YMMV Home Page and Audience Reaction Policy Thread

Per ~Septimus Heap's advice in the Locked Pages thread, a thread has been created for discussing YMMV and Audience Reaction policy on a Wiki-wide level.

Our current topic of discussion is whether Audience Reaction policy applies to other YMMV items, given the following (emphasis mine):

Edited by SkyCat32 on Aug 26th 2020 at 9:01:00 AM

Rawr.

Thanks. The main thing I am questioning is this one on YMMV.Home Page: Be aware that Playing with a Trope cannot apply to these YMMV items. They can't be subverted or downplayed or inverted or averted. which was added only a few months back.

Thing is, currently the YMMV.Home Page is a list of in-story things that require an judgment call by the audience to identify (c.f Moral Event Horizon) but they are not audience reactions per se. And since they happen in a story, they can be subverted or played with (e.g one could imagine someone being set up to commit a MEH-worthy deed, only for them to say "hey, why am I doing this?" and retreating).

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

That said, items like Complete Monster or Magnificent Bastard are not supposed to be played with because of how encompassing they are, and because allowing played with examples would lead to misuse.

Rawr.

I have to agree. If this can occur in-universe, it can be played with. Admittedly, there are some exceptions like Complete Monster and some pages have their inversions split (like It's Hard, So It Sucks! / It's Easy, So It Sucks!), but there should be more freedom in terms of this stuff.

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 26th 2020 at 8:18:26 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

My problem is, these tropes only subjectively occur in the work. Yes they have objective criteria but it's also a judgement call as to how much they actually apply or if they do at all. That's why I personally think they can't be played with- because in the end they come down to audience perception, not the work itself, and whether or not the audience thinks a certain thing can't be played with.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Conversely, the problem with YMMV is that it occurs in the minds of the audience, not the work itself. To use Moral Event Horizon as an example, Anakin killed dozens to hundreds of children. This is a fact from the work itself. It is an opinion that such a crime is inexcusable and thus whoever does such a thing cannot ever be forgiven. The work itself doesn't support that opinion, as Anakin is forgiven (in ignorance), and welcomed into Jedi heaven. Are we supposed to say that MEH in this case is subverted, because we would never expect Anakin to be forgiven, but his betrayal of the Emperor was enough to return to the moral good? Or is it not an example because we saw him being forgiven first and then saw him commit unforgivable crimes chronologically earlier? Or does that make it zig-zagged?

The simplest thing is to assume all audience opinion tropes are played straight and acknowledge that sometimes audiences don't agree on if an example is played straight or even present.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Exactly.

Otherwise we're saying all YMMV tropes are actually objective- and that wouldn't make them YMMV at all.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Tropes and argenfargles are not either YMMV/audience or objective/in-story.

The whole reason why YMMV.Home Page exists is because things like Complete Monster do not neatly fall into either category. In theory the fourth wall would serve as an ironclad separator but in practice lines get blurred when the existence of a trope in the story requires some audience consideration to identify it.

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

We decided long ago that anything on the YMMV or Audience Reactions indexes may not have Playing With subpages. Is there any question about this?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

There is, because we did not decide such a thing at all from what I remember. Besides, even if we disallowed the subpage the play-with variants would still be up for debate.

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

I could have sworn that was the case.

Rawr.

But that's claiming these are tropes that do exist in the story. The entire reason they're YMMV is that not everyone would agree on if these tropes are in the story.

They require audience judgement to decide if they're there. That's inherent. If they could exist separately of whether or not there's an audience to judge, they wouldn't be YMMV.

If a story is written and nobody reads it...can it have subjective tropes at all? I say no- because these tropes rely on audience perception and not just the writing alone. You can't play with a concept that only exists if the fans think it does.

