Wall of Text cleanup

So it didn't get banned in the end? Axe the entire thing

Cutting the Knot, I see. It's gone.

I'd like to apologize for all this.

This earlier post regarding MARDEK hasn't been addressed yet.

• Bittersweet Ending: Where to begin? Well, first you have to fight your own king. Who afterwards promptly dies. Oops. And did we mention that he's actually the father of one of your party members? Then it turns out Qualna wasn't even trying to get you to kill the king, and this is exactly the example he was trying to create to show Rohoph that he's gone off the deep end, and to get him to rejoin the Governance de Magi peacefully. (Although most of the Magi have gone off that end too.) Rohoph promptly kills Qualna too and seals his soul so he can no longer escape after telling her that he wouldn't. Mardek and Elwyen go to a play afterwards to lighten the mood, until Rohoph forces her away, to Mardek's disdain and anger. So now King Gonoroth and probably the most friendly of the Governance de Magi are dead, and Rohoph wants Mardek to have no more friends to become attached to. Yeah. At least Lone Wolf (Deugan) finally talks to Mardek's face, although he doesn't reveal who he is.
  
  Approaches Downer Ending when you realize that Qualna was lying about wanting to use the Violet Crystal for good, but only because the other Governors were watching - he was trying to sneak Rohoph back to their planet in order to help him destroy the Crystal. And it turns out that Rohoph had been corrupted by the Crystal from the start into becoming a paranoid Knight Templar, and he no longer has qualms about forcibly taking over Mardek's body at times. Oh, and the world is slowly dying thanks to the crystals being removed from their temples, and Rohoph's presence might be slowly killing Mardek. Absolutely nothing you did in this chapter has accomplished anything good.
  
  Downer status further solidified by a lot of things that seem minor in Chapter 3 but would have come back to bite the good guys in the ass in later chapters: Steele/"The Mysterious Man" still has the dark crystal; Blatantly Evil Chancellor had control of Xantusia while Ss'lenck was away; you gave a fragment or relative of the Violet Crystal to Vudu, the probably already evil high priest of YALORT; and oh yeah, there's this volcano which could wipe out most of the life on Belfan if it erupted, and the next Magus coming after you is the pyromancer of the group. Really, the only good things that you did in this game were making your party members feel good about themselves by listening to them talk about their problems, and driving away Saul and Muriance (probably temporarily). Well, and destroying the Annihilator, if you did that.

I'm tempted to cut the last part and move the first to Downer Ending as I can't tell the Sweet part of the Bittersweet, but have no familiarity with the work or characters. But all the other Bittersweet Ending entries I've seen never had that problem of not making sense if you had no familiarity with the specific of the work. Any thoughts or anyone familiar with the work to help clear this up?

Or should I just cut the last part as Natter or Fridge Horror which isn't allowed under non-YMMV tropes?

I found this on Younger Than They Look:

DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince and their 1988 rap hit "Parents Just Don't Understand." The entire second verse deals with a situation where the 16-year-old protagonist, while driving around in his father's Porsche that he had taken without permission, picks up what he thinks is a hot, hot, hot, HHHHHHHHOOOOOOOTTTTT!!!!! (wolf-whistle) girl about his age to go out for a ride and maybe start a relationship. At one point, the girl begins to unbutton her blouse and begins acting suggestive toward the teen-aged boy. However, he is caught speeding by the police ... and then learns the girl is not 16 BUT A 12-YEAR-OLD RUNAWAY!!!!! (Needless to say, as implied by the protagonist's lament at the end, his parents were not happy; in the very least, he's jailed for grand theft auto, harboring a runaway, driving without a license and various traffic charges and had the cops not pulled him might have done something with the girl constituting a sex crime, leading to him being on the offender registry. Face it, wanting to be cool may cost him decades in prison.)

Good lord, that’s a lot of natter. I wonder how much entry would be left if the natter and all caps were taken away?

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

I wonder if something like this would work:

In DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's song "Parents Just Don't Understand", the 16-year-old protagonist, while taking his parents' car for a spin while they're on vacation, picks up an attractive girl. At the end, after being pulled over for speeding, he finds out that the girl in question is a twelve-year-old runaway.

Cut the last two paragraphs. By definition a Bittersweet Ending will have angles of "Bitter", it doesn't matter how much, but it's still bittersweet. The only case where it would go full on Downer Ending is if there's only a single good thing and then it becomes a "Ray of Hope" Ending.

Edited by Edgar81539 on Feb 12th 2023 at 11:44:31 AM

From Xenoblade Chronicles 3:

• Ending Fatigue: To cap off a long game (even by Xenoblade standards), the final chapter is incredibly long, even if the party does not deviate to sidequest, and then there's the ending after it. It begins with a fetch-quest that has you trekking to different corners of Aionios to acquire Origin Metal, with cutscenes playing after each one acquired. Then, to obtain the seventh and final piece, the party must complete Noah's Side Story, which is mostly direct but the cutscenes add to its length. Following this, the party can turn in the fetch quest and make for the final dungeon Origin, which is about as long as Prison Island was back in XC1. Then there's four boss fights (two fights against N, Moebius X, and Moebius Y) near the end, with several more cutscenes after the party frees Origin's prisoner. Finally, there's the final boss fight itself, which is two phases, but the first phase has a number of sub-phases where the party is doing little damage and it's interspersed with even more cutscenes to pad out its length, and the second phase also has a number of sub-phases interspersed with even more cutscenes, but none that reduce damage. Cutscenes included, the final boss can easily take upwards of an hour to tackle. Then after all of that, there's the ending itself, which takes time to send all of the characters off with several minutes worth of cutscene as well. All things considered, from entering the final dungeon to the ending of the credits and the final cutscene, the game's ending can easily take upwards of three hours to complete. In short, cutscenes included, Chapter 7 can take nearly five hours to complete with little to no deviation. Even when skipping cutscenes, it would still take at least two from start to finish.

I feel like this entry is a little too long and detailed to make its point, and also not entirely accurate? In general the series doesn't encourage players to through entire chapters in a single sitting at once. If anything, the most common complaint about Chapter is that it's too short and an underwhelming finale because of it, and Origin is typically criticized for not having much meat to it. Likewise, I don't think they intended for everyone to complete the final dungeon in one sitting either.

To me the entry makes sense if it was only the parts about the final boss gauntlet and its interspersed cutscenes (which fans have complained about as being way too long) and the rest of it was trimmed.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 17th 2023 at 9:45:04 AM

The page description for Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is pretty long, but I'm not familiar enough with the series to trim it down. I think I might at least put the lists of characters in each game in folders, if that's ok.

