Complaining: They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot

So...this trope seems to just exist so people can complain that the show didn't turn how they wanted.

There's not really a trope here in its current form. Looking at the pages, it's always laundry lists of things individual tropers would have liked better. Well, anyone can write that. Even the page's quote is useless for the trope - yea, Twin Hitlers is a cool idea in a story where the idea wasn't well executed. So what? That's not really a trope, that's just saying you didn't like a story.

Here's a little handful of entries that get at what I mean:

From the Anime and Manga page:

• Vandread takes place in a dystopian future where men and women live on separate planets. Rather than take this opportunity to explore the cultural dynamics of single-gender societies, the writers instead opt to completely ignore it and have the oblivious protagonists speak frequently about merging their giant robots.

"Hey, the show should be about something completely different and that bothers me!"

From Film:

• Titan A.E. could have saved Don Bluth's career and delivered a blow to the Animation Age Ghetto stereotype. The plot idea was epic enough. Get ready for high flying cosmic adventure, right? Not if Fox has anything to say about it! The movie was rushed and underfunded, and an Ass Pull of a reveal didn't help either.

...this isn't even about the plot, it's just a complaint about the movie's rushed production doing it in thanks to Executive Meddling...

From Western Animation:

• One episode of X-Men: Evolution involved a sports drink that could harm mutants who came in contact with it. In the end of the episode, Professor X tells the creator of the drink about it, who then promises to stop selling the product. But once the Professor leaves, the drink maker gets out his phone and calls someone, telling them he has a product they "might be interested in", and it's obvious he does this with malicious intent toward mutants. This is never even brought up again, a shame, it could've been a good storyline.

...this is an Aborted Arc...

In Video Games:

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is an interesting example. Now, some fans tend to shout and scrape at it being "dumbed down" as compared to its predecessors, but as far as plot goes, Todd Howard, the producer and project lead, actually went ahead and said he wasn't completely satisfied with the story in an interview and that he wanted to do more, but time constraints and a desire for a more immediate focus in the particular installment led to a lot being cut, mostly political stuff involving the Elder Council.
  • Interestingly, Skyrim exposed this quite a bit. Most of the in-game books describe the Oblivion Crisis in ways that Bethesda were unable (or unwilling) to do within the actual game. As someone on Something Awful said: Man, this Oblivion Crisis sounded great. Maybe they should have made a game based on it?

"Boy did this game's plot suck! It sucked so much even the creator admitted it!"

Frankly, with an intro like this has, it's not hard to see why it's collecting entries like this - it's a trope that specifically meant to give tropers an outlet to complain that the plot didn't do explicitly what they thought it should and they're mad.

I'd suggest that this either needs a more effective definition, should only cover in-universe examples (some of the pages have them), or needs a transport to Darth Wiki to exist in its current form. I'd hold back on a cut since the last option seems viable for keeping it in its present form somewhere in the wiki. Now, there's some obvious places where clean up can be done, i.e. places where its being misused to describe other tropes.

edited 25th Sep '12 7:35:59 PM by Rebochan

It's an audience reaction, not a trope. Which is why it doesn't really seem like a trope. Things that aren't tropes often don't seem like tropes. :)

That said, it does seem to be on the complain-y side. Possibly inherently and fatally so.

I'd say that, at the very least, it would need to be named something else, though what that "else" would be I don't know, off the top of my head. Using the current name seems to me that it would invite complaining, regardless of the actual definition.

It's my opinion that a fair bit of entries on these pages define what I like to call self-centered criticism. And the entire concept is basically a negative one. But for all that, the pages aren't anywhere close to as whiny as they could potentially be, and after all it is a YMMV "trope".

So I'm going to need some proof that it's actually causing problems first.

Well, I mainly got here because other works pages are starting to fill up with people getting really upset that their pet plot points never became canon. Hence, they're calling out "THEY WASTED A GOOD PLOT!" not because a plot was "wasted", but simply because the authors told their story and not the story of the tropers writing the entry.

I guess the other problem here is that looking at other audience reaction tropes, its easier to wrap your head around what the trope needs, and then be able to identify in groups larger than a sample size of one or two guys why the audience will see something a certain way.

I really, really hate using "YMMV" as a dumping ground for awful trope entries. You have to draw a line between individual troper's pet peeves and something you can actually identify in a larger segment of the audience.

This trope has also annoyed me because it goes beyond YMMV and straight to the personal opinions of the individual editor making the entry (if you read the wiki with that thought in mind, you will find that a lot of YMMV tropes tend to go this way instead of any semblance of merely observing a phenomenon).

There is an idea there that is not even YMMV, regarding how a decent storyline is superceded by something else (different from Aborted Arc as that is dropped rather than overtaken) but I really can't see that going well.

edited 26th Sep '12 12:31:10 AM by KJMackley

I agree with the OP. I can see the appeal of wishing that a work had turned out different, but that's not a trope, and the examples as shown are all over the place.

Would cutting be a good idea? If this is to be salvaged, I'm not sure what it would be rewritten as.

That's what I mean by self-centered criticism - it's among the most obnoxious and, honestly, infantile audience reactions possible, so there's no need to preach to me about how bad it is as a concept. But the examples that are actually on the page really don't seem all that whiny.

However, if it's becoming a problem on work pages, then I'm far less inclined to defend it.

edited 26th Sep '12 1:32:55 AM by nrjxll

I read through the ones I recognise from Anime & Manga, Film, Live-Action TV, and Video Games. With only a few exceptions, the examples were either "Hey, I thought of this really great idea the creator didn't," or, "This isn't what I wanted." The latter is just whining, and the former comes off as a wannabe fanfic author who has an idea for a plot but can't actually write it herself.

<rant> It's much easier to figure out an on the surface great setting or plot twist, but it's a whole other thing to actually make it happen. I've seen plenty of twists presented as setups for fanfics that never made it past the presentation stage, simply because the author didn't know how to handle them. </rant>

Anyway, I don't see much of anything to save here. Cutting would be doing TV Tropes a favour.

edited 26th Sep '12 3:38:01 AM by AnotherDuck

Should I remove all the examples then?

Not the examples. We need to remove the whole page. It seems to be nothing but a few miscategorized examples and "This Troper liked this movie's premise, but thinks the movie sucked and here is this awesome pitch for a different work with the same premise." This sort of whining is what IMDB forums are for.

I can see that it would be a fairly common Audience Reaction, but the description itself basically does boil down to Complaining About Unexplored Plot Points.

On top of it all, page itself says it should not apply to "otherwise well-written" works, which means that a lot of complaining is not just, well, complaining, but flat out misuse. Scanning the Video Games section, I spot stuff like SSBB (complaining about the Subspace Emissary), Super Mario Sunshine (complaining about a silly story, when actual gameplay and level design were quite good), Halo Wars (quote: "a solid RTS but the story is one huge letdown"), Pokemon Black And White (complaining about the Musketeer Trio's backstory, which you only hear a few snippets and Flavor Text about) ...

edited 26th Sep '12 8:52:17 AM by Stratadrake

Stats, for the record:

All right. I'd better get to cutlisting then.

No, don't get to cutlisting it. Do not jump the gun. You cannot cut a trope this big without a crowner.

Oh. Sorry about that. I'll wait until the crowner then.

edited 26th Sep '12 11:04:27 AM by ScoutsGirlfriend

From Google, this seems to be a concept in story criticism (and well used too). But the description is fishy and the examples forgettable.

I can understand the idea of raising a plot point that is unexplored to its full potential, and it's a distinct concept from an Aborted Arc. I don't think we have that right now as presented.

Can we do that without it sounding like whining about things that never happened? Well, probably.

If so, should we start from scratch and YKTTW it, or just rewrite the current page?

And how do we separate legitimate ones from random ideas? I'm not sure it's even possible to write a story that examines all possible plot points from all angles.

edited 26th Sep '12 12:58:49 PM by AnotherDuck

I'm inclined to agree - "plot point that wasn't fully explored" sounds too common to trope.

I feel that Rebochan's idea (which seems to be to turn this into something objective) is a good one.

I am not sure what "random ideas" and "legitimate ones" are, Another Duck. Can you explain?

@nrjxll: There is no such thing as "too common to trope". It might be People Sit On Chairs what you are looking for, or even Omnipresent Trope.

The problem is how we'd actually define what an example is. What's the scope of the trope? What's obviously not exploring one possibility for one person is just senseless to someone else.

You can have the most perfectly executed plot, exploring as many sides of it as possible, and everyone loves what you did with it, but someone can still think of another angle to explore, or another storyline to derive from the setting. There are always what-ifs to any setting worth writing about in the first place.

Or you can have a setting where magic and science compete with each other and detailed political intrigues concerning which side gets to rule or what purposes they serve in society, and then you have a story about a woman going through a mid-life crisis because her husband left her, without even touching anything that makes the setting unique.

What counts?

edited 26th Sep '12 3:17:35 PM by AnotherDuck

We have pages where examples aren't listed (including many of the Omnipresent Tropes, in fact), because examples are ubiquitous in fiction. Sometimes these pages limit themselves to aversions or other Playing with a Trope variants, but I don't think that's possible here.

Literally anything that isn't the primary focus of a story can be said to have the possibility for more exploration (heck, the primary focus can in some cases). The distinction Another Duck seems to be trying to draw doesn't seem like a meaningful one to me, because - at least in the example given - the difference between a "legitimate" and "random" example seems to be in a person's individual story preferences. In my view, this kind of thing is simply too common to trope.

edited 26th Sep '12 5:17:09 PM by nrjxll

They wasted a perfectly good BUMP.