Hindsight Cleanup

Agreed, plus from what I remember about Devil Survivor, isn't the scenario a bit too fantastical to have any real world implications?

Question about this Hilarious in Hindsight example for the new show Anime.RWBY Ice Queendom.

Initially, the entry was written as follows:

• Hilarious in Hindsight: "RWBY isn't an anime."
  • When it was first airing, RWBY was such a controversial topic on r/anime that it had to be outright banned because people believed that, because it was American-made, it didn't count as anime. A few years later...

I thought this was coming across as a little bit too close to importing drama, and it had a very big Take That! vibe to it. I rewrote it as follows:

• Hilarious in Hindsight: When RWBY first aired ten years ago, it sparked massive debates across the Internet about whether it classified as an anime; the topic had to be banned on r/anime for being too controversial. A few years later, Volume 1 is revamped as an introduction into an anime spin-off of the show.

But I still think it comes across as a Take That! entry.

Back in 2013, the original show came out and caused an uproar in certain anime circles about whether it classifies as one or not. While it did get nasty and very "serious business" in some places on the Internet, that wasn't the case everywhere. The debate has never gone away over time, but the nastiness mostly has. Now that an anime has been made that takes the first volume and animates it as the springboard to the anime's own storyline, people are joking a lot about it now being an actual anime. There's much more good humour this time round than back in 2013.

So, it does feel like there's a legitimate example here, but how does it get written in a way that doesn't make it seem like a Take That! post?

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jun 27th 2022 at 9:26:45 AM

I don't think it's necessary to mention the r/anime bit (but could be just me). The rest of the rewritten example seems okay imo.

We should avoid "ten years ago" as it constitutes relative time. Just say 2013 instead. This way, the statement won't be dated a few years later.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jun 27th 2022 at 2:01:39 PM

And anything about that on the IQ page is wrong-way hindsight, isn't it?

Is it just me, or is this entry rather iffy (and not exactly "hilarious")?

• Hilarious in Hindsight: Seretse's uncle declares that he is unfit to be King because he's married a white woman, noting that if Princess Elizabeth (as she was at the time) had married a black man, she would have had to give up the throne. Fast-forward to 2017/18, when Prince Harry's engagement and marriage to the biracial Meghan Markle was seen by some narrow-minded people as catastrophic to the monarchy (never mind that Harry and his children are highly unlikely to take the throne).
  • Not to mention their January 2020 decision to step down from their position as senior royals, which they revealed in a March 2021 interview was partly due to the racism Meghan faced.

I would like to protest the deletion of the "Seteth is Leopold" example from YMMV.Fire Emblem Three Houses. Not only would there being three similarities prevent it from being a shoehorn (design, classroom, and the "New Horizon" line), but googling "seteth leopold" brings up a tweet where someone acknowledges how the characters look like each other and a bunch of other results that have fanart or do the same. We kept the "Dr. Elsa Schneider couldn't let it go" entry on YMMV.Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade because there were also three points of comparison and "The first clip I found on You Tube has a bunch of comments making the same joke", I see precedent in restoring the entry. (Also the edit reason should have been worded better in my opinion, not saying this to invalidate it but just for future consideration.)

Re: The King entry above: I agree that sounds inflammatory, not sure if the connection is good enough, and also has natter. Cut.

Edited by Piterpicher on Jun 28th 2022 at 7:37:48 PM

Following up on that, I also agree that several of the Three Houses entries (courtesy link here) were deleted prematurely. A bunch of them are pre-release jokes which evolved into long-term memes precisely because of delighted hindsight reactions, such as the Edelgard = Danaerys and Marianne = Berkut/Rinea's Child ones. It's hard to describe the sheer joy people had over Marianne's Three Hopes design and the copious amounts of fanart it inspired as anything other than Hilarious in Hindsight, really.

Here's my opinions on the entries:

• Byleth and Kamille: The entry seems pretty self-evident but it does sound like Fan Myopia; I'm inclined to delete unless folks within the romhack scene can chime in.
• Edelgard = Daenerys: Keep. It was a popular pre-release joke that was considered to be even funnier upon release because people realized just how on-the-nose they were, and can be validated by all the fanart and edits it inspired.
• Trails of Cold Steel timeskip: Definitely Fan Myopia as all of the things listed are pretty common plot devices across media and Trails is far from the first to do these things.
• Marianne = Berkut/Rinea's child: Keep. As mentioned above, it started off as an offhand joke that picked up further steam once her stats were revealed, and got even funnier when Three Hopes gave her a design that validated the jokesters.
• Linhardt = Lyn/Reinhardt's child: Keep. See above. It operates on a similar principle.
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions: Misuse. This sounds more like Fandom Rivalry than hindsight.
• Punished Dimitri: Keep. While the "Punished" meme is a fairly broad one to begin with, can confirm that there were jokes of that caliber that intensified and inspired fanart because of the hairstyle because nobody expected it to be quite that on-the-nose.
• Manuela/Seteth: Misuse of what is likely deliberate foreshadowing.
• The two Cichol examples: See above, misuse of deliberate foreshadowing.
• Rhea is Cherami Leigh: Actor garbage. Feel free to dump.
• Death Knight's sweet tooth: Self-evident but it is admittedly a bit obscure. People might've made these jokes but I don't remember encountering many. Lean on keeping for now.
• Edelgard and Zero: Misuse. While it's technically Actor Garbage, quite a few fans have made the connection and made fanart and memes of it, but it's not really an example of hindsight. Or at the very least it belongs on Drakengard 3's page, not this one.
• Rhea Palutena: Possibly valid? People did make those comparisons, to the point that it seems to be a deliberate Ascended Meme even, but it might be best off migrated to there instead of left on Hindsight.
• Byleth's Sothis outfit: Misuse. It's not particularly funny, it's just a standard Mythology Gag.
• Ace Combat: Actor garbage.
• Claude's name: Misuse that belongs to I Knew It!, not here.
• War Cleric meme builds: Valid. It's related to the Warmaster Hanneman meme, and people were quite amused that it became a reality.
• Seteth = Leopold: Valid. See for a more in-depth reason why.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jun 28th 2022 at 2:04:04 PM

Damn ninja edit...

Edited by VampireBuddha on Jun 28th 2022 at 7:01:07 PM

Gotta say, I'm not at all sure I like the "three points of comparison" thing, because that's still a pretty low bar to clear for fan myopic shoehorning. It's not an issue in the above case(s) because I agree that finding a bunch of independent offsite fans making the joke is clear proof it's legit, but I don't think it should be treated as any sort of precedent or hard-and-fast rule.

OK, now I have time to go through the examples Alley says we should keep.

Hmm. There is a trend I've noticed in a number of subjective tropes whereby people assume that the order they experience a work in is the same order it was made.

To explain: people see the announcement first, then the trailer, then the actual work. They then act as if the trailer was made first, and the work itself was based on that. Obviously, it's actually the reverse. This is especially true of Nintendo, who since the launch of the Switch have adopted a policy of only announcing games when they're finished and due to ship in a few months.

This all means that by the time the trailer dropped, Edelgard was already a Daenerys-like character. And if my understanding of the trope is correct, Hil in Hin is supposed to be for a moment in the work which becomes funnier later on. This seems to be saying that some aspect of the work became funnier as a result of the work actually being released, which doesn't seem right.

Also, every single character in the game can become a Wyvern Lord, and it's widely considered to be the best class overall, with the possible exceptions of Barbarossa (exclusive to Claude) and Dark Flier (DLC); indeed, it's not uncommon to make a team entirely of Wyvern Lords. There is nothing special about Edelgard being able to become a Wyvern Lord, and indeed Claude is the character most associated with dragons, as both of his exclusive classes are wyvern-based.