A smile better suits a hero

From Roman Torchwick's section in Characters.RWBY Salems Faction:

• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: RWBY depicts Remnant as a world where humanity clings to existence within four protected kingdoms while villages outside the kingdoms live a precarious, often short, existence. This is due to the Creatures of Grimm swarming all areas of the world, hunting down and trying to destroy humanity. While Huntsmen do their best to fight the Grimm and protect humanity, there are far more Grimm than Huntsmen, and Huntsmen often die young as a result. Ruby dreams of being a Huntress so that she can protect humanity like the heroes in the fairy tales she grew up reading; her desire to protect even extends to dealing with prosaic villains like Roman, who is a thief and killer. When he finally loses his temper with her constant attempts to "save the day" he rants about her idealism being at odds with Remnant's reality. He points out that Huntsmen always die young, and the only way to live in such a dangerous world is to become a pragmatic survivalist like he is — cheating, lying and murdering as necessary for his continued survival. It doesn't dent her resolve.

Do you guys think this should be trimmed down?

Edited by gjjones on Feb 22nd 2023 at 4:53:54 AM

He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.

I definitely feel like the description of the state of the world could be shaved down, if not cut entirely.

Edited by Afterword on Feb 23rd 2023 at 2:54:12 PM

A smile better suits a hero

All right. How about this?

• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: In his final confrontation with Ruby, a frustrated Roman rants about how her idealism is at odds with the state of Remnant: Huntsmen always die young and the only way to survive in Remnant is to become a pragmatic survivalist like he is. However, it doesn't dent her resolve.

Edited by gjjones on Feb 23rd 2023 at 3:46:38 PM

He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.

Here's what's on Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids! for the sake of comparison:

• In the RWBY episode "Heroes and Monsters", Ruby Rose, despite being on the ropes, is still determined to be the hero, save the day, and stop Roman Torchwick and the other bad guys from wrecking Vale. Torchwick laughs that off and tells her that if she still wants to be the hero, then she should just roll over and die like every other Huntsman in history. He proceeds to tell her that this world has no room for her type of idealism, that it should die along with her and he'll keep doing what he does best - "lie, cheat, steal and survive!" A split second later, a Griffin Grimm gives him the ultimate Shut Up, Hannibal! by eating him. Adam Taurus tells Blake Belladonna the same thing in the same episode: when she tells him that she wanted peace and equality for the Faunus races, Adam roars out that "What you want is impossible!"

On Affirmative Action Girl:

• Thomas & Friends:
  • The series had mostly an all-male cast for its first six seasons. The only female engines were Mavis and Daisy, who are both diesels. Thomas and the Magic Railroad introduced Lady, a female steam locomotive, but she only appeared twice (the second time was during a dream sequence) before being forgotten by canon. Other female characters included every piece of passenger rolling stock, a few road vehicles (Caroline and Elizabeth), and many human characters, notably Lady Hatt and Mrs. Kindley. Starting with Season 7 in 2003, after years of complaints from moms accusing the series of sexism, the first canon female steam locomotive, Emily, was introduced, and became a member of the main cast. Season 9 introduced a second female steam character named Molly, who only had one lead role, several minor roles, and background cameos before disappearing after the show's eleventh season. Rosie was introduced in Season 10 and has had at least one speaking role until Season 14 when she was relegated to the background (though has been regaining screentime from Season 21 onwards). Season 12 introduced Flora, a female counterpart for Toby; Flora suffered from HiT Entertainment's bad habit of introducing a character, then said character disappears without a trace as an excuse to quickly and cheaply market new toys. Season 15 introduced Belle (who wasn't well-received by fans due to having unrealistic water cannons attached to her side tanks, when her class, the British Railways 4MT, was a passenger locomotive), and Season 17 introduced Millie (the first female narrow-gauge engine) and Caitlin. More female steam locomotive characters are likely to be introduced in coming seasons.
  • In Season 22 onwards (going under the title Big World! Big Adventures!), the core cast gains TWO new female members - Nia the Kenyan tank engine, and Rebecca the yellow streamlined tender engine. Their addition expands the number of female members in the core cast from only one (Emily) to a whopping three, combined with four existing males (Thomas, James, Percy and Gordon) to form a near Gender-Equal Ensemble. According to Word of God from Mattel executives, Nia and Rebecca's introduction, much like Emily's, was done in response to criticism over the show being sexist, and also due to a rise in interest for the series from female and minority audiences.
  • Prior to the show's transition from scale train models to CGi, Isobella was the only female member of the Sodor Construction Company. Although Isobella wasn't carried over from the transition, Season 23 introduced two new female members to the team; Brenda the Bulldozer and Darcy the Digger. Unfortunately for Brenda, as she now fulfills Byron's position as the Sodor Construction Company's bulldozer, this has caused her to be hated by some fans of Byron, who like Isobella, wasn't carried over from the CGi transition.

This is just an exhaustive list of almost every female character. I removed some of the complainy parts a while ago, but I'm pretty sure this could be cut down to, like, five sentences.

DoctorWho.Tropes A To C has a lot of entries under Broken Aesop, some of them concise but most of them long. I've listed all the ones that need attention below, with the ones that are already fine removed. Some of them are borderline and only need slight trimming (eg "The Face of Evil", "The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People", "The Doctor Falls"), but some are true monstrosities (eg "The Idiot's Lantern", "How the series handles the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler's codependent relationship", "Journey's End"):

• Broken Aesop:
  • "The Ark" is about a slave race, the Monoids, who are mute and subservient to humans. After a plague occurs, the Monoids eventually rise up over the humans and enslave them instead. The (apparent) attempted moral is announced at the end of the story when the Doctor tells the humans and Monoids that they need to live in equality to survive, but thanks to What Measure Is a Non-Human? writing (in which the Doctor doesn't care about the deaths of tens of Monoids but realises it's an emergency when a human dies) and the fact that the Monoids' defining character traits are being "savages" and making terrible tactical decisions for no reasons other than to allow the humans to win, how the Monoids are returned to an underclass at the end, and how the story was made in 1966, it comes across more like a racist allegory for how extending civil rights will cause the oppressor to become oppressed by a race that can only run civilisation with incompetent savagery unless they are returned to Happiness in Slavery. Elizabeth Sandifer of the TARDIS Eruditorum subscribes to this interpretation and believes the stupidity of the Monoids was intentional, rather than the invokedSpecial Effect Failure it is generally imagined as.
  • "The Dominators" has two. The invokedWord of God aim was an allegory about how the hippie movement is bad because they would have got their arses kicked if they'd been in control when the Nazis had invaded. However, the oppressed, pacifistic Dulcians don't work as a hippie allegory, as they're characterised either as elderly politicians or as attractive young people who unthinkingly repeat the elders' lessons by rote until the Doctor and companions turn them against their racist, fascist oppressors, while the old Dulcians get slaughtered through trying to negotiate with Always Chaotic Evil aliens. The result is that it comes off as an allegory about how student activism is the future because the apathetic old politicians are only concerned with keeping superficial comfort and not with fixing big societal problems, and have engineered their own destruction. The second is in the B-plot: The villains have an internal conflict, between Rago, who favours caution and condemns meaningless destruction, and Toba, a Psycho for Hire who just loves destroying things. The problem is that everything Toba says is right - if he just had blown everyone up on sight (including the Doctor and Jamie) the Dominators would have succeeded in their plan. The result of this is that the story is simultaneously both far more left-wing and far more right-wing than intended.
  • "The Face of Evil" is based on the premise that the Doctor's egotistical attempts to save a space mission AI (by simply imposing a print of his own brain over it instead of actually fixing the problem) led to the AI becoming an insane God who selectively breeds the settlers into opposing Cargo Cult factions that worship him, and creating a dystopic Egopolis based on the Doctor's image. It all seems like it's set up to criticise the Doctor's big ego and Chronic Hero Syndrome... but it ends with the AI, having realised who it is, asking the Doctor for an explanation as to where he went wrong, absolving the Doctor of all responsibility and even having 'God' ask him for tips on how to be better. Striking becafuse the new series absolutely would never have missed the opportunity to criticise the Doctor's god complex.
  • "The Parting of the Ways" has the Ninth Doctor decline from destroying Earth to destroy the Daleks, claiming that it's the morally better choice to not wipe out humanity with the Daleks. However the Daleks have just attacked Earth with such force they have distorted continents, meaning they have probably wiped out at least nearly all humanity and any survivors will soon be either killed, enslaved or turned into Daleks, which is clearly a Fate Worse than Death, the Dalek Emperor even saying humanity will be harvested. The Doctor even points out that humanity won't be wiped out with Earth as they have spread to other worlds by now, "You're the only Daleks in existence. The whole universe is in danger if I let you live". But the Daleks surviving means they'll attack other worlds, giving humanity even less of a chance. It's only a literal Deus ex Machina that saves possibly the Universe from the Daleks. Overall the Doctor's decision, considering he may well be the only non-Dalek in range of the delta wave and the Daleks are about to exterminate him anyway, looks quite odd. It is suggested that his actions are based on his overwhelming guilt at having to destroy the Time Lords in order to also destroy the Daleks, he's too broken and demoralised to essentially make the same decision once again with Earth, and that he's just looking for any thin shred of hope that will justify him not doing so.
  • "The Idiot's Lantern" has one of the most bizarre examples of a broken aesop in the entire revival. Mark Gatiss devotes the entire B-plot of the episode to the Connolly family, and it's about domestic abuse. It's incredibly uncomfortable to watch, but it's clearly meant to be and the audience trusts that it will lead someplace worthwhile. Sure enough, the entire B plot builds to an aseop about realizing when someone you used to love has become utterly toxic to you and knowing when it's time to just let go, cut ties with them and kick them out of your life - take back control. This is something that's always painful and always hard to do when it comes to abusive relationships in real life - especially when it involves your parents - but considering Mr. Connolly has been characterized for the entire episode as a creepy, controlling, disrespectful and quite frankly disgusting husband and father who treats his loved ones like his property but only dares to do so behind closed doors, it's definitely the right call for Tommy and his mother to make. Up until the last five minutes, when the episode suddenly decides that Tommy should try to keep his bastard dad in his life after all, for literally no reason other than Eddie being his father. Not only does this sabotage the moral of the episode, it's also terrible advice to give to someone who just got out of an abusive relationship. It sort of makes sense that Rose would give it - she got burned twice by her alternate universe parents in the previous story and she's clearly projecting her feelings about Pete onto Tommy here - but it's incredibly baffling coming from the Doctor.
  • How the series handles the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler's codependent relationship. It's very apparent that the Doctor and Rose were just what each other needed in Series 1. The Doctor needed to cope with his depression and survivor's guilt so he could enjoy saving the world again, and Rose needed someone to come along and change her monotone outlook on life. But the problem with the idea of ‘needing someone' is that that line of thought leads to really codependent places really fast, and that's what eventually happens with the Doctor and Rose. In Series 2, the Doctor and Rose become increasingly lost in each other and their clever adventures, and increasingly detached from and uninterested in everyone around them, which numerous characters notice and become worried about. By the second half of the season, Rose comes to loathe her old life and builds so much of her new happiness around the Doctor that she can't live without him in her life. She even tries to ditch all of her friends and family in an alternate universe forever so she won't have to say goodbye to him. The denouement of "Army Of Ghosts / Doomsday", in which the Doctor and Rose are forcibly separated and Rose in particular is absolutely devastated, appears to be a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't make one person the centre of your world, because it will only lead to your heart being broken (hints of this were seeded back in "School Reunion", when Rose realized that while the Doctor might be the centre of her world, he's lived far longer than her and she will never be the centre of his). But if that's the case, then Rose's return in Series 4 is positively baffling. In "The Stolen Earth / Journey's End", we learn Rose has not even tried to move on, she's spent the last few years trying to think of ways to get back to the Doctor (remember that time moves faster in Pete's world, so it's been a good long while since "Doomsday"), and when the Daleks almost destroy the universe Rose leaps at the chance to jump universes so she can try to find the Doctor. She's rewarded with a clone Doctor that can grow old for the rest of his life with her, and in a deleted scene she was going to receive a TARDIS so they can go travelling again. So that Rose can receive a happy ending, the lesson of her arc is changed from 'beware unhealthy, codependent relationships' to 'if you cling to someone hard enough, and never ever let go, eventually you'll get everything you ever wanted and more'.
  • "Journey's End" is yet another and even worse example of the series trying to suggest that the Doctor's attitude to the Daleks is Fantastic Racism while still depicting them as Always Chaotic Evil. The Doctor treats his clone as wrong for wiping out the Daleks (they're back next series), saying it shows how violent and brutal he is. Yet the Daleks had just come very close to wiping out entire Universes and are fictions poster creature for Scary Dogmatic Aliens. The Doctor had temporarily incapacitated them but considering how resourceful they are it was unlikely they would have remained like that for long. The moral makes even less sense considering that 10 in the same series had basically done the same thing to a race that wasn't as dangerous as the Daleks and in the process killed 20,000 innocent people, even if this was what history decreed. Meanwhile his clone was only wiping out the Daleks and (possibly) their Omnicidal Maniac Creator Davros, who refused a chance to be saved by the Doctor. Not only that but when the Doctor declined a chance to destroy the last Dalek in their previous appearance, claiming there has been too much death today, that Dalek had escaped and caused the problems of this episode. Not only that but that Dalek had been responsible for most of the deaths, killing the Dalek-Humans that numbered over a thousand because they were not Dalek enough. To be fair, the Doctor may just be using the clone Doctor's supposed 'genocide' of the Daleks as a convenient excuse to put the human Doctor onto Rose and prevent her from damaging the universe through the disk-hopping.
  • The two-parters story "The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People" is about a rebellion of clones who are sick of being treated as disposable vessels by miners to operate in dangerous circumstances. The Doctor even sides with them saying Clones Are People, Too and try his best to save them. At the end of the day, the Doctor reveals to his companions the reason of their visit to the factory: Amy has been replaced with a clone all along. The Doctor immediately and rather hypocritically kills Amy's clone with his sonic screwdriver as if nothing in the last few hours ever happened. The problem is lessened a bit in that Amy's clone appeared to just be remotely controlled by the real Amy, which the next episode confirms, but it's still a matter of how sure was the Doctor that it hadn't been gaining sentience like the others. He axed Amy's clone awfully quickly when he figured it would help Amy.
  • "The Doctor Falls", the Twelfth Doctor's penultimate episode, draws a parallel between him and his companion Bill Potts, who are both in situations where they each must deal with and accept an unwanted, fundamental change to their lives. She's been converted into a Cyberman against her will, he's on the cusp of regeneration. Neither wants to live if they can't stay who they are. At the end of this episode, the frustrated Doctor gets a "Ray of Hope" Ending setting up a Christmas Episode in which he accepts regeneration and the Loss of Identity it comes with at last. Too bad that in the meantime Bill gets her original form restored with awesome new powers to boot when a barely foreshadowed Deus Ex Machina steps in to make her Ascend To A Higher Plane of Existence. "Twice Upon a Time" does end with the Doctor deciding that helping the universe is Worth Living For even if it means he has to lose his identity, but never addresses Bill's fate so the Aesop remains broken.

