Unclear Description: Cursed With Awesome

Just chiming in with my opinion that the names Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck are great, and regardless of subtle redefinition or making one or both YMMY, that part should not change.

I don't think anyone wants a name change. It's just that the definitions are all over the place and not agreeing with each other.

@Madrugada That sounds like a good solution. It would at least help with deciding if it's Blessed with Suck or Cursed with Awesome as well as if the power/condition/ability is supposed to be viewed as a bad thing or not.

I think the definitions of both tropes (and their entries on the Distinction page) should both be rewritten so that they all agree with each other as it's currently majorly confusing.

I think the distinction page should be changed to something like this:

Trope Distinctions/A-C

• Blessed with Suck is when you have a power that is supposed to be considered an advantage, but one that everyone else thinks is not worth having
• Cursed with Awesome is when you have a power that is supposed to be considered a drawback, but one that everyone else thinks is awesome

Current distinction page:

Trope Distinctions/A-C

• Blessed with Suck is when you have an awesome power, but it comes with tons of drawbacks.
• Cursed with Awesome is when you have a relatively sucky power, but it gets you good advantages.

edited 7th Jul '14 7:56:41 PM by ObsidianFire

Well, razorrozar seemed to not like the name.

Hmm. Would saying "it has to be lampshaded" merely determine whether an example fits either trope, or would it also determine which trope it fits? Because if the latter - and the distinction seems to imply such - I could easily see some examples moving from one trope to the other, not always appropriately; yes, they're supposed to be opposites, but they can look very similar. When is the good part "blessed" and when is it "awesome", when is the bad part "suck" and when is it "cursed", especially when there's no active agent to impose this state on anyone? Maddy's hypothetical Hulk example could as easily be read as Blessed with Suck.

Depending on how you read "other characters" or "another character" in Maddy's post, or "everyone else" in the above distinction, it seems like when there is no agent to impose the state on the character in question and it's not clear what side the story is on, this approach would assume that the person actually in the state is "wrong" and everyone else is "right", that the person's own attitude is the "blessed" or "cursed" part and the person who doesn't have it sees the "suck" or "awesome" part, as though this really were intended to be an Audience Reaction and an "in-universe example" would involve the person without the power being the "audience" to "react" to the person with it. Putting aside that that would change the tenor of the tropes substantially, and that even without the implication that this defines the difference between the tropes it seems to leave out some important cases, I suspect there would be more than a few cases where the reverse would be more appropriate.

Moreover, I think this suggestion gets at the root of the problem only indirectly, and incompletely to boot, since lampshaded examples of Zuxtron's "Trope 1" at #20 (like the Batman movies) might still end up in Cursed with Awesome even if they don't fit the spirit of the trope. To respond to #22, I think Spider-Man is a better example of the problem we were talking about before the re-clocking: a power with no negative side effects whatsoever, but which the character hates for some reason. Which seems to basically amount to misuse for I Just Want to Be Normal (though even then in an awfully YMMV way - besides the general whiny tone of some of the examples that don't even acknowledge whatever downsides exist or barely do so, having a What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? power does not mean the character doesn't like it unless they say so, so there is also misuse for Heart Is an Awesome Power - and fixing it admittedly wouldn't necessarily solve all the problems with the page).

Morgan, I think you've put your finger on the problem: right now, both tropes leave it unstated who decides the Blessed/Cursed part and who decides the Suck/Awesome part. So we have examples going in both directions on both tropes depending on which pattern the editor who added them was using.

If that's the case, the solution is to decide which party determines which part and build that into the description.

Personally, I think the "Blessed/Cursed" decision should be up to the entity who bestowed the power/gift/ability/whatever (if there is one) or to the person who has it if there is no "bestowing entity".

So:

If there is a bestowing entity

• Their stated intent determines whether it's "Blessed" or "Cursed". (e.g. Ovid's version of Midas' golden touch. The god Dionysus rewarded Midas for being hospitable to his foster father Silenus by giving him anything he wanted. It was clearly intended and stated by Dionysus to be a reward, a Blessing.)
• How the person themselves feels about it must be at odds with the intent. If the entity intended a blessing, the person must consider that "it sucks". If the entity intended a curse, the person must feel that "it's awesome". Midas started out thinking it was Awesome (So neither trope was in play in the early part of the story.) Later, he came to regard it as sucky. The trope in play is Blessed with Suck.

