What to do about (New crowner swapped in 8/2/12): Nightmare Fuel

This trope is supposedly distinguished from High Octane Nightmare Fuel in being about that which was unintentional, but given that there are different extents of scariness to intend or achieve, this distinction is really more of a continuous spectrum than a solid line. For that matter, it's hard to tell what level of horror was intended in the first place. You could point to this being a YMMV trope, but "intent of the author" isn't even a matter of opinion so much as of assumption.

In practice, of course, it's not even typically used for "unintentional horror." It seems to be more often used for either "scary, but more mildly so than high-octane nightmare fuel" or "scary, but in a more child-friendly way." (Related, but not interchangable traits.) So, we can either try to sort through all the examples to make them fit and continue to do so for later added examples, or... adjust the definition to fit the examples. Apart from yielding to trope misuse, the latter still doesn't really solve the problem, because some examples really are about "unintentional horror."

No matter what we do, we'll have to go through the examples trying to sort out which was which. And even that might not be possible; it's often uncertain whether someone intended to write an entry for "mildly scary" or for "unintentional horror;" just as it's hard to tell whether horror was intentional or not in the first place.

Personally, I think we may as well give up on Accidental Nightmare Fuel as it is. Apart from the rampant misuse, it's also infested with natter arguably fit to rival troper tales, and I think whatever effort it would take to clean up the misuse and natter would be better used elsewhere.

I say cut it, and redlink it so that all examples crosswicked with it will be broken links. The whole trope is a mess and I think it would be best to get rid of it.

edited 20th Dec '11 1:12:05 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

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

Agreed. Cut ANF, HONF can be re-named "Nightmare Fuel", I think, and be the go-to CMOA for scary thing.s

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Accidental Nightmare Fuel is one of the absolute most broken tropes/audience reactions on the site*

, so I would have no objections to cutting it. All its subpages are a mess and read just like Troper Tales (complete with This Troper and abominable Word Cruft like, "Seconded."). Any cleanup of the subpages would just result in absolute destruction, as the meat and potatoes of the trope itself are pretty much, "This scared me as a kid." High Octane Nightmare Fuel is a lot easier to spot and has a lot more examples (often erroneously potholed to ANF).

Rename High Octane Nightmare Fuel "Nightmare Fuel" or "Scary Stuff" or something and redirect both tropes to it. Then we should take care of the anecdotes. It's sorta like trying to fix a pile of metal scraps at this point, but permanently wiping them just seems a little extreme, even for this. Honestly, I'd love to erase them both, as so many sources of Nightmare Fuel can fit into objective tropes.

I'm not crazy, I just don't give a darn!

I support this proposal entirely, but I would note that I'm pretty sure that no more "Moments" tropes are allowed. The fact that Nightmare Fuel already effectively is one won't matter in that regard, I think.

edited 20th Dec '11 2:36:54 PM by nrjxll

Not really. The Woobie, at its core, is about pitiable characters, and Complete Monster, at its core, is about pure-evil characters. So, even those tropes' misuses are generally in the right direction, even if they underestimate the extents involved.

Accidental Nightmare Fuel's examples don't even seem to generally be in the right direction.

edited 20th Dec '11 3:02:00 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

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

Most of the serious misuse is from when it was NightmareFuel. When referred to as AccidentalNightmareFuel, people generally are a bit closer to the trope's intention.

Because you'd have to be very odd to read Accidental as Intentional.

Yeah, so like Xanatos Gambit, let's clean up the wicks, and after that, if there is still misuse, we look into a more serious fix.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Thing is, misplaced examples are still being added. MLP:FIM's Nightmare Fuel page has relatively recent examples (ie. last few episodes) still being added that were obviously meant to be creepy. And it's not just the misuse, either; there's also other problems reminiscent of troper tales that have been pointed out by various users.

