Needs Help: Unfortunate Implications

So blogs are OK if they have indepth research?

Normally, I'll all for restricting examples, but this doesn't seem the best solution to me.

If we're cataloging the reaction, then sure, we can make this in-universe. But if we're cataloging the examples themselves, I don't think an example noted by site X is necessarily more valid than one noted by troper X.

There has to be a better way of vetting examples. We should tighten the definition, as we often successfully do elsewhere.

You are a bit fast on comparisons there. A site has usually more weight than a troper. And a citation standard is not simply a "site". And I want to see how you want to narrow the definition without it getting constantly decayed.

I think that we should allow In-Universe examples even without citations.

In-Universe examples cite themselves.

Do you have a good definition we can tighen it to?

edited 23rd Jun '12 11:38:59 AM by Feather7603

For starters, shall we cut the categories for "Most tropes that fit the pattern 'All [group of people] are [insert characteristic here]'." and "Stereotypes of any kind"?

I think that these are Unfortunate Implications by default.

Still prefer to have the citation standard, possibly with

But if you stereotype a group, what's unfortunate about that? That's pretty much what you intended, right?

A lot of stereotypes aren't actually intended. If someone writes a story that implies all black people are crackheads, they will deny to the skies that that could even be seen as racist even if you squinted. That's why it's unfortunate implications. You might not have meant it like that, but it's how it came out.

I forgot Values Dissonance. Until around 1960, it was ok in America to portray Asians as the Yellow Peril so works in that time people will have that trope, but nowadays, we say, really? really?

Ah, that. Hmmm...

Yeah, it really seems hard to tighten the definition to prevent misuse. But if that's true, isn't that a problem inherent to the trope itself? Is this a trope if it has no workable definition? Should we convert it to an Audience Reaction, changing the name and description accordingly?

It is an Audience Reaction.

Practically, but it isn't, right? It's not on the audience reaction index. And it's phrased as a trope. It's "Unfortunate Implications," not "Offended By Unfortunate Implications."

It's YMMV. That automatically means abuse, I'm afraid. Coupled with sinkholing, I find attempts at tightening the definition hopeless.

Ah, but if we make it a reaction, then in-universe is on the table, isn't it? And all the cited examples can go under Web Media?

Citations don't work like that. In-Universe examples can stay as in all other places, Audience Reactions need citations to avoid becoming Troper Tales or other purely personal stuff.

It's not an audience reaction, except in the most literal sense. Amanda Palmer producing an atomic firebomb of controversy over Evelyn Evelyn with the disability community isn't a matter of opinion, that's something that actually happened.

That is exactly what an Audience Reaction is. It's not about things that don't happen; it's about things that don't happen within a work.

@paws: The audience reacted to the work and its treatment of disabled people. Thus, it was an audience reaction.

OK, seems that we have several options for a crowner here:

• Regardless of what else happens, make Unfortunate Implications Flame Bait.
• Regardless of what else happens, make Unfortunate Implications into an index of tropes about them and add a verifiability/citation standard for the non-In-Universe items so that it doesn't turn into Handle This Index With Care #2 (optional: redirect Handle This Index With Care to Unfortunate Implications for its 180 inbounds)
• Leave the examples alone
• Cut examples
• Add a verifiability/citation standard so as to prevent shoehorned/Troper Tales/personal examples.

A big part of the problem is that most of the tropes do not qualify as single examples, but do as pervasive patterns across media.

Having a gay character who is highly promiscuous is not a problem, it becomes one when all the most visible gay characters are.

So this is a phenomenon that is visible from a global view, but once you get down to single cases it disappears.

Another difficulty is how you identify a character: is a scary black thug counted as a thug or black? Are the awesome superpowers of the X Men offensive to real mutants like my young cousin (she has trisomy 21) who are more often badly held back by deformities? As is often pointed out, reducing a character to being a representative of a group is itself highly problematic. (Relevant)

Really, I am very conflicted here. On the one hand, this is something genuine that needs to be talked about and cataloguing it is helpful. On the other, it is the mother of all natter magnets.

And by that I mean it is a well-meaning but exasperating hyper-protective control freak. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some letters from the National League Against The Defamation Of Parents to read.

edited 24th Jun '12 2:30:20 PM by RJSavoy

I suppose you could rewrite the description so that it only includes examples where there there is a pattern that point towards the Unfortunate Implications, with nothing that points away from it. That could work in addition to cited controversies and In-Universe examples.

So, if a black character is a bad guy, it's not this. If there are two, it could count, if they're not related somehow (as that would just make it a group, which is singular, and not a pattern). Also, if there are non-bad-guy black people, they break the trope, so it's not an example.

Regardless of that, character opinions should not at all count as Unfortunate Implications. Characters can be bigoted, racist, chauvinistic, or whatever. It's not an Unfortunate Implication unless the narrative actually says it's okay. Explicitly.

It is a pervasive problem we also find with morality tropes; some highly cynical works (Watchmen is a good example) intentionally undermine any morals they may have, and the protagonists are in no way role models. If Puella Magi Madoka Magica has a message, it is that the universe doesn't care about right or wrong. Yet Broken Aesop is listed on its page. (If you've watched it to episode 10, you'll know what they mean.)

I should clarify that the problem comes up most when an entire genre rather than a single work has an absence of, say, gay people in functional relationships. At the level of single works it's less noticeable.

I suggest as guidelines:

1) Each entry has to explain at what point things become bad, at least when treating a single work.

2) We focus on "perpetuating misconceptions" rather than offending a given group.

3) We make entries treating swathes of successful, culturally influential works of similar genre in a specific time/nation frame.

No. No, no, no, no. TV Tropes is not the place to launch a crusade for social justice in media. I actually agree that one is needed, but it's neither on topic for this site, nor something we can trust the userbase to handle responsibly. This is absolutely not what the page should be for.

Actually, seeing this kind of argument makes me wonder whether we should have the page period.

So, if a black character is a bad guy, it's not this. If there are two, it could count

In this case one common situation is that there's a black character who's a bad guy, and then there's a second black character who's a bad guy in a completely unrelated work, and then someone counts it because there's more than one of them and it's the media as a whole who are implying that blacks are bad guys.

Lots of people completely outside TV Tropes use this method to discover Unfortunate Implications. Of course, this means that there's no way to portray even a single black bad guy because someone can always say "this is part of the general media tendency to imply that blacks are bad guys". It also means that the better the media gets, the worse the misuse becomes (the fewer black people portrayed as villains out of prejudice, the greater the chance that an example is completely innocent).

It also gets worse when there are tropes such as Angry Black Man, Black Best Friend, Magical Negro, etc. all of which are treated the same way. Almost anything done to a black character can fall under at least one Unfortunate Implications trope if you look at the tropes this way.

And black is just an example. Repeat for women or gays or anything else.

I would go with "require that it be called Unfortunate Implications by some source other than just one individual blogger or TV Tropes user".

Yeah, I think that they should have at least one outside link to a site. But my thing is, maybe there should be a warning about using a reputable site. So we won't have people cherry picking some conspiracy theory site to support their opinion.