If there is no bestowing entity:

• How the person themselves feels about it determines whether it's "Blessed" or "Cursed". (Peter Parker for the most part hates being Spiderman. The trope will be Cursed..." if it's either one.)
• How other characters regard it it must be at odds with the person's view. (Numerous other characters think his various spider-powers are pretty damn cool. The contradiction is present and stated. Spiderman is Cursed with Awesome.)

The contradiction must be present in the story. Fan reactions or audience reactions don't count for either one.

In short: The stated intent of the bestowing entity determines whether the trope that might apply is "Blessed" or "Cursed". If there is no bestowing entity, the person's own attitude determines this. The other characters' attitudes determine whether the trope as a whole applies. There must be stated difference of opinion between how the person in question feels about it and how other characters feel about it within the work.

edited 12th Jul '14 7:58:09 AM by Madrugada

Problem is, as I said, there are definitely situations where the reverse would seem to be more appropriate - and then there are the cases I mentioned that wouldn't appear to be covered at all, as exemplified (in my mind) by the Hulk's cousin, She-Hulk, who currently provides the page image - an image I once tried to remove only to be quickly shot down with literally no one agreeing with me, yet Maddy just underscored why I tried to remove it then and why we would probably need to remove it if we went with her suggestion(s), because She-Hulk has in fact rarely been both "cursed" and "awesome" at the same time, in-universe anyway. When first created and at the time that cover ran, She-Hulk was pretty much played as a straight-up female equivalent of the Hulk, and while there were some important differences, in essentials the same argument Maddy makes for the Hulk not being an example would apply to She-Hulk as well.

It's only about mid-way through her first series that she mostly retains her personality and control over her transformation, at which point her state has pretty much no drawbacks whatsoever (aside from those normal for a superhero with a Secret Identity), as is already acknowledged in the story arc that ended her first series. Only issue #12, possibly through issue #18 or #19, would see both elements present at the same time. It'd be hard for the character as a whole to be considered not an example, even in-universe, but the difference is temporal, not varying across characters at the same time. Surely when the character's own reaction changes it would fall under one of these tropes? My inclination would be to make the temporal order match the order listed in the trope name, so She-Hulk's bad-to-good transition is Cursed with Awesome, but that still doesn't make it a good image. In fact I'd say that should be the general definition: whichever is brought up first, regardless of which character brings it up, gets the first word.

By the way, one incident subsequent to that first series that comes to mind where both elements were present at the same time is the incident where Reed Richards gives her the "bad news" that she will be stuck in her She-Hulk form forever, and she responds, "So what's the bad news?" Under Maddy's suggestion, this would be a case of Blessed with Suck because it's the person without the power that sees it as a bad thing, even though that seems ridiculous even on a surface reading and a clear case of Cursed with Awesome. This is a bit of an extreme case because the effect in question was entirely negative and it was only She-Hulk's attitude that neutralized its effect without even really making it positive... but then we're back to determining ourselves whether or not something is positive or negative.

If Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome are tropes, they are tools the story itself can use, and as such the story can be quite clear which one it intends it to be with or without a "bestowing entity" and regardless of whether it fits the framework Maddy just laid out. Indeed characters themselves can see their situation as Blessed with Suck or Cursed with Awesome, if they recognize both sides of their situation at the same time - and I suspect Spider-Man falls under the former.

edited 13th Jul '14 1:57:39 AM by MorganWick

That is the trouble I'm currently having with both those tropes. In some cases, it could be either trope depending on how it's worded. Then there's other cases where it's clearly one or the other. The there's some cases where it flip-flops.

I don't know. The She-Hulk case you outlined seems to be more of a Cursed with Awesome situation that turns into a Blessed With Awesome situation once certain factors resolve. It never really goes into Blessed with Suck as far as I can see.

