Ambiguous Disorder/Diagnosed by the Audience Cleanup

That reads a lot better, and more like documentation of fandom behavior than a polemic by the fandom.

Alright; swapped it in on YMMV.Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders, citing this thread.

Pulled from YMMV.Major Grom Plague Doctor due to a lack of sufficient context:

• Ambiguous Disorder: Sergei's symptoms suggest a bouquet of possible conditions, including Dissociative Identity Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Pyromania, and Psychosis. The most probable diagnosis is likely Schizoaffective Disorder.

YMMV.Sin City, moved without rewrites:

• Diagnosed by the Audience: Marv is often considered stupid and insane, an opinion that he shares. He did poorly in school, has No Social Skills, gets "confused" a lot, and often has violent blackouts, although he has mentioned fighting in a war and suffering from traumatic symptoms. In his first story, he mentions that he has always been good at puzzles, implying that he's capable of solving complex mysteries. He was certainly intelligent enough to go up against a powerful crime family. He also cares a lot about his friends and family, is friendly towards complete strangers, and is something of an awkward gentleman with women. On the other hand, he often displays bizarre emotional responses, most prominently a near-sociopathic Lack of Empathy — there have been multiple instances of him remaining genuinely perfectly calm during moments of intense chaotic violence, and he's capable of cool, calculated cruelty and a complete lack of queasiness or discomfort while casually torturing people to death (not that his victims didn't deserve it).
  Marv: I got a condition. It's bad to forget your medicine when you got a condition.

• Diagnosed by the Audience: Dr. Ventress is extremely blunt (often tactlessly so) in social situations, speaks in a monotone and has an odd, jerky vocal cadence, seldom makes eye contact, rarely emotes, and frequently responds in a manner that is either overly literal or misses the intentions of the other speaker, and several characters make note that she is completely friendless and has no real identity outside of her work.

I deleted both and sent the tropers misuse notifiers.

Currently clean main DBTA potholes that were just moved from AD, and I'm curious about this one from Character Rerailment:

• Justice League:
• [...]Also from Zack Snyder's Justice League, Barry Allen's awkward obsessions with "brunch" and Pet Sematary that needlessly amplified the perception of neurodivergence in the 2017 film are excised and he's not afraid to go fighting anymore.

It mentions "perception" so presumably audience-related, though I'm still on the fence about it given the trope.

Edit: and another from Escapist Character, under My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: What makes Twilight a particularly good example of an escapist character is that, in good Dungeons & Dragons Wizard Classic fashion, and in spite of being the Chosen One predestined by a higher power and who won the Superpower Lottery with "more raw power than any pony Celestia had ever seen", she still learns her magic through study and is a bit of a loner before, and to some extent even after, discovering The Power of Friendship. A few of her personality quirks, such as her lack of social skills and obsessive desire for order, could easily be read as signs that she may be somewhere on the autism spectrum. The kind of kids her character is sure to resonate with tend to have difficulties in their social life, and many of them surely wish they could become influential and popular and have a group of close friends, just like Twilight.

Also this on From Entertainment to Education, which while audience is involved doesn't necessarily feel correct?

• Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is used as a case study in borderline personality disorder, as he hits six of the nine criteria (five being necessary for a diagnosis).

Edit 2: also wanted to show this lovely wordswap:

• While he's a good man at heart, he's obsessive in his interests to the point of Diagnosed by the Audience

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Jul 8th 2023 at 5:55:05 AM

The wording of the justice league one is weird, makes it sound like neurodivergence is some negative "error" that needs to be "corrected"

Oh, yeah. Honestly it wouldn't be hard to just reword it to this:

• Also from Zack Snyder's Justice League, Barry Allen's awkward obsessions with "brunch" and Pet Sematary that needlessly amplified his Cloudcuckoolander nature in the 2017 film are excised, and he's not afraid to go fighting anymore.

YMMV.The Batman 2022:

• Diagnosed by the Audience: Aside from the given PTSD and depression from his parents' murder, this version of Bruce also shows signs that he's on the Autism spectrum.

Deleted and sent the troper a misuse notifier.

I think a ZCE notif would've sufficed better.

Was doing little wick cleaning and came across this on DeathBattle.Tropes D To M:

• Diagnosed by the Audience: In-Universe: Wiz speculates that Crash Bandicoot is actually plenty smart, and that his muteness and unusual behavior stems from having autism.