The last sentence of The Face of Evil entry can go because the writers couldn’t possibly have known what people would do with the series decades later.

Thanks, I removed it. I also deleted the last sentence in "The Ark" since the views of one person don't need inclusion, and broke "The Dominators" up into two sub-entries since it's two separate examples that just happen to occur in the same story. The second one is definitely concise enough, the first one may still need a bit of trimming. "The Ark" is still definitely too long, not sure if "The Face of Evil" needs to lose any more. Still several monstrosities to deal with.

Updated version:

• Broken Aesop:
  • "The Ark" is about a slave race, the Monoids, who are mute and subservient to humans. After a plague occurs, the Monoids eventually rise up over the humans and enslave them instead. The (apparent) attempted moral is announced at the end of the story when the Doctor tells the humans and Monoids that they need to live in equality to survive, but thanks to What Measure Is a Non-Human? writing (in which the Doctor doesn't care about the deaths of tens of Monoids but realises it's an emergency when a human dies) and the fact that the Monoids' defining character traits are being "savages" and making terrible tactical decisions for no reasons other than to allow the humans to win, how the Monoids are returned to an underclass at the end, and how the story was made in 1966, it comes across more like a racist allegory for how extending civil rights will cause the oppressor to become oppressed by a race that can only run civilisation with incompetent savagery unless they are returned to Happiness in Slavery.
  • "The Dominators" has two:
    • The invokedWord of God aim was an allegory about how the hippie movement is bad because they would have got their arses kicked if they'd been in control when the Nazis had invaded. However, the oppressed, pacifistic Dulcians don't work as a hippie allegory, as they're characterised either as elderly politicians or as attractive young people who unthinkingly repeat the elders' lessons by rote until the Doctor and companions turn them against their racist, fascist oppressors, while the old Dulcians get slaughtered through trying to negotiate with Always Chaotic Evil aliens. The result is that it comes off as an allegory about how student activism is the future because the apathetic old politicians are only concerned with keeping superficial comfort and not with fixing big societal problems, and have engineered their own destruction.
    • The villains have an internal conflict, between Rago, who favours caution and condemns meaningless destruction, and Toba, a Psycho for Hire who just loves destroying things. The problem is that everything Toba says is right - if he just had blown everyone up on sight (including the Doctor and Jamie) the Dominators would have succeeded in their plan. The result of this is that the story is simultaneously both far more left-wing and far more right-wing than intended.
  • "The Face of Evil" is based on the premise that the Doctor's egotistical attempts to save a space mission AI (by simply imposing a print of his own brain over it instead of actually fixing the problem) led to the AI becoming an insane God who selectively breeds the settlers into opposing Cargo Cult factions that worship him, and creating a dystopic Egopolis based on the Doctor's image. It all seems like it's set up to criticise the Doctor's big ego and Chronic Hero Syndrome... but it ends with the AI, having realised who it is, asking the Doctor for an explanation as to where he went wrong, absolving the Doctor of all responsibility and even having 'God' ask him for tips on how to be better.
  • "The Parting of the Ways" has the Ninth Doctor decline from destroying Earth to destroy the Daleks, claiming that it's the morally better choice to not wipe out humanity with the Daleks. However the Daleks have just attacked Earth with such force they have distorted continents, meaning they have probably wiped out at least nearly all humanity and any survivors will soon be either killed, enslaved or turned into Daleks, which is clearly a Fate Worse than Death, the Dalek Emperor even saying humanity will be harvested. The Doctor even points out that humanity won't be wiped out with Earth as they have spread to other worlds by now, "You're the only Daleks in existence. The whole universe is in danger if I let you live". But the Daleks surviving means they'll attack other worlds, giving humanity even less of a chance. It's only a literal Deus ex Machina that saves possibly the Universe from the Daleks. Overall the Doctor's decision, considering he may well be the only non-Dalek in range of the delta wave and the Daleks are about to exterminate him anyway, looks quite odd. It is suggested that his actions are based on his overwhelming guilt at having to destroy the Time Lords in order to also destroy the Daleks, he's too broken and demoralised to essentially make the same decision once again with Earth, and that he's just looking for any thin shred of hope that will justify him not doing so.
  • "The Idiot's Lantern" has one of the most bizarre examples of a broken aesop in the entire revival. Mark Gatiss devotes the entire B-plot of the episode to the Connolly family, and it's about domestic abuse. It's incredibly uncomfortable to watch, but it's clearly meant to be and the audience trusts that it will lead someplace worthwhile. Sure enough, the entire B plot builds to an aseop about realizing when someone you used to love has become utterly toxic to you and knowing when it's time to just let go, cut ties with them and kick them out of your life - take back control. This is something that's always painful and always hard to do when it comes to abusive relationships in real life - especially when it involves your parents - but considering Mr. Connolly has been characterized for the entire episode as a creepy, controlling, disrespectful and quite frankly disgusting husband and father who treats his loved ones like his property but only dares to do so behind closed doors, it's definitely the right call for Tommy and his mother to make. Up until the last five minutes, when the episode suddenly decides that Tommy should try to keep his bastard dad in his life after all, for literally no reason other than Eddie being his father. Not only does this sabotage the moral of the episode, it's also terrible advice to give to someone who just got out of an abusive relationship. It sort of makes sense that Rose would give it - she got burned twice by her alternate universe parents in the previous story and she's clearly projecting her feelings about Pete onto Tommy here - but it's incredibly baffling coming from the Doctor.
