As noted in the "Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki" thread, post 371: " Captain Obvious Reveal is apparently "The Un-Twist, but always negative and incomprehensibly not YMMV". I am guessing in nominate this. Opinions?
edited 25th Dec '13 11:00:51 AM by MagBas
Captain Obvious Reveal: Seems to me like it's a reveal where the outcome is already implied earlier on. Not sure if that is YMMV.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Captain Obvious Reveal seems to be The Un-Twist but always negative. I'm strongly inclined to think it should be cut altogether. But making it YMMV would at least be a commonsense stopgap measure while I wait for a TRS slot to open.
Let me check the definitions against each other:
- Captain Obvious Reveal: A reveal which is amply obvious beforehand.
- The Un-Twist: Viewers expect a trope to be subverted but it ends up played straight. (Seems like the laconic is correct, for once)
I don't think these are the same thing - even taking out the positive/negative implication - because only one of them is from the audience's point of view more and the other is about The Reveal specifically.
At any rate, while Captain Obvious Reveal does show some "fan opinions" that should be taken out, that is not enough to label it YMMV when they go against the definition.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
From Captain Obvious Reveal:
I don't know how else to interpret that.
And either that laconic is wrong, or The Un-Twist has extremely widespread misuse, because I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything but an audience reaction where a plot twist turns out to be what most people already expected.
If anything, the definition you're giving for Captain Obvious Reveal is what The Un-Twist is normally used as - and since what's "obvious" differs from person to person, I don't see any way how that's not YMMV. Note that The Un-Twist is already YMMV.
edited 27th Dec '13 2:29:12 AM by nrjxll
I do not usually rely on compare/contrast paragraphs for trope descriptions as they are not the definition and often wrong. Nor do I rely on comparisons with other tropes, as they can be bad comparisons and comparisons work in both direction besides.
As for the "obvious" thing, I am on a fence. It can make the thing YMMV or just fuzzy.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
No, the other one.
Whenever something says it always or never is one way or the other, it's almost never true. Also, author intent should never figure into it, unless the trope is specifically about author intent. What the author intends can only be guessed, interviews or other Word of God material aside.
Anyway, I don't think it's something that should be solved by this thread.
edited 27th Dec '13 4:33:31 AM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!This is the "Pages that need the YMMV banner" thread.
I'm not trying to fix Captain Obvious Reveal entirely here. But virtually every paragraph in its description has something about how it's an audience reaction, so I think that whatever else needs doing, it clearly should be made YMMV.
Okay, i am putting this in the crowner.
I'll vote to thumb that down - seems like a case for a TRS and description cleanup more than YMMV.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Emphasis mine:
This can happen for a couple of reasons. The more common one is that the author put in so much Foreshadowing that the reveal becomes clear long before it was intended. Another reason is that there were no other options for the reveal; if we're told that a character has a missing father, and there's only one character we already know who's the right age and position to have a missing child, audiences are likely to figure it out. And finally, it could be that this particular reader/viewer is very Genre Savvy; no matter how well you plan your plot twists, there will always be someone who can figure it out.
Note once again that this will never apply to 100% of the audience. Likewise, just because one audience member was genre savvy doesn't mean we have this trope - that particular audience member is just very genre savvy and good at recognizing foreshadowing. Also worth noting that among the thousands who watch a movie/read a book, someone is bound to simply guess the plot twist ahead of time, no matter how well it is set up - its practically a statistical certainty.
Compare The Un-Twist; this trope is very similar, but not quite identical to that one. (The difference is that The Untwist can be intentional and always comes from too much foreshadowing. Here, it's never intentional, and it doesn't necessarily have to be foreshadowing.) Contrast Tomato Surprise and Deus ex Machina. The in-story version of this is Everybody Knew Already.
...I'm frankly horrified at the fact that anyone is not interpreting this as an audience reaction. I don't know what you're thinking the trope is "supposed" to be, but everything currently on the page is about "audiences guess The Reveal in advance".
edited 27th Dec '13 12:26:55 PM by nrjxll
Hmm ... that seems like a strong case, although I have to wonder how indicative that is - back on the fence.
Frankly, I'd prefer if all talk about making something YMMV happened in TRS. For one thing, a lot of items that come up here can easily be fixed up to make them objective. Second, putting a YMMV banner on a page is a "misuse me!" flag - it's much harder to clean something up once it's done. Third, it's discussion high-profile enough to merit its own discussion.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanIf i am remembering well, one of the motives to the creation of the crowner was to reduce the number of trope repair shop threads waiting to be created, because of the limit of threads in the trope repair shop.
edited 27th Dec '13 6:41:51 PM by MagBas
I've added Last Note Nightmare. What might be one to some may not be to others. I don't see what's objective about it. It's basically a subtrope of Nightmare Fuel.
To the three people who have so far voted down Captain Obvious Reveal: please read the description again and count the number of times "audience", "someone", or other words to that effect are used.
Seriously, I'm this close to losing all faith in this thread's value. It's borderline insane that this thing wasn't YMMV to begin with, but when I see things like this, it makes me wonder how useful crowners actually are.
I think that some people are downvoting it because they think that the times "audience" is mentioned is evidence that the description is poorly written, not that it's YMMV.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Of course the description is poorly written; as I've said I don't even think it's a trope. But everything that's currently on there is about it being an audience reaction. This isn't a remotely ambiguous situation.
Again, The Un-Twist (which would be a super- or sister trope even if Captain Obvious Reveal is salvageable) is YMMV already.
I also don't see how Captain Obvious Reveal isn't an Audience Reaction—it's entirely about the audience being able to predict an aspect of the work. It would not exist without the audience; it is not objectively present in the work.
I don't think it's always negative or the same thing as The Un-Twist, but I do think it's inherently dependent on the audience.
I'm actually surprised Last Note Nightmare got as much "nay"s as it did. How is it not subjective? Just because one editor thinks the last few seconds of a song are scary, it doesn't mean another editor will/does. For example, the page sites "Josie" by Steely Dan as an example because of its "menacing fadeout"
, while I don't hear anything menacing about it. I'm not sure if he/she was talking about the brass section in the background, or what, but I just don't hear it. This is why I think it needs to be YMMV.
Last Note Nightmare seems like a clear subtrope of Nightmare Fuel.
As I said, I'm starting to lose my faith in the effectiveness of this thread.
See, that is part of why I don't like to take this kind of decision here instead of TRS.
As for Last Note Nightmare, horror can be intentional in a work. Probably the reason why it's getting ![[tdown]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_down_emoticon_3571.png "[thumb down]"){kind=small}
.
That argument could be equally applicable to Nightmare Fuel proper.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
While this is true, whether or not its effective is decided by the viewer/listener. One person may find it scary, one may just find it a bit odd, another may not think anything of it at all.
Besides, the page only mentions musicians most likely doing it in an attempt make their songs memorable, then goes it goes on to say it's more likely it'll just scare people.
Crown Description:
YMMV is for items that are reactions of the audience to works and tropes that need a significant judgment call to tell whether they exist objectively or not. Should these items become members of YMMV? Note: Audience Reactions need to be subjective, emotional responses and things that are likely to cause arguments and disagreements. Merely being outside a work or inside an audience don't make things YMMV
Whoops. I made a post about Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode, but misunderstood what it was about.
edited 9th Dec '13 12:15:30 PM by Someoneman