Does this count as in-universe? Is an announcer for the show part of an audience??

I was under the impression that a single person's view, in-universe or out, was too few to count. Granted, the video examples for Diagnosed by the Audience use cases of YouTubers armchair diagnosing characters, but I never brought them up in the Video Moderation Requests thread because I assumed that video examples permitted single reviewers/commentators in lieu of an audience for practical reasons.

I think it's allowed if the reviewer is summarizing the fandom's opinion rather than their own.

• Fairy Tail: Erza shows many signs of autism, such as having No Social Skills (this could be due to her childhood as a slave, although you'd think she'd have learned to socialise after having been with the guild for years), difficulty showing emotion, being extremely rules driven, and loving fashion to the point that it comes across as a special interest.

This doesn't sound like an accurate description of erza to me. The No Social Skills and difficulty showing emotion stuff specifically

She has some Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies, but I can't recall her struggling with social situations to that degree, just being a bit odd at times. Early on shes a bit guarded about specific things but she overcomes that and outside of that I don't recall her having difficulty expressing emotion

Im not entirely sure what the rules driven bit is referring to

The fashion stuff is accurate

I tried looking it up to see if this is common, I only found one reddit thread supporting it, but the only comment disagreed with it.

Hi all: the question I'm having is regarding what belongs to Sandbox.Ambiguous Disorder (i.e. cases where the disorder is in-universe ambiguous).

Specifically, while reviewing examples on Manga-Waido, I noticed two videos ("My father-in-law left me in the mountains, but then..." and "I was left out on the company trip but I had a trick up my sleeve", specifically) where the protagonists have, in first-person, confirmed they were medically diagnosed of certain types of "developmental disorder", and this fact has to do with the stories' plots (both involves some form of Bullying the Disabled). However, the exact disorders the protagonists have are not named, despite symptoms have been described (and are sufficiently realistic, I've to say). Are they the kind of cases that can be listed in the Ambiguous Disorder sandbox?

(Note: I don't intend to armchair diagnose them. It's my general policy to not do so.)

Edited by SamCurt on Dec 31st 2023 at 8:02:16 AM

I think it's like if a character is said to be "mentally ill" without specifications — if there's no specific diagnosis it's still ambiguous.

Thanks. Added to the sandbox. I suspect even when that draft gets into the TLP stage, it'd need another name, since we've been using "Ambiguous Disorder" to mean what's now mostly meant Diagnosed by the Audience for more than a decade.

Just stopping by to make a one-off post saying I realized that Ambiguous Disorder being a blue link with an entry on YMMV Redirects might have been making cleanup harder than it already was, particularly when it comes to improper moving of wicks to YMMV pages, so it's now a Green Link. The page's text could probably use some adjustments; the idea to make it a Green Link was just something that came to me recently.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 2nd 2024 at 3:25:39 AM

Ultimate X Men:

• Diagnosed by the Audience: The traumatic experiences in Rogue's life have driven her more than a bit mad and it's shown from time to time that she's teetering on the edge of complete insanity.

The example says nothing about the audience diagnosing her. It just says that she had mental issues, though what disorder she's suffering from is never clarified.

Looks like a wick moved without context. Sounds like textual trauma to me, not even ambiguous, so probably could be moved to an applicable trope about trauma.

I say remove this example from her after reading it.

The closest trope I can think of is Shell-Shocked Veteran. Is that limited to soldiers, or can it apply to superheroes?

Going by the description, Shell-Shocked Veteran seems to refer to any case of someone who has particularly severe PTSD, so I think that could be a valid trope to move that to.

I've seen some speculation that Dakota Fanning's character from War of the Worlds might be on the autism spectrum, and from watching the movie I think she does show quite a few signs of it. There was an entry for her prior to the cleanup but it was later deleted along with many other entries. Do you think it fits the current trope definition enough to be re-added?

Edited by Javertshark13 on Feb 1st 2024 at 12:07:03 PM

If there's been speculation from other fans I guess it is legit.

I saw many folks on internet speculating that Ash from Fantastic Mr. Fox has autism. Does this counts as Diagnosed by the Audience?

(Btw, I am new troper here and this my first post on this discussion).

Edited by Filip04 on Mar 3rd 2024 at 3:41:45 PM