Discussion Main / MortonsFork

In the real-life section, there is a series of entries about "loaded questions" and questions used by bullies to embarrass you.

Examples

• Are you a homo? If yes, you are a homosexual; if no, you're not human (a member of species Homo sapiens). A good third option is "I'm just as much of a homo as you are." (be prepared for a punch in the face, however).
• "Do you have HIV?" No. "Are you positive?" If you say yes, you're "positive" in the sense of being "HIV positive"; if you say no, you're "not positive" in the sense of "not positive that you don't have HIV". The way around this one is to say, “I am positive that I don’t have HIV.(note If you actually are HIV positive, then this would be an Insult Backfire, though.)
• "Have you stopped beating your wife?" If you say no, then you beat your wife. If you say yes, then you admit to having beaten your wife. The only way to escape is to say that you have never beaten your wife (or that you aren’t married).
• "Are you embarrassed that you soiled your pants today?" If yes, you admit to soiling your pants. If no, you admit to soiling your pants, and you're a weirdo who doesn't see anything embarrassing about that. You can also replace "pants" with "diaper" to add the extra embarrassment of not being toilet-trained. Possible counter: Say no because you do dirty work ("Hey, someone's gotta do it"). Or turn it around ("Why would you know if someone did that or not? What are you, a poop fetishist?").

My question is how do these count as entries? To me, it defeats the purpose of being a morton's fork if there are specific responses in order to get out of them. Can someone explain this to me?

Edited by Buck

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Renaming?, started by Tnophelia on Nov 6th 2010 at 12:11:43 AM

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

https://youtu.be/VQyuNpzp29E A video example

A while back I added this entry. Somebody has now deleted it because it is a current political issue. I am saving it here so that it can be added back when it is no longer a current issue.

• Donald Trump is facing this problem with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. One side argues that the DACA is illegal because it wasn't within Barack Obama's constitutional authority to create it. The other argues that, because it has already been in place for years, if Trump ends the DACA, then many illegal immigrants that came to the United States as children would lose their protection from being deported. No matter what Trump does, he is going to make a lot of people angry, and several states have threated to sue if the program is not ended. He's chosen to give six months' warning before phasing the DACA out, to give Congress time to pass a legal version of it. However, he's still getting criticized for this, primarily because, since Congress was not able to pass a legal version of the act in all eight years of Obama's presidency, there's not much hope that they can do it in just six month.

• The second Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game (Justice for All) features a version of this that takes up the entire plot of the last case. Phoenix's friend and legal assistant Maya Fey is kidnapped by an assassin and is told she will be killed unless he gets Matt Engarde, a suspect in a murder, found innocent. Over time Phoenix finds out that his client is truly guilty (he hired the assassin holding Maya hostage to kill the victim) and that if his client gets off the hook, another suspect, a truly innocent young woman, will be charged and possibly executed for the murder. Therefore, Phoenix must choose between defending a killer to save a friend while an innocent person is killed as a murderer, or letting said friend die to see justice done as well as saving a innocent woman's life. That being said, with Phoenix being a morally upstanding attorney who fights for justice, this choice is not so simple for him. However in the end Phoenix manages to Take a Third Option and shows the assassin holding Maya hostage how much of a monster said assassin's client is, along with proof that Engarde was planning on selling out the assassin anyway. Since this assassin strongly believes that Even Evil Has Standards, he eventually drops his agreement with Engarde and lets Maya go, giving Engarde no leg to stand on. This twists the situation around so that Engarde is now the one facing a Morton's Fork: either he gets off as "not guilty" of the crime but the assassin will kill him for his act of betrayal, or he goes to jail to face the death penalty. No matter what Phoenix does at that point, Engarde snaps and screams in court that he's guilty.
  • And then it happens in Spirit of Justice where this time it was Apollo Justice against Phoenix Wright in a civil trial. Phoenix must have his clearly guilty client get ownership of the Orb. If Phoenix wins, Maya gets to be free but at the cost of Apollo having a strained working relationship with Phoenix. If Phoenix loses, something terrible will happen to Maya. Like before, Phoenix thought all hope was lost until Apollo reassured Phoenix that Maya is needed alive or else things won't go in the favor of Justice Minister Inga. Those two aside, there is Nahyuta. If Nahyuta rebels against the Fake Queen, terrible things will happen to Rayfa. If Nahyuta accepts which he did, his kingdom would go into even more chaos. And back to Phoenix again, it was during his tutorial. If Phoenix didn't intervene, his tour guide would be given the death penalty. If Phoenix intervenes, he can of course save his tour guide but if he lost, he will be given the death penalty alongside his tour guide due to the Defense Culpability Act.

None of these qualify. Everything involving Maya is regular I Have Your sister-like figure, same goes for Nayuta and Rayfa, nothing mortony about it. Matt has a choice between going to prison and being assasinated. Both suck, but one sucks less. Albi's situation doesn't even come close, as Phoenix can will from the start and choice is "risk your life to save him, or let him die for sure".

The NES Classic had this (http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/11/13597938/nes-classic-edition-shortage) happen to it. And it seems like the Nintendo Switch is going down the same path. In short: Stock issues because they hate us, or stock issues because they suck?

Edited by Benterful

It seems to me that there's a lot of no-win-scenarios and damned-if-you-do-etc in the examples, which aren't actually Morton's Forks because: A) The options are shaped by circumstances, or by multiple parties, not one controlling authority B) There's two or more bad outcomes, not a single one that all forks lead to C) The options are freely chosen, not imposed or D) The options aren't closely tied to the desire to avoid the inescapable outcome

I'm inclined to cull a bunch based on this, starting with all the examples that fall under A, which is at least 1/3 of them...

