Too Bleak, Stopped Caring

This ATT thread was getting pretty long, so we were told to take it to the forums.

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is supposes to be for work who's darkness causes audiences to stop caring or following it as they loose hope it will have a desirable ending, but is being misused to complain about any dark works. Even if the works aren't that dark in tone, are too successful to say significant audiences lost interest, or just ending or moments as opposed to the overall work. Tropers adding it seem unaware Angst Aversion exists and might fit better, if wee clean up misuse that might fix that.

Let's use this threat to discuss anything we want to cut as misuse and maybe come up with a bigger cleanup plan.

Some proposed cleanups:

• Remove Foregone Conclusion examples as they know there's no hope as opposed to gradually losing it.
• Remove successful or long-running works as it's success means fans aren't losing interest.
• Require objective evidence (sales, reviews, creator acknowledgment, attempts to course correct) like is being done with Audience-Alienating Premise.

Any other Ideas to clean it up?

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Oct 11th 2019 at 12:03:15 PM

The only issue I really see is that requiring documentation is always problematic suggestion to put on the trope, for the reason that the idea doesn't really fit the overall tone and style of the wiki and when it comes to YMMV can be really hard to gauge actual audience response because blog posts and isolated reviews don't really reflect it. I'm not aware of any trope where doing so has been unanimously successful.

Otherwise, do agree that the trope is centered around the marketing and overall reception when it comes out. Suggesting that some people might tune out because it's a prequel with a Foregone Conclusion is a really vague. At the same time, I do think an example could read "season three was poorly received because of this trope (with specifics), which lead to a Lighter and Softer fourth season in response." If it doesn't actually describe any notable backlash but remains hypothetical, that's a universal problem with these types of examples.

I was initially going to resist, but while writing my reply I thought about it some more and started to come around.

Angst Aversion does seem like a better place for a lot of the examples on Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. Angst Aversion is directly about the subjective perspective of wanting to avoid a story if it's too dark, while Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is saying that the existing audience is starting to give up on it.

I was going to say that Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy could perhaps be merged into Audience-Alienating Premise for both being about audiences as a whole being turned away rather than individuals avoiding a story, but then I realized the distinction there as well.

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is more akin to Jumping the Shark or, thus, the opposite of Growing the Beard. A period in which the previously invested audience starts to feel overwhelmed by the darkness and walks away. The misuse might be helped just with a rewrite rather than adding more qualifications.

It might also help to have some examples for Angst Aversion on its page. If some of the misuse on Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy was moved there, it would be easier to redirect the problem.

Edited by Jokubas on Oct 11th 2019 at 3:45:44 AM

We can start with Riverdale: "Season 2 has Archie and Veronica unhesitatingly doing a ton of underhanded stuff out of blind loyalty to Hiram and Hermione, while somehow no one else can come up with a single effective strategy against them. Between that, we also have Jughead becoming a willing gang member to the point of cutting up a sociopathic woman. While the show was a dark Archie adaptation from the get-go, some felt that the second season pushed it a little too far."

Angst Aversion is example-less because it is defining a term for how an individual might feel, but is ultimately diverged from any discussion of the works functional value. Holocaust movie or superhero comedy, which sounds like a better evening?

Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy is when the drama reaches a breaking point, what is supposed to still be entertaining and marketable is too melodramatic and angry to be fun.

DIAA is not about "this show got dark, I'm out". This is a common misconception and probably the source of much misuse.

DIAA is precisely and specifically when a work establishes the idea that no side is "good". Everything is shades of grey, nobody has the moral high ground, nothing anyone does can meaningfully change things for the better, and so the audience loses all sense of stakes.

A work can fall into that state over time if it begins hopeful but then everyone starts Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and there's no longer anyone who can reasonably be called the good guys, or if the good guys are so ineffectual that there is no hope that they can win or even make things slightly better.

What DIAA is explicitly not is the audience deciding that there aren't enough consequences for evildoing, or that the heroes aren't identifiable enough, or that a bad thing happens to someone they like, or that a heroic character does something amoral and doesn't immediately suffer a karmic brick to the face.

DIAA is: "Nothing good is ever going to happen in this world or to these characters, and none of the characters is likable anyway, so why should I care about it or them?"

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 2:48:02 PM

Well, that was what I thought at first, but then it seemed like that was a more specific version of Audience-Alienating Premise, which is already being scrutinized. I figured there had to be a larger difference.

Audience-Alienating Premise happens before the work is released. DIAA happens after. Also, AAP has nothing to do necessarily with the tone of the work: something that is too silly or too fluffy can turn off potential viewers just as easily as something that is too dark.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 2:33:29 PM

Ah, okay. I was just thinking that why it alienates the audience isn't necessarily grounds enough to make a separate trope, but if there are other distinctions that's fine.

"DIAA is precisely and specifically when a work establishes the idea that no side is "good". Everything is shades of grey, nobody has the moral high ground, nothing anyone does can meaningfully change things for the better, and so the audience loses all sense of stakes."

