Some of these don't need vindication: Vindicated By History

I took a quick view of Vindicated by History today, and I'm struck in particular by one thing: many of the examples really shouldn't qualify.

For example, one inclusion in the video game section is the trio of Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger. Yes, history does look fondly upon all three of these games. But the thing is, all three of those were also very fondly thought of upon their release. They sold ridiculous numbers of copies (FFIV was one of the top sellers of the SNES' first year, FFVI was one of the all-time best sellers for the system, and while not quite the numbers of FFVI, nobody went hungry after CT was released). They were critically acclaimed across the board. And they were extremely popular - give me enough time, and I'll dig up the Nintendo Power charts where they regularly received votes for most popular game. History only affirmed the opinions held from the outset for those three.

A few other examples that seem more than a little odd from various places on the page - The Empire Strikes Back (even noted for being, at the time, the second-highest grossing movie at its release), Ten by Pearl Jam (popular with critics and one of the top sellers of that year with a couple top singles in "Jeremy" and "Evenflow"), and Tiny Toon Adventures (which was extremely successful and liked at the time; it just was overshadowed by the fandoms for Animaniacs and Freakazoid for a while).

I think the problem is that it isn't too clear from the page just what needs to happen upon a work's initial reception to justify this trope. Does something have to commercially bomb? Does it have to get savaged by critics? Just what needs to occur before this trope can be cited should the media in question receive acclaim in the future?

The problem is that people will arbitrarily add examples without thinking about what the trope means. I myself have been guilty of this in the past. In this case, the trope means something that either the critics or the audiences (many times both) hated when they first saw it, but changed their opinions later on. In shorter terms, the opposite of Deader Than Disco.

the Real Life section, at least, ought to be culled. Too many justifying edits and nattery comments.

I think that critical reception should only be included if it was as harsh as the general public's perception. An instance where the public loved it but critics panned it would probably better fit under Critical Dissonance.

I guess the question is, just what qualifies as an "initial failure"? Poor ratings? Bad sales? Just what level of each? I mean, at the moment, Super Mario 64, which had tons of critical love and sold several million copies, becoming one of the best-selling games of its generation (and that's not counting the DS remake or the Virtual Console rerelease) is listed on there. In order for that to qualify, I think it'd have to grant superpowers to people.

This isn't even a trope, subjective or otherwise. Nothing to do with story telling. At best it is trivia.

Well, as of now, it's listed YMMV, being based on critical and audience reception and all.

As is, yeah, there are a lot of very questionable examples. (Marathon? Isn't that the the game series that had always been considered as "One of the advantages Mac gamers have over PC gamers since PC users can't play these awesome games, nyeh nyeh :p")

edited 30th Sep '11 6:53:51 PM by Servbot

^^ Y'know, I agree. This really is more like trivia.

@5 It hadn't occurred to me when I started this thread, but I think you're right. I can see the argument that it should be YMMV (since it depends on audience reactions), but it doesn't actually affect the work itself, so Trivia makes more sense.

Trivia makes sense. It can't be a true YMMV since it's a late-arrival reception

And a reception that will never help a work's reputation since, after all, it came late.

I'll make my vote if there are options.

We moved to Vindicated by Cable and Vindicated by Reruns to Trivia, but we agreed that Vindicated by History should stay in YMMV, since it's an Audience Reaction. Another thing is, people seem to confuse this with Cult Classic. They overlap often, but it's not the same thing. But otherwise there is a lot of gushing and non-examples.

edited 15th Nov '11 2:10:00 PM by hotrods4ben

Does anything else need to be done with this page?

Why shouldn't this be Trivia? I don't think it's a trope at all. I don't think any Audience Reactions are tropes. Maybe we should make a separate namespace for those.

Audience Reactions are not tropes indeed (their In-Universe forms are however), but it's a Wiki Talk topic - see this for example.

In fact, given that this topic seems to pop up regularly, it might be a good idea to reactivate that old thread instead of discussing it in every TRS topic.

Clock's set.

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