YMMV Home Page and Audience Reaction Policy Thread

Right; I'm not arguing that. But it's a matter of scale I think: Lean too far into the "objective criteria" zone, and then what's actually objective about it?

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

...Okay, so hopefully this will help us stop focusing on MEH: I want to take it to TRS and we need a Wick Check. Anyone who wants to help me, please join me here.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

So is this the generalized, long-term YMMV review thread? It seems like the site culture has shifted away from being inclusive with YMMV to being more exclusive (possibly due to better standards in TLP and YMMV not being the new, exciting classification anymore).

It says there must be some discrete event that informs the audience that this character is no longer redeemable. That's not the same thing. We could both look at the same discrete event but disagree on whether that makes the given character irredeemable. That doesn't mean the character is "objectively irredeemable." The two words (objective and irredeemable) don't make sense together, is what I'm saying. Nothing can be "objectively hopeless" or "objectively unforgivable." It depends on the individual standards of the audience member. Some things may be more clearly unforgivable than others, but we're not only talking about those things like cannibalism or rape but rather any of these events that may lead to a character being irredeemable, or a culmination of different events that crescendos into the MEH.

These are two very different questions that are understandably difficult to discuss at the same time.

I won't touch on the former right now because that's been the bulk of this conversation, it seems. (And you're also going to make a TRS thread so...)

For the latter, however, Fighteer did give us a test. Namely, asking how a given YMMV trope can be played. If it can be saliently played with (e.g. inverted, subverted, deconstructed, etc.), then it is more likely than not a regular trope. Otherwise it must be something other than a trope.

But that test assumes we know what can be played or in what way it is to be played. I'd argue that:

• To the question of "what" should be played:
  • Both the discrete event and the interpretation.
    • If you subvert a trope, that discrete event is set up and then not executed. But the expectation was clearly there, the objective trope was about to be played but ultimately was not. Any reaction from the audience (e.g. catharsis, etc.) could be experienced, and which specific reaction doesn't matter.
    • If you subvert a YMMV trope, that discrete event is set up and then not executed. But the specific reaction cannot reasonably be present without that event happening. So the YMMV trope cannot be subverted. You cannot "subvert" a specific reaction.
• To the question of "in what way" should it be played:
  • At least the following: subversion and inversion. Maybe include deconstruction there as well, but if it cannot be subverted or inverted then that seems like a surer test.
    • It seems to me that objective tropes certainly can be subverted, inverted, and deconstructed at the very least. Whereas YMMV tropes cannot.
  • Possibly include playing for laughs / drama, though an audience reaction could be done intentionally that way.
  • IMO, the following should be strictly disallowed for this test: discussed, invoked, conversed, and other plays defined by characters talking about the concept.
    • Literally anything could be discussed/invoked/etc. That would be a bad test for trivia, useful notes, or YMMV.

Personally I don't take issue with that. We have to have some useful criteria for adding or removing these from the wiki. It just seems like a natural consequence that there be some objective criteria to these concepts. So long as the most important criterion is an emotional interpretation, I myself have no issue with a YMMV trope being made YMMV. It's when the objective criteria outweigh the subjective that I find it a problem (as with Acceptable Targets or Evil Is Sexy or...).

Notably, the site's standards were shit back in the day. People would make things YMMV because of some site-side disagreement rather than subjectivity in the concept. And "voting" would be done without a crowner (because we didn't always have crowners).

Cool.

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The following is a response to this discussion, but it seems like we're using this thread as a YMMV-review thread so I'll include it here. Sorry that this post is basically dobuled now but I already wrote the following so...

Evil Is Sexy was created in 2007 at the latest and it wasn't until May 2011 that it was added to YMMV, with the simple edit reason "Audience Reaction." Its current description on YMMV.Home Page seems inaccurate, saying this is when the audience is "sexually attracted to a villain," but that's a specific form of Perverse Sexual Lust (which isn't even listed on Evil Is Sexy, implying that the two aren't meant to have a super-/sub-trope or sister trope relation). The summation on YMMV.Home Page continues, saying this is "YMMV because [...] there's a chance [a given audience member] will not be attracted to [the villain]." For one thing, there is a science to beauty and attraction, implying sexiness on its own is not subjective in this context. For another thing, this is a "red paint argument" so to speak. "There's a small chance that any given audience member would think X character, who was designed to be sexy, is not sexy or supposed to be sexy, and since there's a small chance, we should treat it as though people necessarily will think that about X character."

Apparently, this came up before, and I even participated in that discussion a bit. IIRC, Evil Is Sexy was changed partially due to disagreements on the wiki?