  • How the series handles the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler's codependent relationship. It's very apparent that the Doctor and Rose were just what each other needed in Series 1. The Doctor needed to cope with his depression and survivor's guilt so he could enjoy saving the world again, and Rose needed someone to come along and change her monotone outlook on life. But the problem with the idea of ‘needing someone' is that that line of thought leads to really codependent places really fast, and that's what eventually happens with the Doctor and Rose. In Series 2, the Doctor and Rose become increasingly lost in each other and their clever adventures, and increasingly detached from and uninterested in everyone around them, which numerous characters notice and become worried about. By the second half of the season, Rose comes to loathe her old life and builds so much of her new happiness around the Doctor that she can't live without him in her life. She even tries to ditch all of her friends and family in an alternate universe forever so she won't have to say goodbye to him. The denouement of "Army Of Ghosts / Doomsday", in which the Doctor and Rose are forcibly separated and Rose in particular is absolutely devastated, appears to be a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't make one person the centre of your world, because it will only lead to your heart being broken (hints of this were seeded back in "School Reunion", when Rose realized that while the Doctor might be the centre of her world, he's lived far longer than her and she will never be the centre of his). But if that's the case, then Rose's return in Series 4 is positively baffling. In "The Stolen Earth / Journey's End", we learn Rose has not even tried to move on, she's spent the last few years trying to think of ways to get back to the Doctor (remember that time moves faster in Pete's world, so it's been a good long while since "Doomsday"), and when the Daleks almost destroy the universe Rose leaps at the chance to jump universes so she can try to find the Doctor. She's rewarded with a clone Doctor that can grow old for the rest of his life with her, and in a deleted scene she was going to receive a TARDIS so they can go travelling again. So that Rose can receive a happy ending, the lesson of her arc is changed from 'beware unhealthy, codependent relationships' to 'if you cling to someone hard enough, and never ever let go, eventually you'll get everything you ever wanted and more'.
  • "Journey's End" is yet another and even worse example of the series trying to suggest that the Doctor's attitude to the Daleks is Fantastic Racism while still depicting them as Always Chaotic Evil. The Doctor treats his clone as wrong for wiping out the Daleks (they're back next series), saying it shows how violent and brutal he is. Yet the Daleks had just come very close to wiping out entire Universes and are fictions poster creature for Scary Dogmatic Aliens. The Doctor had temporarily incapacitated them but considering how resourceful they are it was unlikely they would have remained like that for long. The moral makes even less sense considering that 10 in the same series had basically done the same thing to a race that wasn't as dangerous as the Daleks and in the process killed 20,000 innocent people, even if this was what history decreed. Meanwhile his clone was only wiping out the Daleks and (possibly) their Omnicidal Maniac Creator Davros, who refused a chance to be saved by the Doctor. Not only that but when the Doctor declined a chance to destroy the last Dalek in their previous appearance, claiming there has been too much death today, that Dalek had escaped and caused the problems of this episode. Not only that but that Dalek had been responsible for most of the deaths, killing the Dalek-Humans that numbered over a thousand because they were not Dalek enough. To be fair, the Doctor may just be using the clone Doctor's supposed 'genocide' of the Daleks as a convenient excuse to put the human Doctor onto Rose and prevent her from damaging the universe through the disk-hopping.
  • The two-parters story "The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People" is about a rebellion of clones who are sick of being treated as disposable vessels by miners to operate in dangerous circumstances. The Doctor even sides with them saying Clones Are People, Too and try his best to save them. At the end of the day, the Doctor reveals to his companions the reason of their visit to the factory: Amy has been replaced with a clone all along. The Doctor immediately and rather hypocritically kills Amy's clone with his sonic screwdriver as if nothing in the last few hours ever happened. The problem is lessened a bit in that Amy's clone appeared to just be remotely controlled by the real Amy, which the next episode confirms, but it's still a matter of how sure was the Doctor that it hadn't been gaining sentience like the others. He axed Amy's clone awfully quickly when he figured it would help Amy.
  • "The Doctor Falls", the Twelfth Doctor's penultimate episode, draws a parallel between him and his companion Bill Potts, who are both in situations where they each must deal with and accept an unwanted, fundamental change to their lives. She's been converted into a Cyberman against her will, he's on the cusp of regeneration. Neither wants to live if they can't stay who they are. At the end of this episode, the frustrated Doctor gets a "Ray of Hope" Ending setting up a Christmas Episode in which he accepts regeneration and the Loss of Identity it comes with at last. Too bad that in the meantime Bill gets her original form restored with awesome new powers to boot when a barely foreshadowed Deus Ex Machina steps in to make her Ascend To A Higher Plane of Existence. "Twice Upon a Time" does end with the Doctor deciding that helping the universe is Worth Living For even if it means he has to lose his identity, but never addresses Bill's fate so the Aesop remains broken.

Is the "The Almost People/The Rebel Flesh" one even accurate? Like the example itself says, there's a clear difference between the remote-controlled "Ganger" clones like the one Amy was (which is how the technology was supposed to work), and the autonomous ones rebelling that the Doctor and the narrative are supporting.

The last few sentences of "The Parting of the Ways" feel like a Justifying Edit.

---

Here's my attempt to trim down the Affirmative Action Girl example I mentioned:

• Thomas & Friends:
  • The series had no (canonical) female steam engines until Season 7 introduced Emily, who eventually became part of the main cast. Then the Big World! Big Adventures! Retool added TWO new female members - Nia the Kenyan tank engine, and Rebecca the yellow streamlined tender engine. Their addition expands the number of female members in the core cast from only one (Emily) to a whopping three, combined with four existing males (Thomas, James, Percy and Gordon) to form a near Gender-Equal Ensemble. According to Word of God from Mattel executives, Nia and Rebecca's introduction, much like Emily's, was done in response to criticism over the show being sexist, and also due to a rise in interest for the series from female and minority audiences.
  • Prior to the show's transition from scale train models to CGI, Isobella was the only female member of the Sodor Construction Company. Although Isobella wasn't carried over from the transition, Season 23 introduced two new female members to the team: Brenda the Bulldozer and Darcy the Digger.

