Misused: What An Idiot

Oh joy.

Should the thread be kept or the Short Term can deal with it? This may eat the slot for a very long time.

Curious about how dedicated subpages should be handled considering this is Darth now.

I thought we would keep the work subpages? After a scrubbing of course.

Anyways, came across this example on All That Glitters:

• Richie Rich: The villain, Van Dough, hears about the Rich family vault and assumes it's where the Rich family keeps all their wealth. He engineers the kidnapping of Richie Rich's parents in an attempt to get access to it, only to find out that it's full of keepsakes. When he has a meltdown demanding where all the money is, Mr. Rich tells him it's in banks, real estate, stocks, and presumably other revenue generating forms, in a tone that suggests he thinks Van Dough is an idiot for thinking their money would be anywhere else. This is actually a joke about the original franchise, where that WAS the case.

What An Idiot was potholed to "in a tone that suggests he thinks Van Dough is an idiot for thinking their money would be anywhere else", but I feel like it fits another trope, I just can't think of it.

We're only getting rid of off-page examples. The subpages will stay, similarly to how So Bad, It's Horrible works. The mod chat hasn't been very active lately due to the holidays, but once things pick back up, maybe I or another mod could ask the admins to hide the subpage tabs, similarly to what's done with DMOS, if that ends up being necessary.

Edit: I just indexed this on DarthWiki.This Exists. I have no idea how I forgot to do that earlier.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 28th 2021 at 11:40:50 AM

I get removing/rewriting the examples that don't follow the "You expect-Instead" format. However, it is for the best that the works that either use "You expect-Instead" and/or have their own subpages be left alone.

Many of the deleted moments are straight from the ymmv sub-pages have followed the "You expect-Instead" format and/or are being just purged instead of being rewritten to "You expect-Instead", making many pivotal idiotic moments that are the work of countless tropers be lost. I already noticed this mass deletion coming with what happened with SRO. I fear that history is repeating itself here.

Edited by Shivader on Dec 29th 2021 at 7:19:05 PM

In most of those cases, the trope is either being misused or there's not enough context to it to rewrite in the format.

If there's any specific deletion you want to contest, you can bring it up here.

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Dec 29th 2021 at 7:04:38 AM

They can be treated like ZCE. If there's enough material to tell what are they talking about, they could be reformatted; if not, they could be removed as an unreasonable complaint, and some fan of the work (cleanup thread?) may elaborate later.

I only hope that when entries are discussed in a cleanup thread, it's done in reasonable detail, and doesn't just fill up with people saying something among the lines of "Plot happens" like in the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome thread.

Yeahhh, the SRO thread is a huge mess and if What An Idiot gets one it needs to be done so much better.

Edit: Well it already has one in short-term, but you know what I meant.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 29th 2021 at 3:03:37 PM

I don't have a problem with What an Idiot! having a cleanup thread, since So Bad, It's Horrible is another Darth section with a cleanup thread, but I don't want to punt this thread's wick cleanup to one.

The thread that made Ear Worm IUEO had to deal with a similarly high wick count when removing out-of-universe wicks, and like that thread, the fact that most wicks can simply be removed (wicks for non-Darth and non-Flame Bait pages in this thread's case, and YMMV wicks in Ear Worm's case) makes the job more time-consuming than hard.

Edit: Neglected to mention that while I did close the recent Never Live It Down thread in favor of deferring to the cleanup thread, that was because the only change that thread made was making it NRLEP, and even the Real Life cleanup thread mostly deals with on-page examples after making tropes NRLEP.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 30th 2021 at 4:20:47 AM

Is there a way for the main redirect to display the Flame Bait icon?

Hello, everyone. I'm not a regular forum / articles contributor, so I'm unsure how appreciated my input on this subject will be. I apologise if the comment ends up being a bit unpolished. Since I'm late to the discussion, I'll just respond in a quote-comment format for now.

My comment's TL;DR is mostly this:

Relocating What An Idiot into darthwiki or removing it altogether effectively censors genuine criticism aimed at plot discussion and systematically breaks neutrality in favour of fans of any given work. Criticism by itself isn't automatically "bash-y": if the discussed points are valid, then they should have the chance to be expressed. Otherwise, I think, this website as a whole loses an important element as a platform for discussing the quality of fictional stories and analysing them.

>only seems to exist for the purpose of complaining

Valid criticism is not just complaining but a valid form of literary analysis. Treating all criticism as complaining is having bad faith in other community members and also harms neutrality in favour of story fans that can be biased.

>there's enough dislike/outrage over stupidity the reaction is valid even if too problematic to allow examples >Mark as Flame Bait / Move to Darth Wiki

A stance like this essentially allows outrage to be weaponised by the fans of a given work to affect TV Tropes' neutrality about the title. Moderation should work in both directions, or the forum will keep sliding towards censorship more and more.

—-

Having said that, I understand that these two tropes can be a source of constant problems for the moderation team. And if there is still some chance for them to be relocated to YMMV and allowed there, the rest of my comment is on my thoughts about some of that (as replies to issues that were brought up by others in the previous pages of this thread):

>WAI applies to every stupid decision by definition of stupidity

This problem is solvable by adding a caveat to its definition that the WAI action shouldn't be performed by a character for whom making stupid / bad decisions is the norm intended by the story-writers (e.g. the same Homer S.).