Plus, A Song of Ice and Fire (or, more likely, Game of Thrones appears to have been a direct influence on Three Houses'', which makes fit even less well in my opinion.

See above. These all describe stuff that was already in the game when people started making the jokes, so they seem to be saying that something in Three Houses became even funnier when Three Houses was released, which I don't think is right.

This one comes in DLC, but it's based on a romhack. Not sure.

They are rather similar, but Smash spirits always try and resemble the source material as much as possible. I don't think the similarities were intentional - flowing white robes are commonly associated with divinity, and beautiful women with long green hair is the sort of thing you expect to see in Japanese media. That said, yeah, OK, this one can probably be restored.

It's DLC, but it doesn't really reflect anything in the game; this feels like troping real life behaviour.

I agree with nrjxl, but in this specific case, I think this one can be restored for the reasons Piter cites.

You're looking at it far more strictly than most people in these threads do.

Regarding the War Cleric one, mechanics/metagame examples have always been allowed. There's nothing NRLEP about that entry, lest we purge 70% of Overwatch's Hindsight page too.

The thing about Hindsight tropes is that they're about measuring audience reaction. Whether the full context of that information was already present in Nintendo's servers before it got to the public and people started cracking jokes doesn't really matter, it's about the order in which that information is parlayed to the audiences. So long as the audience had that sort of reaction (in this case, bemusement that trailer impressions based purely on aesthetics which they fully knew to be shallow at the time, turned out to be validated beyond their expectations by the narrative/mechanics). We've permitted examples for reaction sbased on movie trailers in the past, so there's no reason it can't apply to game trailers as well.

Point is, empirically speaking these reactions do exist, that's always been the important part. The vast majority of Hindsight misuse comes from Zero Context Examples or Fan Myopia where the connection is made by a single person, but due to the reasons I provided, we can safely discount Fan Myopia for a good chunk of them, especially since Fan Myopia was the original justification for removing them.

Do you have an explicit Word of God statement that confirms Game of Thrones to be a deliberate influence on these games? As far as I'm aware, the creators have said more about being inspired by The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Jugdral Fire Emblem games (and they're pretty obvious). It's not impossible that ASOIAF might've been a secondary or tertiary influence but most of the similarities that are singled out are tropes seen throughout the fantasy genre in general so I don't think a suspicion of that is enough.

I think removing the Wyvern Lord part for Edelgard is fair enough (although people have made jokes about the connection), but the fact of the matter is, you can find all sorts of people going "haha oh wow, I know I joked about Edelgard = Daenerys for months when the game was first announced because of her hair and eye color, but now that the game's finally out I can't believe they actually had the nerve to make Edelgard be that much of a Daenerys". That definitely constitutes the spirit of a Hilarious in Hindsight reaction to me.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 1st 2022 at 3:15:46 PM

From YMMV.Spaceballs:

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Yogurt says that, "God willing, we'll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: Da Soich for More Money". And they do indeed meet again... In Spaceballs: The Animated Series. Maybe
  • Some behind-the-scenes video of Star Wars as it was being filmed reveals that David Prowse, Darth Vader's body actor, has a voice very similar to Rick Moranis. Hear Prowse as Vader for yourself Here. Don't know if this made made knowledge before or after the film's release
  • Several plot points and characters from Spaceballs are similar to those from later Star Wars movies:
    • Space heroes rescue space royalty from bad guys. While the good guys are escaping, they drain their spacecraft's energy and have to land on a desert planet, where they find a powerful being. Sound familiar? Maybe
    • The black Spaceball combing the desert has been compared to Finn the Stormtroper in the desert of Jakku in the The Force Awakens trailer. The same actor went on to play Tuvok. Yes, just try picturing the stoic Vulcan telling Janeway "we ain't found shit!" The Second part is actor connection
    • Several of the characters seem like they could be parodies of Star Wars Legends characters from works that came out after Spaceballs, e.g. Prince Valium maps pretty well to Prince Isolder and Commanderette Zircon could easily be Admiral Daala. The same also applies to the Prequels, for example Druidia looks like a parody of Naboo in retrospect with its opulent Renaissance style clothing and architecture, while Princess Vespa's Mercedes spaceship evokes Padmé's various royal yachts a lot more than Leia's relatively no-nonsense Rebel Blockade Runner. Possibly
    • Similarly, the Spaceballs are oddly "corporate" for a straight-up parody of the purely totalitarian, militaristic Empire, but it meshes nicely with the corporate capitalist parodies that made up the villains of the Prequel trilogy. Maybe
    • Spaceballs parodies the Mos Eisley Cantina with a stereotypical diner IN SPACE! Come Attack of the Clones, we have an actual 50's-esque diner in the Star Wars universe with Dex's. Maybe
    • And of course, Rick Moranis as a Nerd in Evil's Helmet is downright prescient in light of the whiny, emo Anakin shown in the prequel trilogy and whiny deranged Vader fanboy Kylo Ren introduced in the sequel trilogy. Maybe
    • Some have noted similarities with several elements of the sequel trilogy, including villains Kylo Ren and Dark Helmet. Both wear masks that they periodically remove, both talk to inanimate objects when alone, both prone to whiny outbursts, etc. The connection becomes even more hilarious after a big plot twist of The Last Jedi. Dark Helmet, in an anticlimactic subversion of the "I am your father" twist, revealed that he was Lone Starr's "father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate," which essentially meant their relationship was "Absolutely nothing." Kylo Ren would similarly dismiss the idea that Rey had any special relation to the other main characters by revealing that her parents were absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. On top of that, with The Rise of Skywalker, we have the revelation that Lone Starr is the long-lost son of royal parents paralleling the revelation that Rey is actually the long-lost granddaughter of the former Emperor of the galaxy. Possibly
    • Mel Brooks had to kneel to portray the diminutive Yoda expy Yogurt; decades later, Lupita Nyong'o had to do the same thing to portray her diminutive Yoda expy Maz Kanata in The Force Awakens. Possibly
    • In Spaceballs, a pair of Spaceball troopers try to arrest Lone Starr and Barf for illegal parking. In The Last Jedi, Finn and Rose are placed under arrest for a parking violation. Probably works
    • At 60 KM from wingtip to wingtip, the First Order flagship Supremacy in The Last Jedi may actually be bigger than the ludicrously-oversized Spaceball One. could work
    • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also had a planet surrounded by an impenetrable barrier like Druidia, that eventually is assaulted by a large capital ship. could work
  • Only an idiot would have 1-2-3-4-5 as their password! Maybe
  • Lone Starr's line, "Did I miss something? When did we get to Disneyland?", becomes even funnier when Lucasfilm was bought by Disney, and Disneyland would open a Star Wars-themed area in 2019. (However, Star Tours already opened a few months before Spaceballs premiered.) Disney owns everything shoehorn
  • And speaking of Disney, the cold never bothered Lone Starr. Fan Myopia
  • And, of course, when they actually do watch the movie, they end up watching themselves watching themselves watching themselves ad infinitum. Cue "We have to go deeper!" jokes. Fan Myopia
  • The fact that there is an item used in the film called Space Jam. Fan Myopia
  • Canned air is now a real thing in China. Maybe
  • Lone Starr's coat has a brownish hue... along with a few other Mal Reynolds-ish traits. Fan Myopia
  • The idea of selling flamethrowers as merchandise also became a reality in January 2018, thanks to Elon Musk. Maybe
  • The announced Rocky Five...Thousand review is somewhat funnier since an actual Rocky V was made (there were four Rocky films when Spaceballs came out), but even funnier since Rocky returned again a lot later in Rocky Balboa, and yet again in Creed and Creed II. Possibly
  • The Spaceballs One ship transforming into a giant maid robot becomes this after the Darth Vader versions of Transformers. Unsure
  • One DVD feature allows the viewer to watch the movie at Ludicrous Speed (e.g., sped up beyond comprehension). Movies played 1000% faster have since become a YouTube meme. Bit of a stretch
  • The singing alien parody at the end apparently got a job in Aliens: Colonial Marines. Fan Myopia
  • Vinnie's robot makeup bears a striking resemblance to The Spine. Fan Myopia
  • On the 30th anniversary of the film's release, Bill Pullman revealed that he hadn't seen any of the Star Wars films at the time it was filmed. Not really hindsight
  • Lone Starr could probably teach Hayato Kanzaki a thing or two about being a Composite Character of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Fan Myopia
  • The climactic Schwarz battle between Lone Starr and Dark Helmet is even more hilarious in the 2020's now that there's a commercial run by a Dr. Schwarz regarding Erectile Disfunction treatments! Unsure
  • Vespa going full Rambo after she's shot in the hair with a laser becomes even more amusing when someone sees JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, as it is highly reminiscent to any of Josuke's rampages whenever someone insults his hair. Fan Myopia
  • Not quite "instant cassettes" out "before the movie is finished," but the idea of releasing major films into homes and bypassing theaters completely became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seems like a stretch
  • Speaking of which, the Warner Home Video FBI Warning screen at the time is depicted as the one being used by MGM/UA Home Video in-universe. A few years later, MGM/UA would use that warning screen for real on a promotional laser videodisc. Maybe
  • This isn't the only fiction to feature a main character named Dot Matrix. Fan Myopia

