Needs Help (New Crowner 11 April 2021): Moral Event Horizon

Dude, we're way past the point where "leave everything exactly as it was" is an option on the table.

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

I edited the crowner to be clearer about the votes for UP and DOWN.

I'm of the camp who prefers a trope that has objective and clear criteria to one that's so vaguely defined that pretty much any instance of a character acting anything less than upstanding could be listed under the guise of "subjectivity." It wasn't really used as anything more significant than "here's what I think the character's worst moment was."

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

You know, is it just me or is this thread attracting an unusual amount of dissent for a post-crowner thread (there was a definition crowner before)?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

It's a big trope, and I guess people didn't realize TRS was happening before.

I don't get why people would get heated, though. Ideally, we won't cut examples that make some sort of sense, and by making it a trope, we'll allow subversions and more examples that wouldn't fit currently. Pinpointing specific criteria that accepts all reasonable examples is tricky, but we should have criteria.

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

I mean, we advertised it as much as we could, short of making a bulletin or personally sending a PM to every single troper. It's not easy to account for all the people who disagree with the discussion if they only make their voices heard after the vote...especially if they're basing their arguments on flawed reasoning we'd already discussed at length.

It's also a trope that has been very cemented in wiki-culture. Changing it will have an impact, and some people might not like changing something this ingrained, even if what we're changing is fundamentally broken.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

The fact that so many people have/had different ideas on what the trope means/meant is more evidence that it is/was broken.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

That's the very reason I made this thread. We had multiple discussions on MEH in the past and everyone had a different interpretation of it, and the wick check shows the exact same issue.

People aren't worked up because we're changing the trope, they're worked up because our definition doesn't match the way they'd interpreted the trope.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I keep comparing this to the Getting Crap Past the Radar TRS that closed a short while ago. That's also a change to a huge trope that struggled due to a lack of concrete definition and massive misuse. GCPTR was one of my personal favorite tropes (it brought me to the site) and the strict redefinition was a bit difficult for me. However, I accepted that the old definition was too vague and too broadly misused (my interest in it is what encouraged me to shoehorn misuse when I was younger), and we instead proposed alternatives to cover the different kinds of use, which led to Surprisingly Lenient Censor and Demographically Inappropriate Humor.

If there's multiple different ways to interpret the trope, and they don't fit into the definition, why not just try to spin off new items that cover what people believed this item covered, if there are none that exist already?

Edited by mightymewtron on Feb 3rd 2021 at 6:55:22 AM

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

Someone suggested we do what we did for Adorkable and do an In-Universe / YMMV split. My concern with that was primarily that if we kept a "YMMV version", people would just ignore the reason behind the split and nothing would change. But that's if the YMMV version would just be MEH as it was, unaltered.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

A new YMMV item would at least be easier to curate. But what would the definition be? Just whatever fans believe is the most evil act a character ever did? "Crowning moment of evil" so to speak?

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

Well, the issue I have with the redefinition is that a trope that allows a South Park character but does not allow Tarkin from Star Wars is totally at odds with the previous definition of the trope. And frankly, such a redefinition isn't really particularly useful or interesting.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I admittedly do still sort of feel like some of the criteria we have now was more or less invented in the redefining process, rather than anything that came organically from how the trope occurs "in the wild". But I've already debated my thoughts on it to death and it'd be best for everyone's sanity if I don't rehash everything again, even if I'm still not fully satisfied, I can live with it.

Still, I can sympathize with people who think the new definition is too radical of a change because I feel similarly. But I wish more people would come and discuss with us if that was the case. Without, ya know...using a lot of faulty logic to do so. If people are genuinely unhappy, that's something we can talk about, but we can't do anything if their only response is to downvote the crowner or sulk in silence. We can't account for the opinions of people who won't share their opinions.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I prefer leaving discussion to everyone else, but well... with some of the criteria... I've been wondering a bit, it sounds more like kind of a plot twist trope now, right? The "change in narrative" requirement kinda hints at that. So rather than a character trope, it's more of a "the moment this thing that got played for laughs turned serious" or "the moment the story got dark(er)" thing.

But is that really not a trope we have already? It sounds like something we'd have. And if we have that, wouldn't this definition be "the same but more specific" to that trope?

(For what it's worth, I thought the old definition was supposed to be the moment or action that made people unable to sympathize with or like a character from that point onwards, even if the author didn't intend for that to happen. That one seems pretty incompatible with this one...)

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

We already have Knight of Cerebus for a character who’s arrival signals a darker shift in tone for a series and “moment something that was funny, stopped being so” sounds like it would fall under Cerebus Retcon or Beware the Silly Ones.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Feb 4th 2021 at 12:32:17 PM

Why waste time when you can see the last sunset last?

No, it's a change in a character's portrayal, not a change in narrative. Here's the full criteria.

Yes, but if it's an event that changes how everyone else treats the character, that doubles as a change in narrative, doesn't it?

It's intentional by the narrative, only villains can do it, it changes how the villain is portrayed, the villain must stay around long enough for said change to be perceived, and it must be part of a continuity.

I can't see a way for all this to happen without changing the tone of the story or the narrative in the process. So the trope feels like "a story event that causes a shift in narrative/tone to show that things are more serious + was caused by a specific villain".

(... Do we really not have a trope for "story event that causes a shift in narrative/tone to show that things are more serious"?)

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

Then watch Frozen (2013), where the tone did not change when Prince Hans reveals he's been lying about his love for Anna, or Macbeth, when the Lady convinces her husband to murder Duncan in his sleep, which is his Start of Darkness and turns her crazy. The tone of the story doesn't undergo a permanent change in either work.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

That's Cerebus Syndrome I think.

Edited by ReynTime250 on Feb 4th 2021 at 6:55:40 PM

Change in the narrative, sure, yeah, that's sort of inevitable whenever anything in the work changes. You can say the narrative is what the characters do and how they react to things, so villains doing Bad Things (TM) does of course change the narrative, but not necessarily in the way big plot twists do.

And this is coming from someone who, as discussed before, doesn't even fully agree with the "change in portrayal" criteria to begin with. I still don't think it's what you're making it out to be- all it really necessitates is that the villain wasn't originally portrayed as irredeemable and now are, exactly what MEH was about in the first place but put into words (assuming the irredeemability "switch" qualifies as a portrayal change).

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 4th 2021 at 2:00:09 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I didn't mean to be making it out to be anything... I was just genuinely confused and unsure over possible overlap, and you did say people should speak up instead of watching quietly. I guess there wasn't any, though, so being quiet would probably have been better.

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

Oh, don't feel bad, I'm glad you stopped by. I did want people to voice their thoughts. If we helped you understand what was confusing you, that's great.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I think the reason this thread is attracting so much dissent after the crowner is because they can no longer use MEH to list anything they find outstandingly evil, which seems to be how the trope was actually used, and what some people may have (incorrectly) thought the definition was. So I created a TLP draft that can fill that void. And guess what? Tarkin blowing up Alderaan counts for that. Is everyone happy now?

Edited by Kevjro7 on Feb 6th 2021 at 1:01:09 AM

No, I am not. The problem is that the trope as-is is now no longer useful or interesting and that we are trying to convince people to use it in a completely different manner from before. Merely making another overlapping trope does not help.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I'm sure some of us find it useful and interesting; I certainly find it more useful now that I know what it is than I did before we laid down some criteria. Regardless of how one feels about the new state of it, you can't deny that MEH was a clusterfuck of contrasting interpretations, character bashing, and misuse before this thread came along.

I'm not sure I'm sold on the TLP draft, but we can hash things out in the TLP itself.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness