Misused: Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped

Maybe, despite the title, the closest parallel is not Anvilicious but the various types of An Aesop: Broken Aesop, Clueless Aesop, and the rest. SANTBD could be seen as Necessary Aesop or something like that.

If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you. -James Thurber

The Wick Check says that is not how the trope name is currently used. Saying "despite the title" suggests that such a definition would be counterintuitive.

edited 11th Jul '17 4:59:47 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Defining Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped in relation to Anvilicious seems to be getting us nowhere, so maybe we should try defining it in relation simply to An Aesop instead. A rename is out of the question, but the name does seem to imply a judgement on the "anvil" itself (i.e. the aesop).

I think we should do this especially given the wick check, since it found that most of the misuse was people thinking this meant "good aesop."

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EDIT: So, I found the previous thread on this issue, and I'm more inclined to support a merge than I was before. I think we could either merge or redefine, and I'm not sure what's better or easier.

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So, there was a previous thread on this matter from 2012. That thread also had an issue with the "Anvilicious but done well."

I think a major problem with SANTBD as it is now is its (partial) origins as a Sugar Wiki page (called SugarWiki.Anvils That Needed To Be Dropped). This post sums it up a bit: SANTBD used to just be "unsubtle aesops that people liked" (hence the connection to Sugar Wiki) and used to be example-less.

To sum up what happened, I guess, there was a crowner to merge the sugar wiki page with SANTBD, which had consensus to merge. Then there was a following crowner about merging SANTBD with Anvilicious. There wasn't actually a lot of discussion about that merge, but it did not have "consensus for action" which is weird because it has 6 for and 18 against (1:3 ratio?). Enough time has gone by, though, that I think it's fair game to bring back up.

So, my question is...:

• Should we (re-)consider merging SANTBD with Anvilicious (keeping Anvilicious as the name, given that it's a Trope Of Legend / Overdosed Trope)?

There was some talk in this thread to move SANTBD to Sugar Wiki...

edited 15th Jul '17 9:30:47 AM by WaterBlap

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

Regardless of how this whole thing came to be, I wholeheartedly believe that what this page has become is worthy of appreciation in its own right. A place where people can share meaningful, well-done morals encourages learning, growth, positivity, and the ability to see things from another perspective. This is not just in the lessons themselves, but in how we can share them with others, either by acting as a gateway to these works, or by inspiring future writers to share these lessons with more insight than before. Whatever course of action we take, it would be a total shame if it came at the expense of all this. I think the best thing to do is to look this less as Trope Decay, and more as Trope Evolution, and change the description to match the redefined trope.

Edited by Noah1 on Jun 16th 2021 at 10:53:47 AM

An open mind and compassionate heart are among the most important qualities we can have.

That would be appropriate for a Sugar Wiki page, I think. We're coming full circle, it seems.

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

If "Necessary Aesop" is not what SANTBD means, then shouldn't it be a trope in its own right? (A YMMV one, most likely, but not necessarily Sugar Wiki.)

There are enough good examples like Nineteen Eighty-Four or Uncle Tom's Cabin or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington where the point can be made that trying to remove the Aesop/Anvil from the work would make it meaningless, both as a worthwhile moral point in its cultural context and as a coherent work of art. (Imagine 1984 without anybody saying totalitarianism is bad; consider the importance of saying totalitarianism is bad in 1949.)

Or perhaps the question is: Can we define SANTBD in a way that's distinct from the way I define Necessary Aesop? Are they the same trope?

I'd make the case they're the same. I'd parse SANTBD not as "This particular work is anvilicious but I like it" but as "Some particular anvils (and/or Aesops?) have the quality of needing to be dropped, in order for the work to accomplish what it does."

If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you. -James Thurber

This looks correct for Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped. Note that "anvil" was a reference to Anvilicious. The trope name means "an aesop that has the quality of needing to be presented in an obvious manner" (the full definition is that the work benefits by presenting the aesop in an obvious manner).

The problem is that this trope is consistently and heavily misused. Over 76% of fifty random wicks were misuse for "this is a great moral that people should hear" instead of "the work would be worse if the moral was more subtle". When an internet search was done, the links agreed with the misuse over the actual definition.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

It's also possible we might be on to a potentially bigger issue with some Trope Decay around the distinctions between "An Anvil" and "An Aesop."

If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you. -James Thurber

And I officially have a headache. We did all this discussing and nothing has come of it due to various issues that turn into a case of 'agreeing to disagree'. There are very few points people can agree on it seems....

Locking per New Year Purge.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman