Misused: Body Horror

15 yes votes and no negative votes. It seems the crowner has an unanimous consensus?

So should we work on the new description for the super trope?

edited 4th Apr '14 1:13:30 PM by xanderiskander

Calling for the proposed fixes.

[Proposed definition of] Body Horror: Anything involving a normative element or function of the human body becoming distorted or extreme, usually by the influence of an categorically non-human source. Body Horror requires some part of the infected human body to stay recognizably the same for at least some period so that the change/horror is palpable by contrast.

I think we'll need to be very carful about the description for the subtrope on transformation/mutation body horror, because unwanted mutation already has a trope, Baleful Polymorph. The fact that a lot of Lovecraftian Superpowers rely on this implies you can have a wanted body horror, so there is a place for the trope though.

The way I look at it, body horror has a lot of crossover with Gorn, so that could actually be listed as a sister trope.

Few tropes suggested for the super trope collection or as related tropes that aren't linked now: Nightmare Face, Power-Upgrading Deformation, Unwilling Roboticisation, The Assimilator, Transformation of the Possessed, My Brain Is Big, Mainlining the Monster, The Power of Blood (Especially Types B, AB, and O), Shapeshifter Weapon (sometimes), Shape Shifter Mashup, Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance, Beauty to Beast, What Have I Become?, Eyes Do Not Belong There, Eyeless Face, The Blank, and Mutants (astoundingly not listed yet that I can find, the two go clawed hand in slimy grasper)

edited 9th Apr '14 1:07:30 PM by Scorpion451

Gorn explicitly says it's not about "frightening people" though, and that it's about "thrilling and exciting the audience". So it's not really related. "Blood and gore played for horror" doesn't have it's own page currently.

Also Baleful Polymorph is a more general "person is transformed into an animal". It's more of an inconvenience or a conflict than being about horror. Mutation Horror would be distinct in that it's about the process of their body changing unnaturally being played as horrifying.

edited 9th Apr '14 2:24:28 PM by xanderiskander

Baleful Polymorph applies to any unwanted transformation, its just that it has to be unwanted.

On the gorn part, remember, horror is an mildly ambiguous term, and Body Horror can be played in ways other than for straight fear or gross-out horror. You don't have to be a Nightmare Fetishist to appreciate something masterfully creepy and disturbing. You just have to enjoy a good trek though the Uncanny Valley. Body horror has a fandom, I assure you, and some of us are surprisingly well adjusted.

For instance, I'm a concept artist and I love messing around with things like cyborgs and Humanoid Abominations that play with this trope just for the fun of creating something Creepy Awesome. Its fairly common among people in the creative side of the horror & creature creation industry, actually. Studios have a blast trying to come up the most disturbing thing possible, its like a game of horse or something- "I see your skeletal vaguely humanoid alien and raise you reanimated twisted corpses and Meat Moss."

Another good example is the biomechanical art movement where body horror is subverted into images and objects that are aesthetically pleasing, like tattoos and sculptures.

edited 9th Apr '14 8:23:39 PM by Scorpion451

Okay, sure. We still don't have a page where blood is played for straight up fear and/or gross out horror though. And either way we can't direct people to Gorn to list examples like that anyway because that page is locked and doesn't have any examples.

I'm just saying that the fear aspect is YMMV, and we don't want to downgrade a perfectly good trope. If we focus on the idea of body horror being about things like "bones belong on the inside, not the outside" no matter how its used, we can take YMMV out of the equation.

That is really odd that "blood played for horror" doesn't have a trope already. I think this thread is going to end up creating a bunch of new tropes- so far we've got "creatures that resemble (collections of) body parts", bloody horror, and horrific mutation.

Been thinking about a good definition for the new trope about horrific transformation... This might work: "any transformation, voluntary or involuntary, graphically emphasizing body horror occurring during the transition" That way we can cover a lot of ground on whether its voluntary or involuntary and whether the end result is body horror or not, by just having it be about the process itself being body horror.

edited 10th Apr '14 12:55:50 PM by Scorpion451

It seems like Baleful Polymorph is more general unwanted mutation. The definition of Body Horror would perhaps need to emphasize the part where whatever is "changing" or rendered extreme is originally a human characteristic (like giving birth in the Twilight book).

Body Horror: Anything involving a normative element or function of the human body becoming distorted or extreme. Body horror requires that the changing element be considered a normal human function, but is experienced in a way that is abnormal. Some part of the infected human body to stay recognizably the same for at least some period so that the change/horror is palpable by contrast.

edited 12th Apr '14 5:02:01 PM by bibwrecks

Thats part of what was decided already, that body horror is not about change, which is Baleful Polymorph as you point out.

The crowner decided that body horror is: "Squickiness involving body parts, mutation, or unsettling bodily configuration, not induced by immediate violence."

