Complaining: They Just Didnt Care

I'm sure I remember this trope having a more coherent meaning related to Did Not Do The Research, once upon a time. Now it seems to be more like So Bad, It's Horrible BUT WORSE!!!

Is it serving any kind of useful purpose?

edited 30th Apr '12 1:20:53 PM by johnnye

I actually remember reworking the description about 2 years ago so that it was something other than anything that pisses someone off (Continuity Snarl, They Just Didn't Care! Trailers Always Lie, They Just Didn't Care! Adaptation Decay, They Just Didn't Care!). It was agreed upon at the time that the trope needed to be primarily about production values, namely something that was shoddily put together with little care to the (largely objective) quality as per the Trope Namer. It's tagged subjective just because it generally incites a strong reaction in editors.

The description seems to be mostly the same, but the trope is prone to misuse as the name is a catchy term that can be applied to anything. Regular maintenance is mandatory but I'm frankly surprised how stable the trope has remained, only a handful of genuinely bad examples have cropped in. While not considered a good movie by any means The Last Airbender had generally good production values all around, and there are a couple of Wall of Text examples that are clearly just angry people rambling about something like the Alias example.

Yeah, in this case, it's something more like No Budget meets Cut And Paste Translation or Off-Model. No Quality Control would be a good alternate name, I think. It is rather specifically not Character Derailment, Race Lifting or any other sort of Canon Defilement.

And it's not an indication that no one will like the movie, either; Manos The Hands Of Fate is one of the most sloppily-made movies ever released, and it's still popular because it has a certain charm to it.

I'm going to take a look at cleaning up the description a bit, since it does stray some from production elements into storytelling and Canon Defilement territory.

edited 1st May '12 12:20:17 PM by lee4hmz

Well that would presumably be due to So Bad, It's Good.

What brought me here is a discussion about Fallout 3, where someone's trying to argue it's TJDC because in his opinion the backstory and worldbuilding aren't as coherent as other instalments in the series.

Something about the way the trope's presented (and the name is a big part of it) seems to make it ripe for Complaining, and I'm trying to work out if that's inherent to the trope (in which case we probably shouldn't have it) or if it's something that could be reduced with some tweaking and maybe a rename.

edited 1st May '12 12:24:03 PM by johnnye

It's definitely being misused. It sounds like whoever used it got lost on the way to Ruined FOREVER or Wall Bangers, maybe even Sequelitis or Seasonal Rot since he's comparing it to a previous installment.

I've sandboxed a new version of the intro here, if anyone wants to have a look; I really want to do something about some of the tropes linked from there (the two Video Game-related ones in particular), but, one thing at a time. The key here is that it must be focused on production values; basically, making it Stylistic Suck's accidental Evil Twin. Otherwise, it'll just be a clone of Wall Bangers.

edited 1st May '12 12:42:31 PM by lee4hmz

It's a stock phrase and concept that was introduced via MST 3 K, it's not a trope made up for the site. It's like trying to rename MacGuffin or Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, WE didn't name it and so we don't get the priviledge of renaming it. The issue isn't the description or even the main page of examples, but in how editors will misuse it across the site to describe their own personal feelings about something.

MacGuffin is a term widely used outside the wiki, along with everything else listed on Lit. Class Tropes. BLAM and TJDC are not. Someone else may have "come up with the idea" (such as it is), but that doesn't mean we have to give them naming rights if the name they chose doesn't suit our purposes.

Misuse is the fundamental criterion of whether a trope should be renamed or not. People would be less likely to misuse it if it didn't have such a vague, uninformative and complain-y name.

edited 1st May '12 7:22:36 PM by johnnye

This is definitely a real thing, but these examples need some help. The the trope namer gave us a perfect example of what we're looking for.

^^ If you are really serious about trying to rename the trope you have to do a wick check to determine the level of misuse as well as provide very clear evidence that there is another term used for the definition. There are several tropes we just sort of accept we will never be able to clearly define and keep from being used and abused.

People tried to get Big-Lipped Alligator Moment renamed but the trope was too synonymous with the name in the general public. Is it a bad name? Yes. Is it wildly misused? YES! But regardless of how appropriate you think the name is, the name is not something that we invented.

That is the point, we don't rename because we don't like the name society gave it.

It's kind of ridiculous calling this a name that society gave something.

It would be like if someone made an article called Sucks Balls. And after a few years, people began asking, "hey, what is this page? Should we rework it?" And got the response: "We can't rename it. It's an outside name."

Yeah, it's an outside name. But an outside name for what? Not for a trope. Let's make the tropes and lose the name.

