WhamLine and WhamEpisode

A couple of things.

First of all, both Wham Line and Wham Episode is currently listed as a trope. However given that the description contains lines like "the audience must not see it coming" and "This is strictly an audience trope" (emphasis mine), and the fact that the page image to Wham Episode depicts an Audience Reaction, shouldn't these "Wham" tropes be YMMV? Note that we also have Dropping the Bombshell, which is defined as am in-universe reaction of a shocking statement.

Also, we probably need a clearer criteria/definition of what counts as significantly changing the status quo, because depending how broadly we define that term, this trope can easily derail to mean "any scene/line that contains a surprising reveal" (which is how I often find this "trope" being used in work pages).

Edited by Adept on Nov 9th 2018 at 11:06:34 PM

You know that making a trope YMMV is as simple as putting it in said index, right?

Just because there is a reference to the audience in the description doesn't mean it is a YMMV trope. All tropes have to be observed and observable, YMMV is for when the nature of what is observed is subject to interpretation (as well as fan reactions and fan behaviors). A Wham Line, Wham Episode or Wham Shot may only be as such because they are conveyed to the audience, rather than acknowledged by the internal story and characters, who in turn pick up on what is being communicated.

In short, a character saying "I'm pregnant" in a dramatic close up followed by a musical sting is a Wham Line and certainly not an Audience Reaction.

No, because while adding a trope in an index is simple, changing a page type is a pretty big change, and should at least warrant a discussion before it should be done.

So basically, it's an Intended Audience Reaction? I take issue with that explanation because Wham Line (and, by extension, Wham Episode) also defines itself as a shocking revelation that radically changes the everything, which could be subjective depending on how the audience have already perceived the show.

For example, the line "I'm pregnant" might obviously be intended to shock the audience, but while some may consider this development as a big game changer to the plot, others may not perceive any significant difference in the characters' dynamics with each other and/or the way they proceed with the ongoing plot, thus bearing no notable changes in the "status quo"— which is apparently a requirement for this trope.

Edited by Adept on Nov 9th 2018 at 11:28:19 PM

"In short, a character saying "I'm pregnant" in a dramatic close up followed by a musical sting"

Without any context? No.

Although, there's probably a trope out there that covers the way it is delivered (by dramatic close up, musical sting, etc).

And yes, story context is very important for why a Wham Line, Wham Shot, Wham Episode etc can be a "wham" in the first place.

"radically changes the everything"

...That's too extreme. The trope shouldn't be that way in the first place.

Edited by 4tell0life4 on Nov 9th 2018 at 5:41:31 AM

Intended Audience Reaction is when a trope viewed as an audience reaction was anticipated and/or expected by the creative team. As an example they may deliberately make a character obnoxious to evoke The Scrappy, only to give them a noble and heroic death to evoke Alas, Poor Scrappy. That is meta-context.

The key difference in what I'm talking about is that tropes have to be accessed by the audience before they functionally exist. The audience has to perceive and identify the trope by isolating all the elements surrounding it. Otherwise there is no difference between Badass Longcoat and Not-So-Badass Longcoat. You take away the audience perception and all you have is someone wearing a long coat, and that's not a trope.

And all the "Wham Tropes" are essentially any singular moment that is A) treated with high dramatic/emotional value and B) provides a tonal shift from where the story was originally going. The "I'm pregnant" example may need a little more context, but identifying the line as being accompanied by a close-up and musical sting is definitely points in its favor. Because of the "tonal shift" you can't have too many without diluting the impact of the trope (or you're playing it for comedy). Trying to put up rules that it must shatter the foundation of the setting is far too extreme, as Status Quo Is God and the setting might be re-established by the end of the story.

Edited by KJMackley on Nov 9th 2018 at 10:38:58 AM

They're definitely tropes, since they occur within the works. They might be subjective tropes (which is different from them being Audience Reactions), since exactly what qualifies as an example might be subjective (whether it's impactful enough to qualify). However, that doesn't mean they're not proper tropes.

Edited by AnotherDuck on Nov 9th 2018 at 8:08:15 PM

YMMV index does have subjective tropes, though.

"And all the "Wham Tropes" are essentially any singular moment that is A) treated with high dramatic/emotional value and B) provides a tonal shift from where the story was originally going."

A) THIS should be the hard part of the trope. Only this. B) is not necessary.

"identifying the line as being accompanied by a close-up and musical sting is definitely points in its favor."

Now I'm seriously asking if we have a trope like this.

Part B is still pretty important. A dramatic story having a dramatic moment is pretty meaningless, thus it needs to be pretty impactful in how it changes the tone of the story.

Right, so back to my first question, should the wham tropes be flagged as YMMV?