Understandable, but when you see that tropers are adding things that feel "dark" but do not fill this criteria, we know we have a Missing Supertrope.

We have something close to three billion tropes about tonal shifts in media, so I literally have no idea what you're talking about.

The freaking title. It's too broad for its own good.

That definition is a stark difference from the way its used, its used more for in works 'that are so dark and depressing that you know everyone's going to die so viewer is completely apathetic when someone actually does.'

How is that substantively different from what I said, though? "The story is so grim that you can't care about any of the characters" encapsulates the definition reasonably well, though not as comprehensively as I'd like.

Anyone who relies on the trope title exclusively and doesn't bother verifying that the definition matches their first impression is doing it wrong. I know we put a lot of work into indicative trope names, but come on. Put in at least a minimum amount of effort.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 11:41:57 AM

YMMV.Pokemon Anime

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: This is a common complaint about the Kanto Arc. A majority of the characters were jerks. Ash, despite him being heroic, started off as being an immature, brash trainer. When Ash wasn’t being a jerk, a majority of the people were needlessly cruel to him. They would love to talk down on Ash about his poor training skills despite him being a rookie trainer.

I'm cutting because that's complaining about darkness as opposed to how it's so dark we stopped caring about the stakes. It's being the most popular, iconic season argues against people growing apathetic to it.

I support cutting that. Feels like a personal complaint.

Is Trope Talk the right place for this kind of project?

Nobody is complaining. I spoke about this in a forum with others that said that, which prompted me to write it.

Edited by MsCC93 on Nov 9th 2019 at 12:42:48 PM

It's a blatant misuse of the trope. "Some people didn't like this arc" is not DIAA. It's not any trope; it's just complaining.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 10th 2019 at 2:22:57 PM

A good example of Darkness-Induced Audience apathy is the original Crossed comic. Barring some very rare issues, most of the stories ended with every single main character dead, and since they were at their best VERY flawed anti-heroes and at worst bordering on Crazy Survivalists it was very difficult to care about anything that happened. It doesn't help that the comic had an... unfortunate habit of shoving gore/rape/dead babies in practically every single page to be "darker", making the average reader simply unfliching when a character death happened.

The trope is really more about broad issues with tone and premise rather than fine details of the plot, otherwise we will run into hundreds of "disliked for killing fan favorite character" type of examples.

I found this example:

• Persona 3 has Shadows roaming the world during the Dark Hour, leaving most of humanity completely defenseless and even unaware of what could be happening to them during that time. Every full moon gives the player a tough Shadow to defeat, while the world gets more and more filled with cases of Apathy Syndrome; an illness that leaves people standing around Zombie-like with dark rings under their eyes. These cases get worse as the player continues, the party members all have their share of personal baggage and then the game reveals that the End of the World as We Know It is imminent, because of what the party has been doing and there is no proper way to avoid it. And in the end, the protagonist dies for the sake of the greater good, making a good chunk of the journey feel like you wasted your time. Like the Final Fantasy II example above, this might be why Persona 4 decided to go the opposite direction.

Persona 3 is a very popular game. Although the story is somewhat dark, the good guys frequently score clear victories that help them towards their final goal. And sure, the story ends with the hero dying, but that DEFINITELY doesn't make "a good chunk of the journey feel like you wasted your time", since it's a Heroic Sacrifice that leads to a Bittersweet Ending.

The way the example is written on YMMV.Persona 3 is even worse:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: The entire game can sort of be this. Every character has been or is touched by death in some way, several are orphans or have lost at least one parent, and most are either subtly or overtly broken as a result.

It literally says "can sort of be this", which is probably Word Cruft and shoehorning.

Agreed. You don't need permission to nuke bad examples like that, but you have it.

This might be considered a necro, but it's a cleanup, so eh.

If I'm understanding Fighteer right, then this entry on YMMV.Steven Universe Future is misuse, correct?

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: More than a few fans have admitted that the first 7 episodes have caused this in them, in large part due to this series arguably being a Happy Ending Override to the movie and having to sit through Steven being mentally and emotionally put through the ringer. This includes but is not limited to him apparently suffering some nasty Sanity Slippage throughout the episodes. Add the promo for the second half of the series alongside some very emotionally acted audio leaks and you have at least a small contingent of longtime SU fans who are either considering or already have dropped the show and exiled it to Fanon Discontinuity out of a belief that however the show ends, it won't provide enough emotional payoff and resolution for everything its putting Steven through to be worth it.

Future is an epilogue to a show where the good guys won, everyone was saved, and peace is established across the galaxy. This is still true for Future, even as Steven's mental health declines. Also it mentions leaks, which is bad.

I agree with cutting that example. DIAA is about a story where there are no good guys to cheer for (whether it's because all the heroes suck, or all their successes are short-lived and pointless). In SU:F, the good guys accomplish loads of major and significant achievements.

The mere fact that it mentions (and heavily relies on) leaks should be grounds for axing the thing.