Objective or Subjective? : The Woobie

This discussion came up in the "pages that need banners" thread, and we couldn't quickly resolve it there.

First, The Woobie could be interpreted as just a characterization method, that happens to evoke the audience's emotions of pity and caring. In the same way as an Annoying Younger Sibling is supposed to evoke annoyance, a Hot Librarian is supposed to evoke lust, or all the Comedy Tropes are supposed to evoke laughter.

On the other hand, the description itself insists that this is mostly an "audience-driven phenomenon", and "sometimes a matter of opinion.", that would warrant a YMMV banner.

On the third hand, the examples themselves contain practically zero disagreements about whether or not a charactr is indeed an example. I ran through the (amazingly long) Anime, Comic Books, Film, and Literature subpages, and found exactly three such disagreeing reply-natters, in a list of hundreds, that's not more than what most objectives have.

Supposedly, natter, and edit wars are the reasons why we can't objectively list certain characterization tropes, but in this case, it looks like we were too cautious, and our mileage doesn't, in fact, vary.

The possibilities (As I see it):

• Keep the description, and have the page as an objective trope
• Change emphasis in the description to sound more like an objective trope
• Change emphasis in the description to sound more like a subjective YMMV
• Keep the description, and have the page as a subjective YMMV

I think Break the Cutie can cover most examples of The Woobie and has a much more solid definition. Perhaps we can merge them. The only problem with Break the Cutie is the name, since The Cutie is an Always Female trope.

The Woobie is quite different than Break the Cutie in the fact that The Woobie it happens more than once to the same character or a continuous chain of situations along those lines to make the audience feel for the guy. Generally not subjective in the fact that its very obvious who is the target of the pain. Subjective part is if it works on the audience emotions or not but that's not what this trope is about.

Take Hayate from Hayate The Combat Butler Everyone is out to get him from his parents on down Iron Woobie Till much later in the manga when the iron breaks down. The Chew Toy, Abusive Parents,Parental Abandonment, Cosmic Plaything, Butt-Monkey, Disproportionate Retribution, Heroic Self-Deprecation all apply fully.

edited 6th Feb '11 4:02:16 AM by Raso

I disagree. I've seen many examples of The Woobie based just on a single tragic event in a character's backstory. And Break the Cutie does not say anywhere it needs to be a single event, as a matter of fact it says "They beat the character with one cruel stroke of fate after another".

And while I do agree that the subtypes like Iron Woobie don't fit well with Break the Cutie, I think the basic idea is the same.

Also, what, no Negima example? I'm kind of disappointed.

edited 6th Feb '11 4:12:23 AM by Killomatic

Hmmm The Break the Cutie should be about the event that happened and The Woobie should be about the character itself.

How did you figure that?

Funny, I just wanted to say the opposite, that they are different because Break the Cutie is always a pattern of events, while The Woobie isn't any event, but a character type that can be caused by any backstory, or general treatment, even evoked with just appearance, background music, or atmosphere.

Also, Break the Cutie is always cute by default, while The Woobie can be cute only due to their misfortune.

Edit: Ninjad.

edited 6th Feb '11 4:17:21 AM by EternalSeptember

It just seems like it was first meant to be that way but had a definition drift.

The person who recovers from a Break the Cutie event can become The Woobie (if they dont recover or have it slammed on them constantly), Butt-Monkey or Badass ect.

This technique is sometimes used to build The Woobie.

They beat the character with one cruel stroke of fate after another until they are just a shell of their former cheerful, carefree self.

On a positive note, sometimes breaking the cutie can result in a cute but weak character Taking a Level in Badass as they confront their tormentors and become more assertiveon a less positive note, prepare for the advent of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds if the cutie was quite the badass to begin with. Or it can fail entirely, creating The Pollyanna. If the victim is not a cutie but the tormentors believe him or her to be, it's a case of Bullying a Dragon.

Also, this is frequently part of the backstory of the Broken Bird, and instrumental in the Freudian Excuse of a villain who Used to Be a Sweet Kid.

edited 6th Feb '11 4:22:13 AM by Raso

Also, The Woobie page image is a good example why the two are not the same. The film doesn't go to great lengths to try to make Wall-E suffer, he is just a Woobie for being alone in the original setting, and looking sad.

It's not objective. It's a trope about how the audience feels sorry for a character. That's clearly YMMV.

^This, period.

Everything that makes The Woobie depends entirely on a single factor outside of a story or work's control: The viewer's reception.

edited 6th Feb '11 12:14:49 PM by SeanMurrayI

That's a very generic, and misleading way of defining YMMV. Every single trope is intended to provoke some sort of audience reaction, even the ones that are most obviously written there in the story.

