Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki

Yeah.

Wait, Out of Jimmy's Head wasn't part of CN Real?

Nope! It aired through 2007 and 2008.

Huh, learn something new everyday.

Also, added the image.

All right, I think we're good! Thanks a ton, Crossover-Enthusiast!

Edited by Kappaclystica on Jul 1st 2020 at 10:44:16 AM

From Character Shilling.

• A 1985 Betty Boop cartoon titled "The Romance of Betty Boop" takes this to the extreme, with people gushing about how wonderful Betty is as she walks down the street. And it's every bit as cringe-inducing as it sounds.

Are there other entries in this trope that feel complainy?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jul 1st 2020 at 2:34:26 PM

There seems to be quite a few entries with complaining/audience reactions, which I brought up on the previous page. Given the definition of the trope (or at least the way the description is written), it seems kinda inherent to it in some ways.

(I did add it to Tropes Needing TRS as previously suggested.)

Found this little bit of complaining on Zombieland: Double Tap's Headscratchers page

Edited by ScarletNebula on Jul 2nd 2020 at 10:11:32 AM

We actually have a headscratchers cleanup now.

I have some concerns about the Sequelitis.Films Live Action page. My Final Edits has raised a concern that his edits are far too negative.

I also had to remove a section from the Executive Meddling entry on Trivia.Dark Phoenix page which reads something like this:

• Can't believe the guy who directed the Fantastic 4 reshoots made an unpopular movie. Can’t believe the guy who wrote a poor adaption of Dark Phoenix in 2006 wrote and directed a poor adaption of it in 2019. If only we had some sort of sign, like a filmography which clearly indicates potential issues.

I think we should do a cleanup to remove the negativity from that particular Sequelitis page. Thoughts?

Edited by gjjones on Jul 3rd 2020 at 8:15:33 AM

I'm trying hard to bite my tongue and not blow a gasket here.

This might be the eleventh or twelfth time someone has chided me to Complaining About Shows You Don't Like and inserting "reviews" into that article. I used hard facts. Box office gross. Creative issues. Studio constraints. Reviews. All of them were axed for one reason or another. (There are no shortage of escape hatches for editors who want to keep the wiki upbeat.) The reboots were cut. Then the remakes. Then the superhero and sci-fi franchises because they are not sequels but serials. And still you say it's too negative.

You may as well set fire to this whole trope. It cannot exist without a degree of negativity.

Edited by burgerants on Jul 3rd 2020 at 6:25:12 AM

What I said on ATT (admittedly only a few minutes ago) is also relevant here, so I'll just copy+paste:

Pointing out that a negative reaction to something exists isn't an inherently negative trope. We're not here to point out "hey, this sucks, here's why" nor are we here to pretend everything is fine and that no bad opinions exist. We're just here to record those opinions, good and bad.

There's nothing contradictory about it. We're documenting media trends and that includes fandom trends. An audience having a negative reaction is something we can and do discuss, we just do it from an objective "here's how people reacted" standpoint, rather than a subjective "this sucks" standpoint.

When was I "tone policing", exactly? All I said was that the trope is about the audience's reaction, but that we need to be objective about it because we're not trying to make statements on the work but to explain fandom trends.

Thass it.

You can try and twist the meaning of my post all you want, but I did not tone police. I was just trying to explain a possible point of confusion because a lot of people think YMMV is for sharing opinions rather than documenting opinions.

"the trope is about the audience's reaction, but that we need to be objective about it"

So how do you suggest we go about that? Specifics, for god's sake. I'll be the first to add your disclaimer to the top of the page.

Edited by burgerants on Jul 3rd 2020 at 6:55:58 AM

I actually kinda agree with burgerants - I'm not sure what we really gain from having examples on Sequelitis. I usually just see it linked as reference to the meta-concept of sequels not being as good in general; naming names does sound like a recipe for complaining.

Thank you.

Whenever I see it on a YMMV page it's more just like "Hey, people didn't like the sequel much". It can stray into complaining, sure, but it does have a legit use and it's as much an audience reaction as the other sequel tropes like Surprisingly Improved Sequel and Contested Sequel. I think the term itself is used often for the trend of sequels to be bad, but the documenting of the unliked sequel is still valid- it just happens to be very common for people to dislike sequels. That doesn't necessarily mean the trope itself is "sequels bad".

If I'm wrong I need to brush up on the trope, but still; documenting a negative reaction to something isn't the same as complaining about that something, even if it's a very common something to complain about.

I added this to Weird Al Effect but I'm worried it's complaining about AVGN copycats, even though that's not my intention, just acknowledging the material itself is mocking people who try to copy AVGN's style. Does it need tweaking?

• In the Game Grumps episode on Mickey Mousecapade, Arin spends the entire episode speaking like an AVGN wannabe, with deliberately bad jokes and a ton of off-color scatological humor. A lot of viewers just enjoy the bizarrely-specific Toilet Humor at face value without realizing it's based on a specific video (a riff of the same game by the fairly-obscure GameDude8899), especially since AVGN copycats aren't as prominent as they were in the early 2010s.

Wait, are you saying that Sequelitis should be used for any bad sequel rather than the trend of bad sequels, like it was originally defined?

But yea, I’m not sure how it’s so hard to grasp that YMMV is for recording audience reaction. Everyone’s telling you how it works yet you still don’t get it.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jul 3rd 2020 at 3:41:02 PM

I mean, how do we use it otherwise? It'd be a trope in aggregate, basically; there's a trend of sequels being really bad. I get that. I accept that. But on an individual example level the trope is about fans disliking a sequel- because what else could it be used as when on a YMMV page?

And when it comes to YMMV, we don't claim everything is either "good or bad". We talk about how people think.

Ergo, when used as a trope and not when discussing the wider context, Sequelitis is about documenting when fans think the sequel isn't good.

At least, that's my train of logic here- it's not feasible to say that the "wider trend" idea works when discussing individual movies. It's what leads us to arguments like the one on ATT, where questions like "what makes a sequel bad" are being tossed around when the focus should be on the fact that fans don't like it, not the nitty-gritty of what went wrong with the work, because the nitty-gritty isn't what we're talking about and since it's YMMV for a reason (and not, say, Trivia), it has to be about opinions, not a wider phenomenon. Otherwise it'd be somewhat objective and probably wouldn't even be able to be used as an actual trope.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 3rd 2020 at 2:55:51 PM

FWIW, I'd assume Sequelitis should only count if the same franchise has a trend of bad sequels, or at least if the majority of them are bad- not just if some of the sequels are good and some of them are bad. Otherwise it's not really evidence of a trend (the laconic says "sequels get worse with each installment; "sequel that is bad" on its own sounds chairsy without that context). Also probably should be considered a step down from the original by critics and fans.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jul 3rd 2020 at 2:55:34 PM

I guess that makes a little more sense? I was thinking of it as the broader "sequels in general turn out bad" concept rather than a more narrow "sequels get worse as they progress".

Even then though, it's still based on what people feel and think about the work, not objective things like behind-the-scenes factors or production value. Those things can make a sequel bad, but if we were talking about objective things like that it'd be...well...objective, not YMMV. Since it is, it's still about opinions first and foremost and the focus should be on documenting the opinions that exist, not on making statements about the actual quality of the work as if they're inherently factual.

That's all I've been trying to say, really- that documenting negative opinions isn't the same as complaining, and that the focus shouldn't be on the fine details of the work's quality rather than the actual opinions.

On that note though, how is "bad sequel" less noteworthy than "Surprisingly Improved Sequel" and "Contested Sequel"?

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 4th 2020 at 3:01:31 PM

Sequelitis is not less not noteworthy than the other two tropes (in fact, I think Surprisingly Improved Sequel is only notable because it averts Sequelitis), and I don't think anyone is disputing that. I guess the problem is that it can attract needless complaining, especially if an overzealous editor goes on to write thousand-word long essays breaking down why the sequel doesn't work, where the original does.

And in longer franchises where the quality of each movie goes up and down with each installment, it gets harder to pin down the trope.

Welll....

Mightymewtron was disputing the value of my version of Sequelitis...so that's why I was asking.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 4th 2020 at 1:37:36 PM