Darkness Induced Audience Apathy Cleanup

I don't know about you, but some entries in Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy could use some cleaning up. For instance:

The genre of suburban/middle-class peril: films from Fatal Attraction to Cache/Hidden suffer from the fact that their heroes are smug and successful without any moral virtues or other good qualities to endear them to the audience.

According the Laconic description, this trope is Crapsack World + cast of Jerkasses = "I don't care what happens to these people." The trouble with the entry is that the worlds presented are not that crapsack, and some characters in the casts are not even close to being Jerkasses!

Don't ever make the mistake of using the Laconic version as the canonical trope meaning—the laconics are often written by people who don't actually understand the drop. In this case, the laconic only corresponds to one possible cause of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.

edited 24th Jan '13 1:48:42 AM by Ironeye

I think a better laconic would be along the lines of "The audience doesn't care what happens, because it will make no real difference either way."

The difficulty in cleaning up this page is that it is an audience reaction, so there is no objective criteria.

Then WHY DO WE HAVE THEM if they are inherently inaccurate? That's madness.

edited 9th Dec '14 7:44:50 PM by FOFD

Um, "often" not "inherently". Laconics are also often great. But don't expect to win any arguments by quoting one.

The point is if a laconic entry doesn't match up with a trope description, then it should be changed so it does.

The point of laconics is to get a quick overview of the heart of the trope, not a precise definition of it. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if a trope is about an action, a character performing the action, or the result of the action, and a laconic usually tells you that straight up.

The main problem at the base of inaccurate Laconics is that when they were first created, a number of editors treated them as a game, to see who could be the funniest or use the most memes, regardless of accuracy. There's an ongoing clean-up effort dedicated to trying to make them more consistently accurate.