"Badge of Honor" tropes

That's true to an extent, but a lot of these don't even really have a rational reason for being badges of honor. Take Genre Deconstruction It's total possible for a work to meet the definition (a metafictional criticism of its own genre) and completely suck. A work also doesn't "earn" being called a deconstruction, it just fits that definition or it doesn't.

Unrelatedly, I've noticed Gray-and-Grey Morality and the general concept of "moral grayness" being misused a lot. Specifically people don't seem to know the difference between a character who has sympathetic/humanizing traits but is still an unambiguous villain and a character that is genuinely morally gray.

Tropers managed to fix the issue with Doing It for the Art. The trope was a badge of honour, but after a crackdown on bad examples, it's actually pretty neutral nowadays. While most of the examples are positive, there are a number of negative ones, and examples do sometimes describe how the trope can be a bad thing.

Bumping this because this is actually a legitimate discussion that petered out (and I wanted to contribute since I was on hiatus when it originally happened.)

What is the difference between a "Badge of (Dis)Honor" trope and just a regular trope used to gush/complain? I'm curious to know because it could help identify other tropes that go through this.

I know that, before it got cut, Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped was a big trope that got used to gush about shows. I think South Park in particular had a huge page for it before it got cut/moved to Anvilicious.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Dec 11th 2021 at 5:28:27 AM

I would say that Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped wasn't a badge of honor trope because the gushing was more about the message than the work itself.

Alright, so Some Anvils wasn't one.

What would constitute one? Nightmare Fuel obviously is one, but how would one determine others?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Dec 11th 2021 at 7:19:06 AM

There are tropes that are specifically designed to praise or criticize a work in some fashion, from The Scrappy (all characters should be universally appreciated for their role in the story, these are not) to They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot (the set up was great but the delivery squandered it) to Rooting for the Empire (the bad guys overshadow the good guys in the coolness factor). We try to emphasize Tropes Are Tools so that it's not exclusively one or the other (ie The Scrappy is intentionally annoying so they can be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap). Note that all of these are YMMV, as they end up being focused more on audience debates rather than the text of the work.

Part of what is being discussed in this thread is more of tropes that are intended to be objective but are slipped in as a way of stealth complaining/praising. Deus ex Machina would be low on the list of complaining tropes, but it does have the "not foreshadowed" as part of the definition. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome (recently renamed from Reality Ensues) is one that has garnered a lot of misuse because of the belief "more realistic is always better" gives it more credibility (the trope is about expectations being subverted with a more plausible outcome, while the misuse is a much broader "this would realistically happen" without accounting for the expectations).

Should there be a page dedicated to documenting this concept, like what we have for Pothole Magnets? It might be worth getting the concept out to a wider audience.

As for tropes that are often used as a "Badge of Honor": Developer's Foresight has seen this a lot, both before and after its rename from The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.

This trope was brought up before, but I think Big-Lipped Alligator Moment became this because it was named after a meme from The Nostalgia Critic, the then-most popular Caustic Critic online. Tropers who saw that FernGully: The Last Rainforest review immediately leaped into not only making it a trope, but applying it to any work they could (even if the criteria didn't fit) because they were excited by the pedigree of its reviewer connection.

I saw a fascinating case of this when it came to Deconstruction: After Puella Magi Madoka Magica got big because of its infamous fake-out twist^note It was marketed as a standard Magical Girl show, with the darker elements and twists deliberately hidden, anime reviewers started to call just any darker anime show they loved a "deconstruction of the [X] genre" even when the term didn't actually apply. This got so bad that whole videos were made pointing out why they seemed to be using it as essentially a "Badge of Honor" moreso than actual criticism (note that the term was always used to praise a show, never to criticise bad ones).

Animation Age Ghetto's also always had this, since many tropers are animation lovers (myself included) who often feel insecure when animation is betlittled as just a "children's medium". Tropes love to put it on any piece of animation that's dark, even sometimes on otherwise family-friendly shows and movies.

Edited by harryhenry on Dec 29th 2021 at 5:25:42 AM

I always thought Big-Lipped Alligator Moment was a Badge of Dishonor.

I didn't even know it was a badge, I just thought it was a funny moment that came completely out of nowhere

, Those are some good points! I guess it depends if you like BLAMs or not. And it's still just my opinion, I could be totally wrong in thinking it is seen as a badge.

Edited by harryhenry on Dec 29th 2021 at 7:50:01 AM

Don't we already have Tropes Are Tools?

Even if every single troper/editor read and know about that page (which I doubt), it doesn't necessarily stop people shoehorning "good" tropes into their favorite works to make said work appear more awesome/sophisticated/smart/etc. than it really is.

It is a good overview, though (ironically) part of me thinks adding a mention of "badge of honor" would make it a little too insider-y.

I had considered that, but I don't think "Tropers would still be shoehorning tropes if the page existed" is a good reason to not do so. By that logic, why even have rules if tropers are gonna break them anyway? For example, there's still tropers out there who misuse tropes listed on Square Peg, Round Trope, but does that make the page useless? No, because that's not what it's designed to do.

Another one is usually Composite Character, turning out to be "based on X, and that minor detail/incident about Y is there, too!"

I think that's more just regular old shoehorning at its worst, though.

So the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome page for Brooklyn Nine-Nine has the more serious episodes that deal with racial profiling and sexual harassment among the examples. I'm pretty sure those would count as Very Special Episode but that's too much of a badge of dishonour so they're on SRO instead Edit: Actually I checked and Very Special Episode was listed on the show's main page. Nonetheless a lot of the examples on that trope's main page feel the need to justify how they're a good one so I think my point still stands

Edited by mollyvanp on Jan 5th 2022 at 11:21:39 AM

Yes, Very Special Episode definitely seems to have a complaining problem. May need to bring it to TRS if it’s that bad…

Resurrecting this to consider Genre-Busting. A scroll on the examples of the page seems like it's just Genre Mashup or Genre Roulette but more special.

The name isn't helpful. It makes it sound like it's a duplicate of Genre Mash Up.