Alley: OK, that makes sense.

No, it's just an impression I got.

If the Leopold and Seteth one is still found to hold true, then shouldn't it be a reaction for the Animal Crossing YMMV page? The entry itself notes that Leopold predates Seteth.

Bringing up the following example from Mega Man 3:

• Hilarious in Hindsight: This game introduces Doc Robot, who has a skull-shaped head and can use multiple abilities of other Robot Masters such as the ones from 2. Several years later in My Hero Academia, we get All For One, who has a skull-themed mask and uses stolen Quirks for his own.

Looks like Fan Myopia, but I wanted to make sure. Is anyone here familiar with My Hero Academia?

Edit: By the way, Marvel had a skull-themed character who copied other people's skills way before Mega Man and My Hero Academia even existed. This alone theoretically invalidates the rest of the example.

Edited by TantaMonty on Jul 1st 2022 at 6:42:43 AM

Mega Man/MHA example is definitely Fan Myopia.

Any thoughts on the Spaceballs entries I posted?

I can't comment on all of them, but:

• I agree that all the examples with Fan Myopia should be cut.
• The one about the Syrian president should be cut because Weblinks Are Not Examples. And 12345 apparently is the world's third most common password anyways.
• The ones about canned air and flamethrowers violate Weblinks Are Not Examples.
• Spotted a Zero-Context Example: What's the connection between the film's battle and the commercial?
• The one about Covid-19 is an easy cut.

Are the Space Jam and Dot Matrix examples really fan myopia? The former work at least is well-known, and those are good comparisons.

Edited by nw09 on Jul 1st 2022 at 10:07:58 AM

Isn't the normal response to Weblinks Are Not Examples to take the information found behind that weblink and put it on the page?

They're not "good comparisons." They're not comparing things at all. They're just saying "these things have the same name."

"The black Spaceball combing the desert has been compared to Finn the Stormtroper in the desert of Jakku in the The Force Awakens trailer. The same actor went on to play Tuvok. Yes, just try picturing the stoic Vulcan telling Janeway "we ain't found shit!""

This one is really poor. In addition to the second part being actor garbage (as OP pointed out), the first part is only "hilarious" because both are black guys on a desert planet. That's... not a very strong connection.

Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Jul 1st 2022 at 12:23:45 PM

So are we not allowed to add two things that have the same name? Not even if the name is very specific and the coincidence is unlikely?

That's what Names The Same is for.