Gone Horribly Right vs. Careful What You Wish For

Gone Horribly Right

Be Careful What You Wish For

The description of the former says "A Sub Trope of Literal Genie, basically putting it in the scientific category as opposed to Be Careful What You Wish For, which seems more magical."

However, some examples of Be Careful What You Wish For are not even about magic at all, but about someone wanting one thing and finding out once they get it (whether through effort or circumstance; point is, not always magic) that it is a bad thing.

I would have thought that, if anything, Gone Horribly Right would be a subtrope of Be Careful What You Wish For, rather than both being subtropes of something else, let alone something as seemingly specific as Literal Genie.

So yeah, a bit of clarification as to what exactly these tropes mean, what counts and what does not, and a clearer distinction, might be worthwhile.

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

From reading the intros to both tropes, it seems to me the difference lies here:

From Gone Horribly Right:

Gone Horribly Right seems to be for when all goes according to plan, and that is what makes things terribly "wrong", in a sense. The superweapon works, it is capable of vaporizing an entire army. Why is that bad? Well, because we just had a misfire. Also, the enemy country is coming at us.

Careful What You Wish For is similar, but compares from "less" instead of "more". All goes according to plan, it's just that it isn't enough, you got exactly what you wished for, but it didn't exactly live up to what the wish proper was. The superweapon works, it is capable of vaporizing an entire army. Why is that bad? Because it vaporized the army as they were — stationed on your now dead crops.

They start the same but turn in two distinct directions, for both plot purposes and setting's development. Not sure it would justify merging or subtroping.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

I thought Gone Horribly Right was when you had worked towards a plan, the result of which ended badly despite being what you thought you wanted, while Be Careful What You Wish For was when you wished for something to happen, it did happen (not necessarily magical, it just had to be by chance, not something you worked towards on your own with a plan) and it ended up being bad despite it being what you thought you wanted.

In other words, Gone Horribly Right, your effort resulted in the bad thing, whereas in Be Careful What You Wish For there was no personal effort on your part, other than wanting something, which usually requires magic or cosmic coincidence so it just falls into your lap or happens on it's own.

The Monkeys Paw would be Be Careful What You Wish For. Frankenstein would be Gone Horribly Right.

edited 4th Jan '12 4:00:01 PM by NoirGrimoir

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

Noir, I think that's exactly it. And your examples are spot-on.

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

None whatsoever, you mean? What about things that may or may not count as effort depending on how you interpret them? Amount of effort involved is more of a continuous spectrum than all-or-nothing, so if we're to use that as the distinction, we really should specify the threshold at which the tropes are split.

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

The difference isn't just one of effort. In Gone Horribly Right, you get what you expected, it just turns out to be bad. In Be Careful What You Wish For, what you get isn't what you expected (and is bad).

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If I could put your a bit more simply, even cutting out the magic/science if necessary (let me know if I'm off base).

• Gone Horribly Right: You work for what you wanted, but while the end result does do what you desired it occurs in a way that harms you.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: You get precisely what you wanted, with the end results you desired, but it turns out the ends aren't what you thought they were.

Or perhaps a little more simply.

• Gone Horribly Right: You want something. You make it a reality. It never stops being what you wanted but nevertheless spirals out of control.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: You want something. You get it. It turns out to not be what you wanted after all.

This is a fairly solid distinction, though a problem arises with Be Careful What You Wish For's parlance definition which does encompass both of these definitions, and even these definitions can be effectively equal if the definition of Be Careful What You Wish For is applied to vague wishes.

edited 9th Jan '12 9:46:18 AM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Gone Horribly Right is also related to Gone Horribly Wrong. While Be Careful What You Wish For isn't.

• Gone Horribly Wrong: Some kind of experiment or plan has a bad outcome because it didn't do what it was supposed to do.
• Gone Horribly Right: Some kind of experiment or plan has a bad outcome from doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Someone's wish or desire is fulfilled but turns out to result in a bad outcome.

Be Careful What You Wish For is usually the result of a spur of the moment, shortsighted desire that wasn't thought through by the wisher, and the bad outcome is An Aesop. The Aesop is usually both to not take action on a temporary feeling or desire without thinking through the consequences, and to not think any one thing is the key to solving all your problems with zero effort. It doesn't have to be magical. For example a character can think that if he just had more money all his problems would go away, and then he coincidentally wins the lotto the next day. When his problems gets worse, it proves that wishing your problems would go away on their own without putting in the effort is inherently bad thinking. You have to do things yourself and earn it.

Gone Horribly Right, is usually about proving the character's pursuit or desire itself to be inherently dangerous or evil (compared to the above example, which isn't necessarily saying there's anything wrong with money). Example, scientists make a plague to kill their enemies, its kills their enemies than goes after them. Making plagues to kill people is just wrong.

Both can tell various Aesops and shares many of them, but each type tends towards certain ones. For instance the zero-effort is bad Aesop relies on the magical nature of Be Careful What You Wish For to work.

edited 9th Jan '12 7:19:26 PM by NoirGrimoir

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

,Yep.

Let's take "turning stuff into gold" as an example.

• Be Careful What You Wish For: You wish that everything you touch would turn to gold. Your wish comes true. You choke to death when you try to drink a glass of water.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: You create a machine that turns things into gold. It explodes and kills you.
• Gone Horribly Right: You create a machine that turns things into gold. Except that it turns them into animate, malevolent gold statues, which proceed to kill you to death.

edited 10th Jan '12 10:02:35 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Eh, for Gone Horribly Right, it would probably be more like you can make gold, but since you're generating free gold, it's suddenly worthless and you invested so much money in making it you're now worse off. The distinction being that it's not just a diabolus ex machina, but rather something that makes sense.

edited 10th Jan '12 10:11:24 AM by Arha

Even that is still a blurry distinction, because each trope is about wanting something and not anticipating X unwanted consequences of it.

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

Should this discussion be closed?

They're related tropes. That doesn't make them the same trope.

Yes, this discussion should be closed.