Edited by NitroIndigo on Feb 27th 2023 at 3:05:14 PM

I think nrjxll has a point about the obvious difference. On the other hand, there is a scene in the story which shows a pile of discarded flesh that is seems to be intended to make the audience think that the flesh's treatment (even before the lightning strike that made them autonomous) is wrong. This is may be a discussion that should happen elsewhere (is there a Broken Aesop cleanup?)

I removed the Justifying Edit portion of the "Parting of the Ways" entry. I also trimmed down the rest a bit, hiding some non-essential bits (lines from the episode that merely reinforce what's already been said) in "note" tags. It's still long but I'm unsure what else can go. Maybe the "It's only a literal Deus ex Machina that subsequently saves the Universe from the Daleks" sentence, but I'm not sure.

It also turned out that there was a separate page for BrokenAesop.Doctor Who, which was created from what had been the Doctor Who entry on the BrokenAesop.Live Action TV page but the contents under the entry on DoctorWho.Tropes A To C were left on the page when they should have been removed and merged with the new separate page.

The contents of the new page were mostly the same as the existing entries I posted before I started trimming them, but there had been some divergences. A lot of it was minor re-wording but there was a Justifying Edit added to the end of the "Doctor Falls" entry, which I took out again, so the only real difference is that there was a second entry added to "The Doctor Falls".

The new "merged" version on the separate page is listed below, with the cuts already made and the aforementioned new entry. This does highlight an issue with the TV Tropes system of having two versions of the same examples, one on the work page and one on the Trope page. Even if they're created to be identical initially, they can diverge over time as Tropers forget to crosswick, or just make edits to an existing example and don't do the same to the other version. This can make things very messy if they subsequently have to be re-combined into a new standalone page. I'm not sure what the solution to this is though.

Updated version (now hosted solely on BrokenAesop.Doctor Who):

• "The Ark" is about a slave race, the Monoids, who are mute and subservient to humans. After a plague occurs, the Monoids eventually rise up over the humans and enslave them instead. The (apparent) attempted moral is announced at the end of the story when the Doctor tells the humans and Monoids that they need to live in equality to survive, but thanks to What Measure Is a Non-Human? writing (in which the Doctor doesn't care about the deaths of tens of Monoids but realises it's an emergency when a human dies) and the fact that the Monoids' defining character traits are being "savages" and making terrible tactical decisions for no reasons other than to allow the humans to win, how the Monoids are returned to an underclass at the end, and how the story was made in 1966, it comes across more like a racist allegory for how extending civil rights will cause the oppressor to become oppressed by a race that can only run civilisation with incompetent savagery unless they are returned to Happiness in Slavery.
• "The Dominators" has two:
  • The invokedWord of God aim was an allegory about how the hippie movement is bad because they would have got their arses kicked if they'd been in control when the Nazis had invaded. However, the oppressed, pacifistic Dulcians don't work as a hippie allegory, as they're characterised either as elderly politicians or as attractive young people who unthinkingly repeat the elders' lessons by rote until the Doctor and companions turn them against their racist, fascist oppressors, while the old Dulcians get slaughtered through trying to negotiate with Always Chaotic Evil aliens. The result is that it comes off as an allegory about how student activism is the future because the apathetic old politicians are only concerned with keeping superficial comfort and not with fixing big societal problems, and have engineered their own destruction.
  • The villains have an internal conflict, between Rago, who favours caution and condemns meaningless destruction, and Toba, a Psycho for Hire who just loves destroying things. The problem is that everything Toba says is right - if he just had blown everyone up on sight (including the Doctor and Jamie) the Dominators would have succeeded in their plan. The result of this is that the story is simultaneously both far more left-wing and far more right-wing than intended.
• "The Face of Evil" is based on the premise that the Doctor's egotistical attempts to save a space mission AI (by simply imposing a print of his own brain over it instead of actually fixing the problem) led to the AI becoming an insane God who selectively breeds the settlers into opposing Cargo Cult factions that worship him, and creating a dystopic Egopolis based on the Doctor's image. It all seems like it's set up to criticise the Doctor's big ego and Chronic Hero Syndrome... but it ends with the AI, having realised who it is, asking the Doctor for an explanation as to where he went wrong, absolving the Doctor of all responsibility and even having 'God' ask him for tips on how to be better.
• "The Parting of the Ways" has the Ninth Doctor decline from destroying Earth to destroy the Daleks, claiming that it's the morally better choice to not wipe out humanity with the Daleks. However the Daleks have just attacked Earth with such force they have distorted continents, meaning they have probably wiped out at least nearly all humanity and any survivors will soon be either killed, enslaved or turned into Daleks^note the Dalek Emperor even says that humanity will be harvested. The Doctor even points out that humanity won't be wiped out with Earth as they have spread to other worlds by now. The Daleks surviving means they'll attack other worlds, giving humanity even less of a chance^note the Doctor acknowledges this himself: "You're the only Daleks in existence. The whole universe is in danger if I let you live". It's only a literal Deus ex Machina that subsequently saves the Universe from the Daleks. Overall the Doctor's decision, considering he may well be the only non-Dalek in range of the delta wave and the Daleks are about to exterminate him anyway, looks quite odd.
• "The Idiot's Lantern" has one of the most bizarre examples of a broken aesop in the entire revival. Mark Gatiss devotes the entire B-plot of the episode to the Connolly family, and it's about domestic abuse. It's incredibly uncomfortable to watch, but it's clearly meant to be and the audience trusts that it will lead someplace worthwhile. Sure enough, the entire B plot builds to an aseop about realizing when someone you used to love has become utterly toxic to you and knowing when it's time to just let go, cut ties with them and kick them out of your life - take back control. This is something that's always painful and always hard to do when it comes to abusive relationships in real life - especially when it involves your parents - but considering Mr. Connolly has been characterized for the entire episode as a creepy, controlling, disrespectful and quite frankly disgusting husband and father who treats his loved ones like his property but only dares to do so behind closed doors, it's definitely the right call for Tommy and his mother to make. Up until the last five minutes, when the episode suddenly decides that Tommy should try to keep his bastard dad in his life after all, for literally no reason other than Eddie being his father. Not only does this sabotage the moral of the episode, it's also terrible advice to give to someone who just got out of an abusive relationship. It sort of makes sense that Rose would give it - she got burned twice by her alternate universe parents in the previous story and she's clearly projecting her feelings about Pete onto Tommy here - but it's incredibly baffling coming from the Doctor.
• How the series handles the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler's codependent relationship. It's very apparent that the Doctor and Rose were just what each other needed in Series 1. The Doctor needed to cope with his depression and survivor's guilt so he could enjoy saving the world again, and Rose needed someone to come along and change her monotone outlook on life. But the problem with the idea of ‘needing someone' is that that line of thought leads to really codependent places really fast, and that's what eventually happens with the Doctor and Rose. In Series 2, the Doctor and Rose become increasingly lost in each other and their clever adventures, and increasingly detached from and uninterested in everyone around them, which numerous characters notice and become worried about. By the second half of the season, Rose comes to loathe her old life and builds so much of her new happiness around the Doctor that she can't live without him in her life. She even tries to ditch all of her friends and family in an alternate universe forever so she won't have to say goodbye to him. The denouement of "Army Of Ghosts / Doomsday", in which the Doctor and Rose are forcibly separated and Rose in particular is absolutely devastated, appears to be a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't make one person the centre of your world, because it will only lead to your heart being broken (hints of this were seeded back in "School Reunion", when Rose realized that while the Doctor might be the centre of her world, he's lived far longer than her and she will never be the centre of his). But if that's the case, then Rose's return in Series 4 is positively baffling. In "The Stolen Earth / Journey's End", we learn Rose has not even tried to move on, she's spent the last few years trying to think of ways to get back to the Doctor (remember that time moves faster in Pete's world, so it's been a good long while since "Doomsday"), and when the Daleks almost destroy the universe Rose leaps at the chance to jump universes so she can try to find the Doctor. She's rewarded with a clone Doctor that can grow old for the rest of his life with her, and in a deleted scene she was going to receive a TARDIS so they can go travelling again. So that Rose can receive a happy ending, the lesson of her arc is changed from 'beware unhealthy, codependent relationships' to 'if you cling to someone hard enough, and never ever let go, eventually you'll get everything you ever wanted and more'.
• "Journey's End" is yet another and even worse example of the series trying to suggest that the Doctor's attitude to the Daleks is Fantastic Racism while still depicting them as Always Chaotic Evil. The Doctor treats his clone as wrong for wiping out the Daleks (they're back next series), saying it shows how violent and brutal he is. Yet the Daleks had just come very close to wiping out entire Universes and are fictions poster creature for Scary Dogmatic Aliens. The Doctor had temporarily incapacitated them but considering how resourceful they are it was unlikely they would have remained like that for long. The moral makes even less sense considering that 10 in the same series had basically done the same thing to a race that wasn't as dangerous as the Daleks and in the process killed 20,000 innocent people, even if this was what history decreed. Meanwhile his clone was only wiping out the Daleks and (possibly) their Omnicidal Maniac Creator Davros, who refused a chance to be saved by the Doctor. Not only that but when the Doctor declined a chance to destroy the last Dalek in their previous appearance, claiming there has been too much death today, that Dalek had escaped and caused the problems of this episode. Not only that but that Dalek had been responsible for most of the deaths, killing the Dalek-Humans that numbered over a thousand because they were not Dalek enough. To be fair, the Doctor may just be using the clone Doctor's supposed 'genocide' of the Daleks as a convenient excuse to put the human Doctor onto Rose and prevent her from damaging the universe through the disk-hopping.
• The two-parters story "The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People" is about a rebellion of clones who are sick of being treated as disposable vessels by miners to operate in dangerous circumstances. The Doctor even sides with them saying Clones Are People, Too and try his best to save them. At the end of the day, the Doctor reveals to his companions the reason of their visit to the factory: Amy has been replaced with a clone all along. The Doctor immediately and rather hypocritically kills Amy's clone with his sonic screwdriver as if nothing in the last few hours ever happened. The problem is lessened a bit in that Amy's clone appeared to just be remotely controlled by the real Amy, which the next episode confirms, but it's still a matter of how sure was the Doctor that it hadn't been gaining sentience like the others. He axed Amy's clone awfully quickly when he figured it would help Amy.
• "The Doctor Falls", the Twelfth Doctor's penultimate episode, draws a parallel between him and his companion Bill Potts, who are both in situations where they each must deal with and accept an unwanted, fundamental change to their lives. She's been converted into a Cyberman against her will, he's on the cusp of regeneration. Neither wants to live if they can't stay who they are. At the end of this episode, the frustrated Doctor gets a "Ray of Hope" Ending setting up a Christmas Episode in which he accepts regeneration and the Loss of Identity it comes with at last. Too bad that in the meantime Bill gets her original form restored with awesome new powers to boot when a barely foreshadowed Deus Ex Machina steps in to make her Ascend To A Higher Plane of Existence. "Twice Upon a Time" does end with the Doctor deciding that helping the universe is Worth Living For even if it means he has to lose his identity, but never addresses Bill's fate so the Aesop remains broken.

