Needs Help: Base Breaking Character

In the Long Term Project cleanup thread for Base-Breaking Character there has been trouble with how strict demands seem to be in order to call a character "Base-Breaking". Currently, in order to be called Base-Breaking a character must fit four criteria:

• Split the fanbase into at least two vocal factions of similar size. Fans who don't care about the character don't count as a faction. There must be both fans and haters, and both in similar amounts.
• Have little to no middle ground: most of the work's fans must have a strong opinion, positive or negative, about this character. Two Vocal Minorities aren't enough to truly break a base.
• Inspire a vicious conflict. Mentioning your love or hatred of this character should carry a strong probability of turning the discussion into a debate, if not a full-blown Flame War. If most members of the two or more factions don't care enough about the issue to argue their position, that's a sign that the conflict is not particularly vicious.
• Have a sustained base of fans and haters. Obviously, whenever a new character is seen, or an old character does something big, fans are going to talk about it for a while. But if the discussion dies down after a few episodes, that's a sign that the character is not that divisive. A conflict should last for at least six months to qualify; any shorter and it's probably just your average fan disagreement.

Most of these points seem fair, but point two seems to be giving us some trouble for a few reasons;

• It can be hard to gather evidence that the fandom circles tropers hang out in aren't just vocal minorities. How do we define hatred or like as a simple Vocal Minority within a fandom?
• Many fandoms are too small to have easily-gathered proof of vicious sustained conflict and majority besides the word of other tropers, or all evidence that once existed has been lost to time.
• Middle grounds for everything exist, similar to how Scrappies will always have some fans. How do we define a middle ground as "too big"?

There were calls in that thread to make a TRS thread for the trope so I'm making this here. We had a few suggestions for how to resolve this issue but are open to more. Currently we've had:

• Do nothing, the trope is fine as it is
• Broaden point 2 or remove it, requiring only two strong factions engaging in long-term, vitriolic debate over an issue and ignoring the potential for people who simply don't care
• Axe the trope entirely as it is too hard to document
• Other???

Opening. I think people are getting ahead of themselves a bit with #2 - we don't have techniques to reliably tell the opinion of a large group of people.

Agreed, these requirements are unverifiable without the use of extensive polling, which we simply cannot do at the moment.

I think part of the problem is trying to apply Wikipedia standards to an audience reaction trope.

Okay, as the guy partially responsible for this thread getting made, I had a few suggestions I was gonna make in the initial BBC thread. I'll just lay em down here:

The biggest problem with Rule #2, and the cleanup's handling of this trope in general, is that the rule effectively functions like a childish "I win" button with little substance. There always exists a massive majority of a fanbase that we absolutely cannot extract any kind of meaningful data from. The consequence to this has been obvious - any time this rule gets brought up, any and all examples have been shot down. It's used for no reason other than to lock stuff out, instead of adding meaning to examples. The rule relies on people to gather data from a group so large that obtaining a sample size would take a literally impossible level of effort to attain.

Another issue is it asks us to gain the opinions of, for lack of a better word, the casuals. From the moment this trope was made, we have literally never cared about the casuals, and that's because you just cannot get data out of them. It's like they're invisible. The vast majority of YMMV items period strictly care about the hardcore crowd. The ones who post fanart, the ones who go on forums, the ones who cosplay, the ones who will relish and enjoy the work for years, and most importantly, the ones actually willing to pick fights over this kind of crap. These are the people creators often listen to, not Old Chucky who will watch literally anything. If the scope of the trope (trope scope?) is narrowed down to just the hardcore crowd, that makes this way easier - they're by far the most noticeable and active part of any fandom, and they can provide us with juicy, juicy data.

Finally, I will make the claim that the rule overrides a significantly more important stipulation. Rule #1 dictates that 2 large groups of people are already fighting each other, while this rule mandates that quite literally the whole damn fanbase is up in arms, which is statistically impossible. Is two large groups not enough? Obviously you need to mind exceptionalism (some characters are clearly more controversial than others, and sometimes popularity or hatred just eclipse the other soundly), but as is, it is an extremely arbitrary rule that does nothing except turn this trope into the cool kids club.

