Unclear Description: Blessed With Suck

The two tropes Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome tend to be mixed up. They're very similar in nature, and unfortunately the descriptions of each of them are a bit confusing. Even the Canonical List of Subtle Trope Distinctions does very little to clear it up. (Really, how is "an awesome power, but it comes with tons of drawbacks" different from "a relatively sucky power, but it gets you good advantages"?) Even the page quote on the Blessed with Suck page actually describes someone who is firmly in the Cursed with Awesome category. (The page quote describes Rob McKenna, a minor character in the Hitchhiker's series. He is Cursed With Awesome, because the rain clouds follow him around and always rain on him (curse), but then he becomes rich by getting paid to avoid certain vacation spots (awesome).)

As I understand it, Blessed with Suck refers to a person receiving a power which initially appears to be a blessing, but ultimately is terrible (such as King Midas). Cursed with Awesome refers to a person receiving a power which initially appears to be terrible, but ultimately helps them. Both tropes really need their descriptions to be shortened and streamlined, and make those key facts clear, IMO.

EDIT: Actually, it occurs to me that these are both subtropes of "Mixed Blessing", which simply means something that both hurts and helps you. So, basically there are three types of Mixed Blessings: Things that appear good but are actually bad, things that appear bad but are actually good, and things that from the start are clearly both good and bad at the same time.

edited 3rd Mar '15 10:43:34 AM by zoop

Seems to be a case of Missing Supertrope Syndrome. It looks like a Mixed Blessing supertrope would help channel the edge cases somewhere useful.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I agree with shimaspawn. Make the Mixed Blessings supertrope (or maybe just a disambig page?), and clean up both example lists.

for the Mixed Blessings supertrope.

+1 for Mixed Blessings as the supertrope.

+1 for Mixed Blessings.

edited 25th Aug '15 2:39:12 PM by Karxrida

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

I always thought Blessed With Suck was supposed to be a supposed "blessing" that is a lot more trouble than the advantages make it worth, while Cursed With Awesome is a supposed "curse" that actually has much better/more advantages than drawbacks. Like a blessing in name only vs a curse in name only.

Guess I was wrong.

edited 25th Aug '15 3:52:09 PM by PhiSat

Oissu!

The problem is that you can phrase a lot of things like both Blessed with Suck or Cursed with Awesome. Not to mention that the definition of both isn't consistant across the site.

Huh, I thought it was about the perception of the character with the power. If they hated their ability, it was Cursed with Awesome, even if it was something other people would gladly take, weaknesses and all.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Clearly we have a problem, if we can't agree on what the trope is even supposed to be about.

edited 26th Aug '15 9:01:34 AM by PhiSat

Oissu!

This was my understanding as well.

This is actually reflected in the description of Cursed with Awesome:

So Cursed with Awesome is definitely something that's presented as being a bad thing (a Curse), but in effect is a good thing (something awesome). Blessed with Suck is described as "when a character is given a special ability that seems to cause nothing but trouble", but it's also described (on both pages) as the opposite of Cursed with Awesome, so I think "something presented as good but turns out to be bad" is the legit definition.

I think most of the ambiguity comes from whether the narrative or the characters think it's awesome/sucky, which can vary.

Still, some examples are pretty ambiguous, so a supertrope couldn't hurt. Mixed Blessing by itself is a bit vague, but Mixed Blessing Powers or something could work. We'd also need to be careful to differentiate it from Necessary Drawback.

edited 30th Aug '15 11:50:34 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

In, say, Cursed with Awesome, are the disadvantages overly inflated and the advantages downplayed by the characters only, with the story emphasizing that those characters are being silly? Or does the story somehow try to have characters act as if it were a really bad curse, when a closer look at the plot reveals it's not that bad and the characters are just Wangsting?

Any of the above really... I find the main thing that ties all the example together is that the way/method the "curse" was gotten is almost always treated as negative by the narrative. In Blessed with Suck, the way the "blessing" is gotten is treated as positive or neutral by the narrative. It really doesn't help that Cursed with Awesome is usually an inversion to both Cursed With Suck and Blessed With Awesome in many different ways. The same thing goes for Blessed with Suck.

