Misused: Stealth Parody

Scroll through the entries, and tell me if you notice a pattern.

"Some people think", "It's hard to tell if", "a possible example", not to mention several examples that are apparently just Parody Retcon.

I dare say that a good 75% of the entries on the actual page are just pure speculation, and this is really a trope that requires Word of God to confirm, otherwise it's pretty much just "this work is so over-the-top it has to be a parody". I don't know if the wicks are any better, but the page itself requires some serious pruning.

I don't see how Word of God would help either, given Parody Retcon.

So what exactly is the difference between this trope and Poe's Law?

I don't think there is one. It really just seems like a collection of things the editors thought might have been intended as a parody.

The difference, is one's intentional, the other is about how it is sometimes hard to tell which is intentional. The movie adaptation of Star Ship Troopers was purposefully not like the book because the producer felt the book was glorifying fascism. The movie set out to do the opposite, make fascism look bad. This it undeniably did(the soldiers are ill disciplined, their tactics are horrible, the drive of their entire society is questionable) Poes law come in that many people missed the parody part, and just assumed the film had a horrible writer who knew nothing about the book and wanted to promote fascism.

Dolemite was supposed to be a parody of black exploitation films of its time. The protagonist's only redeeming trait to a modern audience is that he isn't guilty of what he's accused of, but he's guilty of plenty, arguably worse crimes no one seems to care about. He's constantly spouting nonsensical speeches which no one can really complain about because he's pretty much invincible in combat, even though he really shouldn't be and is altogether unpleasant. That isn't arguable but many people missed the parody and just assumed the writer had wrote up a particularly bad, straight example of an exploitation film. If they knew those who knew the writer knew Dolemite was usually the antagonist in most of his stories so saw the parody right away.

Stealth Parody is a trope, Poe's Law is an audience reaction to stealth parodies. Does Stephen Colbert really that much against the other political party or is he parodying people who are against the other political party?(He's an actor playing an entertaining character on a fake news show but because of Poes law, people can't leave it at that) We should be getting rid of Poe's law before we do anything to stealth parody.

Would the Scream movies count (listed as "arguably")? They did parody a lot of the classics of horror, but they didn't intentionally hide it. Rather, it was because the modern audience was too young to catch most of those references that they thought it was a genuine horror movie. Well, with comedy included, I suppose.

That's a good explanation, but in practice the two pages seem to attract the same kind of examples. I think we should consider declaring one of them example-less, and moving all examples to the other.

Really, the examples Cider mentioned are what should be on the Stealth Parody page, but far too many are people just guessing because something was over the top.

Stealth Parody is basically an author using Obfuscating Stupidity — he's making it intentionally unclear as to whether the work should be taken seriously or not.

Since it's virtually impossible to determine the author's actual intent (especially with intentional retcon — "No, really, I meant to do that!"), I think Stealth Parody should be without examples. Just say "Hey, this happens sometimes, sometimes authors claim it as a defense when they really just wrote something awful, it's hard to tell which is which because of Poe's Law."

Either that or put in a note saying you can only add examples where the author went on record as saying his work was satirical, and even then they might be lying.

edited 29th Jun '12 1:46:02 PM by Escher

I think we should grab a chainsaw and do a major Examples Are Not Arguable cleanup.

Clocking due to lack of activity.

It's really hard to discern what constitutes a stealth parody unless the author admits it.

Make this YMMV or Word of God only, and purge arguable examples.

Restricting to Word of God on a page about stealth parodies? Doesn't that make the examples useless/misleading?

Stealth refers to the work, not to Word of God. They aren't the same.

No, but they often to go hand-in-hand.

And, like someone mentioned way earlier, there's the problem of Parody Retcons

Because of Lying Creator, right?

Expired clock and stale. Locking.