Wick Check Project

Thinking it's time to finally buckle down and do a Wick Check for Moral Event Horizon. This puppy needs TRS, because it's apparent that people have no idea what it means or how it should be used.

110 wicks to check. Anyone want to help me tackle it?

I think I will able to whenever I am free.

I can try to help, though I'm still unclear on how concrete the rules are surrounding MEH...which is why we need the TRS to begin with.

Speaking of which, I was considering running a wick check on Does This Remind You of Anything?, because it way too often gets misused in a speculative way, but it's an Overdosed Trope and Pothole Magnet so it would take a lot of work. I was originally going to start a cleanup but I want to see how widespread the misuse is.

Yeah, the MEH one wouldn't be collecting misuse/proper usage like most wick checks; it'd be for figuring out what sort of things it's used for and how these things manifest. Blatant misuse would get discussed too if we find it, but this won't be operating on a "this is correct / this is incorrect" model since I don't think anyone actually knows what MEH means.

I'm also down for your proposed wick check.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 29th 2020 at 6:34:02 AM

Started the check for Does This Remind You of Anything?. I wanted to get a large number of wicks, but I didn't get to mark them down yet.

One thing I can say right now: lots of ZCE.

I'll get a few wicks done soon.

So I've been working on my wick check for Fan-Preferred Couple, but I'm wondering exactly I'm looking for. Currently, I've been looking for misuse based on the trope's technical definition at the moment, which is basically the one most popular ship for any character that isn't already an Official Couple, regardless of whether or not they're already part of another canon couple or are given an Implied Love Interest or not. But I'm starting to wonder if looking for misuse based off of the current standards is the best solution, especially since it requires me to do fandom research with fandoms I'm unfamiliar with based off of what I can gather from Ao 3 and FFN stats. Is there a better way to dictate this wick check?

I think you're actually golden the way you're doing it now. It takes a little more work, but you can point to this effort and confusion in your TRS thread as a potential reason why the definition should change- because finding real examples is so difficult and the current description is so restrictive that it made even the wick check hard.

MEH Wick Check sandbox

Made a few folders for now based on how I think it gets used. We can obviously add more folders if necessary.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 31st 2020 at 3:54:01 PM

Hm, fair point. Alright, I'll keep doing it the way I've been doing it.

I do have one other question, though: if one page has multiple different examples listed under it, does each example count as a wick, or should it be per page? Because there are many pages where one or two examples listed are used correctly while they'll have a few more that are misused.

I typically only count each page once. Sometimes I need to split the examples between folders, but yeah.

If there are multiple examples for the trope in the same page, I just put them in the same bullet and say something like "x amount of examples, 1 correct, 2 incorrect, 1 ZCE," ect.

I'm going to contribute to the Sandbox.MEH Wick Check.

I intend to put Designated Hero examples under "Not a villain" as by definition they are not being portrayed as villains despite audiences digressing. Any objections or other place they should go?

So I was checking wicks for MEH and found this on YMMV.Zones Of Thought.

• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Tomas Nau: when we meet him he's already over the horizon by several million klicks — but it takes time for the truth to come out. If he hadn't already passed it before, we see several MEHs for him in text, but the biggest one is probably that he keeps Qiwi as a lover while still keeping around video footage of the time he raped and murdered her mother; then repeatedly allows her to find out about this and then wipes her memory of the event.
  • In The Children of the Sky, Nevil Storherte spends most of the novel coming across as a weaselly but charismatic manipulator, hungry for power. Not particularly violent; he is not apparently complicit with some violent kidnappings early on (that is, he's complicit with the kidnappings, just not with them being violent), and when violence is done for his benefit, it's generally shown to be Vendacious indulging his truly evil urges rather than acting on Nevil's orders. So all in all, the only real harm he does seems to be due to his seditious actions, not any actual violence or violent orders. Then, quite suddenly, he fires an explosive Wave-Motion Gun into a crowd of civilians in an attempt to kill one person who might be there. Later, he even blames—privately, suggesting that he actually believes what he's saying—his intended target for what happened.

The first part of example 1 is just fluff and I don't think a character can have more than one MEH moment as that wouldn't make any sense if they are already irredeemably evil.

Not sure where example 2 goes.

Hmmm...personally I'd put them in folder 1, but it's your call.

Folder 1 seems right as it’s more about the act I will put there

Where would we put examples where the character isn't really 100% redeemed, since they're forgiven by some characters and not forgiven by others and it's ambiguous whether they'll continue to grow in a positive direction or relapse back into bad behavior?

Forgiven by some but not others can go under "Murky", as other factors need to be accounted for in that case. If it's ambiguous if they'll return to their evil ways, "Redeemable" as the point of an MEH is that they are unambiguously past the point of redeemability.

Yeah, basically.

Like I said, I created the folders based on the sort of examples I've seen while at the cleanup thread, but it's hard to draw definitive lines for some of them. It's all very ambiguous.

Just started an Ambiguous Disorder Wick Check. It seems that beside Armchair Diagnosis issues, it's also being used for characters who are diagnosed with a mental disorder in the story.

I'll add it to the OP.

Hey wasn't that trope originally "Ambiguously Autistic?" I think it may be suffering from similar problems that sent that trope to the Permanent Red Link Club.

I think (I wasn't around then so IDK) Ambiguously Autistic was an attempted subtrope that spiraled into even worse misuse.

Only need 46 more wicks for MEH. The results so far seem pretty conclusive, but idk, maybe it'll suddenly change when we get the last batch.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 7th 2020 at 3:01:45 PM

Question! Is a wick check supposed to be entirely one troper's effort, or is it allowed to be collaborative? Because I pulled up a bunch of random wicks for mine but I haven't gotten to analyze them, especially as many are ZCE for media I don't know, so I can't tell if they're misuse or not, so I'd love other feedback.