Duplicate Trope: All There Is To Know About The Crying Game

The difference between this and It Was His Sled is tenuous, but first I need to mention trope names. All There Is To Know About The Crying Game isn't literally a character-named trope, although the argument against those from Everything You Wanted to Know About Changing Names still applies. To paraphrase that page, unless it's one of the truly iconic characters who truly embodies a trope- and frequently makes it into the dictionary like The Pollyanna- naming a trope after a character risks Popcultural Osmosis Failure.

I mention this, because of that mention of Popcultural Osmosis Failure. The difference is theoretically that in All There Is To Know About The Crying Game, people only know the twist, while in It Was His Sled, people know things other than the twist. However, it's just as possible that all someone could know about The Crying Game is that there's a trope named after it, while all they know about Citizen Kane is that Rosebud was his sled. Essentially, Crying Game is Sled with less pop-cultural osmosis.

The alternative titles add to this confusion. Crying Game is also called Everybody Remembers The Twist, while Sled is also called Expired Spoiler, which makes the difference sound like whether you want to call something a twist or a spoiler. You could argue that people already knowing a twist is a subtrope of people already knowing a spoiler, but that's different from the current definitions about whether or not people remember anything else about the work.

And finally, a wick check. From a purely numerical standpoint, Sled is 8 times more common than Crying Game, or 10 times more common if you include the related trope, Not His Sled, which doesn't have an equivalent for Crying Game. Crying Game has returns 313 results, plus 5 for All You Need To Know About The Crying Game. It Was His Sled has 2577 results. And Not His Sled has 676 results. Alternatively, if I restrict it to just YMMV pages, there are 154 results for Crying Game and 1265 for Sled, although that's actually still about 8 times as many. In either case, tropers have a clear preference for listing things as It Was His Sled, so it should be the "primary" trope in this merge.

Some trope pages even list the same example under both tropes. At least within the YMMV namespace, there are 74 pages that do this, which is nearly half of the pages that mention Crying Game.

As a simple example, YMMV/Hamlet lists everyone dying as both tropes:

• All There Is To Know About The Crying Game: The Everybody's Dead, Dave Downer Ending is probably one of the best-known parts of the play, third only to the "to be or not to be" speech and the imagery of Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

• It Was His Sled: Ophelia goes mad, and everyone dies

Or tellingly, YMMV/TheCryingGame and YMMV/CitizenKane are both on the list. From YMMV/CitizenKane:

• All There Is To Know About The Crying Game: It's a guarantee that the only thing people who've never seen the movie know about it is that It Was His Sled.

And from YMMV/TheCryingGame:

• It Was His Sled: The Reveal has been the subject of so many parodies and jokes that even people who have never seen the movie know the twist.

As one last point, Film/TheCryingGame also links to both, using It Was His Sled to describe the twist in the opening paragraph, but Film/CitizenKane only mentions It Was His Sled.

I would also support merging them both into one of the redirects like Everyone Remembers The Twist, because It Was His Sled runs into the same issue as tropes named after characters, although before we did that, I think we would need to come up with a new name for Not His Sled to avoid orphaning the reference.

Edited by Razanir on Feb 8th 2021 at 6:01:18 AM

That's a lot better, ~Razanir.

Opened!

I wouldn't oppose merging All There Is To Know About The Crying Game and It Was His Sled.

Though, I don't know if we need to rename It Was His Sled. Sure, that title wouldn't fly today, but thanks to the Grandfather Clause, it's become a very easily-understood and well-known name. Unless there's evidence that the name causes issues, it'd be better to just leave it be.

Agree all around.

Merge the two, under the name It Was His Sled (which, due to the Grandfather Clause, is now part of the troper jargon).

Also agree with merging and not renaming It Was His Sled. It's one of our oldest (non)tropes and firmly ingrained in trope-culture. I don't think I've seen it confused and misused as something else, and I want to see a wick check for misuse before renaming is on the table.

