SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome, aren't those just aversions?

I've seen Surprisingly Realistic Outcome show up on a lot of pages recently. And I kinda have... issues figuring what the trope is about. Like, I get that on paper its when a regular trope you'd expect to happen in media doesn't happen, and instead you get what would happen in real life in this situation. And I'm kinda stuck on "Isn't this just an aversion of the regular trope?"

The page has "criterias" but a lot of them seem... YMMV to be the least. "Surprising" being a big one. Then there's the passages on how this differs from deconstructions

Isn't realism or things behaving like they do in reality also predictable? I'd argue reality is way more predictable that a deconstruction? also, a work can deconstruct tropes without the work itself being a "deconstruction" so that bit is basically useless?

Dunno maybe I'm just reading it wrong. What's people's read on this? How's this just different from an aversion?

Surprisingly Realistic Outcome is the result of a TRS on what was once Reality Ensues. It's had a hell of a history since then—the cleanup thread was having trouble with the definition before and after the TRS, it ended up in TRS again for an unclear definition among other things, then went to Trope Talk after a required wick check turned up misuse from Reality Ensues that was moved over instead of cleaned up during the wick cleaning, the definition was tightened in Trope Talk I believe, and now we're here.

I wasn't super active in the whole debacle so I can't really elaborate—the links should provide some backstory, or someone who was involved could post here to elaborate better than I.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:23:47 AM

It's depressing to learnt he current depression is the best version of the definition the page has had coz, wow.

Though I guess the page being some vague remain of a larger dumpster trope explains a lot.

Still not clear on what it's actually supposed to be about and how it differs from aversions. But at least that history is enlightening so thanks for that!

Edited by Ghilz on Jan 20th 2023 at 7:25:36 AM

You're welcome. Like I said, I wasn't very active in this whole debacle so I'm not the best messenger here, but I'm sure someone who was can explain better than I, as I said.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 20th 2023 at 10:28:49 AM

Well, technically, they're subversions rather than aversions - the expectation of the unrealistic outcome is set up before pulling the rug out from under your feet.

That's a fair cop. Though from the examples I've come across the "expectation" bit is very... rarely elaborated upon.

I would say that showing the realistic outcome of something is Deconstruction.

I'd argue that too but the page has several paragraphs insisting it's not because frantic hand waving.

The concept might be unsalvageable, precisely because it appears to be disconnected from tropes and more about an observation of a general event within a work. Because there is no standard of what kind of event is happening the idea attracts examples that merely say something was plausible, in turn implying that all of fiction is unrealistic. A problem too is that audiences are getting more and more savvy and may be reading into things something that wasn't there.

I would disagree that it is "just" a deconstruction because a deconstruction is more about applying an alternative result of using a trope, taking into consideration ideas that were previously ignored. Whether or not it is realistic is a different story.

I generally view the trope centered around expectations and how it pays off. So either the character or the narrative of the story is establishing a particular order of events and what they think will happen, and something gets derailed because it had not taken into account something obvious in hindsight. The event itself should be a reasonable assumption because that is where the "surprising" comes from. A sort of "I was expecting something plausible, but got a dose of realism instead."

Plenty of other conversations have been had on this trope. So I'm not sure what else we can add to it.

SRO is a subversion using reality. That means the narrative sets up the trope then unexpectedly bats it away in favour of something else. For SRO, that "something else" has to be based in real life, but it has to something that isn't typical to the work in question (which is what makes it surprising). It effectively stops the narrative cold by randomly inserting a moment of reality instead of narrative (and, yes, that does mean that any work that lays out the premise that it's going to be as realistic as possible effectively bans SRO from being in play for the work — I confirmed that recently over an example I checked on).

A deconstruction requires a trope to be played out in full, not subverted. In fact, a deconstruction is a trope that is played completely straight... right into realistic consequences that would happen if that trope played out in real life.

An aversion is where a work doesn't even try to set up a trope. The trope just doesn't appear in the work, and the work never once acts like it'll ever appear.

So, SRO is definitely a subversion, and not a deconstruction or aversion. The problem is that it's fundamentally broken as a concept for all the reasons Emerald Source states in their post, making it all but impossible to manage. The other problem is, as already mentioned, that the Reality Ensues misuse was never cleaned up, so we actually don't have any idea how well or badly SRO is functioning because it's still full of RE misuse. My gut instinct is that the SRO TRS never fixed the fundamental problem with RE.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jan 21st 2023 at 12:10:21 PM

I'm getting the feeling that the best course of action here is probably to either disambiguate the trope and yard the concept or kick it back to TLP and start from scratch.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jan 21st 2023 at 9:36:50 AM

^^ SRO is a subversion using reality.

That's close to a Deconstruction which explores how tropes play out with RL consequences.

To me, SRO is a subversion/deconstruction combo. It rides on the surprise element (subversion) and makes a point about its flaw (deconstruction) but it doesn't really go into much exploration of the latter.

I would agree with Emerald Source about SRO being different from a Deconstruction in the sense that it could apply to any event while Deconstruction is confined to tropes only. Which makes SRO fuzzy at the edges and invites questionable examples.

Well, SRO is subverting a narrative set-up, which is not what a deconstruction does.

So the narrative is setting up a trope to be in play, but then veers away from it at the last minute. It's a standard subversion, in that sense. It's what it veers to (a moment of reality that doesn't otherwise appear in this work thereby creating a surprise) that's the trope.

A subversion requires a trope to be set up and then stopped just before it can actually happen. A deconstruction requires the trope to actually play out in full, and as straight as possible first before the deconstruction can begin. Because a trope is just the typical pattern that occurs in storytelling, it's often disconnected to how such a thing would play out in real life. While a story will therefore normally ignore or avoid the reality-based consequences of that trope's play, the deconstruction decides to actively explore it instead of following the normal narrative.