As I said in another thread about another trope, trying to clean up the examples while misplaced ones are still being added is like trying to clean up an area affected by a sewage leak while the sewage is still flowing into it.

edited 20th Dec '11 4:25:23 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

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

It doesn't help at all that "Nightmare Fuel" redirects to ANF and not HONF.

edited 20th Dec '11 4:47:27 PM by Firebert

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All of the Nightmare Fuel tropes have been having constant, widespread problems despite all the attempts to clean and fix them (of which there have been many and it keeps coming back), it's time to just cut them. Cut them all.

edited 20th Dec '11 5:00:23 PM by NoirGrimoir

SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)

In hindsight, we should have took the original meaning(or at least the meaning popularized by that song) and merged both pages, then changed the description to "Add stuff from your favorite shows that scares kids here" then put it on Darth Wiki as a Black Comedy like Worse Than It Sounds or Warp That Aesop, then Used Defanged Horrors for the real trope about stuff designed to scare kids and Adult Fear for stuff that targets adults.

Hey, it aint too late to do that is it?

edited 20th Dec '11 5:10:39 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Part of the problem is that people don't want to go through the trouble of creating and managing two different "scary" pages for just one work, so people will just dump all kids show examples in ANF. Sometimes both pages get the same example.

If the pages are still worth having around at all, maybe they should just be lumped together and we can forget about the whole "intentional"/"for adults" vs. "accidental"/"for children." Big if.

I'm not crazy, I just don't give a darn!

Eh, I'd be a little more inclined to give High Octane Nightmare Fuel a chance. Again, like CM and Woobie, the examples are typically at least in the right direction, even if they get the extent wrong. And while it too is natter-infested I don't think it's to the same extent.

For now, let's just focus on whether or not to cut Accidental Nightmare Fuel in particular.

edited 20th Dec '11 5:22:09 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

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

Yeah but High Octane Nightmare Fuel isn't a trope at all, it's just "This thing is really scary!" it's more of an audience reaction if it's anything.

SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)

I should note that the claim that these tropes are still being massively misused is something that needs verifying - while they are undeniable blights on the wiki, until fairly recently they were Nightmare Fuel and Nightmare Fuel But More So - much of the misuse of ANF may actually date from that time.

Again, my point is, whether or not HONF should also be cut, for now the focus should be on ANF.

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

I still think HONF isn't much of a trope, or at least should be called something like "Deliberately Scary".

BTW, there are plenty of in-universe examples of Nightmare Fuel. So could we limit it to that, and flush any other examples?

edited 20th Dec '11 5:43:15 PM by DragonQuestZ

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

As I said last thread. No need to cut examples. They're fun to read.

Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Rename to just plain old Nightmare Fuel and just leave the definition since it's a Trope Of Legend. No examples.

Move all Nightmare Fuel examples to High Octane Nightmare Fuel, rename that to Scary Moments in Sugar Wiki.

DONE.

Personally, the examples make me fear for the human race. But it's a subjective thing.

I repeat, though, that turning this into Scary Moments is unlikely to fly - I believe Fast Eddie himself has said that the site doesn't want any more "moments" pages, even if that's what these tropes already pretty much are.

We could make a Nightmare Fuel Wiki.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Agree with the thought that splitting "Nightmare Fuel" between HONF and ANF continues to look more and more like a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. It may have been an issue to begin with, but the attempts to rectify it only seem to make it even worse.

As for the NF subpages, is it too bold to suggest renaming/moving the entire Nightmare Fuel namespace to simply "Nightmare/" or "Scary/" ?

edited 20th Dec '11 10:43:38 PM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Most of the examples are good for a laugh and nostalgia. But I hope Fast Eddie can make an exception in this case for scary moments, I think that's the best way of fixing this issue instead of blind cutting.

I could live with that.

SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)

We seem to have both a NightmareFuel and Accidental Nightmare Fuel namespace (the latter shown on Accidental Nightmare Fuel's examples, the former on work's pages).

I don't know if we need them both, but works I imagine many people will see a "Nightmare Fuel" namespace and misuse it like the days of old.

edited 21st Dec '11 1:47:03 AM by MangaManiac

So were troper tales.

That could severely diminish the implied extent of scariness to the latter, which has already been somewhat diminished by misinterpretations both of the trope and of the works claimed to apply. (Let alone Fan Myopia about people wanting to make given works out to be "especially scary" or whatever.)

And yet, you get to the NightmareFuel namespaces through links from Accidental Nightmare Fuel.

edited 21st Dec '11 7:00:30 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

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