No Endor Holocaust and Inferred Holocaust: No Endor Holocaust

Links: No Endor Holocaust, Inferred Holocaust

My first thought was that Inferred Holocaust means that the audience is not specifically told "no holocaust" and therefore can conclude that one might happen, while No Endor Holocaust is that the audience is specifically told "no holocaust". If that was so, however, the two tropes should have no overlap. Also, the trope descriotions aren't very good at making this clear.

As far as I can tell:

Inferred Holocaust is "supposedly happy ending made unhappy due to Fridge Logic".

No Endor Holocaust is "heroes do something that would be incredibly destructive in reality, but this is not addressed in the work".

The two can therefore overlap.

I think No Endor Holocaust is more that the actions that should be destructive are explicitly shown not to be. The explosion of the Death Star should have destroyed life on Endor, but the last scenes show them celebrating the victory on Endor.

It seems like No Endor Holocaust is when the audience assumes that no serious consequences happen because Nobody Can Die (when the monster crushes a building by falling over dead, the reaction is "yay, we beat the monster!" not "oh no, all the people in that building!"), while Inferred Holocaust is when a happy ending gets turned downer by Fridge Logic.

Both could use better names.

So I guess nobody really agrees on the distinction?

— Is the distinction that one is about a work specifically showing that there's no holocaust and the other is a work which doesn't show one but leaves room for the audience to assume it?

— Is the distinction that one is about a happy ending and one is about the consequences of a specific action?

edited 16th Dec '10 1:01:10 PM by arromdee

It seems to me that No Endor Holocaust is about the lack of huge body counts or other horrors when the lack makes no sense. Countless super hero battles are examples.

Inferred Holocaust is about stories that end well until the audience realizes that, by the stories' own rules, they're headed towards catastrophe. The story just cut away before the other shoe dropped. Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and the ending of Wall-E before the credits montage was added are examples. (In Wall-E, almost immobile humans with no skills whatsoever come to repopulate the Earth. Test audiences assumed that everyone died, and a montage of their successes was added.)

These tropes are quite separate, and important to have. I can clean them up next Tuesday, and we can emphasize the differences if those aren't clear: No Endor Holocaust is explicit, while Inferred Holocaust is always implicit, and Inferred Holocaust only applies to things that happen after the story ends.

I think that their current distinction is fine, and that a merge would never work.

edited 16th Dec '10 1:49:35 PM by Kizor

So you're saying that one is about the lack of something in the present and the other is an inference about the future (or about something unseen)?

I suppose that's similar to "one specifically shows no holocaust and one leaves room to assume it", which seems to be the most popular one in slightly different versions. In either case it doesn't seem like an example can go on both pages—"seeing that no holocaust happened" and "not seeing anything so you can conclude that one happened off screen" are mutually exclusive.

edited 17th Dec '10 8:25:17 AM by arromdee

I can sort of see the logic between the difference between an Inferred Holocaust and a No Endor Holocaust. Inferred is Fridge Logic, subjective, and primarily about endings. By contrast, No Endor Holocaust is about something really obvious that should have happened right away because of what we just saw on-screen.

For the sake of contrast, I remember back in the old days of the Internet, John Solomon savaged Dresden Codak for using this trope- characters that quite obviously should have died from things such as having a boulder thrown on them were perfectly fine in the next strip, even though this was supposed to be a serious, dramatic moment. This would be a No Endor Holocaust.

Unfortunately, the main example of an Inferred Holocaust I can think of...is what happened to Endor at the end of Return Of The Jedi. Outside of physics nerds, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone was thinking "shouldn't the planet be destroyed" while the dance party was going on. This was Fridge Logic that only occurred to people later.

The path seems clear to me. Inferred Holocaust can stay as it is, but No Endor Holocaust needs a rename to make even the slightest about of sense with this rubric. I made a crowner. Feel free to add other choices.

I think the crowner is premature. We need to decide what differentiates the tropes before we can have a crowner on the name.

Maybe we need a crowner for the meaning:

1. The distinction between the two tropes is based around whether the lack of a holocaust is explicitly shown. In other words, if there should have been a holocaust it's No Endor Holocaust, while if there should be a holocaust coming up, it's Inferred Holocaust.
2. The distinction between the two tropes is based on how soon the viewer is likely to figure it out. Inferred Holocaust is if the user later realizes things may be bad, while No Endor Holocaust is if it's immediately obvious.
3. Lack of consequences from a single event is No Endor Holocaust while lack of consequences from the ending is Inferred Holocaust.

edited 21st Dec '10 12:43:20 PM by arromdee

Inferred Holocaust doesn't have to be the ending; it can also be a What Happened to the Mouse? situation. We just have to have a situation that should have caused massive death and destruction, and never see its consequences onscreen. No Endor Holocaust likewise doesn't have to be immediate, as long as the holocaust is eventually shown not to have happened.