The thing is, I think a lot of the confusion comes from whether the narritive, the characters or the reader is the one to determine if something is "awesome" or "suck".

The way I see it, it all depends on if Blessed With Awesome or Cursed With Suck is being inverted. Because Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome are the inversions of both those tropes depending on what is being stressed. Is it the method the power was gotten? or the power itself?

If we go by these questions we get these four tropes:

Blessed With Awesome: The way a character gets a power/ability is treated as positive or at least neutral. And the power they get out of whatever method is viewed as being a great power overall.

Cursed With Suck: The way a character gets a power/ability is treated as negative. The power they get of it is at the very least an inconvenience or outright dangerous. Angst is probably going to come up and it'll be (mostly) justified to boot.

The inversions get tricky because something viewed as Cursed With Suck by the character who has it or the narrative can often be viewed as Cursed with Awesome by other characters or the audience.

Inversion 1: The way a character gets a power/ability is treated as positive, but the power they get is sucky/inconvenient/etc. If something is being angsted over (or viewed as annoying) it's the power/ability not the way the power/ability was gotten. Example: In mythology, King Midus is given one wish (with good intentions) and chooses to be able to turn anything he touches into gold. The god granting this wish even tries to talk him out of it.

Inversion 2: The way a character gets a power/ability is treated as negative but the power is viewed as great. What's usually angsted over is the events the character went through to get the power. Oftentimes the way the character view those events effects how the character thinks about the powers they got from the events. However, a character can be perfectly fine with the powers they have and still have this trope apply to them if they way they got those powers is considered negative. Example: In mythology, Scylla is cursed to become one of the most powerful, hideous, and feared monsters in existence. Instead of bemoaning her fate, she decides to stay in the spot she was transformed for the rest of her life and devours anyone who comes near her. She at least thinks being a monster is great.

Personally, I think the way to fix this is to make the method a power/ability is gained the determining factor as that's a lot less YMMV then if the power gotten is awesome or not. Otherwise both Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck become YMMV very quickly especially when it's the audience who thinks the power is awesome, but no one in-universe does. There's also the problem with characters having differing opinions, especially as it's really common for the person who actually has the power to think its Cursed With Suck while the rest of the cast spends the entire narrative trying to convince them that they're Cursed With Awesome even if there is a Necessary Drawback.

As a side note, I think having Blessed With Awesome and Cursed With Suck be exampless omnipresent tropes wouldn't be a bad idea as that would at least give contrasting tropes to put on work pages if characters in a series feel different ways about the same powers. IE: some characters think a power is Blessed With Awesome, other people think it's Blessed with Suck.

So are we gonna go with the "curse/bless" and "suck/awesome" dichotomies?

MAX POWER KILL JEEEEEEEEWWWWW

Bump.

We really need to fix this. If simply to just make all the different definitions of the tropes be the same across the site Currently, Blessed with Suck gives a different definition for Cursed with Awesome then the actual Cursed with Awesome pages does and vice-versa. And the A to C page gives definitions that are different then both the actual trope pages.

for Mixed Blessing Powers

Another big problem, I think, is that what exactly "awesome" and "sucky" mean isn't really defined. Does it have to help/hinder the plot or characters, or is it just a bad/good thing to have in general? If it's the first one, then there's a lot of cleanup to do. If it's the second one, then these tropes both become very subjective.

edited 9th Oct '15 3:32:57 PM by mintweasel

"Awesome" and "Sucky" are usually used as bad/good in general, which makes alot of the examples nearly YMMV. If the definition of Awesome and Sucky were left up to the characters (particularly the character with the power) then a lot of examples would need to be moved around.

And that still doesn't address if the origin of the power has anything to do with the trope...

Nothing else seems to be happening towards cleaning this trope up, so I'm going to chime in again with what I think we have right now.

• Mixed Blessing Powers (or simply Mixed Blessing): Someone has some sort of power with both advantages and drawbacks that are relevant to the story.
  • Blessed With Suck: Someone gets "blessed" with something that causes them difficulties. I think this trope should be limited to powers like the Midas Touch, things that are good on the surface but have major or unforeseen drawbacks.
  • Cursed With Awesome: Someone gets a "curse" of some kind that turns out to do good. It doesn't have to be an outright punishment for the user, it could be an inherited trait, or guilt by association.
    • A possible subtrope of this would be for cases where it's supposed to be a bad thing, but the "victim" knows they're better off with it. Could be the inverse of Freakiness Shame.