In either case, at least one of the two (WAI / IB) should be allowed to be expressed (at least in the YMMV section) when the viewer feels like the stupidity of a characters actions was incongruent with their prior psychological profile, or with just having a baseline human capacity for thinking, etc. Which is also an important distinction between those tropes and the "Didn't Think This Through" — the latter can't be used to underline that a character's actions were unreasonably stupid in the given situation. To use a chess analogy, for an established player to just make a bad move and fail to see consequences it'll lead to would've been an example of the "Didn't Think This Through" trope. And, in contrast, for them to make a mistake that the audience member thinks should've been blatantly obvious and preventable would require a WAI or IB tag instead.

>How do you tell when a character's actions were intentionally dumb? .. Does the narrative need to frame the character as exceptionally unintelligent

Yes, this works. Another example would be for a temporary affected intelligence to some situational factor (e.g. comedic portrayal of falling in love, being under mind control, etc). There can be many other contextually viable cases also, like flawed characters, characters "underspecialised" (e.g. LitRPG Charm / Wisdom stats) in certain "types" of intelligence, etc.

>As What an Idiot! does not allow examples where you would not expect them to make intelligent decisions, how does that not limit it to OOC idiocy (as in-character idiocy is by definition expected) thus making it identical and redundant with Idiot Ball?

And whether it's a WAI or an IB is a matter of how strong / wide statement is being made when adding that trope: if the audience member thinks the character's actions were both idiotic and Oo C (and is prepared to substantiate both of these claims), then it's an IB, from their perspective. And if they're not sure whether it's an usual occurrence for that character to make stupid mistakes like that or not, but they're at least sure that the decision / action by itself was pretty idiotic, then it's a WAI case.

If portrayed in terms of Venn diagrams, the largest circle (A) would be the set of all idiotic decisions made in fictional settings, judged subjectively by an audience member. A smaller circle (B) that's inside (A) would be all the stupid actions / decisions that are NOT made by characters that are intentionally / obviously portrayed by the story-writers as routinely showcasing stupid acts or lines of reasoning, etc (see previous section). And circle (C) that's inside (B) would be stupid actions / decisions made by characters whose backstories (previously displayed behaviour, reasoning, backstory, show-don't-tell intelligence traits, etc) should've been incompatible with the currently stupid decision that they've ended up making. In such a diagram, if the audience member is ready to substantiate a case inside circle (B), then it's a case of WAI, and if they're ready to successfully argue for the action being inside both (B) and (C), then IB would be applicable instead. Finally, if it's difficult to distinguish whether a specific example belongs to (A) or (A-B), then there shouldn't be a problem with playing it safe and just including it in (A) to begin with. With the caveat that if another editor manages to successfully argue that it was, in fact, a case of (A-B), then both tropes get removed as redundant and/or inapplicable).

The "You'd Expect/Instead" format also seems like a good problem-prevention tool

>how does one show or tell "unintentional stupidity" in a work

Making it work the opposite way should be both easier and more effective (see prev. section): that is, "unintentional stupidity" should not be required to validate WAI / IB, and if later on another editor wants to remove an already-added WAI / IB through this line of argumentation, the burden of proof should be on them to successfully argue that the character is an "intentionally stupid" one (in which case IB doesn't apply, WAI becomes redundant and both can be removed).

>and say there was no way the creators didn't realize how dumb it all seemed?

Unless the creators shared their thoughts through an interview or whatnot, being unable to read their minds would make this into a non-starter.

>on requirement for sympathetic/unsympathetic for WAI

Removing the axis of sympathetic/unsympathetic from this trope would clear things up quite a bit, since requirement for audience sympathy (or lack thereof) to validate these tropes adds an entire dimension on which conflicts of opinion will be constantly arising. What matters is whether the decision itself was deemed idiotic or not. Some audience members may still sympathise with the character even despite thinking that their action was rather idiotic, Oo C, etc.

>Idiocy is Worse Than X

Similarly, this would unnecessarily complicate things by adding a new trait axis to the definition. One that is not only also subjective in nature, but also isn't even relevant to the question of whether a certain action was idiotic or not.

>~what is it that separates WAI from more objective Stupidity Tropes? (e.g. "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot, Stating the Simple Solution)

WAI is a trope about a character, while CHAT requires it to be about the plot as well, and St SS seems to be a rather narrow subset of WAI (if not a set of its own). E.g. the described formulaic dialogue / interaction (on St SS' page) has to take place, the moment-of-idiocy should be about ignoring the simpler solution in favour of the more convoluted one, etc. And You Fool! requires for another character to call out the idiot, in a specific manner / context at that.

>It seems redundant with all Stupidity Tropes

I think it's not redundant for at least two reasons: 1) It's easier to learn and know the definition of one single trope, than an entire list of tropes, each of which will be having their own usage nuances, etc. 2) In many cases it is easy to justify the applicability of WAI or IB, but trying to do the same for any of the Stupidity Tropes would quickly land the editor in a quagmire and make them defenseless in their attempts to support their position. I.e. adding WAI / IB is a much weaker statement than addint a more specialised stupidity trope.

