Too Bleak, Stopped Caring

The example on YMMV.Ghosts Of The Future merely states "Heroes keep being put through Hell a lot". I'm pretty sure I can cut that, because I think the heroes are still likable and I haven't seen any backlash against that outside of TV Tropes.

Edited by PrincessPandaTrope on Feb 17th 2021 at 12:47:39 PM

Reposting from the previous page:

Bringing up the following example from It Comes at Night:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: This might just be the most depressing post-apocalyptic movie since The Road, even managing to be more depressing since at least The Road had a somewhat hopeful ending.

Agreed. There's not nearly enough context.

That's a lot of telling without showing. What about the work makes it dark and hopeless? Did it turn off a potential audience or bomb in sales because of those issues?

Reposting from the previous page:

Bringing up the following example from Malcolm & Marie:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: Many viewers have noted that the two characters are so thoroughly unpleasant two each other for the entire film that it's difficult to like or care about them and their issues.

Bringing up the following example from I Care a Lot:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: A major problem with this film is that Marla was found too heartless and unlikable by the audience.

Insufficient context.

From Spider-Man:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy:
  • Between all the grief Peter goes through in both his personal life and superheroing (most of the former being caused by the latter) and the cyclical nature of the stories (something good happens to Peter, Spider-Man-related incident(s) ruin it, he loses it and he has to start over from the very bottom) it can get frustrating for readers who eventually tire of the predictability of it all and give up on it entirely.
  • One More Day because of the story does this in a manner that is practically unintentional. EIC Quesada in that story ended Peter and MJ's marriage hoping for a clean slate to go back to the single and relatable and more youthful college era but the fact that the same story verbally had Mephisto state that this was the truest and more purest love either will know and that a part of their soul will suffer forever (and that they lose a child they would have had) means that it's impossible not to see the Post-OMD status-quo as an Ironic Hell, and the essentially Static Character mandate by Marvel casts an overall sense of hopelessness that permeates Spider-Man's current run, since fans know that the Fleeting Demographic Rule will continue to dominate.

I can see One More Day qualify for this. It's notoriously unpopular. The franchise in general? Nah.

One More Day has this entry on its page:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: How exactly Quesada expected people to feel good about reading Younger and Hipper Brand New Day Spider-Man is a puzzle? Theoretically, he could have commissioned a story and plot that provided some Catharsis Factor (similar to Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? which closed the Pre-Crisis Superman with an all-time classic story that didn't upset or dampen enthusiasm for the Continuity Reboot, despite the many tragic deaths of Superman's supporting characters). Instead the story he commissioned to end the old era and signal the start of the new is a bleak, humorless, and joyless story where Peter is at his most unlikable, unsympathetic and whiny, and whose subtext is that he's losing the best thing that ever happened to him and his reward is to be permanently stuck in an eternal 20s which most readers interpret as an Ironic Hell (especially with Mephisto claiming a small part of Peter's soul will suffer forever) and akin to the Downer Ending of Brazil, while making long-term Spider-Man fans feel entirely demoralized.

Bringing up the following example from I Care Alot:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: A major problem with this film is that the two main characters are too heartless and unlikable by the audience: Marla is a conwoman that especially targets the innocent elderly while Roman is a ruthless mob boss who kill an innocent woman just because she is an associate of his real target. Fran is significantly Out of Focus and a Satellite Love Interest.

I know nothing about the film, but in reading the description it looks like having the main characters be bad people is the point. Calling it DIAA sort of misses the mark because someone watching it should know what they're getting into.

"I didn't know this horror film would have blood in it! 0 of 5 stars!"

Now, if it can be shown that the lack of positive characters affected its reception or box office returns, that would be evidence in favor of the trope.

Bringing up the followings example from Ultimate X Men:

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy:
  • The first of the Ultimate Marvel books to hit the GrimDark wall (more so than the also Millar-written The Ultimates, which at least had a cynical edge to its humor), particularly during the "Weapon X" story arc. That, however, could be chalked up to a minor Creator Breakdown on the part of Mark Millar - he was stuck in the hospital with chronic pain due to a debilitating illness at the time of writing. He later admitted in an interview that he was projecting much of the misery he was feeling onto the characters.
  • Most of the stuff leading up to, and following, from Ultimatum suffers from this. The heroes are pricks, the villains are worse, and the world is a crapsack one.

Per TRS, Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy entries now requires evidence of audience apathy (like ratings failing, attempts to course correct). Any examples that don't offer proof can be zapped.

Per said TRS, Angst Aversion is when a work is avoided per it's reputed darkness as opposed to disliking the actual content. Be wary of attempts to move DIAA misuse to there.

From Fallout 4, with the spoiler tags removed for readability:

• The Covenant sidequest. Siding with the town mean allowing the Compound to continue to abduct travelers they suspect of being Synths and torture and interrogate them, all in the name of "perfecting" a psychological test to detect Synths that probably doesn't even work. Putting a stop to what they're doing means massacring a town of mostly innocent civilians whose Fantastic Racism is actually understandable, as it's implied they're all traumatized victims of Synth attacks and came to Covenant seeking safety from Synths out of fear. Many players were upset that there was no way to shut down the Compound, or at least free Amelia, without turning Covenant hostile, and thus believe there is no good ending to the quest.

For proof of audience apathy - a Steam thread, another Steam thread, a Reddit thread, and a GameFAQs thread. There is also a mod that allows a way to kill the Compound head without turning Covenant hostile with a comments section.

All espouse the same general sentiments from multiple people - there is no morally satisfactory solution to this quest, because either the player sides with the Compound and Covenant and they continue to kill innocent people for the sake of their experiments, or the player must massacre both. While some rationalize the death of Covenant's people by pointing out their complicity in what the Compound is doing, many others are not comfortable with doing so. And several go so far to claim that because there is no morally satisfactoy solution, the player should do whatever they like because it doesn't really matter.

Edited by DrakeClawfang on Feb 26th 2021 at 5:21:01 AM

A show pleasures itself on torturing a character and keeping them as miserable as possible because that character is designated as “the Bad Guy”. Does that qualify as DIAA?

Edited by LaptopGuy on Feb 26th 2021 at 8:22:42 AM

DIAA applies to a work as a whole, not parts of a work. That example cannot apply because there are many other quests in the game that are not so horrible and there are ways to play the game to get positive outcomes. Also, the Fallout series is known for grey vs. grey moral choices, so it's not atypical.

Again, DIAA applies to an entire work. There are lots of other tropes about characters being forced into villainous roles.

Is Their something else you can put that under.

I'm probably gonna open a bag of fungus-invested zombies but here goes:

• The Last of Us: The game opens with the main character Joel's daughter being gunned down by the federal government. Things never get much lighter or more pleasant for him or humanity at large. Either you live a "secure" life under martial law where you're still not that safe from infection, or you brave the wilderness, which is full of marauders who shoot on sight—and Joel confesses to having been one himself. Some of the only kind people Joel and Ellie happen to meet end up dead due to one getting infected, then the other killing him then himself. Then Joel nearly dies, and Ellie is taken hostage by a cult of cannibals. And after making it through that, at the very end of the game, the "good guys" require Ellie to die in order to save this terrible world. To make it worse, it's flat out stated The fireflies have tried making a cure from other people the same way they wanted to with Ellie and nothing came of any of their deaths. Even if Joel had let them kill Ellie, it's likely she would have died for nothing, just like the others. The fact Ellie wasn't asked if she was okay with dying for a possible cure makes the whole thing even more problematic. It's entirely possible that there is no cure.
  • Its sequel, The Last of Us Part II is worse, with the biggest criticism of its story overall being how unflinchingly dark it is. In the first game, there was still enough hope that players were still able to get invested in the world and its characters without getting turned off by it, with Joel and Ellie's relationship playing a big part in that. This game, however, was criticized for being much darker while also lacking the same ray of hope that the first game and its Bittersweet Ending gave off. Joel's brutal death early on in the game, in particular, is a point where some players stopped caring about what happens in the story, and it doesn't get better from there. Through the game, Ellie is consumed by hatred, and countless people die in her ensuing Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Abby, the character responsible for Joel's death, is a protagonist and playable for half of the game and her sections are nearly as dark as Ellie's with it being practically impossible for most players to sympathize with or root for the woman who so callously and brutally murdered such a beloved character as him. As a result, the game's story was criticized for its incredibly dark narrative rather than praised for it.

So I know the first game is a Crapsack World but not only is both the critic and audience reception for the game universally well-received but it also has Joel and Ellie for the audience to root for so I think it can be safely cut.

Now for the second game though how much does either the critics and audience play a factor? Cause while the critical reception is overwhelmingly positive, even winning the game of the year, audience reception is extremely mixed, much of the criticisms of it specifically because of the story.

I knew this one would come up. I believe that it was decided in the TRS topic that DIAA requires that a work actually suffer consequences for its tone. TLOU is certainly a dark work, and it is certainly a controversial work, but I don't think many people would say that it underperformed commercially. Still, this is as close a candidate as we are likely to see from the AAA sector and I'm willing to entertain arguments.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2021 at 9:14:41 AM

You're referring to the second one, right? Because the first sounds like a clear non-example.

Yeah, the first definitely doesn't qualify. There was a lot of negative reaction to the second game because of the lack of relatable characters and everyone basically being on an unrelenting march to their own destruction, making stupid decision after stupid decision. The question is whether enough players got turned off to qualify it for DIAA.

I've never played the game (either one) so I can't judge at a personal level.

For what it's worth, the user score on metacritic for The Last of Us Part II is 5.7, and the reviews that are organized by "most helpful" on the first page are negative, with the exception of 4 mixed reviews.

The game had a review embargo until release. Upon release it initially topped sales charts in Japan, but fell 85% in the subsequent week. It fell 80% in the second week in the UK as well, which is below usual. I don't know if that helps.

Thoughts on the One More Day entry I previously posted?

This was just added to Grave of the Fireflies.

• Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: More or less intentional on the director's part. The beginning of the movie makes it very clear that our two protagonists, Seita and Setsuko, both die from starvation, which makes it difficult to get invested in the story, especially since throughout the movie, nothing ever goes right for either of them.