Body horror is about playing with the Primal Fear of distorted or dramatically abnormal anatomy. Mutation is just one form- an eldritch abomination that looks like its made out of a tangle of organs would be body horror, for instance.

The crowner also ruled that there is a need for a trope which addresses situations where a transformation involves body horror, so that new and separate trope needs to be hammered out, and sounds like that's the sort of thing you're defining. I'm thinking of starting a YKTTW for Horrific Mutation if someone hasn't already, after I finish a rework of Body Horror to reflect the updated definition, so you might pitch in there.

So we have YKTTW's going for the subtropes now. in Transformation Horror, and Bloody Horror, (which was already in YKTTW and was revived).

For Transformation Horror I was under the impression we were going to move Body Horror's description to the subtrope (with some minor edits) and write Body Horror a new description from scratch? Might have misunderstood since it said "move the definition there", but I think we might as well do that anyway since Body Horror's description emphasizes transformations too much, and pretty much needs to be rewritten to match it's new definition.

edited 16th Apr '14 7:45:44 AM by xanderiskander

I think that was original idea- I started out doing it that way at least- but as I was reworking Body Horror, I began to realize how much of a patchwork quilt of conflicting definitions the old version was- essentially it was a supertrope long before this; its just now its been officially recognized as such, and had a firm definition established.

It was honestly easier to start a fresh writeup from scratch for both and then figure out what to salvage, rather than just move a jumbled mess from the old article to a new one we're trying to clearly define from the start. Did salvage a lot of the old article between the two, at least in spirit.

I think that line about "Someone is becoming a monster" at the start of the old version was really at the root of the confusion. A lot of people seem to have read that opening sentence and jumped to the conclusion that body horror basically meant "Squicky Baleful Polymorph". Need to learn our lesson and be careful how we phrase the definition of Transformation Horror. =(

edited 16th Apr '14 3:36:09 PM by Scorpion451

I think Transformation Horror might be a Supertrope itself, with a patronage covering things like :

• Rapid Aging
• I'm Melting!
• Painful Transformation
• Viral Transformation
• Shapeshifter Swan Song
• Power-Upgrading Deformation
• Evil Makes You Monstrous
• Transformation of the Possessed
• The Corruption
• The Virus
• Shape Shifter Mashup

I figured there should probably be some sort of official thumbs up on that before officially declaring this a Nesting Doll of a trope

edited 18th Apr '14 9:19:51 AM by Scorpion451

Starred this thread since it's in the cleanup phase; where are we at?

We got some YKTTW's running for the subtropes, but they've been stalled for about a month.

The description for Body Horror still needs to be rewritten, and generally I'm pretty good at coming up with good descriptions. As I said earlier though I'm having some writer's block with this one. I tried to get some help in the descrption improvement thread, but nobody responded to me. Someone still needs to write it though.

Scorpion451 seems to have edited the Body Horror page with a much clearer description. Thank you very, very much for doing that.

Now we just need to get the subtropes active again. And edit Body Horror's description again to reflect them when they're launched. I've gone ahead and bumped them.

I don't know if Scorpion is working on Transformation Horror anymore. If not I might have to adopt that one.

edited 17th Jun '14 7:13:51 PM by xanderiskander

Transformation Horror is up and running! Anyone know how to redirect a redirect? We need to move Transformation Trauma from pointing at Body Horror to Transformation Horror.

edited 11th Jul '14 7:51:08 PM by Scorpion451

Done. For reference, you need to take the URL of the redirect and append ?action=edit at the end.

Bump. Is there anything left to do here?

Hoooo, boy, yes.

The current description meanders a bit, the list of tropes is "not" a list of subtropes (on other wiki pages, a list like that are subtropes, not 50 tropes that may or may not be related) and violate Example Indentation in Trope Lists, and the examples may not have been checked to become moved to the appropriate subtropes, and what exactly is a sub-supertrope?

A "sub-supertrope" sounds like a Sub-Trope that is also a Super-Trope to other subtropes of its own.

^^I don't think that Example Indentation In Trope Lists applies to indexes and supertropes. They aren't examples in this case- its a quick reference index. Its only logical to group related topics; thats how encyclopedia indexes do it for a reason.

^Yep. Supertropes can be subtropes of other supertropes if there's enough information to cover, just like subtropes can have their own subtropes. Its like a Matryoshka Object, and layers get added as needed.

Think this one's ready to be closed, aside from Body Horror indeed needing some minor weeding and sorting of examples. (Might do that myself next time I have a couple hours to burn) Otherwise both Transformation Horror and Body Horror seem to be doing well following their separation. (There's a joke in there somewhere about conjoined twins, but I'll let it go unfound. X3)

edited 19th Jul '15 3:01:58 PM by Scorpion451

Locking as part of New Years Purge.