Drafting a clearer definition of "Fan-Speak."

I suppose "proper" is the wrong term. Perhaps "the TV Tropes page for this phenomenon". For instance Narm, while not being a trope, is a well documented Audience Reaction that had a name. However, because Narm became entrenched, we're stuck with it, rather than Bathos.

I believe that having an article defining "Fan Speak" without any other purpose (I presume that's what you mean) is pointless. The term means "jargon used in fandoms" and trying to make the definition any more than that is simply incorrect.

I'm not saying leave it as is, but either cut it, or make it a glossary index of pre-existing fan jargon, optionaly split by genre, no mater whether they're tropes or non tropes (Jossed, Shipping, ((Otaku)), ((Tsundere)), Soup Cans, UST...). Why? Because there are people who, say, will go into a fan fourm, see these being used and wonder "what the hell?".

On the rest of the subject at hand, trying to draw the lines where I see them (and I believe this post by Mada is very important):

YMMV Tropes: Yes, tropes, because this category comes out of the work and may have been invoked intentionally by the writer (but not as what we're calling in-universe usage), but they are subjective because not everyone agrees on their presence, usually because it involves a moral, emotional or other value judgment. They are about the content of the story nonetheless. Complete Monster is a major example - this is a trope we tried Very Very Hard to make objective, with set rules, but for a variety of reasons still comes down to judgment calls, especially the rule about what constitutes "heinous acts" vs "standard villainy". Moral Event Horizon, same token. Tear Jerker and (at least) High Octane Nightmare Fuel are examples on the emotional end and in most cases I think you'll find the author was going for this unintentional. Someone reading TV Tropes as an aspiring writer may inform their storytelling by studying their examples to see how other authors created the effect.

Audience Reactions: I think of this as "troping the fandom". These would include all not-tropes that attempt to classify a work or elements of it as "good" or "bad" - The Scrappys, The Wesleys, the Good Troi Episodes, Anvilicious, Narm (usually), the items formerly known as Crowning Moments - and not-tropes about the fandom itself - Shipping, "Stop Having Fun" Guys, Unpleasable Fanbase, Memetic Sex God (except for in-universe use), and so on. They may or may not be informed by the work, but they are not "of the work". You could, if you're splitter-inclined, make "Tropes about Fandom" (treating 'fandom' like a work) a separate subcategory.

Is there anything those two definitions don't cover?

That's like the "Tropes for which Your Mileage May Vary as to whether they are present" vs. "Tropes that are about Mileage Varying" thing we talked about before. I think it's a good distinction.

I think, Flame Bait or Natter Bait are both better banners for YMMV than YMMV itself.

Technically, almost every trope that is related to evoking emotions is YMMV. Your Mileage May Vary about whether or not a Happy Ending was happy, if the Hot Teacher was hot, or if the Food Porn looked tasty. You can't measurably prove that these are in the story, but most people tend to agree about them.

For example I'm a vegetarian, and most things listed at Food Porn honestly look Food Gorn to me, but the thing is, I can see what the author's intention was, and I don't feel an urge to argue about them..

And that's why the YMMV tropes need a banner. Not because Complete Monster or Tear Jerker can't be proven, that's normal for any trope, but because we know from experience that some tropers will feel obliged to argue with it.

That's an important difference, I saw many Trope Repair Shop threads that decided for a banner, just because after pages of brainstorming, they found a part of a trope that could hypothetically cause arguments.

edited 28th Jan '11 12:37:56 AM by EternalSeptember

You forgot about Trivia.

A new namespace is definitely a good idea.

^^ Well yes, but that already has its own thread where it's being worked on.

So it sounds like we want to leave YMMV as "you may disagree about whether these tropes are present in a work" and create a new Audience Reactions subpage for "these things are not tropes, they're about the audience rather than the work".

More or less. That way we can have a place for things that are not tropes, yet are measurable enough not to be considered subjective. Like say Killer App, which came up in the Trivia thread, because we don't know where else to put it.

Still, may want to rename YMMV to something else.

edited 28th Jan '11 7:51:21 AM by Killomatic

I don't think you can have most "subjective tropes", since they're not really tropes, they're reactions for the most part.