Edited by offa on Feb 27th 2023 at 7:14:07 PM

I replaced the Affirmative Action Girl example.

Found this on Characters.RWBY Salem:

• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Salem yearned for freedom, locked in isolation by her father until rescued by the legendary hero, Ozma, with whom she fell in love. Devastated when he dies from sickness, she begs the God of Light to resurrect him and then, when he refuses, the God of Darkness. Restoring Ozma provokes a confrontation with the God of Light, where Ozma is repeatedly killed and resurrected in front of Salem's eyes until she turns on the two gods in rage. They punish her with immortality to prevent her reuniting with Ozma in the afterlife until she learns the value of life and death. Driven to Suicide, but unable to die, Salem raises an army against the gods; in retaliation, the God of Darkness destroys humanity before both gods depart the world, leaving Salem to exist alone for years until she tries to end her curse by throwing herself into the God of Darkness's Pools of Annihilation. She's instead transformed into a being of pure destruction. When humanity returns to the world, the God of Light reincarnates Ozma to guide them to redemption. Salem finds freedom by raising a kingdom and family with Ozma until he becomes so worried by her destructive urges that he absconds with their children. Confronting him, their ensuing battle destroys her freedom, home, kingdom, and children. Now Salem is determined to ruin Ozma's mission by dividing humanity, ensuring that when she brings the Relics together and summons the gods, they will destroy Remnant and in turn, the curse on her allowing her to die.

Thoughts?

He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.

Bumping this.

YMMV.Tokyo Xanadu has this (under Broken Base)

• The True Ending. Fans are split on whether the True Ending's better than the Normal Ending. On one hand, Kou gets a chance to bring back Shiori, and he succeeds, which ends off everything on a happy note. And the option to choose the True Ending is shown only if the player chooses to do a lot of the optional stuff in the previous chapters to get Kou's stats high enough, so it somewhat matches with the game's message of the importance of one's choices (which is unsubtly mentioned again and again by Rem). On the other hand, though, the retconning of Shiori's death is thought to undermine the idea that Kou and the other residents of Morimiya must learn to move on from the great lie that they had lived in, and to some even makes this feel like a "Shaggy Dog" Story as the entire build-up to this point is just undone like that. Moreover, it's made possible because of the Nine-Tailed Fox, of whom there were few to no signs in the foregoing chapters, and so he came off as a Deus ex Machina that the writers put in to give the story a happy ending that it didn't truly need, and so the Normal Ending is seen as bolder and more coherent. This is allayed by the After Story in the eX+ version, which shows off how Kou, Shiori, and the others are now doing and reveals that reviving Shiori also unwittingly came with reviving the Twilight Apostle.