Anything that is written without the expectation that the audience will react to it in one specific way, would be People Sit On Chairs. The difference between people sitting in random chairs, or in the Slouch of Villainy, is that the latter appears scary-cool, not random.

For example, in my thread starting example, Hot Librarian and Annoying Younger Sibling, who are supposed to cause the audience reactions of attraction, and annoyence.

These audience reactions are always implicitly parts of a trope. If they wouldn't be, these would be just "random librarian, who happens to be a young female" and "The protagonist happens to have a younger sibling"

The things that we call Audience Reactions are actually Audience Reactions that are unrelated to the author's intention. For example because some of them, by definition, comes up only after the writing is done, like Shipping, or Unpleasable Fanbase.

The Woobie is not one of these it can be intended by the authors, and the only reason why we wouldn't list such tropes is that sometimes we can't decide when was it intentional, and when when it's only a fandom minority opinion.

Every single trope is intended to provoke some sort of audience reaction...

What?!?!? No!

Fruit Cart, Flying Car, Space Clothes, Video Phone, Twin Banter, Black Cloak, Soviet Superscience, Does Not Like Spam, Crusty Caretaker, pretty much any trope that comes up when I hit the "Random" button... NONE of these have anything to do with an audience or how it reacts.

edited 6th Feb '11 12:39:12 PM by SeanMurrayI

Annoying Younger Sibling is supposed to be annoying to the other characters, not just the audience. Hot Librarian should be attractive to other characters as well. The Woobie...

A woobie (named for a child's security blanket) is that character you want to give a big hug, wrap in a blanket and feed soup to when he or she suffers so very beautifully. Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, divorced almost entirely from the character's canonical morality.

The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.

If the character is the Chew Toy, Butt-Monkey, or is a Jerkass he is not The Woobie (unless the character is also meant to be sympathetic).

It's all YMMV. Is a character The Woobie? Who knows? Maybe.

Complete Monster is also intended by the author (usually), and so is Alas, Poor Villain, but they depend almost entirely on audience reaction for their "success".

People have a tendency to find Complete Monster where it wasn't intended. Mr. Krabs and The Wicked Witch Of The West have been listed as complete monsters, for example. The Woobie has the same kind of thing going on.

And their success usually doesn't come, because the audience doesn't have a single united reaction, but different interpretation.

But as I said in the fist post, this is what didn't happen with The Woobie. If it can be used by the writers, and we tend to agree which are these uses, it isn't subjective.

edited 6th Feb '11 1:23:23 PM by EternalSeptember

NONE of these have anything to do with an audience or how it reacts.

Yes, they have.

Fruit Cart - adding a spectacular accident to a car chase. If the audience would find them boring instead of spectacuar, they wouldn't be there. Nowadays Played for Laughs.

Video Phone - Modern examples don't count, exactly because in the age of Skype, that would be considered PSOC. If Video Phones would have been common in the sixties, it wouldn't be a trope, because the audiences wouldn't consider it futuristic.

Twin Banter - Exists because of the stereotype because twins should be single-minded. If audiences wouldn't interpret bantering as a sign of single-mindedness, they would use another trope to show that.

Black Cloak - Evil. D'oh.

Soviet Superscience - based on Dirty Commies, the cold war american audience's paranoia.

Crusty Caretaker - Scary. D'oh

Flying Car - "So your hero needs a Cool Car ..." Cool= Audience reaction, unprovable. Also, just like Video Phone, considered futuristic.

edited 6th Feb '11 1:25:39 PM by EternalSeptember

Eternal September, are you a member of the debate club? I only wish I could twist any counter-argument to back up my position like you.

edited 6th Feb '11 2:03:36 PM by Killomatic

^^No, they don't.

Neither an audience nor a reaction from them is dependent on any of those tropes I listed.

The Woobie, on the other hand, depends ENTIRELY on how an audience views a character (in fact, the audience reaction itself IS the entire concept being defined by The Woobie), or, to use the same pronoun the article uses, how YOU view a character. And how you view a character will likely differ from how I (or anyone else for that matter) view the same character.

How any two people view something like Flying Car or Video Phone is completely irrelevant to what those tropes actually are. While in the case of The Woobie, however, this means EVERYTHING.

edited 6th Feb '11 4:55:31 PM by SeanMurrayI

But Fruit Cart and the others don't need to succeed or fail in order to exist. The cart is there to provoke that reaction, but whether or not that reaction actually happens it is still there in recognizable form. Not only does the Woobie need to be successful in order to exist, it also can exist without being intentionally invoked. Whereas, the audience does not conjure up an imaginary fruit cart based on their individual emotional response to the scene.