In summary, these are my suggestions:

• Narrow the trope to specifically focus on hardcore fans; it is 600% unfeasible to gain the opinions of anybody else and they're the only ones willing to pick fights over this anyway. Maybe do the same for Broken Base, as it seems to be suffering a similar problem.
• Just gut Rule #2. It has accomplished nothing except get in the way of people who actually want to get things done and eclipses the much more important Rule #1. It changed a perfectly valid fandom concept into something blatantly Too Rare to Trope. Once more, do the same for Broken Base.

Edited by DocSharp on May 29th 2019 at 2:25:35 AM

I'd join and in all honesty? I prefer to gut the Rule #2 entirely because I'll echo what Sharp had said. It's not only narrowing the definition but the lack of what constituting as no "Middle Ground" can be confusing at times, even for newcomers.

I also think the "no middle ground" rule is arbitrary. Why can there be no broken base WITH a middle ground?

Even in a dedicated fan forum, it’s not like every single member will jump in on the debate when someone asks (to use an example I’m familiar with) “Do you guys love or hate Shadow the Hedgehog?” Nobody’s going to jump into to the topic just to say “I’m pretty ambivalent toward him,” and counting the amount of unique posters compared to the forum’s userbase will usually reveal that some people are clearly sitting it out.

Hence, cutting the "No Middle Ground" rule. Besides, I'm not suggesting loosening the rules to the point where anything goes, because that would just put us back to where this trope was before the cleanup effort. If an example goes up, I'd wish people made sure there was a pattern of hate/love across multiple sites, fandom groups, etc, and making sure there was a genuinely significant amount of people involved.

I'd just rather this trope was actually, y'know, a trope instead of the unattainable hypothetical concept it currently is.

Edited by DocSharp on May 29th 2019 at 4:13:43 AM

While I get that criterion number two is trying to prevent incredibly minor conflicts from popping up, I'd be in favor of making it so a lack of middle ground isn't a requirement.

My next questions:

• In this day and age, are certain fanbases civil enough that they can have the same disagreements without visible name-calling and yelling? I personally view it as a middle ground between Ensemble Dark Horse/main character that people like versus The Scrappy.
• Can things like Alas, Poor Scrappy and Rescued from the Scrappy Heap apply to Base Breaking Characters too?

From my two cents, I'd just axe Point 2.

YMMV sections were just fine before squabbles over differences of opinion (and the validity of those opinions) erupted.

If there are external sources (either official reviewers or fan forums, videos and blogs) that point to divisive qualities in a story and its characters, that should be enough evidence to showcase a crack in the base.

Just because this site has "more rules" doesn't make some of the opinions from sites like Reddit or personal fan blogs any less relevant or deserving of consideration.

Edited by BrightLight on May 29th 2019 at 11:23:49 PM

Axe rule 2.

It's now been used more or less to shut down actual attempts to cleanup the page by attempting to make this unattainble.

Even ignoring the fact that polling in some cases an entire fandom is near impossible.

That's the thing that is wrong with this whole "Middle Ground" criteria.

If that rule is applied to select candidates for The Scrappy (amongst other YMMV writing tropes regarding story and characters), the whole working of the trope will grind to a standstill because people will argue back and forth about the validity of opinions.

Even the most egregious Scrappies have a couple of fans, and some portions of several fandoms might hold the view that people are too harsh and biased against a Scrappy.

And on the other hand, one person's Ensemble Dark Horse might be another person's Scrappy.

So really, this whole "Middle Ground" thing is subjective reasoning gone mad — gone mad against the straightforward and objective truth that some stories and characters have more than a few holes in them from a writing standpoint.

Edited by BrightLight on May 30th 2019 at 1:38:00 AM

I'm also in favor of axeing the middle ground rule.

I personally am against removing Rule #2, because otherwise what Base-Breaking Character turns into is just "People fight over this character while some people sit out." Rule #2 being there means that the character in question is divisive to the point that almost everyone in the fandom either loves or hates the character.

I would also like to point out that a lot of the bad examples brought up in the cleanup thread and cut were flat-out disregarding Rule #2 long before the issue with Rule #2 was brought up, either going for "This character didn't have enough haters to be The Scrappy, so into Base-Breaking Character they go" or just "Some people like the character, some people hate the character, some people don't care."

Considering how Base-Breaking Character also seems to be a magnet for complaints, I don't think it's a good idea to axe a rule that has the potential to have people once again listing every character and their mother as an example. II'd also rather not have Base-Breaking Character be the dumping ground for characters that didn't make it into The Scrappy.