Any possible rewrite?

Edited by Ayumi-chan on Mar 3rd 2023 at 7:16:56 PM

She/Her | Currently cleaning N/A

From YMMV.Dark Web - the first one's not that bad compared to the Chasm entry, but they both need an awful lot of pruning. Thoughts?

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Both of the main villains of the crossover are given sympathetic motives in being unwanted clones that have both been subject to many years of mistreatment from the universe and just wanting to take back the memories they feel were stolen from them, but they end up both draining their sympathy extremely quick in opposite directions.
  • Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen, starts with a vague but grandiose goal, wanting the X-Men (and Jean Grey in particular) to pay for stealing her happy life. She uses Chasm, Hallows' Eve, a brainwashed Venom, and the legions of Limbo to serve as distractions so that she can retrieve a Cerebro unit hidden in the X-Men's treehouse. Does she want it to expand her powers and make her an unstoppable force? No, she was only seeking the memories of Cable's childhood that were once given to Jean. This winds up rendering the story's conflict pointless once Jean Grey and the X-Men are able to talk Madelyne down, and Jean shares the memories with her - with the only caveat being that Madelyne stop her invasion. The subsequent attempt of the narrative to paint Madelyne's actions in a sympathetic light, and her sudden Heel–Face Turn, not only flies in the face of decades of needless antagonism towards the X-Men on her part, but also fails to recognize the sheer scale of collateral damage her plan caused, particularly for Eddie Brock who was blackmailed into participation just to find his son again. From here, joining the X-Men in stopping the invasion of Limbo could be interpreted either as wanting to make amends for her constant needless antagonism of the X-Men or deciding that Ben and Janine have fulfilled their purpose as distractions and thus no longer worth helping. In the end, Madelyne is reestablished as the Queen of Limbo, back on good relations with the X-Men, and even allowed to keep the new portal to Limbo open as a new embassy by effectively blackmailing the US into doing so. All in all, when you consider the amount of help she gave Chasm and Hallows' Eve, how she and Chasm share responsibility in turning Eddie Brock into Bedlam, and the amount of deaths caused on Christmas Eve by the demons of Limbo, many fans think the X-Men were far too lenient with how they handled her, especially since Madelyne Pryor effectively got everything she wanted from her plan and more.
  • Chasm begins with the understandable goal of capturing Spider-Man to forcibly steal his memories back, even starting with extra sympathy points for the accident that turned him into Chasm and his stay in Limbo causing him to suffer nightmares and hallucinations, painting him as not evil for its own sake but someone who is extremely mentally ill and in need of help but pushed to extremes due to paranoia and no longer being able to trust anyone save those who he feels have suffered like he has i.e. Madelyne Pryor and Janine. However, once Chasm actually springs into action, the reader begins to find it impossible to retain their sympathies because his own plans and motives become impossible to follow. Between his first major plan to use the invasion of Limbo to draw Spider-Man into a fight for revenge and to make him give up his memories, being sidetracked to beat down the reformed Norman Osborn as revenge for killing him and antagonize members of Spider-Man's supporting cast, his second major plan to use demons to psychologically torment Peter Parker through an over-the-top reenactment of his life working at the Daily Bugle into eating a demon fruit to give up his soul, his third major plan to transform random demons into Limbo-themed versions of Spier-Man's rogue's gallery to prolong his torment along with enhancing the chaos of the demon invasion, and his final off-the-cuff plan to simply take over Limbo with Hallows' Eve and destroy New York City as its new king, it becomes impossible for readers to keep track of what he's even trying to accomplish, let alone whether he still wants his memories back or if he just wants to torment Spider-Man. If it were the former goal, not only has he been shown using magic to steal memories before with Madelyne Pryor's help, fans have pointed out that the X-Men (with Peter's permission) could easily have pacified Chasm by offering to copy Peter's portion of Ben's missing memories into him like they did to help Madelyne. If it were the latter, then Peter himself points out that Chasm not only did not need to involve anyone else in their quarrel, but that all of his attempts to torture Peter are a massive waste of time due to hinging on a fundamental misunderstanding of Peter Parker/Spider-Man's nature as the Determinator. It really doesn't help that the story itself comments through Spider-Man and Madelyne that Chasm's frayed sanity and obsession with Spider-Man mean none of his plans ever had any internal logic behind them beyond making Peter Parker and New York City as a whole suffer. On a lesser scale, compared to Madelyne Pryor, Hallows' Eve, and the brainwashed Venom, Chasm still carries Ben's/Peter's tendency to joke and quip in all but the most serious situations, making it ambiguous whether the reader is meant to take Chasm's angst and gallows humor regarding his losses at face value or to laugh along with the dark humor and over-the-top hamminess he engages in with abundance during the story. In essence, the narrative's attempts to establish Chasm as Eviler than Thou compared to Madelyne Pryor, along with his general Sanity Slippage, makes Chasm impossible to root for due to falling into Stupid Evil territory right at the start and never stopping. Even Chasm's ultimate fate is confused on whether the reader is meant to pity or scorn Chasm, as he's made to take the entirety of the blame for planning the invasion of Limbo, left imprisoned and alone in the new embassy in comfortable surroundings as a small concession on Madelyne's part for involving him in all of this, before the story seemingly tries to slam the door shut on any remaining sympathy points by showing Chasm giving Madelyne and Peter's offers to help him the silent treatment in favor of angrily brooding over his losses. Overall, readers are left confused on whether to consider the narrative is asking them to consider Ben a sympathetic victim of circumstance due to his clear mental illness and being an ignorant pawn in someone else's conflict until he was discarded, or an irredeemable monster due to his gleeful slide down into Stupid Evil once cut loose by Madelyne and unrepentant nature. Many can't even decide if Ben would even go to such extreme measures in the first place were he not crazy-town banana-pants for the sake of having a final villain.

I don't know what's with the Spider-Man fanbase and this need to be so overly specific. As an X-Men fan, reduce the Madelyne Prior entry to something like this.

"While it's true that she's understandably lashing out against a world that hasn't accepted her, she is barely doing anything against her actual tormentors (Sinister and the X-Men, by extension, Krakoa), instead choosing to attack and get a bunch of innocents killed in New York, and that she faces no comeuppance at the end of it all, instead being rewarded for her actions when the X-Men have put people in the hole for far less."

Edited by Edgar81539 on Mar 5th 2023 at 5:12:24 AM