Rather anvilicious itself (What do you mean It's not didactic): Ptitledz7rgdh9wrk 1

The writer of the What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic? description obviously had an axe to grind, writing up an angry rant that even misses the point of Straw Critic. Simply put, the description could stand to be less biased against didacticism.

Wow, two people made the same thread at once!

Yeah, I know. Take it as a sign of this issue's severity or something.

edited 5th Apr '11 10:44:18 PM by DonZabu

"Wax on, wax off..." "But Mr. Miyagi, I don't see how this is helping me do Karate..." "Pubic hair is weakness, Daniel-san!"

Personally, I completely agree with everything in the article. I hate this mentality. However, it really isn't TV Tropes' place to tell people what to think. The article needs a rewrite, badly. And I agree on the misunderstanding in the Straw Critic pothole, too... What Were You Thinking?, article creator?

What second thread is there on this topic?

edited 6th Apr '11 1:40:51 AM by nrjxll

It was zapped.

Fixed tag. Why does no one get the whole "you have to point the tag at the article" thing?

Fight smart, not fair.

What my thread said was that Moby-Dick is a terrible example to use when complaining about over-analyzation, because the book was purposefully written with that much symbolism in mind. If you're going to complain about reading too deeply into things that don't warrant it, at least pick something that actually doesn't warrant it.

edited 6th Apr '11 7:39:48 AM by DonZabu

"Wax on, wax off..." "But Mr. Miyagi, I don't see how this is helping me do Karate..." "Pubic hair is weakness, Daniel-san!"

I'm the guy who started the page.

When I made the page, I was trying to describe the notion that True Art is all about deep hidden meanings, and the idea that enjoying a book for the story is stupid. Evidently I didn't succeed.

Also, I've never read Moby Dick, I just picked that one as a random example.

Ukrainian Red Cross

What you ended up doing was crafting a mentality that enjoying a work at any point beyond its face value is stupid. Basically a mirror image of the point you disagreed with.

"Wax on, wax off..." "But Mr. Miyagi, I don't see how this is helping me do Karate..." "Pubic hair is weakness, Daniel-san!"

That's actually pretty funny, when you think about it.

Insert witty and clever quip here. My page, as the database hates my handle.

So, what's an easy example of this sort of thing that actually applies to the trope in question?

"Wax on, wax off..." "But Mr. Miyagi, I don't see how this is helping me do Karate..." "Pubic hair is weakness, Daniel-san!"

Also, the example it starts with is terrible, because Moby Dick very much is glaringly didactic.

But anyway, this really feels like several tropes/rants combined into one:

1. Some classic literature and theater gets spoiled based on the idea that being surprised by the plot isn't really the point (and on the It Was His Sled effect — people assume you know the ending of Romeo and Juliet already.) This should be spun off into its own trope, with no negativity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this trope; most coverage of classic literature, opera, and so forth is going to assume that you know the plot from the beginning, usually on the assumption that that is why you're reading / watching it in the first place (and with classic theater and opera, it's a reasonable assumption that a large part of the audience has seen productions of it before.) I'm not totally sure whether this is a real trope, but we could at least write a non-ranty page about it as a subtrope of It Was His Sled.

2. People over-analyze things that don't really have any meaning (writing essays on Twilight and such.) That's a separate trope. While this gets made fun of a lot, remember that even something with no intentional meaning can still tell you a lot about the culture that produced and embraced it — maybe there's no hidden meaning to Twilight, sure, but you can dissect it to figure out why it's popular and learn a great deal of actually real things about modern culture based on that. Often, people will analyze successful big-budget movies to see what they say about the people who embrace them. If the current name is kept for anything, this is what it seems to be closest to describing; the other things I'm listing should probably be excised into separate tropes.

3. Literary critics value Deep Meaning over an entertaining story. I'm not sure whether this is a trope, whether it's accurate, or whether we should have an article about it at all — it makes a lot of assumptions based on pretty shaky evidence (for instance, spoiling Moby Dick's story doesn't necessarily mean that you don't think it matters whether it's entertaining or not; it might simply mean that you think that its entertainment value isn't really contingent on not knowing the ending — in fact, Moby Dick itself is a terrible example of what the article's rant is trying to say, because it spoils the ending itself right from the beginning.)

edited 7th Apr '11 2:56:53 PM by Aquillion

Not sure if this is what you're referring to, but: Because they're in the wrong order. When you're creating a new TRS thread, the trope title is in the first box and the title of the thread is in the second, but they're the other way around when displayed. (I'd be fine with either order, just so long as it's consistent.)

Should probably bring that up in Tech Wishlist.

Fight smart, not fair.

Something i really miss in the article is a link to, comparison or one of those, to Apliccability.

If it's rewritten, or even if it's not, it should be added in there somewhere due to how close they are.

I'd add it myself, but i'm not sure where or what to call it... And i'm lazy right now...

Applicability.

Being didactic — that is, preachy and pedantic — generally is considered in something of a negative light. There are meaningful stories that aren't didactic, but this trope isn't about them. The description could be consolidated and clarified, but the trope is a valid one. The tendency of some people to read symbolism into everything, even when evidence up to and including Word of God says otherwise, is something we've probably all observed in action at one point or another. As is the case with Americanitis, the trope sort of is negative by its very nature, but some things are, and this does not invalidate them as observable phenomena.