I'm personally in favor of just flat-out axing Base-Breaking Character entirely due to people using it to complain and not really seeing any worth for it (what happened on Captain Marvel (2019) comes to mind as the most recent example), though I highly doubt there are enough people also in favor of just cutting this audience reaction and it probably has a lot of inbounds.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on May 29th 2019 at 7:41:56 AM

If one wants to axe the whole trope entirely, what's stopping them from just cutting out They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, Creator's Pet and The Scrappy entirely?

Those tropes also rely on Point 2, to varying degrees.

Edited by BrightLight on May 30th 2019 at 2:51:52 AM

From what I've seen, the six-month moratium we have on the trope has done wonders for preventing knee-jerk examples from being added. Most of the more debated entries I've seen on the clean-up thread have been grandfathered in, so there's considerably more debate over them.

Unless someone mentions "Oh, some fans don't care. Discussion over." I get it, you want to make sure it's actually a reasonable debate in the fandom. No one wants to list a character who maybe has a few minutes of screentime. But often times, the fans that don't care are significantly smaller than the ones who do, which is where the Base Breaking part of the name comes from. I'd say if the fans that don't care about the debate rival the size of the ones who do, that's fair grounds to cut. But if there's a 50-40 split of fans who fight with each other and 10% that don't participate, is that fair grounds to cut an example? Probably not.

Personally, I'm for axing those audience reactions as well due to being complaint magnets (The Scrappy is a particularly bad offender in this regard; too many entries are less documentation of characters with absolutely horrid reception and more tropers listing why the character sucks and why everyone should hate them). However, they probably get a lot of inbounds as well so I don't see them going away any time soon.

Where did the six month rule come from? If it just to prevent airtime kneetime reactions, a month should suffice quite nicely, I think.

Maybe another solution to this and those other tropes is to only allow examples through a specific thread?

I think six months is the wiki standard wait time for reaction tropes. A devoted thread, Complete Monster style could work.

Six months was established to ensure that the conflict is long-sustained; a month is too short and still knee-jerky.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on May 29th 2019 at 8:23:30 AM

Not sure how I feel on this one. One the one hand, I do think we need some sort of clear standard for what counts as engaging the majority of the fanbase, because otherwise you get entries like "the character that me and my brother always argue about" or characters that have a very small, vocal hatedom.

On the other hand, I agree with others that it is almost impossible to actually provide solid evidence for critera 2, as every work has a silent majority of causal fans who don't interact with the fandom. We (as a site dominated by fans) don't really care about these people, and we don't have a way of measuring their opinion.

This whole thing makes me sort of want to get rid of these kinds of negative audience reactions. On the other hand, Base-Breaking Character is demonstrably a real phenomenon, and a lot of people seem to like the YMMV tropes (thus bringing in the engagement).

I guess the best solution would be to get rid of #2, add a 6-month waiting period, and require/allow evidence from major fan sites (if a character causes Flame Wars or has been banned from discussion on multiple fan sites, it's probably an example, in my opinion).

Yeahhh, after reading this thread, I can say that removing requirement #2 (or at least allowing for examples that don't have the "entire" fanbase fighting) seems reasonable.

I can certainly empathize with you here, especially since the wiki is primarily concerned with finding objective tropes. Sadly, audience reactions are probably here to stay.

I'm still loathe to remove Rule #2 because I really don't think cases like "5% of the fanbase really like this character, 5% of the fanbase really hate the character, and they're constantly getting into flame wars with each other while the rest of the 90% really don't care enough to get into fights" is a good example of a Base-Breaking Character. It's just two vocal minorities screaming at each other, and I don't think Base-Breaking Character should be used by said vocal minorities to gain validation for their beliefs.

If Rule #2 does get removed, I do think tightening the rules about causing conflicts is a good idea. It shouldn't be enough that people hold differing opinions on a character; that's too omnipresent. If said character causes heated arguments and/or flame wars pretty much every time they get mentioned, then they have a stronger case for being a Base-Breaking Character.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on May 29th 2019 at 12:17:10 PM

Well, yeah. If we do remove rule #2, we'd have to replace it with something similar, but less restrictive. I think we can find a way to allow for middle ground, but to still require the majority of the active fanbase to be engaged in the debate.

I think a requirement for heated arguments or flame wars could be a good requirement. What do we do with much older works that had a base breaking character, but no longer has a very active fandom, or never had an internet fandom to begin with?