There's a Morton's Fork situation in the Michael Chirchton novel Prey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)

Not to mention there's one in Star Wars: The Clone Wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu3BvWpvSFU

Edited by MetalMax1991

Removed the following:

• In Star Wars: The Old Republic:
  • Republic Trooper players get confronted with a classic halfway through the third chapter of their storyline - Havoc Squad respond to a distress call from Sergeant Ava Jaxo, a decidedly feisty young Special Forces soldier who is a non-companion romance option for male characters on Coruscant. Summoning them to a hidden Imperial prison facility currently containing more than three hundred important Republic personnel. Storming the prison goes smoothly at first but turns out to be a cunningly laid trap by Imperial General Rakton, who shows up with a fleet of destroyers and starts shooting the station apart. The player is given the choice of A) diverting power from the maintenance levels where Sergeant Jaxo is hiding to the shields, which will kill her but buy enough time for all three hundred and fourteen prisoners to make it to the escape ship or B) rescuing Jaxo, who is begging for her life, but condemning half or more of the prisoners to die in the process and causing Jaxo to suffer from survivor's guilt and never forgive you.

T His is not an example of the fork. This is a Sadistic Choice. But the outcomes are notably different. In one Jaxo survives, and a bunch of other people die, and in the other, Jaxo dies but nobody else does. Yes, it's a little Morton-ish since either path leads to you not being with Jaxo, but there's too many differences to actually count.

This entry sounds more "Unpleasable fanbase" than it does Morton's Fork:

"Seems to come up often in PC gaming circles. If a game is on a console, performing too well means it obviously was developed for the "weaker" consoles in mind and it's not taking full advantage of the power P Cs have. If it runs too worse, it was obviously a crappy port, regardless of how much better the quality of the visuals are (which graphical quality have reached a point where only the most scrutinizing of people care)."

Those are not the only options offered nor do any of these answer inherently produce the same undesirable outcome and of course, it's entirely subjective as to what this applies to.

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Removed the following:

• Raven from Dark Wings gets a summons about a prospective job with a meeting at 10:00...with the summons deliberately arriving at 9:30. He has to either ignore it, thereby insulting the powerful nobles who sent it, or else be put at an instant bargaining disadvantage by the near-certainty of being late.

Because this is not a Morton's Fork, it's two completely different outcomes that both suck. I also added a notice at the top of the page clarifying this distinction to try to discourage future mistakes like this.

Moving examples that aren't Morton's Forks here, to see which of them should be moved to the trope currently in YKTTW, "Vicious Circle":

• In Red Tails the Army Air Force is trying to shut down the Tuskeegee Airmen because they haven't scored any air-to-air kills. This is because they haven't been assigned any missions where such kills are available, due (officially) to the fact that they have yet to prove themselves in aerial combat.
• Discussed in The Last Starfighter:
  Alex: Wait a minute. We have to destroy the turret to stop the fighters. But we can't get to the turret without going through the fighters. We're dead.

• Catch-22 contains some of the most prominent modern examples: "There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Moving this example here from The "Mythology" section. It's not Biblical in origin (I didn't think so, but I checked to be sure.)

If someone can identify the work it's from, it can be properly sourced and place in the correct section.

• In the Bible, Jacob was set to marry Rachael, but was worried that her father would disguise her sister, Leah, as Rachael and slip her into the wedding instead. To foil this trick, Jacob and Rachael figured out a signal. If "Rachael" didn't give the signal, it would be Leah under the veil and thus Jacob would know to call off the wedding. This subjected Rachael to the Fork, because if she taught her sister the signal, her fiance would marry her sister. If she didn't teach the signal though, she would knowingly be subjecting her sister to public humiliation. She taught Leah the signal and Jacob ended up marrying both girls.
  • It should be clarified that this isn't actually in the traditional Biblical canon.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it. Hide / Show Replies

• Myth Conceptions: The king of Possiltum hires Skeeve as court magician to defeat an invading army. The fact that the army is apparently unstoppable and Skeeve and Aahz are likely to die in the attempt isn't the biggest problem; the problem is that it's now a matter of principle that the kingdom is choosing to rely on magic for its defenses rather than the military. If they lose, or take the money and run, the reputation of magicians everywhere suffers; if they win, they'll be assassinated on the way back, on the orders of the general who's pissed that the king hired a magician instead of using the army.

Removed because this isn't actually a Morton's fork. Both outcomes are undesirable, but are completely different results. Being humiliated and living, or being triumphant and dying are two different outcomes, which negates it being a Morton's Fork.

>>"The myriad antitrust laws in the United States make it illegal to sell an item on the open market. If you are selling without competition you're a monopolist and are breaking the law, if you sell for less than a competitor you're engaging in predatory pricing and are breaking the law, if you sell for the same price as your competitor you're guilty of conspiracy or collusion and are breaking the law and if you sell for more than your competitor you're selling at an unreasonably high rate and are breaking the law. Microsoft found to their expense that you're breaking the law even if you (literally) give your product away for free. It's just a damn good job that the antitrust laws are only enforced when the government decides it doesn't like the fact that a corporation is succeeding; if they were applied consistently every American businessman would have to be imprisoned. "

Is this true AT ALL?I am not an american, but it sound more like the delusions of a libertarian more like something that actually exist, at best it is a misunderstanding of the law.

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Morton's Fork feels like a very obscure trope name. Perhaps it should be changed.

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