Can we please stop twisting semantics here?

I thought, that's the point, that subjective tropes like Complete Monster are tropes, just with Nattter Bait, and they are ddifferent from Audience Reactions.

Complete Monster is either an audience interpretation, or an authorial intended audience reaction, rather than a verifiable characteristic.

It's a little of both, probably. It's a trope for people who agree with it and a reaction for those who don't. Any taxonomist will will tell you there will always be things that defy classification. And if we can apply Natter Bait to both tropes and reactions, does it really matter what we're gonna call it?

Tropes can absolutely be subjective. Or rather, if they apply or not can be subjective.

Take something relatively simple, like Happy Ending. Say The Hero is a Death Seeker who ultimately wins the day by making a Heroic Sacrifice. The Big Bad is defeated but at the cost of The Hero's life — Bittersweet Ending, right? Well, but he was a Death Seeker, so he wanted to die, maybe that makes it a Happy Ending. Or would that make it an Esoteric Happy Ending? It can be looked at as any one of the three.

Things like The Woobie, The Scrappy, and The Wesley aren't tropes at all — they're not elements of the story, they're about how people react to it. And since everyone reacts a little differently, they're inherently subjective. Happy Ending, though, is definitely a trope (it's certainly a story element), but there could be disagreement over whether a given work actually has a Happy Ending or not. So that's subjective, but still a trope.

Audience Reactions have been identified as distinct class.

Now we come to the class of things where it is a storytelling device, but whether it is present or not is something that could be questioned. The Happy Ending example is a murky item because the title could mean either that the ending makes people happy [audience reaction] or is an upbeat resolution [trope], then further murkied-up by disagreement over whether or not it was actually upbeat. We're calling that class of things YMMV's.

We have discovered that calling that YMMV class 'subjectives' doesn't help us much because — Bog help us — it is interpreted differently by some people.

That discussion should go on in the YMMV thread, though.

If we could keep this thread about remarks on the pending action to do away with "Fan-Speak" as an index/banner classification, it'd be sweet.

edited 28th Jan '11 9:43:02 AM by FastEddie

While The Woobie et al may not have originally been a trope, it really is now. There are writers who specifically design characters to have that audience reaction. I'd argue that this is more common than it happening on it's own, nowadays.

Heck, I'd argue that there are certain genres that are entirely about turning the characters into Woobies.

Fan-Speak just wants to be its own thing, right? You have your classes: Trope, YMMV, Audience Reaction. Fan-Speak is just about where names come from, and it has contributed titles to all three classes. I don't think it even needs a banner of its own, when that's all it's aiming for.

edited 28th Jan '11 10:16:13 AM by Tyoria

Please read the thread.

...I have been reading the thread. It's not entirely clear what you're after by this point. Most people see to think of fan-speak as just a term about titles. What you've apparently been pushing for is a term to cover the not-tropes that aren't even YMMV. Fan-speak isn't it. Are you just looking for titles now?

This is the present plan.

Why do we still have a fanspeak banner if we can reclassify everything in that category?

And which is the YMMV thread exactly? Cause that should probably be in Special Efforts too?

edited 28th Jan '11 10:34:25 AM by Killomatic

We're doing away with it. We haven't done away with it yet.

Are we going to do a different project for sorting YMMV from Audience Reactions?

I think Fan Speak works as an index of jargon used by fandoms, with no need for a banner. It would include both tropes (eg, Retcon) and non-tropes (eg, Jumping the Shark). It would only include actual words/phrases used by fandoms, not things about them (eg, Pandering to the Base). Think of it as a sort of Useful Notes Fandom Jargon index.

edited 28th Jan '11 10:37:39 AM by NativeJovian

So basically we've determined Fanspeak doesn't mean what the banner thought it meant and therefore the banner was badly named. Why aren't we just removing that as a banner option now? It appears to not be serving its intended purpose.

Then there's the question of the index. FE suggests unindexing it. Several tropers have protested that they like the trivia of knowing that X title came from Y fandom and have suggested keeping it as a purely name-related index, similar to Tropey the Wonder Dog.

From there we moved on to classifying types of argenfargles. So far we have Trope, YMMV Trope, Audience Reaction. Should this be its own thread?