Shale: It sounds like you're suggesting option 1, but not quite.

The problem is nobody can agree on which of these options the tropes actually mean.

edited 21st Dec '10 3:52:42 PM by arromdee

Is it an option to split off "no consequences of a specific action" to keep the tropes about holocausts?

Bump.

Someone created a crowner. The crowner has very few votes.

What are we going to do about this one? The pages should have a difference, but nobody can agree on what the difference is.

This seems like a fairly obvious distinction.

No Endor Holocaust is when we see that the horrific consequences that logically should have followed don't happen.

Inferred Holocaust is when the horrific consequences may or may not occur, because the work ends before addressing them.

edited 25th Feb '11 8:19:23 AM by SakurazakiSetsuna

Except that every person has a different idea of the fairly obvious distinction.

It seems that most people agree on Inferred Holocaust - it's when "a happy ending turns unhappy because of Fridge Logic." If there's a quibble, it's whether it has to be the ending or not.

No Endor Holocaust is the problem (and I would have originally given it the definition I gave Inferred Holocaust). Which is probably a sign that it Needs A Better Description. Into the breach:

But let's think about this for a moment. Halt the Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever in a major city by blowing it up. Or just kill it and let it fall over, for that matter. That's going to do some monstrous damage to the city. Yet any collateral damage or casualties are depicted as minimal. Either we cut to credits before we see any aftermath, or (more blatantly) we actually see that there was no collateral effect at all. If there are, they are just Conveniently Empty Buildings.

Suggests that (at least) two different phenomena are going on here that are achieving the same goal, indicated in the penultimate sentence. The first is Inferred Holocaust. The second is Arromdee's #1. According to this paragraph, Inferred Holocaust is (usually) a subtrope, and No Endor Holocaust is any generic "something should cause a lot of damage but doesn't" situation. (There's also a third option, not reliant on Fridge Logic at all because it's "addressed" with a Hand Wave, mentioned in the last-sentence link to Conveniently Empty Buildings.) So, Arromdee's #1, except No Endor Holocaust includes both meanings. (Nyktos probably comes closest to this, and Kizor also comes close.)

On the other hand, we have the preceding sentence: "Yet any collateral damage or casualties are depicted as minimal" (emphasis added). That implies just Arromdee's #1, but since it's immediately contradicted, I read "are depicted as minimal" as "no more than minimal casualties are depicted" - which does not necessarily mean the depiction rules out more than minimal casualties.

Then you have the following paragraph:

Maybe they have a brilliant plan to lure it somewhere uninhabited before they blow it to rubble, but surprisingly often, it's just not something the writers concern themselves with, leading viewers to notice the Inferred Holocaust.

If the second half of the sentence is taken to define the trope, rather than the first half taken to define a potential Hand Wave or justification for it, then the trope-subtrope relationship seems to be opposite, with No Endor Holocaust a subtrope of Inferred Holocaust. It could also lead to Arromdee's #3, which, when you think about it, basically makes Inferred Holocaust a subtrope of No Endor Holocaust but defines it wrong. Probably this group is trying to reconcile the two statements of the trope by focusing on the "cut to credits" part of the second paragraph.

Also, "leading viewers to notice the Inferred Holocaust" could be taken to imply arromdee's #2, since "viewers" is vague, or even that the writers might have intended for people to notice what the consequences are. However, there's also a way to parse it that reinforces the definition I gave above: the second half refers to a common approach to this situation, which is Inferred Holocaust.

But wait! What about Inferred Holocaust? Well, that trope throws a completely different distinction at us:

Understandably, this can get depressing and completely overshadow the intended ending, prompting fans (and authors) to say there was No Endor Holocaust.

This suggests that No Endor Holocaust is an Audience Reaction or form of Dis Continuity, and lends credence to Arromdee's #2. (NEH may well have been originally intended as an Audience Reaction, with Inferred Holocaust being the objective trope.) The page also states, perhaps crucially, that Inferred Holocaust does not have to involve death (whereas No Endor Holocaust seems to indicate that it does).

It seems like there's a fourth option that Nyktos and Kizor have been getting at and probably best describes the difference, but that arromdee has misinterpreted as #1 (or maybe #3): No Endor Holocaust is when something, at any point in the story, should create a lot of casualties but isn't shown as such (whether the consequences are shown to be otherwise or aren't shown at all), while Inferred Holocaust is "a happy ending turns unhappy because of Fridge Logic." They may exist independently of each other, or they may overlap (and the confusion is probably rooted in the fact that they do, quite often). My hunch is either this (which I guess is close to #3), or No Endor Holocaust is an audience reaction whereas Inferred Holocaust is more objective (in what way I'm not sure, since I could make a case for a version of #1 or #2).