>Move/rename to Darth Wiki

Since it seems to ultimately be a subjective judgement (e.g. audience age groups, preferences, etc can vary drastically), I think YMMV should solve a big chunk of the underlying problems.

Hey, welcome to TRS, Door. Your post, while certainly long (I pretty much just had to skim to get the gist of what you were saying, but I think I understand a lot of what you were trying to say) does have some good points made for it.

The sad fact of the matter is that the crowner has already been finalized. Unless of course your arguments sway people into doing a re-vote, which we've had happen before, it's sort of impossible to go back now.

Yea. And while you do seem very passionate about this, the main thing about What An Idiot is that even if it was for specifically stupid moments the character shouldn't have logically made, it was being misused for any and every time a character acted like an idiot (see the copious amounts of What An Idiot potholed to Main/ despite it originally being a YMMV trope), even when the context gave a reason for why the character acted the way they did (for example, I once cleaned up the WhatAnIdiot.Steven Universe page, and most of the examples were "this character was emotional and therefore an idiot", "this character is a child and therefore an idiot", or "this character didn't have all the information and is therefore an idiot despite having no way to obtain that information").

And there actually was a butt-ton of complaining, the short-term cleanup shows that quite well.

Point being, even if this had potential to be used correctly, the misuse was heavily outweighing it.

Edited by Crossover-Enthusiast on Dec 30th 2021 at 5:05:45 AM

That's a neat analysis, but...

1. I don't see any concrete proposals when the "community" has already considered out what would be for the best and the democratic voting is how things work here. If there are objections, it may need another TRS or a new trope made without previous problems, so good luck on that.
2. The previous checkup concluded that the amount of "valid criticism" was less than desired. The options made were specifically to address this, so the valid ones are kept while invalid are rewritten or flushed. It's pretty odd bringing up "censorship" here when the point of this TRS was specifically because poorly-written negativity "harms neutrality" as well.

That said, Door, you do seem very passionate about this subject and you do make some good points. We could use that kind of energy for some of our other struggling tropes. It might be worthwhile to check out some of the other TRS threads that don’t have a crowner yet. People like you who are very passionate about tropes and feel that they have good input on the fixing of them are always welcome in TRS. Just understand that this specific decision has been made.

(Although I will say that the word “censorship” as used here is a bit intense-we’re just trying to fix tropes that attract problems after all.)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Dec 30th 2021 at 5:16:31 AM

Right, yeah, restricting things to Darth Wiki isn't censorship at all. We're still allowing examples to exist and be added, we're just keeping them off normal YMMV pages and moving them to an area where people can be more negative and where the rules are a lot looser.

Wicks now at 7900.

If the website's business model works on outsourcing the moderation work to volunteers, and the number of moderators increases disproportionally slow compared to website's popularity and active userbase, then it will lead to more frequent cases of censoring controversial tropes over time. Because otherwise those volunteers will simply be unable to keep up with the gradually increasing dispute resolution work.

And in case of TVT I think it is censorship, because you are effectively removing some valid tropes and putting them in much less visible areas of the website, not to mention prefacing them with a disclaimer that they are somehow "Darker and Edgier; the inverse of the wiki's mission; Misinformation and entertaining lies; cynical; etc".

Well, if the voting has already been decided then all this doesn't matter much anyway. So to avoid veering off into offtopic I'd just like to thank y'all for the work you're doing for TVT as a project and stop there.

Also, Happy New Year to you!

Nothing is being "outsourced" to volunteers. TRS isn't a process that excludes non-mods—anyone can participate in TRS. I only started participating in 2020.

That said, if you don't want to participate, that's fine too. Happy New Year's to you as well.

Censorship isn't putting stuff in the more obscure sections of a website, given that Darth Wiki is just as accessible as any other part of TV Tropes.

Nobody is forced to participate in the TRS. Anyone with a TV Tropes account can participate in it (excluding those who are blocked or banned). I too started participating very recently.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Dec 31st 2021 at 1:52:23 PM

How do we deal with What An Idiot moments that don't actually cause any problems?

Case in point comes from Squid Game - Sang-woo lets his teammates take complex shapes for the honeycomb challenge, knowing full well that their failure to complete the shapes will get them killed. This doesn't happen, but it could have easily gone wrong. If they had died, he would have had fewer allies to help him survive later rounds.

This is the entry in question:

• In episode three, Sang-woo realizes what game they're about to play, and that Gi-hun and Player 001 are almost certainly heading to their deaths.
  You'd expect: He warns them to choose the triangle, so that he won't lose his two closest allies in the second game out of six.
  Instead: He lets them choose difficult shapes, knowing that the penalty for losing is death.
  As a result: They both survive by the skin of their teeth with mere seconds to spare. Things worked out for him this time, but he almost sacrificed two people he would need to survive later rounds.

If nothing goes wrong, I see no reason to complain about it.

Flame Bait items can be included in trope descriptions, right?

They're not supposed to be listed anywhere on the main wiki, so I assumed "no".