Discussion Main / YouBastard

Somebody said it back in 2014, but I notice a lot of the examples here are still just about media where the main character is a Designated Hero or a Villain Protagonist or somesuch, not when the audience gets called out for it like the trope is supposed to refer to. I thought the Breaking the Fourth Wall and/or Leaning on the Fourth Wall aspect was the main thing that distinguished this trope from the other ones I listed. If so, could use some cleanup.

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Ambiguous Name, started by SmoothWarrior on Nov 21st 2018 at 5:44:28 AM

Removed from main page because these examples reek of Shameless Self-Promotion.

• Mocked in Video Game Morality Play, which was largely a response to Spec Ops: The Line and video games that indulge in this trope. Eventually, the "game" forces you to kill innocents, and you have to go through with it to proceed. After the deed, the game calls you a monster and asks if you enjoy this. If you respond that you don't enjoy shooting civilians in real life, the game forces you to either say you're a souless person for trying to escape your droll, boring, worthless life (as declared by the game makers) by wasting your time via saccharine "fun" that just forced you to shoot civilians in the face (which is completely your fault, the game tries to convince you so), or say you're an evil materialistic shit for buying corporate entertainment that lines the pockets of evil fat cats. You have to "admit" you are a evil bastard, and you're awarded with "We deserve every bullet we make". Picking FUCK YEAH OBVIOUSLY has you go on about your life after rating the game a 7/10 or 6/10 (it's an okay shooter), and you go do some volunteer work, where you decidedly don't appreciate killing civilians.
  CONGRADULATIONS [sic] YOU CONTINUE TO BE A PERSON
  • Similarily, You Were Hallucinating the Whole Time mocks both this and Shocking Swerve, by having both happen with classic 8-bit games - where it turns out you keeping the ball away from the opposing paddle in Pong was you making a small child cry, the dots in Pac Man are firefighters you just ate, and the enemy ships in Space Invaders are orphan children. Both authors have a dim, dim view on Spec Ops: The Line and its fanbase.
  YOU ARE A MONSTROUS HUMAN BEING. WHY DO YOU KEEP PLAYING... FOR ENTERTAINMENT?!?!?! YOU SICK BASTARD. YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'VE DONE.
  • Shitty Fucking Art Game has a segment that parodies Spec Ops' brand of player guilttripping by taking a page from the xkcd webcomic about making an FPS mod that randomly assigns pseudo-poignant snippets of life that get more and more ridiculous to the squares you kill, as well as indie games about war with a segment where you lazily sign documents on behalf of the Illuminati.

Do you think we should change the image for the page?

This could really use a rename, there's nothing setting the title apart from You Monster!.

Would the flavor text to Magic the Gathering's Lotus Petal count? ("Hard to imagine," mused Hanna, stroking the petal, "such a lovely flower inspiring such greed.") It sounds like they're shaming the sort of players that drove up the value of Black Lotus prohibitively high.

It seems like some of these examples need to be cleaned up a bit — many of them are less "the text directly confronts the reader with the moral implications of the story" and more "the characters feel a bit guilty about something, and so the readers might as well, I guess, possibly".

Just wanted to write that this is one of the most well-written trope descriptions on the site. Kudos to whoever was involved!

Saw an ad recently for some kind of secondhand smoke prevention campaign showing a baby captioned "I gave you love. You gave me athsma." Is it this trope?

How is this an example of the trope? Lady Snowblood: there's a bit of exposition on the scientific theories of the late 18th century, where one guy suggests that the Japanese should start having children with Europeans and generally open up to the Western world. The narration goes on to ponder on if this had happened, maybe Japan wouldn't have become the jingoistic nation uit was, avoiding its expansionist policies and involvement in WWII... and you, the reader, wouldn't be holding this book right now.

That basically amounts to "If history had been different then you wouldn't be able to read about those particular events in a historical novel". It's not as if the reader has any influence over 18th C Japanese immigration policies.

What would be the out-of-universe equivalent to this trope, where you call someone out for watching/doing anything amoral?

Random, unnecessary, poorly arranged spoiler about Discworld in there. I'm taking out the tag and the text.