of Tenchi Solution.

No Romantic Resolution does not have to be Status Quo Is God. Which is why I did not write it as such. While splitting it off from Tenchi Solution the general idea behind it was reworked. So no, it's not just for harems.

edited 27th Aug '11 10:20:28 PM by Arha

Okay, this isn't going anywhere. Let's just put up a crowner make a decision one way or the other and then wrap this all up.

Maybe Ever After isn't the best name for it if it leaves open to interpretation whether there actually is an "ever after" in the first place. Ambiguously Ever After could be better in that regard.

Clearly, this thread needs more drama to attract attention. Should we stage a fake flame war to get people to pay attention?

Seriously, there were other people in the Tenchi Solution thread who had been in favor of a merge. I kept expecting some of them to speak up. Maybe nobody really cares either way?

^ God, could you have a more misinformed opinion? Whatever opinion you just expressed is complete nonsense. I will now proceed to repeat the same exact argument for the next six pages with almost exactly the same phrasing!

I am appalled by your insensitivity! I will now spend the next several posts complaining about how awful this forum is. My posts will become increasingly emotional and increasingly irrelevant to the conversation, until at the end I am rambling about fictitious relatives with terminal diseases and a dead cat named Snookums. No one will have any idea what I am talking about. Finally, I will post a Goodbye Cruel Forum post, and leave for good. In less that twenty-four hours a new poster named something like R Rabbit or A Aardvark will appear, who happens to coincidentally espouse all of T Turtle's opinions.

But hey, even if this thread is eerily quiet, at least a few people are voting now.

Sorry to interrupt your Fun-Filled Faux Flamewar, but I went ahead and posted a link to this thread on the Tenchi Solution thread, to help draw the attention of potentially interested parties.

Actually, though, I'm just posting because I wanted an opportunity to say Fun-Filled Faux Flamewar. :)

Well, we got a few votes, but this thread seems to be languishing again. Would it help if I recapped all the arguments for and against a merge in pig latin?

Bumping again so this thread doesn't get lost.

To recap: right now, we're just voting on whether to merge the existing trope Maybe Ever After into a proposed trope No Romantic Resolution. No Romantic Resolution is a broader trope which covers a wide range of incomplete resolutions to romance arcs. (Note: as far as I can tell, we currently do NOT have a trope which covers all of these endings, and I don't think anyone has denied that we do need something like this.)

It has been suggested that No Romantic Resolution could be launched as the supertrope, while Maybe Ever After should be treated as a subtrope which only covers endings that have a "glimmer of hope" or hint of a Happily Ever After; in other words, endings which hint that the couple will get together, without saying so explicitly. This way, the specific nuance of Maybe Ever After would not be lost.

An objection to this is that the distinction between the two tropes might not be wide enough to keep them as separate tropes, and the similarity might mean that one would be misused for the other. A merge would prevent such confusion, and might also create one larger, more widely-used trope rather than two smaller ones that don't perform as well.

There's also been a lot of discussion about whether the title Maybe Ever After is clear enough, but for now I think we're putting that question aside in order to discuss the possibility of a merge. If we do merge, we will have to decide for sure what to call the new trope. If we don't merge, we will have to focus on how to distinguish the two tropes.

Okay, if I missed anything important, feel free to jump in. I just figured we needed a post that summed up what was going on.

What's the status so far on creating No Romantic Resolution? It's still a redlink.

Well, I wasn't going to touch it until this crowner had been decided on. But it looks pretty settled now.

Yeah, the crowner's not really picking up more votes. What now?

I... guess we head back to Tenchi Solution and start working on the split? We have a sandboxed definition for No Romantic Resolution already. But we should talk about it there instead.

I'm not fond of Maybe Ever After because nothing about it implies that it's a romance trope. It just sounds like any sort of dangling ending.

as I said before, I think "ever after" sort of implies that, but YMM definitely V. In any case, that should probably be a separate discussion. I'm pretty sure this one's done — no merge looks like the solid winner.

Ever After implies a lot of things, but romance is only one of them. It can mean the kingdom is happy. It can mean that everyone lived. It's not obviously romance that it's referring to.

I don't think it's a particularly good name either. It's certainly not something I would look for.

Do we need to start a separate thread to discuss a potential rename? Or rename this thread? If not, this is going to get confusing, because some people are apparently still voting on the merge. It just picked up a vote after it was suggested that it was settled.

The merge is still -8.