So, given that the difference between a subversion and a deconstruction is that a subversion happens before the trope occurs while a deconstruction happens after the trope occurs, that's also the difference between SRO and deconstruction. I agree that there is a relationship between the two because they're basically capturing the timing of a reality-based interruption of a normal narrative pattern (a trope), with SRO kicking in to stop the trope itself from playing out and deconstruction kicking in after the trope plays out to analyse it. It's effectively "reality says this trope will be stopped from occurring" versus "reality doesn't stop this trope occurring, but it will generate this consequence instead of the standard storytelling consequence".

In either case, SRO must have a trope that is being set up in order for a subversion to be capable of happening at all, just as deconstruction requires a trope to have actually happened before it can analyse what the outcome of that trope would be.

On the SRO page, I think the page image is problematic because of this relationship and difference between SRO and Deconstruction. The image doesn't tell us whether Dodge the Bullet or Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is in play. The two tropes aren't as compatible as they might initially seem (although it is possible for them to sometimes overlap). Dodge the Bullet outright acknowledges this fact in its description, pointing out that the two tropes achieve the same outcome (the hero is miraculously unscathed despite the hail of ammunition) but they do so in very opposite ways: Dodge the Bullet depends on the actions of the hero, Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy depends on the actions of the shooters. So, that page image is either a Dodge the Bullet SRO or it's an Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy deconstruction. Without context, we can't tell which one it genuinely is (either the hero is doing acrobatics to pass through a hail of bullets or the shooters started trying to shoot the hero when he was already in motion for some other reason).

If Dodge the Bullet is in play, then the hero decided to do a bunch of acrobatics to pass through the hail of bullets unharmed. Because he set up the moves, but instantly dies because it was never going to be possible to pull that off in the first place, Dodge the Bullet has been subverted in a realism-based way. If Dodge the Bullet was going to be deconstructed instead, the hero would actually suceed in acrobating his way through bullets unscathed... but then we'd discover that the bullets continued their trajectory until they hit bystanders who were behind the hero and only came into the line of fire when the hero launched himself into the air. Afterwards, the hero gets chewed out for not trying something else (like run away, leading the shooters to aim away from the bystanders) instead of trying to do something impressive in front of everyone and getting them killed for it.

If Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy is in play, then the individual shooters might not be able to hit the broadside of a barn, but if you've got an entire line up of them pumping out a hail of bullets over a wide area in the right direction, that barn will get hit by at least some bullets. So, the hero ends up getting shot — not because the shooters could aim, but because there were so many bullets raining in that direction that some of them hit their mark by accident. That's your deconstruction... but if it was going to be an SRO example, then they might be getting into position to begin firing when they're stopped by a higher up coming in with his crack force team, tell them to stand down based on their previous disastrous performance against the hero and they'll take over with their superior team, which proceed to successfully shoot him down with brilliant aiming skills.

Now, I know the specific examples I'm using aren't exactly perfect, but my point is that SRO and Deconstruction have a shared concept, but they kick in a different points of a trope (one to stop the trope in a realistic way, the other analyse the outcome of it playing out in a realistic way; both are about stopping the normal narrative pattern with a dose of realism, but they do so at different stages). My more important point is that, just as a Deconstruction needs to be linked to a specific trope (the narrative pattern being deconstructed), then the only way SRO can work is by also being linked to a specific trope (the narrative pattern being set-up and then stopped at the very last minute). That's not something SRO currently does, and the only way I can think of to salvage it is by doing that. Otherwise, it's completely impossible to sensibly capture it as a trope because it becomes too loosely defined to easily trope.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jan 22nd 2023 at 1:23:23 PM

Get your point.

One way of resolving the problem with SRO would be to admit that it's a form of Playing With a trope. This way we would force any example to be tied to a trope. If we decide this doesn't get its own Playing With page, the entry would just say "Subverted for realism" (or similar). Alternatively, we could turn SRO into a new Playing With subpage with the same benefit of keeping the entry under the trope in play (and drop any examples that don't play off an existing trope).

Edited by eroock on Jan 23rd 2023 at 10:47:22 PM

It includes non-subversions too, such as aversions of Omnipresent Tropes. Also, take this former subpage image◊. It's not subverting the "talking with back turned" trope, because that trope is still happening.

Just to clarify, the pic was changed for reasons other than being non-demonstrative, right?

That's more or less what I've been thinking.

Yeah, that image demonstrates trope lampshading.

The subpage it was illustrating (Webcomics) became short enough after cleanup that it was merged back into the main page.

It would still be illustrating SRO even without the character reactions. You can imagine that instead of reacting out loud, they have question marks over their heads.

Anyways, my point about non-subversions counting too still stands.

Edited by Twiddler on Jan 22nd 2023 at 12:51:15 PM

I think this was mentioned in the previous TRS, but one of the main issue with this trope is that the thing it's supposed to be subverting is so broad and vague that what counts as an example kind of depends on the viewer and how they perceive the work (i.e. whether the work overall is sufficiently "realistic" enough that a "realistic outcome" of a particular event is "surprising").

Edited by Adept on Jan 23rd 2023 at 6:04:29 PM

^ Hence my suggestion above to turn SRO into a Playing With option that requires a trope to be played off of.

Edited by eroock on Jan 23rd 2023 at 10:45:35 PM

You know, I can get behind that option.

Would be better than the present where like 90% of the examples dont really seem to specify what the trope is?

I'd agree with that. As it is now, it's not much more of a trope than just "Toon Physics/Artistic License gets subverted."

I did try and raise the option of it being about a trope that's either being subverted or played with (if you believe it's broader than just subverting tropes), but it didn't really get picked up for discussion back then. I'm on board with it being a played with trope.