Not Tropeworthy (alt names crowner Jan 19, 2020): Lowered Monster Difficulty

After posting in Lowered Monster Difficulty recently I went over to its parent trope Villain Decay out of curiosity - and it has the exact same examples repeated everywhere. Slightly different wording sure, but ultimately they are the exact same thing.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer for example as the vampires and the ancient ones mentioned on both pages with the exact same reasoning.

Dr Who has the Daleks, the Weeping Angels and the Cybermen mentioned on both pages with the exact same reasoning.

Stargate has the Goa'uld, Jaffa and Wraith mentioned on both pages with the exact same reasoning.

Star Trek has the Borg mentioned on both pages with the exact same reasoning.

And this goes on and on. The same things repeated verbatim.

So my question is very simple: why do we have a much smaller subpage that seemingly has the exact same just slightly differently worded examples on it? Either Lowered Monster Difficulty is just not needed because it basically is the exact same thing as Villain Decay, or it needs to be one of those pages that merely explains the trope without examples because its the exact same page just smaller. There is basically no original content on it at all.

Opening.

• Opening sentence of Main.Villain Decay: "The process by which a villain who is extremely scary on first appearance becomes a joke after a few more appearances."
• First paragraph of Main.Lowered Monster Difficulty: "The longer a monster is seen on screen, the easier it gets to defeat or avoid."
• Laconic of Villain Decay: "A villain goes from being really threatening to completely harmless."
• Laconic of Lowered Monster Difficulty: "The more often a given enemy appears, the less of a threat they become."

Sounds more like a Distinction Without a Difference than a supertrope-subtrope relationship. I could get behind a cut/merge.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 9th 2019 at 7:07:05 AM

There is a bit of a studying/leveling thing with Lowered Monster Difficulty I think. Each encounter the main characters are studying it for weaknesses or leveled up between encounters.

Star Trek Online for example if you kill 200 of X enemy you earn an achievement that gives you 2% more damage vs said enemy cause you learned how to kill them better.

Villain decay is almost comical in its well decay.

Edited by Memers on Sep 9th 2019 at 3:20:59 AM

Lowered Monster Difficulty isn't a video game-specific trope. The description doesn't even mention video games until it references Degraded Boss, whose own description says it isn't a subtrope of Villain Decay. If it actually started out as a video game trope, then it decayed into a less commonly used duplicate of Villain Decay.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 9th 2019 at 5:25:18 AM

Studying an enemy as you are fighting or in between fights is not a video game trope as well, even leveling isn't a strictly video game thing nowadays.

There are many ways where the heroes just become better at fighting things.

How does Villain Decay not cover that? Lowered Monster Difficulty claims it's a subtrope of Villain Decay, so the examples should already be examples of Villain Decay.

That sounds like an instance of Villain Decay being a Justified Trope, due to in-universe reasons.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 9th 2019 at 5:45:43 AM

Villain Decay happens over time, like several movies and such and requires multiple instances to 'decay'.

Lowered Monster Difficulty doesn't require that.

Edited by Memers on Sep 9th 2019 at 3:43:32 AM

That isn't a big enough difference.

If there are so many overlapping examples, I think the problem is misuse, not a lack of distinction.

Villain Decay is supposed to be about how, over subsequent installments of a series, a villain will be portrayed as less and less powerful/intimidating, with switching sides or becoming a joke character being the typical culmination.

This is a characterization thing. Almost like a Flanderization of a villain's initial ability to be defeated over the course of the following installments. Buggy the Clown is a good example. His powers haven't changed, but he's gone from being portrayed as a menace to a Butt-Monkey.

Lowered Monster Difficulty is supposed to be about how, over the course of the same story, a slasher villain-type monster will slowly and inexplicably lose its powers like Offscreen Teleportation, Suspiciously Stealthy Predator, and immunity to bullets, in order for the heroes to have a chance against it by the climax.

This is a dramatic thing. As the Plot Armor page says, this is when "The villain's Plot Armor degrades over time, and/or the hero's or group of heroes' Plot Armor becomes more prominent against them." Their portrayal will be just as threatening, but their powers will have diminished.

Lowered Monster Difficulty could probably use a better name. I honestly assumed it was going to be a video game thing.

Edited by Jokubas on Sep 9th 2019 at 10:37:09 AM

How is that distinct enough from Villain Decay? That sounds like "Villain Decay done well" (Villain Decay is in the Bad Writing Index, but Lowered Monster Difficulty isn't), and since Tropes Are Tools, "X done well" and "X done badly" are The Same, but More. That's not the same problem as Ridiculously Similar Trope, but it's still a problem.

They're about different aspects of the story.

Villain Decay is a characterization trope. It's about trying to keep a villain interesting after they've been defeated.

Lowered Monster Difficulty is a drama trope. It's about an antagonistic force that is unstoppable early in the story in order to create enough conflict and suspense, but loses that unstoppability by the end so that the story can come to a believable resolution.

In a lot of ways, examples should almost never be on both.

As I said, Buggy the Clown went through Villain Decay, because while he was initially portrayed as both a serious enemy and a legitimate threat, he becomes more and more of a joke in each appearance until he fully became a comic relief Butt-Monkey character. He is not Lowered Monster Difficulty, because his powers have never changed in any appearance, with his defeats coming as a result of countering or overpowering him, not because the narrative removed his ability to win.

Likewise, the Terminator is a good example of Lowered Monster Difficulty in the first two movies, because they are capable of less and less as the movies go on. For example, the first Terminator loses the ability to run at the very end of the movie, and the second Terminator loses control of its shape-changing ability (the justification for these losses is just a bonus). They are not an example of Villain Decay, because they are not treated as any less of a threat between movies. Even the T-800 in the second movie, despite switching sides, is an extremely useful ally and doesn't succumb to Redemption Demotion.

I think the problem is that Lowered Monster Difficulty isn't a good name and its first line shouldn't reference Villain Decay. It's more a form of You Can't Thwart Stage One. It certainly has a ton of misuse.

Edit: A few other places do needlessly confuse things. The description on the Bad Writing Index for Villain Decay sounds kinda like Lowered Monster Difficulty, but that's because it's describing Villain Decay poorly. Lowered Monster Difficulty should be on there, because it usually is a crutch that elicits a Only the Author Can Save Them Now reaction (the The Thrawn Trilogy entry is a comparable example).

Yes, technically, losing the narrative ability to win that made you a threat early in the story, could be considered a form of your villain threat decaying, but that's not the spirit of Villain Decay. Otherwise, any villain that's defeated at the end of their work (which would probably be most of them) would be examples of Villain Decay. The spirit of Villain Decay is the character being taken less seriously as a villain in subsequent appearances, not in them being able to be defeated to begin with.

Edited by Jokubas on Sep 9th 2019 at 2:09:22 AM

Made a crowner.

Crowner hooked.

Giving the thread a nudge for votes.

I think it's safe to call.

Giving a bump since the thread died before the crowner was called.

Just to start suggesting names:

"Hero's Death Battle Exemption" has been used elsewhere to describe a major part of the concept.

Monster Threat Expiration

Relative Monster Effectiveness

Further the Story, Weaker the Monster?

We're going to need more votes.

Weekend votes bump. We're two votes short on the winning option.

Took care of the laconic and redirects. We only have 142 wicks to move/remove.