I think the name is fine. I think editors are confused because the description says things like:

A new description should clear up the confusion just fine.

edited 3rd May '12 7:35:44 AM by Fnu

The trope namer was describing this exact trope, it's not like the trope Epic Fail originally having the definition that is now Missed Moment of Awesome. Or like people saying the Internet meme "quality" should replace the name Off-Model. Only a handful of trope names are ingrained in the professional level, but quite a few are based on actual terms introduced by a show and/or spread by the fandom.

I do not see how the description is confusing, the lead paragraph spells it out very clearly.

Most of the description is pretty good. This is actually one of the better descriptions I've seen for a trope in the TRS, but I slightly prefer lee4hmz's new version.

I'm happy to check for misuse as soon as I'm clear what the trope is meant to be.

If it's purely about production values, why is it called "They Just Didn't Care"?

• There are plenty of examples of low-budget Doing It for the Art, and I'm sure they don't apply.
• There are plenty of medium-to-high budget films put together with minimum concern for artistic quality, and I'm pretty sure they shouldn't apply, but there are plenty of wicks which assume otherwise.

So is it "no budget AND no concern for quality"? That should at least be a simple enough yardstick to determine correct/incorrect usage.

edited 5th May '12 6:52:17 AM by johnnye

To me "no budget" means "they can't care." Putting more money towards special effects would mean that they can't afford to pay for the cast and crew's lodging for the shoot, or something.

Thus, to me "they just didn't care" should be just for major studio releases. That is, things where the studio can care, where the scriptwriter probably did care, but penny-pinching studio execs or an unreasonably rushed production schedule butted heads with the need for more rewrites, reshoots, or effects and someone said "I don't care, just get it out the door."

I think that No Budget could be an objective trope if we take the quality judgements out of it. Maybe we can split this up into objective bits like that.

We seem to be trying to invent a trope to suit the name. That seems a little backwards. Let's pick a trope and then decide the name.

I don't see how this can ever be objective (and the existence of No Budget as a separate trope is just another reason to cut this one IMO).

First you have the judgement "did this have a reasonable budget or not?" which, while not exactly subjective in the sense we use it, is drawing an arbitrary line between "reasonable budget" and "small budget".

Then you have the judgement whether it's any good or not - subjective.

Then there's an implied judgement whether there's any direct connection between those two factors.

And all that is assuming that we're completely ignoring whether or not the creators cared about the work; if we are, it needs a new name, if we aren't, that's yet another layer of subjectivity.

Some things have nothing to do with budget limitations, like the the trope namer's title. There is no reason they couldn't have avoided that mistake except that They Just Didn't Care.

Now I'll blame the budget for why the the Eye Creatures have giant zippers on their backs (at least ones that actually have completed costumes), but if the filmmakers cared they could have easily kept the zippers off camera by simply never filming the monsters from behind. It would not have been difficult and would have not cost a single extra dollar to do it that way, but They Just Didn't Care.

edited 5th May '12 12:14:53 PM by Fnu

This is part of the problem though. The trope page shows you Attack of The Eye Creatures and basically says "see this? Stuff like this." That's not very helpful in terms of determining what the trope is.

Now if you could show me a couple of borderline examples and explain why one of them fit the brief and the other didn't, that would be evidence that there was a coherent trope at work. I guess what I'm talking about is necessary and sufficient criteria.

Objectively, this is about mistakes that have nothing to do with the budget, or technical limitations, or even lack of talent. If a mistake is caused by one of those things, it is not this trope, period. This is also not about adaptations being unfaithful or about dub

A mistake is this trope if the creators had the money to fix it (if it would have required any extra money at all), had the technical ability to fix it, and simply chose not to bother. Particular emphasis must be placed on that last point. They have to choose to allow a mistake to go unfixed.

edited 6th May '12 10:44:43 AM by Fnu

But how can you know if that's the case or not? It's just speculation.

This is one trope that may require some knowledge of what went on during a work's production. We know Larry Buchanan didn't care about the quality of Attack of the Eye Creatures because AIP basically told him not to care. When they asked him to do color remakes of some of their films, their instructions were "We want cheap color pictures, we want half-assed names in them, we want them eighty minutes long and we want them now". They didn't care, so he had no reason to care.

I'm not defending the rest of the examples on this page, as most of them probably should be cut. This page definitely needs help.

We aren't talking about productions with a shoestring budget, it's about something that was made and thrown together just to get a product out the door. You can have a decent budget and still get something that was thrown together. In general most tropes will have someone deliberately trying to evoke what others do by accident, since Black Dynamite was trying to evoke the horrible blaxsploitation films of the 70's we can list it under a parody of the trope (Continuity Errors, Visible Boom Mic, ludicrous plot that takes itself seriously, Bad "Bad Acting", etc).

Never mind, I misread the previous post.

edited 7th May '12 9:53:54 PM by lee4hmz