Just to chime in, the laconic definition of No Endor Holocaust has this bit of wisdom: "An event obviously should have caused massive collateral damage, but Canonically it did not."

On the objectivity of these tropes, Inferred Holocaust has elements of Audience Reaction because it relies a lot on Fridge Logic to work. A good outcome is implied but not shown or talked about with enough clarity to turn the Inferred Holocaust into an NEH; so fans who like the implied-but-not-shown outcome will deny there being a future holocaust, and can argue the case, while those who do think there will be bad consequences can argue their case. This isn't really possible with NEH since the outcome there is canon. NEH is objective in that it represents a negative outcome as never having happened. Whether the audience likes or dislikes it, the lack of consequences is real within the story, there's no disputing that. The subjectivity comes from a similar (the same?) place as with IH, the audience thinks something bad should have resulted.

Using examples from the tropes: (original) The Day The Earth Stood Still specifically mentions that Klatu's world wide power outage caused no loss of life because it didn't affect places like hospitals or planes, so fan's have their Fridge Logic addressed before they even get up. They may not like it, but it's canon. This is NEH.

(new) The Day The Earth Stood Still ends on the hopeful note of the Gort nano cloud being stopped before it ate the world (canon), and Klatu noting that humanity has it in it to become a more eco-friendly species and avoid killing itself. However, a global power outage (even temporary, implied to be permanent) would have negative effects, costing untold billions in damage to man and environment, and thousands if not millions of lives (fan speculation). So the ending message is undercut by the resulting IH.

edited 26th Feb '11 6:16:41 AM by Earnest

I don't think the original The Day The Earth Stood Still counts as No Endor Holocaust. The way I see it, No Endor Holocaust is a bad writing trope. Its when the author missed the obvious consequences of an event, and it yanks the audience (or at least those members of the audience who know an unreasonable amount about what large interplanetary explosions would do) out of the story.

Inferred Holocaust could be bad writing, or simply an open ending.

Just to chime in, the laconic definition of No Endor Holocaust has this bit of wisdom: "An event obviously should have caused massive collateral damage, but Canonically it did not."

Which is my #1. Except that neither we nor the trope text can agree on whether #1 is the proper definition.

On the objectivity of these tropes, Inferred Holocaust has elements of Audience Reaction because it relies a lot on Fridge Logic to work.

By that reasoning, so does your definition of No Endor Holocaust—the fact that there was no damage in canon is not an audience reaction, but the fact that it "should have caused" more damage is one and in fact is the same audience reaction as in Inferred Holocaust.

Now that we have YMMV segregated, we need to be careful about not classifying things as audience reactions when they shouldn't be. Most tropes have some element of audience reaction in them, if only a judgment over whether there is enough of something. But we can't put every trope into YMMV based on that.

Does the crowner for this still exist? I don't see it.

Can we effectively distinguish this so that tropers will recognize and handle it properly? It seems that the clearest way to handle it is as follows:

Inferred Holocaust is any situation where the necessary consequences of the events of the work would be extremely destructive or deadly, but this is not addressed within the work.

No Endor Holocaust is a subtrope of the above where the Inferred Holocaust is canonically stated not to have happened.

Again: the problem is that everyone seems to have different ideas about what the distinction is. You just added another such idea to the mix, you didn't resolve it.

(I suppose picking that idea as the definition would resolve it, but we have no consensus on picking it over all the other mutually exclusive definitions.)

I'm... not getting that at all. In fact it seems like it's been stated several times in this thread, and on the pages themselves, that No Endor Holocaust is when canonically something that should have had bad consequences is shown to have not, and Inferred Holocaust is when Fridge Logic makes you realize that there should have been afterward.

For instance, take Megamind: The final fight between Megamind and Titan involves skyscrapers being thrown around and massive property destruction. The fact that this should have led to a body count in the hundreds at least is never addressed. That's an Inferred Holocaust.

Whether or not it qualifies as No Endor Holocaust is debatable, because it isn't explicitly stated that there were no casualties, and the people of the city are shown celebrating... but it could just be that they were glad Titan's reign of terror was over. It isn't shown how much time has passed between those two time periods, but it is enough for reconstruction to be done on parts of the city, so it could be justified that the body count -did- happen but that the immediate mourning period had passed.

edited 12th May '11 4:11:48 PM by savage

I'm going with option 1: Inferred Holocaust is when Fridge Logic sets in and the audience realizes things should have very bad consequences, and No Endor Holocaust is when the author says "no worries, that didn't happen."

The Trope Namer will help clear things up here. People saw the destruction of the Death Star and realized the debris would render the forest moon of Endor uninhabitable. Lucas Film saw that reaction and said "No, the Rebellion used hyperdrives to shunt the debris somewhere harmless.

bump... come on...