To-do list:
- Move wicks to a trope listed on the Moral Dissonance disambiguation page if they fit, and remove them if they don't. For reference purposes, here's the list of tropes on the disambiguation page:
- Batman Grabs a Gun: A good guy makes an exception to their moral code treated as O.O.C. Is Serious Business.
- Became Their Own Antithesis: A character embodies the very thing that their previous moral code stood against.
- Broken Aesop: The work breaks their own moral message by having its narrative conflict resolved by the very thing it preaches against.
- Designated Hero: The work portrays the character as a paragon of virtue when their actions are anything but heroic.
- Designated Villain: The work portrays the character as reprehensible, even though they don't do anything that warrants that label.
- Hypocrite: The character preaches one thing and acts in a way that contradicts it.
- Jerkass Ball: Someone acts uncharacteristically cruel or selfish for the sake of enabling Conflict.
- Out-of-Character Moment: A moment when character acts in a way contradictory to their usual morality.
- Karma Houdini: When a character don't get punished for their reprehensible actions.
- Moral Myopia: A character is portrayed as unsympathetic/morally wrong for not holding themselves to their own stated morality.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: The protagonist is subject to different moral standards than other characters.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: When a character is intended to be seen as sympathetic but the audience doesn't think they are.
- Values Dissonance: What is totally acceptable or even applauded for in a particular culture might be seen as reprehensible by other cultural standards.
- What the Hell, Hero?: A good guy is called out by in-work characters for failing to live up to their moral code.
Upon looking at the page, I noticed a lot of complaining, and started a wick check (which was later completed by a few other tropers while I was on a brief hiatus from the site) to see if the wicks had similar problems.
What the wick check found instead was a serious misuse problem. The quick results are as follows:
- There were 12/50 correct examples with not much complaining, or 24%
- There were 4/50 complaining examples, or 8%
- There were 25/50 misused examples, or 50%
- There were 8/50 ZCEs, or 16%, and
- There were 1/50 other examples, or 2%
After returning from my hiatus, I was surprised at the misuse count. Looking through the misused wicks, a common form of misuse seems to be examples where no hypocrisy occurred, and the offending examples simply complaining about the alleged immorality of the actions of the characters. Some wicks also had overlap with Values Dissonance.
My first proposed solution for this trope would be to move this trope to YMMV. I was surprised it wasn’t already when I saw it. My second proposed solution would be to possibly rename the trope to a more indicative name, since “Moral Dissonance” could be interpreted to mean that a character is inherently immoral. An alternative name (which I haven’t been able to think of any) could help with the misuse. Finally, the trope could be expanded, though I strongly oppose this decision as I fear it would lead to more complaining entries.
What does everyone else think should be done here?
Edited by GastonRabbit on May 16th 2022 at 5:55:49 AM
Karma Houdini was added back to the disambiguation. I PM'd the one who added it and they said they'd be fine removing it if it was misuse (which it is as KH only applies to villains and must be intentional). Jerkass Ball seems the best replacement for otherwise good characters behaving objectionably. Any objections/thoughts?
Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Feb 11th 2022 at 2:24:22 AM
Put Karma Houdini back on there. Disambiguations are not meant to be accurate to what the trope once was. The trope no longer exists, and the disambig is meant to redirect to potential tropes they are looking for.
I do not understand how anything on a disambiguation could possibly be misuse when it's not using anything.
Edited by Eiryu on Feb 11th 2022 at 9:51:28 AM
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Right, exactly. We've told you this before Ferot, but the disambig is more about usage rather than definition of the trope that got disambiged.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Ok, understand keeping KH then.
Any objections to adding Jerkass Ball to it?
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Added, thanks.
Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Feb 13th 2022 at 12:35:13 PM
That might help
Characters.Game Of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen
- Moral Dissonance:
- She has shades of this. Like her brother, she seems to be under the impression that she has the moral high ground among all the Iron Throne's claimants simply because she's a Targaryen — completely overlooking (until Jorah corrects her) the fact that her ancestors took the Seven Kingdoms not because they had any right to them but because they could. And because they had dragons. Even after, she still has a bit of a self-centered streak about her — which seems to be a common flaw amongst her family. Despite this, Dany possesses the very valuable trait of listening to and taking advice from others (even if she can be stubborn about her own plans at times), which helps her maintain good relationships with most of her allies and subjects.
- Shows some signs of occasionally overlapping with Moral Myopia; in general, her Black-and-White Insanity tends to rear its head in the form of her denouncing those who are against her as "evil" and presuming herself to always be "good". Perhaps the best example of this is in Season 1; she is outraged that Mirri lied to her and arranged for Khal Drogo to be reduced to a living corpse by a supposed "healing" rite that also killed her and Drogo's unborn son, seeing it as a betrayal. Despite the fact that, as Mirri reminds her, Drogo was a bloodthirsty barbarian warlord whose people kill for fun, rape for pleasure, and ravage the land, and in fact, Mirri only wound up in Daenerys's service because Drogo chose to massacre Mirri's village and enslave her for idle amusement. Furthermore, a Khal's son prophesied to lead the Dothraki to extend their bloodthirsty reach to Westeros really would not be seen as anything less than the spawn of evil by anyone other than a Dothraki. Rather than concede that Mirri has a point, she quite understandably has the woman burnt alive as a human sacrifice for reducing her progress to dust.
- This is explicitly pointed out by Tyrion in the final episode. Throughout the series, Daenerys had many evil men killed, and the people cheered for her because her victims were evil men and she was right. What happens to her when everyone around her treated her as an infallible hero who's always right? She began to believe it. By the time she burns King's Landing and makes plans to continue her crusade across all of Westeros, she makes it clear that because everything she believes is right and justified, she can do whatever she believes has to be done.
The last one I believed can be moved to In-Universe Protagonist-Centered Morality. Thought's for what to do with the others? (Moral Myopia might fit the second one but it might about doing the exact same actions they condemn as wrong in others not just inconsistent morality.)
Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Feb 21st 2022 at 9:31:43 AM
CelestaPlebs
Wicks currently at 485.
Add a title. Stay safe; stay well. Live beyond… memento vivere! Should intermittent vengeance arm again his red right hand to plague us?
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I added a to-do list to the header and pinned it. The OP's original contents have been moved to a folder.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Just stoic wisdom.
Currently at 65 wicks!
Vehicle-Based Characterization | Grief-Induced Split | Locker Mail
HoMM Fan
Pushing through to the end if I can, I put out a notice in the locked pages thread to deal with the ghost wick on Characters.Rod Albright Alien Adventures.
Should I remove the wicks from headscratcher and WMG pages that aren't archived?
"Grandmaster Combat, son!"
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I believe the answer is yes. I'm working on dewicking now myself actually.
(she/her)
Yeah, those are fine to remove. Moral Dissonance is a disambig anyways so anything that doesn't fit an existing article can be safely deleted.
Edited by MacronNotes on May 19th 2022 at 3:28:18 PM
Macron's notes
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
And we're done! All that's left are archives, newsletters, the Ambiguity Index, and related pages. We can now close! (And hopefully my wick cleaning job was OK.)
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall
(she/her)
Crown Description:
What should be done with Moral Dissonance?
Down to 987