Defend Adorkable

Edit: The title of this thread may come off as a bit aggressive. That was inadvertent and I'm sorry. I do want people's sincere opinions on this and I hope the discussion can remain friendly and open.

Adorkable has always annoyed me. It seems like an Audience Reaction version of Nerds Are Sexy, despite not being officially YMMV.

Part of the problem is the vague definition of Dorkiness in Real Life. Is it being a nerd, with strange, boring, or non-mainstream interests? Is it having No Social Skills? Being physically weak? Sometimes, it seems to be used in place of Dojikko, Meganekko, or Cool Loser. Other times, it is used similarly to The Ingenue, which seems further removed from dorkiness (to me).

The second issue is how to define adorable. This seems impossible to distinguish in Sugar Bowl, Moe, or Generic Cuteness settings. In a lot of uses, it seems to come down to "Report Siht likes this character," and claims of cuteness that are simply declared without justification. This seems incredibly YMMV.

This is one of those Overdosed tropes that will inevitably attract a lot of misuse, since it seems positive. For me, I'm not sure how to detect misuse. I once got in an edit war about this which I conceded when I realized I had no idea how to tell whether an example was justified or not.

So I ask you: what do you think this trope is? How does it differ from Nerds Are Sexy, or any other of those tropes in the 2nd paragraph ? Can every single character in a work be Adorkable? How do we detect misuse?

edited 27th Feb '18 7:45:04 PM by naturalironist

• Nerds Are Sexy: A character's intelligence is seen as an attractive trait. It certainly helps if they are attractive themselves, but that by itself is essentially Hot Scientist.
• Adorkable: A character's dorky behavior is seen as an adorable, even charming, trait. It serves to make the character endearing, but not necessarily sexy.

The issue with most of your complaints is that while there can be a disconnect between what the work is trying to convey and how the audience responds, in most cases they are one and the same. What the work is trying to convey is exactly how the audience perceives it. This is especially apparent tropes that deals with attractiveness: Tall, Dark, and Handsome, Ms. Fanservice, Beauty Inversion, etc. Those require a small degree of acceptance as to what is considered conventionally attractive, and there is evidence the work is promoting them as such.

Now a trope like Hollywood Homely is YMMV because there is a disconnect between what the work is trying to convey and how the audience perceives it (in that case trying to say an actor/actress is unattractive when the audience perceives otherwise). If you disagree with an example of Adorkable you would need to make a case that the work is not trying to make the character "awkwardly endearing" to the audience.

edited 1st Mar '18 12:26:47 AM by KJMackley

Adorkable is intended as a characterization.

Um....no? What the author intends doesnt ALWAYS line up with what the Audience feels about any work. For example characters that were intended to be loved could be hated and viceversa.

I dont really have a horse in this race, but I needed to say that.

Even if you don't have a horse in the race, it would help if you're not talking about cows and claiming horses don't exist when discussing the horse race. KJ Mackley didn't say that author intentions always line up with audience reactions for each and every trope.

Tropes where the author intentions line up with the audience reactions aren't tropable as YMMV, since "the audience reacts in the intended way," is People Sit On Chairs. The actual tropes are about creating those expectations. In this case, making character likeable with the use of dorky traits.

If a creator tries to use that trope, but fails to create a likeable character that way, then it's a creator who's failed to use the trope in a way the audience fails to appreciate. The use of the trope is still there, but the result isn't. Tropes are communication tools. No matter how clearly you try to communicate something, there's always the risk of failing. After all, the person you're talking with might be deaf, or not speak your language.

If tropers aren't putting down enough context for the examples to work on their own, that's a problem with the examples, not (necessarily) with the trope definition.

Oh Im sorry for the misunderstanding then! I'll be there in the corner...

No worries. I'm just having fun at your expense.

Im glad there's no hard feelings lol.

I understand that this is one of those tropes about an intended audience reaction. As has been noted, these can miss the mark, and so it's sometimes hard to tell what is and isn't intentional. I recall having issues with tropes like Meganekko for this reason, and I think this is a similar case.

It's fairly clear cut to judge the intended audience reaction when the social connotations of a trait and the reaction clearly line up (e.g. audience is supposed to like cute girl, audience is supposed to hate guy with creepy deformity). On the converse, Hollywood Homely and imo Adorkable mix up these associations by attempting to make a character more relatable or memorable because of having a trait that is not usually considered positive.

To quote the description: "While societal norms would seem to suggest that this is the opposite of the (Western) "Male Ideal", in reality, many people find these characters appealing: Rather than an over-the-top caricature, these characters are enjoyable and relatable because they're not absurd supermen."

To discuss an example from the page, is Shinji Ikari lovable because of his low self-esteem, politeness, and passivity, or do those traits make him irritating and The Load? He's an Antihero, and characters in-universe have both reactions. How do you decide?

edited 9th Mar '18 4:11:26 PM by naturalironist

People generally dislike Shinji because he's too far into the flawed area.

For a trait that's normally seen as negative to be positive, it needs to be moderated somehow. It's like how an Anti-Hero can be a little mean, but can't be a complete Jerkass. Chasing away dogs is acceptable, but kicking them is crossing the line.

Hollywood Homely is Hollywood thinking some traits are far uglier than they really are, or playing them up as such. On the whole, it's about characters who still are attractive by conventional ideas, but are presented as a negative trait to the audience. There's a dissonance between how they're presented, and how they are to the vast majority of people. Taste is always a thing, but this follows what's conventionally attractive, which is a loose standard.

Adorkable, on the other hand, is when they actually possess that trait. In a way, it's kind of reversed to Hollywood Homely, since it's as if a character would be genuinely ugly, but portrayed as if that ugliness is a positive trait to the audience. But applied to awkwardness, naturally.

It can definitely be hard to tell where the hard limits for some tropes are (and some tropes are marked YMMV for it, despite being about what's objectively in the work, without relying on an Audience Reaction).

Tropes are generally not invalidated because of a counter-example. A character can be Adorkable to one person while just annoying and awkward to another. It would be like pointing out that one character ignores the Hello Nurse and therefore the trope doesn't count. The character in question can even be primarily macho and stoic, but have just one adorkable trait and the trope would still be used (in fact, that tends to make the trope more notable).

Not sure where you got that from. What are you responding to?

edited 10th Mar '18 8:17:39 PM by AnotherDuck

The OP naturalironist was saying that different characters treat Shinji's "adorkable" traits as either positive or negative, and posed the question "How do you decide?" I was stating that there isn't an either/or issue involved. If there is evidence those traits are to be seen as positive in any degree it doesn't matter if they are separately also seen as negative.

Right, I agree with that. If the portrayal exists in the work, then the work has an example of the trope. It might be limited to some character or situation, but then the example should add that in the writeup, since it's relevant context.