I mean, even without the more subjected (b) part of 's definition, it still relies on the audience's expectation and emotion for it to work, and doesn't tropes that relies on the meta to work usually goes in YMMV page, even though it's clear that the setup is deliberately invoked by the creators to induce certain audience response? (e.g. Alas, Poor Scrappy, the Funny/Heartwarming/Tear Jerker subpages)

Also, I'm still wondering what sort of criteria or standards are in place when people want to add examples to this trope to stop it from being a list of lines/scenes that an audience happens to find surprising.

Edited by Adept on Nov 10th 2018 at 5:04:50 AM

I've been saying no because there is very little subjective about it, all the trope elements surrounding it are objectively identified. It's neither an Audience Reaction, nor is it a controversial claim (Moral Event Horizon should be a regular trope, but it's too prone to debates that it is listed YMMV). The Wham tropes are also very prevalent, flagging them as YMMV would require moving tens of thousands of wicks.

Unexpected Character was made ymmv because it relies on audience reactions too much.

Likely the same goes to Wham tropes - I've seen a lot of discussions on what is and isn't a Wham thing in work-specific forums in this site, and experience tells me that we can only determine the examples in hindsight while people tend to put anything they see as "wham" immediately.

Unexpected Character fell into a problem that it became a shorthand for "I (this troper) didn't expect them to show up" and applied to anything and everything from Bill Murray's cameo in Zombieland As Himself to franchise crossovers. The trope was built on audience reaction from the beginning.

All the Wham tropes can be subject to misuse because of a low threshold, but it's misuse because of ignoring evidence within the work, not because the tropes are about how the audience reacts to it. As I said, the references to the audience in the description of the tropes is because the audience is often more aware of the situation than the characters in the story. But just because they know more doesn't mean the trope is about their reaction.

The trope isn't about the surprise the audience feels (an Audience Reaction as YMM Vs are generally emotional subjectivity), but rather the surprise of the characters and the audience. It requires a bit of both, where everything changes for the characters and the audience's perception of what's going on. It's like Dramatic Irony without the audience's foreknowledge. I'd say it's a trope in its own right.

Dropping the Bombshell is already mentioned as the in-universe version of the Wham tropes.

The only thing Wham tropes have left is "surprising the audience".

If Wham Line and its related concepts actually have nothing to do with subjective audience perceptions, then the description needs to talk less about the audiences and their expectations. Wham Line and Dropping the Bombshell currently distinguish themselves by saying that the latter is in-universe (objective), while the former is meta (subjective).

TV Tropes is not peer reviewed and editors can put down whatever they want, edits with false or contradictory information can hang around for years before someone fixes it. Dropping the Bombshell is not the In-Universe version of Wham Line, it is specifically a conversation between two characters where one gives a big reveal/discovery to the other. Wham Line is broader than that, and can be more subtextual like Something Only They Would Say revealing who The Mole is. It says in the description of Wham Line that background music dropping out is a sign of it being used, which is an objective criteria. As I keep saying, references to "The Audience" is about what is conveyed by the narrative and not about how the audience was caught by surprise.

The way I see it, the Wham tropes are designed by the work creators to surprise the audience. Yes, the audience's reaction is key to the trope, but they were created specifically for that purpose. The reaction is intentional, and I think an element in a story intentionally made to evoke a reaction from the audience can be considered a trope as it's narrative purpose is to evoke said reaction.

I wonder if we have other tropes like this so I can put them in Intentional Audience Reaction.

Digression: rereading Dropping the Bombshell, I realized it's too close to Internal Reveal. What's the difference between those?

I think that's a good way of putting it. Even if it fails, you can tell when a work is attempting a Wham Episode or Wham Line. You can feel the weight of it. People don't really bother troping those examples, but they could if they felt like it.

All tropes are information conveyed to the audience, whether or not it succeeds is irrelevent to it's existence. Audience Reaction is specifically that, HOW the audience responds to the trope. Badass Longcoat may have the audience reaction of Narm to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean the trope isn't in effect.

Internal Reveal is information the audience already knows, but was a long standing secret made public. Dropping the Bombshell doesn't quite specify one way or the other if the audience already knows, only that it is shared between characters.

So Internal Reveal practically requires Dramatic Irony to be in effect before the reveal?

Bumping this thread because now I'm seeing a lot of Wham examples being nuked with edit reasons like "well, it wasn't completely without foreshadowing" or "this only mostly changed things, not completely changed things."

Now, I know these tropes have serious ZCE problems, but putting that aside the descriptions seem to be really insistent that they have to be completely unexpected and that they could not have been predicted. Which really feels more like a Shocking Swerve instead.

Or maybe it's just a handful of tropers getting overzealous with the cutting because these tropes are crazy overused.

The latter.

Although, I'm partial to a "Wham" cleanup thread if this gets out of hand...

Note that we are about to introduce Shocking Moments as a YMMV trope via TRS to curb the misuse for Wham tropes when the focus is more on the shock effect than its plot-changing effect.