Unclear Description: Cursed With Awesome

The other problem is that "awesome" and "suck" are both terms expressing opinion concerning appeal, not utility. Umbrellas are quite useful, but they're rarely "awesome"; an inside-diameter micrometer is not useful to most people but that doesn't mean it "sucks"

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Change the wording, then? Cursed With Usefulness and Blessed With Hindrance?

We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.

That's redefining the trope.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Perhaps, but there's no need to take it so literally. The kind of things your typical superpowers get used for tend to be awesome when they work and suck when they fail.

edited 23rd Nov '16 7:33:41 AM by DiamondWeapon

What I was thinking was more of is there is this one girl in A Certain Scientific Railgun who's powers are she literally can not be noticed by human eyes, you can only see her using a mirror or camera.

The fridge suck is when you think of how horrible the power is since it makes her an extreme Invisible Loner and target of scorn by other people because they don't trust her to not spy on them.

The main series also goes into other powers like that, but all powers are treated as a good thing universally in the work.

edited 23rd Nov '16 8:44:52 AM by Memers

But this isn't just about typical superpowers. The example immediately above is a good example. So are things like the fairy tales where a girl is "rewarded" for her kindness to a witch by having pearls or gems drop from her mouth every time she speaks.

edited 23rd Nov '16 9:44:29 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Now the question is: does that girl get rich because of having lots of pearls or does she have people after her, sometimes in hostile ways? I.e does that power actually help her or instead give her trouble?

We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.

The stories don't usually go into that, though she generally winds up married to a prince or such like (but often there's an implication that what catches his interest is not her, but the gems.) So it's more of a Fridge-Suck thing.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Well, the actual suck in that fairy tale is her sister who is cursed to drop toads and lizards from her mouth when she talks and ends up getting thrown out of the house/town... It's also implied that everyone already liked being around the good sister becasue she had a good personality before she got blessed, so it wasn't like much had actually changed for her.

But it does give a good example for why the trope shouldn't be based off what the audience of the work thinks about the work. None of the Blessed with Suck is in the original fairy tale. It's not like Midas where the character wishes he could get rid of the power he was blessed with.

Bump.

I agree, the suckiness/awesomeness should be in the story, not just audience opinion. Spitting gems isn't Blessed with Suck just because we can imagine ways in which it could go wrong, if it actually works out just fine in the story.

It looks like making both tropes In-Universe is something most people are okay with, but no matter if we go with that or not, both descriptions need some work.

The Blessed with Suck description is mostly okay, but it could loose the Example As Thesis and we should make sure all the tropes in the compare/contrast/subtrope section really belong there.

The Cursed with Awesome description should probably be completely redone even if the definition doesn't change as most of it looks like it belongs on an analysis page. It's just so muddy right now I still have a hard time figuring out what the actual trope is. And same thing goes for the compare/contrast/subtrope section as above.

I don't know if I should wait to see what other people have to say so I'm not just making definitions in my own echo chamber or if I should just make sandboxes of revised definitions and then see what people think of them.

edited 14th Dec '16 5:03:35 PM by ObsidianFire

"or if I should just make sandboxes of revised definitions and then see what people think of them."

Maybe you can start with that and then let people see so they can add to it.

We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.

I'm fairly confident that the lack of clear meaning ("I'll know it when I see it") has so thoroughly tainted both tropes for me that I cannot say yea or nay to what the "true" definition is. I would rather a clean definition based on the trope name and consider if it is worth the effort to force the wicks to conform. Therefore, my preference is for sandboxed descriptions, not laconics.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Made Sandbox.Blessed With Suck and Sandbox.Cursed With Awesome. I decided to make the descriptions mirror each other as the tropes are inverses of each other.

Obsidian Fire. You did a really good job of cutting all the cruft.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Okay, reading through the two pages, it appears that it has added most of the ideas we talked before.

But something got me there:

• "the character thinks the special ability they got sucks."
• "the character thinks the special ability they now have is awesome."

Thing is,

• It's not always a "special ability". Especially in the context of cursing. It can be a condition (in fact it's more often to be a condition) or a special item, or some other things.
• More importantly, I think it's more important that the example counts based on how the bless actually hinders them or how the curse actually helps them (story-wise), rather than how the subject react to it. I have a case of a certain video game character who hates his immortality yet also finding it useful (it lets him survive a Kill Sat attack for one).

We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.

Your first point: Good catch "special ability or condition" is an easy fix.

Second point: that's veering back into subjective territory: I think we're better off limiting it to How the character regards it, rather than how useful it may be. That's also harking back to the problem that Useful=/=awesome and useless=/=suck.

edited 16th Dec '16 6:56:19 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Special ability/condition was the most neutral term I could find. On both pages, it was originally a "power" that the character got. The biggest part of whatever term goes there is that it's something the character didn't have before the blessing/curse.

The second point is the exact reason I put in this part: "It does have to be their main attitude towards the special ability to qualify for this trope. If their main attitude is that the special ability is usually awesome and only occasionally sucks, then they do not qualify for this trope." on the Blessed with Suck page. This is not about the practical effects of a special ability. It is specifically a character reaction.

Just about every character with a power has found it useless and useful at times regardless of how they feel about the power in general. The trope is about the dissonance between how they got a power and how they feel about it. Referencing how they feel about the power in specific circumstances ultimately takes away from that dissonance.

And good point about Useful=/=Awesome and Useless=/=Suck. *looks to see if that can be added to the definition somehow*

How about something like

"If their main attitude is that the special ability is usually awesome and only occasionally sucks, then they do not qualify for this trope. That's "Awesome" and "Sucks"; not "is Useful" or "is Useless". Utility and desirability are not equivalent for this trope.".

edited 16th Dec '16 11:29:54 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Suggesting that Utility pothole to Mundane Utility.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I disagree. It doesn't have to be a Mundane Utility. Mundane Utility specifies that the utility stems from something Awesome.

edited 16th Dec '16 3:04:48 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

"Useful=/=awesome and useless=/=suck."

Uh, how? That sounds completely 180 from what I believe. If I'd try to guess, maybe you meant that a character only finds meager use from their blessing and still thinks it sucks or they find their curse only inconveniences them a bit and still thinks the rest of it is awesome?

We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.

No, I mean that Awesomeness is not the same as utility and Suckitude is not the same as uselessness. They aren't interchangeable attributes. They are not equal to each other. Something being Useful does not automatically make it Awesome and something being Useless does not automatically make it Suck.

A Voyager minivan is an extremely useful vehicle, but it's not an awesome one. A Dodge Viper is an awesome vehicle, but it's not particularly useful.

edited 17th Dec '16 6:56:03 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

That's the point of Mundane Utility; an extraordinary power is used for ordinary activity. It is not about being a subjectively awesome power.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.