Can we get rid of the Non-Spoiler redirect? THAT is confusing, and nobody's using it.

I am not really convinced that a merge is needed at all here - "only the twist is known" and "everybody knows the twist" aren't the same thing - but I definitively oppose any rename of It Was His Sled. It's far too entrenched.

I can buy It Was His Sled as troper talk and grandfather clause. The Crying Game though, that's a 28-year-old movie that, frankly, most people haven't heard of. So that's just not a good trope name at all.

And yeah, the definitions are pretty much the same, so I'm all in favor of merging.

Edited by Spark9 on Feb 9th 2021 at 2:47:40 AM

I can support a merge. The only real difference I'm seeing here is the popularity of the work itself — if the twist is already well-known and the rest of the work is also well-known, It Was His Sled, while if the twist is well-known but the work isn't, it's ATITKATCG. Which not only seems like an arbitrary distinction at best, but one that flies in the face of There Is No Such Thing as Notability.

As other people have already mentioned, It Was His Sled doesn't necessarily have the best name by modern standards, but it's one of those tropes that's been so thoroughly grandfathered into the wiki that trying to change it now would cause more problems than it would solve.

I've don't think the distinction between between "everyone ONLY knows the twist" and "everyone knows the twist" worked in practice. It's "the same but more"-y and depends on how someone is exposed to the work.

• There is certainly a percentage of the public who knows zilch about Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back but has heard of the Luke, I Am Your Father twist. That's All There Is To Know About The Crying Game for them.
• But for the people who are at least kiiiinda familiar with Star Wars, the twist is It Was His Sled.

I'm fine with merging but definite to renaming It Was His Sled — as others have pointed out it's more trouble than it's worth.

It's pretty much impossible to quantify whether or not the twist is the most well-known part of the work. Like the OP shows, this means that the same example often ends up getting added under both.

Yeah, the distinction made isn't one we can easily judge by.

My only other idea here is to make ATITKATCG a definition-only page, but at that point, what'd be the point?

I agree with what Zuxtron said, though I'm more strongly in favor of a merge.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 9th 2021 at 12:15:32 PM

I say merge. A spoiler overshadowing the work is still a spoiler overshadowing the work whether it's is from a well known movie or not.

Strange that I didn't know The Crying Game until I saw the trope title. And, this is coming from me, given this time of the growing awareness and gradual acceptance of trans people now compared to 1992, would this trope referencing the film be still relevant?

Edited by alnair20aug93 on Feb 10th 2021 at 2:28:03 AM

Merge into It Was His Sled, and keep the original name because the film it is referencing (and its ending) are extremely well-known and often parodied, thereby making them not too obscure a reference for a trope name.

Merge into It Was His Sled. The other thing would be to expand All There Is To Know About The Crying Game into "the only thing people know about this work", like a legit version of JustForFun.Everybody Knows That, because I've seen it used that way.

Disambig Crying Game between these:

• It Was His Sled
• Stock Parody Jokes
• Everybody Knows That

Edited by ccorb on Feb 9th 2021 at 2:44:01 PM

@Zuxtron: Admittedly, I didn't go through all 74 of those to check what the examples were. That was just the result of using comm on Linux to find common items in both wick checks. But even if there are YMMV pages that mention different examples for the two tropes, Crying Game and Citizen Kane listing their respective twists as both tropes feels telling about how interchangeable they are.

Bump. Page action options?

• Merge All There Is To Know About The Crying Game
• Disambiguate All There Is To Know About The Crying Game between It Was His Sled, Stock Parody Jokes, and JustForFun.Everyone Knows That.
• Rename It Was His Sled

Crowner

Off-topic: I now know that I've been exposed to The Weird Al Effect when seeing the Unsettling Gender-Reveal in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Edited by ccorb on Feb 23rd 2021 at 6:31:40 AM

Took care of the redirects. 307 wicks to go!