Regarding Difficulty Spike, I think that has to do with the difficulty in discussing difficulty itself. Not everyone is good at games, so when the difficulty starts to raise, these less-skilled players might consider it a difficulty spike, and technically they aren't wrong since it does get more difficult. The issue and point of disagreement tends to be the degree to which the difficulty raised. Meanwhile, Wake-Up Call Boss doesn't necessarily have this issue as it's (1) the first more difficult boss and (2) not really a matter of degree (so long as it's noticeably "more difficult" it doesn't matter how much more). Whether you're good at games or not doesn't really affect WUCB. I suspect that Difficulty Spike was added to YMMV due to disagreements happening on the wiki, but I don't think I was there for that conversation at all. [EDIT: Turns out this was a recent change, so yeah it's still an open thread in TRS.]

Edited by WaterBlap on Aug 30th 2020 at 1:39:24 PM

Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty

See, I think we're generally on the same page but the nature of the debate has made it a little hard to be sure. I'm not arguing YMMV tropes not have objective criteria, just that if you focus too much on the objective stuff, it stops being about fan interpretation or judgement, and more about what the work does, which just makes it a normal trope- a slightly more controversial than average trope.

While I do want to say you're right about MEH, common opinion at the thread is that the character cannot be redeemed in canon, leading to the easy assumption that the trope calls for the character to already be considered irredeemable by the work's standards, and then we get back to the problem I was referring to. However, TRS thread in development, we'll table this issue for now.

But yeah, I'm all for YMMV having objective criteria, but there needs to be something that makes the trope subjective- the thing that makes it YMMV. If they're truly subjective they can't be played with for the reason you cite- fan opinion can't be "subverted" or "zig-zagged" or "played for horror", it can only exist or not exist, and the creator can do it intentionally or not, but at the end of the day intention shouldn't matter when it comes to YMMV- that's how CM and MB operate, and they base 99% of the discussion on the work's context!

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Despite being a regular in the cleanup thread, I still don’t entirely know why Complete Monster is YMMV. It depends almost entirely on what is shown in the work.

For one, the "Heinous Standard" is entirely subjective.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Yeah, to me, CM actually has a more solid basis for being YMMV than MEH does; CM requires the audience, the posters at the thread, to find them irredeemable and up to thread standards. It's a judgement call every time, even if it's based on what they did in the work.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I also think there were sincere efforts to make it objective at one point but they failed

Absolute destiny... apeachalypse?

NVM

Edited by Piterpicher on Apr 7th 2021 at 6:17:38 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Is it possible for YMMV to be removed from the wiki one day? Or is it going to stay forever?

Why would it be removed? How would we benefit at all from that?

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

It drags the quality of the wiki down. The worst edits I've seen on this site occur on YMMV (trope) pages,^note Rmember Jerks Are Worse Than Villains attracting misuse on its very first day? and the negative YMMV items attract more complaining than their objective counterparts. Quality-wise, the wiki would just be better off without YMMV.

If I'm reading WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.TV Tropes, the reason we created YMMV in the first wasn't because we were interested in documenting Audience Reactions, but because we wanted to decrease edit wars on the main work pages. TV Tropes has grown since then, and I really don't think "subjective tropes" would be approved if they were pitched today.

To be fair to Jerks Are Worse Than Villains, it's far from the first time a trope has attracted misuse on day one. I can point to a specific example that happened because the title was unclear (and because literally not one person bothered to read any deeper than said title...). There's a chance that the title is the cause of the misuse there, too. I've seen many YMMV tropes launch that aren't attracting misuse or decay, so it's definitely not a uniform issue (recent ones off the top of my head are Delusion Conclusion, Rainbow Lens, Realism-Induced Horror, and Trans Audience Interpretation), and I've also seen many awful examples and usages on non-subjective tropes as well.

Personally I think that fandom culture is a massive part of a work. To not analyze it at all would be missing half the context. On a site like ours we can't just look at the objective tropes; the fandom reaction is just as important, especially for aspiring creators to see what does and doesn't work in the eyes of an audience. The misuse is more because people tend to try and make these subjectives objective- that is, they worry more about how "right" or "wrong" a reaction is rather than just stating that the reaction does indeed exist- which is what a YMMV page is meant to document. Even if this wasn't the original idea, the benefit outweighs the cost IMO.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 16th 2021 at 1:46:45 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I have always believed that whether a page is deemed good by readers or otherwise beneficial to our info/popularity, should generally be compared to how much something weighs down our quality, and it's no difference here. While I rarely start YMMV pages, it's mostly because the works I make pages on lack real fandoms or would have difficulty finding YMMV items (YMMV.Synergism is probably the biggest I could really make on my own because there is a wiki and stuff, and one of the items became kinda outdated anyway).

Edited by Piterpicher on Jul 16th 2021 at 7:53:37 PM

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Also, people tend to forget that the site is meant to be fun as well as informative. It might be a bit messier, but moments pages are fun, fridge is fun, posting about fan opinions can be fun if done with care. The wiki would be dry as hell if we removed every non-objective bit of information.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

It's naive to think that removing YMMV would stop people from having opinions about the works they edit. All it would do is push those opinions into the main pages.

Plus, like Jay said, a lot of works are heavily influenced by fandom culture (Homestuck, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, etc) and it'd be silly to act like they exist in a vacuum. I'm pretty sure even the other wiki notes fandom influence when it's culturally appropriate.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jul 17th 2021 at 9:12:46 AM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

I would certainly shed no tears if YMMV is gone. It would certainly cut down on the number of cleanup threads we'd need, and I don't really see any benefit in it staying other than giving people a form of cheap validation or having an easy way to root out problem tropers.

I certainly don't expect it to be gone, but my response to it being gone would only be "Good riddance."

It would cut down on complaining threads, yes. It'd also probably cut out half the appeal of our wiki, as well as make analysis of fandom culture way more difficult, and result in a site traffic drop. Unlike Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel and niche porn shit, YMMV items are a part of pop culture, especially modern pop culture.

If such a thing happened for some reason, I can see YMMV being punted to a rival website a la Fetish Fuel, except YMMV isn't outright disturbing and could survive on a wiki. Said website would probably be even less managed and more chaotic and flame-bait-y. And probably resent us and troll us.

That's what I was saying by "site traffic drop." At least Troper Tales and Fetish Fuel and porn shit were cut by financial necessity (and complete irrelevance to fiction in the first case), not just because we didn't wanna do any cleanup work.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jul 17th 2021 at 4:38:58 AM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

It would also drop our numbers badly.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

Contributor numbers too. Unless you suggest we move CM and MB to main, those threads and the many tropers that contribute to them would cease to exist.

Plus several objective tropes are used as audience reactions (wrongly, but hey). Removing YMMV would only move the issues onto main and create a much bigger mess.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Oh, I'm well aware that getting rid of YMMV will cause numbers to drop, which is why I said I don't expect YMMV to go away. While I think it was a mistake to allow on the site in the first place, I've accepted that it's here to stay as one of the site's three garbage pits.

Still wouldn't shed tears if it ever went away, but I'm not crossing my fingers for it.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Jul 17th 2021 at 2:36:07 AM

I feel like the only reason YMMV looks like a "garbage pit" is because we specifically focus on cleanup threads. The general troping public (which is not entirely made up of the self-indulgent "my opinion matters more than everybody else's" fools that fuck up YMMV pages) seems to just be fine with YMMV as a concept. It's just that a handful of common items get misused because they're so common.

I'm also pretty sure YMMV came about because the site used to be a bigger whine-and-gush-fest because everybody lumped their opinions on the main page. I'd prefer a controlled section to analyze fandom opinions to a total wild west scenario.

(I'd ask what the other two "garbage pits" are but I don't think I really care to know.)

Edited by mightymewtron on Jul 17th 2021 at 5:35:03 AM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

This is also negativity bias speaking. I can name several YMMV and Audience Reaction tropes that are doing just fine. The issue isn't the concept but the way people think YMMV subpages work. (Again, the whole "personal opinions" misconception as well as the clean up thread mentality of "if I don't get it then cut")

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

That's actually a really big issue in general. We are far too quick to cut things—just look at the Hindsight thread for instance. It's even worse on Short-Term because almost no one participates there and we often don't have enough consensus to cut things. This is why the X Killer cleanup thread I started ended up this way—there simply aren't enough participants.

We really need to start discussing things more in depth on threads.

As for whether or not we should have YMMV, I agree with mightymewtron that YMMV stuff does tie in to fiction in a way I feel we should probably document. And as was said, we simply cannot handle the loss of tropers that a YMMV gutting would bring. I don't think we would have many people left if we did that, actually. I don't even think we should entertain the idea for that reason.

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

Doesn't mean YMMV items don't attract misuse or decay more often than objective tropes. Opinion. Aspiring creators can experience popular media to know what works in the eyes of an audience. The Writing Pitfall Index already shows what to not do when writing a story. Pretty sure people having fun with YMMV pages is what causes problems. And y'know what I think is fun? Having less cleanup work to do. I never said that. People put opinions onto main pages even with YMMV's existence.

A significant portion of YMMV's appeal is for people who like criticisms. Said people who join the site because of YMMV would probably use the subpages to complain a lot. Would losing that type of appeal really be a bad thing?

Not if we kept the tropes themselves and just canned the YMMV pages. Every work page I've seen has more inbounds than its YMMV subpage.

That's actually something I had in mind. Those tropes require approval to be listed anyway.

According to WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.TV Tropes, "the main reason YMMV itself was created was to keep the more controversial tropes off of the main pages."

Anyhow, I'm curious to know what the moderators think about this.

Edited by Kevjro7 on Jul 18th 2021 at 7:03:55 AM