What also makes it difficult is that Blessed with Suck almost always seems to make use of a bestowing agent (which is what determines that it's a blessing in the first place), while Cursed with Awesome doesn't necessarily. If anything, Cursed with Awesome is usually based on a (negative) character reaction, not the agent who gave the power.

Another observation/mental exercise: the "normal" tropes are Blessed With Awesome and Cursed With Suck. Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome are when these implicit tropes are inverted/averted. The "normal" tropes are so common that it's only when they don't happen that we need trope names for them. Based on the understood definitions of Blessed With Awesome and Cursed With Suck, what would their inverted/averted definitions be?

Don't know if this helps define the definitions, but anyway...

I'm worried that people will interpret your post to mean we have missing super- or sister tropes here. At best those "implicit tropes" are just ordinary blessings or curses, which I guess is helpful if we consider these tropes subversions of the ordinary blessing or curse (another point in favor of my temporal distinction).

Let's make the case for early She-Hulk being Blessed with Suck, shall we? She-Hulk's origin is that Bruce Banner gave her an emergency blood transfusion after she was shot by some goons, so you could make the case that there is a bestowing entity here, even if he didn't intend to bestow the "blessing" he actually did. Then there are those "significant differences" I talked about: in She-Hulk's first issue, which unlike the rest of her first series was written by Stan Lee, although her transformation is triggered by stress there is actually not that much to indicate any sort of split personality (She-Hulk averts Hulk Speak and seems to have memory of what she does as Jennifer Walters and vice-versa, though I don't know what state the Hulk was in at the time). In later issues, though, she develops enough of a violent and mean streak (and transforms at more and more trivial slights) that Jen becomes legitimately scared of her alter ego, but even then it's at least implied that it's still the same personality, only suffering what This Very Wiki compared to "roid rage" - in the story arc that starts in issue #9, the issue that provides the page image, She-Hulk herself spends a lot of time arguing with herself, torn between her better nature and her baser urges. However, the story arc that starts there also reveals that her uncontrollable transformations are the result of a degenerative blood condition that nearly kills her (she spends all of issue #11 in an extremely weak She-Hulk state) before being cured in the aforementioned issue #12.

So you could make the case that this is a Zig-Zagged Trope - Jen ends issue #1 vowing "whatever Jennifer Walters can’t handle… the She-Hulk will do", becomes scared of her transformation by issue #4, has She-Hulk scaring herself by issue #9, by issue #12 has lost most of what made being She-Hulk so scary for much of that time (in that issue her post-cure transformations, though voluntary, are very long and extremely painful, but I don't know if that even lasts beyond one change each way, let alone the next issue - I don't have any of these issues and am going by the extremely detailed plot summaries at the Marvel Database which get much less detailed with issue #13 onwards), and by issue #20, as Emergency Transformation (which made the "roid rage" comparison) puts it, "her lack of inhibitions [have already] shifted themselves from wanting to break stuff to just having fun" (and she's already vowed at the end of issue #19 to remain She-Hulk permanently).

Now that I've laid it out like this, I'm inclined to say that She-Hulk is increasingly Blessed with Suck over the course of her first 11 issues, swings around to Cursed with Awesome in issue 12^note Quote from that issue as Jen is trying to change to She-Hulk: "The She-Hulk always appeared so unbidden, before… always came out when I least wanted her. But now, just when I need her the most… I'M HERE!!!", and can only be seen as Cursed with Awesome after that if you compare her present state with how she started (or if other characters expect her to be cursed by it, as with Reed Richards and in non-comic media). That illustrates just how tricky these tropes could get.

edited 14th Jul '14 4:55:35 AM by MorganWick

All things considered, maybe we should consider splits for both Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck, having the YMMV versions become new tropes? Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck would be in-universe reactions, and yes, I do think 'bestowing entity' should be included—unless we want a trope specifically for when somebody is handing out curses/blessings/powers that are the opposite of intended. ("You can be a superhero! But you will look like a dyslexic Neo-Nazi the whole time!")

Re-clocking this one.

Clock expired without progress; putting to bed.