Misused: Knight Of Cerebus

If I dont't randomly get hit with an inspiration bomb I'd go with that one. Maybe there's a synomym that can combine any two words from it.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 10th 2022 at 5:31:43 PM

I was also thinking Wham Villain, a la Wham Episode, Wham Line, Wham Shot, and such, but I dunno if that name is clear enough. Are the Wham tropes used correctly?

I'd prefer to avoid wickchecking side tropes again (sorry if the tone sounds wrong) just to see how well they relate, I think Wham Villain fits enough.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 12th 2022 at 6:12:57 PM

and Yeah, if you want to TRS the Wham tropes, you could do that separately. Preferably not as a batch either, batch TRS threads usually don't end well or (as in the case of Wiki Tropes or The Con) take a really long time to close.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 12th 2022 at 10:12:53 AM

I agree with Wham Villain. The Wham Tropes are all about massive shifts in the Status Quo, and that is what the KOC is supposed to indicate as well. The VVSS trope indicates a nasty villainous character without the shift in Status Quo.

I added Wham Villain to the crowner.

Wham Villain might actually be OK. While the other Wham-tropes do suffer misuse, we have a cleanup thread somewhere about them and the term fits in this case.

That sounds like Moral Event Horizon crossing villain or like Vile Villain, Saccharine Show, to me. Thumbed it down.

I voted down Wham Villain. While I understand why people might want to link it to existing Wham tropes, there's already so much misuse of the existing Wham tropes I think this is just asking for the trope to continue being misused — just as per Wham misuse, rather than Cerebus misuse.

I voted down everything but Wham Villain, because everything else looked either clunky, or misleading, and it's my understanding that the character in question is usually seen as jarring, which only Wham Villain emphasizes.

Frankly, I hate Wham Villain. It just sounds like "any villain who is surprising" the same way Wham Episode is misused for "any surprising episode" and Wham Line is misused for "any surprising line" regardless of whether or not these change the status quo in some way. I agree that that we don't need to add to the cleanup pile for those.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 12th 2022 at 9:55:33 AM

I'll admit it's a flawed title, but all the title options so far are flawed, and I think it's the least flawed of the flawed titles, if you catch my drift.

Everything but Wham Villain for the same reasons as Infitroper.

If the crowner stays this way when it's time to call it, we may have to go back to the drawing board to come up with new names. since we already had consensus to change the name to something.

To be fair, we knew that the rename was going to have problems since October at least.

Who's "we"? On the page you linked to, you're the only one objecting to renaming the trope, while everyone else is talking about problems with the current name.

"We" are the people who read that post. If people vote for a rename when there isn't a good choice for a better name and the problem still exists after the rename-or-not crowner is called, that suggests that maybe the rename wasn't a good idea from the beginning - or at least that the issue should have been resolved earlier.

If necessary, we can redo the "Do we rename this?" vote to see if anyone changed their mind on renaming if things stay this way after the minimum three days have passed, and narrow the changes down to allowing examples from non-serial works (the other winning option) while keeping the name the same.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 13th 2022 at 8:09:05 AM

Well, I certainly agree that the other titles aren't appealing. I just wanted to say that I don't find Wham Villain appealing either.

I sort of changed my mind on going back to the drawing board on thinking of new names if this crowner fails. I say "sort of" because I'd rather hold a vote for whether to retract the decision to rename, and just focus on the definition tweak (allowing non-serial works) and cleaning up misuse.

I'd do a re-ask about the rename, it will take a lot of time to come up with better names meanwhile anyway.

I don't think the problem is the name so much as it is the definition. As we've been going back and forth on this, we need a more concrete definition for what a KOC is, what separates it from VVSS, what kind of characters qualify, how many KOC a series is allowed to have, whether the examples should be chronological or of significance, and how to tell if something DOESN'T qualify for the trope (eg. character has a dark presence but doesn't impact the plot or doesn't show up until the end). That's where all the misuse is coming from.