MEH in particular has infuriated me for a while, actually. The insistence that it needs to be objectively true according to the work completely ignores the subjectivity thing- the idea that the villain needs to definitely be irredeemable in canon means that it doesn't matter what the fans think, and makes it objective. Yet it's still YMMV, which means it should be about fan opinion.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 26th 2020 at 5:11:22 AM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Septimus, this has been a long-standing policy. I can even try to find it in Administrivia.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Busted search is making my normal trawls into the past more difficult. Here's citations, but they only reach as far back as 2019 or 2018:

• YMMV.Thatsmy Bush
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=81567&type=att#comment-227940
• PlayingWith.Painful Rhyme
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=YMMV.EthnicCleansing#edit24737561
• https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=YMMV.SuperSmashBrosForNintendo3DSAndWiiU#edit22054860

These citations are very weak evidence, only supporting the claim that tropers are already of the opinion that "YMMV can't be played with" and does not cite a consensus vote, moderator fiat, or admin fiat establishing policy (:P ya'll know that's the sort of thing I can usually find). This might be a case where memetic distribution has created divergent expectations.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

It's been consensus for a long time that Audience Reactions can't be played with. It's not so clear with items on YMMV.Home Page, partly because a lot of people keep mixing them up. FWIW, What Goes Where on the Wiki has some discussion on the distinction but nothing on Playing With entries.

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

Seems like we ought to write such a policy. Anyway, it's also widely agreed upon that YMMV items cannot be played with other than by being Discussed, Conversed, or Invoked, or so I thought.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I mean, maybe people are considering whether it was such a good idea now. I personally only saw the ways to potentially allow playing with YMMV and/or Audience Reaction would be inversions (like Replacement Scrappy getting inverted and having the character loved for replacing the previous character in terms of YMMV). Maybe also subversions (like Discredited Meme though it is an audience reaction, where a meme is indeed discredited, but after a while becomes loved and nostalgic). I'll admit I'm one of the people who does have problems differentiating YMMV and Audience Reactions and sees little point in separating them.

As for making other ways to play with in-universe, those could also probably be done, but I have no idea why. I am tired today.

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 26th 2020 at 11:42:26 AM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Isn't this More Popular Replacement

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

Yeah, it is. I must've forgotten it. Still, inversions do exist, though the current procedure is that they get separate pages (not saying it's bad, just considering).

Edited by Piterpicher on Aug 26th 2020 at 11:48:16 AM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

I think that makes sense; they're different reactions, after all. Inverted tropes are inverted intentionally, or at least obviously flip a pattern around, but the whole point of audience reactions is that they just are what they are- so any inversion of one is just an entirely different reaction.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

One issue is that to the casual reader, it might not be clear whether something is a YMMV trope or an audience reaction. After all, both of these things belong on the same page, and the only way to tell them apart is by whether they're on the Audience Reactions index (and though you can see which ones are on Audience Reactions, there's no easy way to see a list of every YMMV trope that ISN'T on there).

So if someone sees multiple played-with examples being added to YMMV pages, they may get the impression that everything on YMMV is okay to play with.

I just made a large edit to What Goes Where on the Wiki to fill in some gaps (in some cases, really blatant ones).

I would like to add some information about Playing With Wiki but we need consensus first.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Can't a YMMV be discussed/invoked as another played-with trope? Like if a series deconstructs the MEH by showing characters talk about how the concept of irredeemability is reductive and pointless (I have BoJack Horseman on the mind here). Also I didn't know there was even a difference between audience reactions and YMMV. I assumed MEH is YMMV because people react more strongly to different acts a character commits.

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Wouldn't that make it an Audience Reaction- as in, the audience reacts to what the character did?

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

YMMV tropes can be invoked or discussed as can any others, which makes them In-Universe examples. However, in their basic forms they cannot be inverted, subverted, parodied, etc.

How would you subvert MEH? If it turns out not to have been one after all, then the trope simply doesn't occur. How do you parody an Ass Pull (without using a trope that already exists, like Ass Shove)? I suppose you could hang a lampshade on it, but you can lampshade anything.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 26th 2020 at 6:53:27 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"