If you could isolate various methods used to establish The Woobie, you could probably find a few objective ones. "This scene exists to make the character sympathetic to you." The scene may not actually work, but if it follows a recognizable pattern you can't deny it's there.

But The Woobie itself? "This character exists so that you can feel sorry for them"? If it were possible to isolate that from "this is a character you feel sorry for", then maybe. But that's why it's in the same boat as Complete Monster. "This character exists to be the ultimate avatar of depravity and what have you," versus "this is a character you think is utterly despicable".

edited 6th Feb '11 5:08:22 PM by Tyoria

Ok. To demonstrate my point, let's look at one specific example.

How about the page image, Wall-E. He is considered a Woobie, mostly because he looks with sad Puppy Eyes, he is miserably old and rusty, and he is lonely on a planet full of Scenery Gorn. Not to mention the story's plot, where he gets hurt a lot.

Now, if he would get a new shiny chrome casing, his cameras would be less eyeshaped and positioned, and he would work in an active urban setting, would he still be The Woobie?

Nope, he would be the moving trash can from Back To The Future 2.

So there are things that make a character more woobie, and Puppy Eyes, loneliness, and bad physical condition are some of them.

True, the page description doesn't focus much on objective criteria, but this is mostly because once it described the main points, that a sympathetic character suffers, it would be pointless to list every possibe way of being sympathetic, and all sources of suffering known to man, from dead parents to hurting leg, to PTSD, to getting betrayed.

If we would want to get absurdly technical, no, a Fruit Cart that wasn't intended to evoke a reaction, and wouldn't evoke it either, wouldn't be an example of the Fruit Cart trope, just a Fruit Cart that happens.

People Sit On Chairs: Tropes are conventions used in storytelling to convey some sort of information across to the audience. People Sit On Chairs don't convey any meaning — they aren't storytelling conventions at all, they're just things that happen normally or incidentally during the storytelling.

That's what it would be. But most "objective" tropes just get the benefit of doubt, that everyone will get the same reaction, so the emphasis is put on the event itself that appears, expecting that no one will get absurdly technical and argue that they didn't get that reaction so it's not an example.

While subjecctive tropes put more emphasis on audience reactions, because if we know from experience that the audiences will react differently, as they did with Complete Monster, we must note all the different reactions, and note that... your mileage may vary.

In this sense, The Woobie just has a badly written description. It could have an objective basis (like as I listed some with Wall-E), that audiences all agree about (as it is seen from the lack of edit wars and natter, in contrast with Complete Monster), so it is just like if Fruit Cart would be written as "The thing that some people feel when a car hits a Fruit Cart".

edited 6th Feb '11 5:41:42 PM by EternalSeptember

How about the page image, Wall-E. He is considered a Woobie...

He is only considered The Woobie by whoever put the image on the page (and whoever else agreed to put it there—if any). Not everyone considers Wall-E The Woobie because for that to be true, everyone has to be experiencing the same exact emotions and feelings for the character, but not everyone shows the same exact emotions and feelings for any one thing. I certainly don't feel any compelling reason to give Wall-E a great big hug. It's just a CGI polygonal construct that isn't even real.

Different people view things with different eyes and view things differently, and when an opinion of viewers of things they are seeing in works is the entire purpose of a trope concept, then it can't be held up to an objective viewpoint because there isn't an objective viewpoint present.

edited 6th Feb '11 6:01:01 PM by SeanMurrayI

If tropers can't objectively agree about which characters the trope applies to, they are sure putting up a great act of convincing me about the opposite.

Because, as I say for the fourth time, there is no natter, and no edit wars, that usually sign these disputes.

For a usual YMMV subjective, an entry tends to look like this:

• Complete Monster: Bob is this.
  • YMMV, you could see a glimmer of remorse in his eyes before he died.
    • WHAT glimmer of remorse??? That was just a sparkle from the exploding tank!
  • Anyways, he was mostly manipulated by the Big Bad
    • Yeah, but he chose to be manipulated.

Even when we tried to set up specific objective criterias, people kept arguing that those are not really there in this case/ yes they are / No they aren't / Yes they are.

In contrast, even though the page barely any objective criteria listed on it's page, most Woobie entries already look like this:

• The Woobie: Alice is this. To list the more important tragedies in her life, yaddayaddayadda.
  • also, Bob, who had it at least that hard with blablablabla, but he still remains an idealist.

Cuz it's a gushy trope, so people don't feel a need to add Justifying Edits. We don't see a lot of people contesting Heartwarming Moments either.