Though in my opinion, the other proposed tropes for the curse/blessing and awesome/sucky dichotomies wouldn't really work.

• Blessed With Awesome is a Universal Trope. Most blessings in fiction tend to help the user out, and playing it straight is not notable in itself. Pretty much any example can also fall into a more specific trope, or into one of the Wish-Fulfillment category.
• Cursed With Suck is essentially the same as Curse with a longer name.

Until we settle this, the best course of action is where to draw the line between where one of the tropes actually applies and what is merely YMMV.

edited 18th Oct '15 4:15:10 PM by mintweasel

I was just using Blessed With Awesome and Cursed With Suck to show that Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome are not inversions of each other, but of BWA and CWS. Btw, Cursed With Suck should probably be made a redirect to Curse, if just for comparative purposes.

I'd add to both the definitions you proposed that they are from the point of view of the person cursed/blessed. A person is not Cursed with Awesome if they themselves don't think the power is awesome no matter what other people in the story think (IE: The Hulk is not Cursed with Awesome becasue he doesn't think it's an awesome power even if other people in-universe do.)

Otherwise we'll just run into the problem we currently have with both tropes where any power can be Blessed With Suck so long as someone (in the story, in the audience, etc.) thinks the power is awesome/sucky no matter what the character who actually has it thinks.

No matter what we do we'll probably have a lot of clean-up to do... most of it will be moving examples from the Blessed/Cursed pages to the Mixed Blessings page.

edited 18th Oct '15 5:59:03 PM by ObsidianFire

Bump.

We could really use some more input in here as to where we should go from here. IE: crowner? sandbox new definitions?

I'm almost tempted to start a sandbox for cleaned up definitions of Blessed with Suck and Cursed with Awesome if just to see what other people think about them.

Going to put the following description for Mixed Blessings Power though YKKTW later today. Tell me if you guys want to add/take away anything.

Makes sense to me. A sandbox would definitely help clean up the page and allow for better discussion for individual dubious examples.

Personally, I disagree with the inclusion of Difficult, but Awesome and Heart Is an Awesome Power, mainly because the first one's disadvantages often reduce over time until it is no longer a mixed blessing, while the second seems to be more about a negative perception of a beneficial ability.

I think there could be a crowner to determine the next course of action, because it appears that there are a few ways we can clarify/redefine the tropes.

• Option 1: Simply strip the YMMV examples and leave the rest as is.
• Option 2: Clarify BWS and CWA to only include instances where the power affects the protagonist in a way opposite of which it was presented. (e.g. including examples like The Incredible Hulk)
• Option 3: Same as 2, but also only from the perspective of the affected person(s). (e.g. not including examples like The Incredible Hulk)

We could also YKKTW the inverse of Freakiness Shame as I mentioned in post 18.

I wondered if those tropes should count or not.

Before we make that crowner, I think we need to figure out of Cursed with Awesome and Blessed with Suck should be YMMV or not. Currently, they're being treated this way in all but name and if it turns out that they are YMMV, then that's a lot of wicks we won't have to fix.

If they aren't YMMV, then we should probably go and make a YMMV trope about how other people in a work disagree with how a person views their own power/ability. Because that's currently what most of the examples on Cursed with Awesome are as well as some of those on Blessed with Suck. That way we can have a place to document what other people in the work/audience think of the character's powers.

edited 27th Oct '15 5:52:28 PM by ObsidianFire

Achilles' Heel should not be on that list, because it's about being Nigh-Invulnerable with a single weakness. That's not a mixed blessing unless Weaksauce Weakness or Kryptonite Is Everywhere is involved, which is not always the case.

Boring, but Practical doesn't really have any drawbacks out side of being "boring", which isn't a really a drawback as far as utilizing the power/item/blessing is concerned.

edited 27th Oct '15 2:03:50 PM by Karxrida

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?

YKTTW for Mixed Blessings Power can be found here.

I went though a bunch of indexes and added in tropes that I though fit. Feel free to leave suggestions of new tropes (or point out tropes that don't fit) in the comments section.