Misused: Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley isn't "wrongness", it's a specific type of wrongness based on the border between real and fake. The character looks inhuman... but he doesn't look simultaneously realistic and fake. Ergo, it's not Uncanny Valley.

Sorry if I sound annoyed, but the amount of times I've been called out for removing things that are in fact misuse is starting to really drive me up the wall.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 10th 2022 at 12:07:10 PM

I'm fairly sure Cerebus' normal art is too stylised to be almost-but-not-quite-realistic.

It really does suck that we don't have a trope that covers the whole "there's just something off about them" thing because that's a lot of the misuse, and it's also what everyone seems to think this trope is, and it's like...

I do honestly have to sit and think about a lot of them before I cut, and some of them do boil down to a judgement call, but if the example doesn't describe the character as falling into that "realistic but fake" gray area, then most likely it's misuse. In Cerebus, the example was about the character having three toes and being drawn to look creepy... which, yeah, means they're inhuman and unsettling but it doesn't mean they trigger the Uncanny Valley.

I kind of want to bring "making a character creepier by breaking the art style of the rest of the work" to TLP, but the first name that comes to mind is Creepily Off Model so maybe TRS should deal with Off-Model first.

I have Off-Model in the queue right now, actually.

I noticed. XD (I thought it had already gone through for some reason but couldn't find the thread in the Morgue, then realised it was still on the queue.)

Did anyone ever made a wick-cleaning sandbox since not every wick is being removed? I could have sworn there was one, particularly because I usually make one for threads that don't involve removing/moving everything (though sometimes the sandboxes end up going unused), but I must have been thinking of another thread because I can't find one.

Edit: OK, so Uncanny Valley Wick Cleanup exists; I just didn't add it to the header. I'll fix that.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 11th 2022 at 3:41:35 AM

x 5 - Okay, I see what you're getting at, and in thinking about it, what's going on with that character isn't Uncanny Valley so much as his presence causing weird but very subtle distortions in the room around him.

Yeah, it's why I do wish we had something for the "subtly off in a creepy way" concept but IDK if it'd pass through the TLP since I have no idea how it could even be described or titled.

Meanwhile, I may need to change my edit reason, because I got messaged again by someone telling me my deletion reason wasn't valid. I do mention ZCE and misuse, but if people don't understand what counts as misuse, then I might have no choice but to be more detailed.

Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 11th 2022 at 6:33:42 AM

Do you link to the TRS thread in your edit reasons? I almost always do that (the exceptions being that sometimes I'll instead say "Renamed trope" or "This was moved to Trivia/YMMV, so moving it to the Trivia/YMMV page" without linking to the thread in the cases of renames or moving out of Main) and at most I've been asked if an example can be moved somewhere else if the person PMing me has an idea of another place to put it.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 11th 2022 at 9:41:16 AM

My edit reason is:

"Uncanny Valley is IUEO now and the subjective version has been split; cleaning up misuse and ZCE in the process"

So while I don't link directly to the TRS, that's not related to the issue I have, which is that people keep accusing me of malpractice, because they don't understand that the trope being IUEO doesn't mean every "invoked" example is actually valid. I'm not sure what linking back here would actually accomplish, since so far everyone's issue has been that I've cut things labeled "in-universe" while those people don't look deeper into the trope to see what the actual definition is.

I don't see anything wrong with that edit reason. It seems like people just aren't grasping the part about removing misuse. (I'm guessing it's matter of people misunderstanding the definition of "uncanny valley" even despite it being a preexisting term, and not bothering to read the description to double-check the definition.)

Kind of reminds me of when I was nearing the end of dewicking Contemptible Cover and one wick was put back on the grounds that it was an "in-universe example" despite the fact what it was claimed to be an "in-universe example" of was no longer a trope at all (not to mention it wasn't YMMV even before the merge), but a redirect to Covers Always Lie (which I tried explaining, with little success).

Edit: And yes, this "in-universe example" was the sort of "bad cover" misuse that the TRS thread was made to tackle before it was determined that the actual definition had nothing setting it apart from Covers Always Lie and Sexy Packaging.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 11th 2022 at 12:56:10 PM

I just wanted to ask about the removal of Penny from Characters.RWBY The Heroes (but it hasn't been removed from the trope page). Now, before War Jay thinks this another case of confusing the trope with "wrongness", I believe — as written — it was correct to remove the entry. My question is about whether there's a salvageable rewrite possible. That requires me figuring out the boundary between "intentionally narratively unsettling" and "intentionally narratively weird".

Penny is a Robot Girl with a living soul, who is introduced in a freaky way. She's accidentally knocked over on the street and starts talking to them while still lying down. She doesn't get up until she's asked if she wants to get up, which she does (with a combat flip). She has a strange way of talking, repeats certain things, and generally comes across as spaced out and not quite with it. Ruby goes along with it in an awkward attempt to be polite, while the rest of her team clearly want to get away from the conversation as fast as possible. Penny latches onto to certain things in a strange way (such as Ruby calling her "friend" to be polite, Penny taking it literally and becoming clingy to the group ever after because she's so thrilled to have a friend), and the second time they all meet, Ruby's team does ditch Ruby and Penny.

When Penny fights she has this strange way of moving and interacting with her opponents that make her look like a marionette (as a Robot Girl, she's another Pinocchio reference, and she controls her weapons through barely visible wires). Although Penny isn't revealed to be a Robot Girl until early Volume 2 (where some of her weirder traits end in favour of her starting to behave more naturally human), the weird way she was behaving did have the fandom realising she was a Robot Girl in her very first Volume 1 scene. Everyone thinks Penny is weird, but you could argue that the heroes being weirded out isn't necessarily the same thing as being unsettled, which is why I'm asking this question.

The entry that was removed is about the above but is not written in a good way for the trope. Below are two examples that I'm including because it's possible they might enter into the trope territory far more than what I've described above, so I'm including them for sake of completion, given that I'm asking about whether Penny might be a salvageable example:

In the Volume 3 climax, she's accidentally ripped to shreds in the tournament, so the entire world can see an adorable "dead" girl, who is filled with robot parts instead of blood, muscle and bone. To create mistrust and paranoia, The Heavy deliberately invokes the idea of a robotic killing machine designed to look like an "innocent little girl" for the purpose of infiltrating other kingdoms.

There is also a scene in Volume 8 where Penny is magically transformed into a real girl by separating her soul from her robotic body. When she first regains consciousness after the transformation, there's a Pinocchio callback where she sees her old robot body next to her, and is quietly (body language only) freaked by its appearance: the robot body reaches for Penny while moving in increasingly unnatural and jerky motions as it collapses to the ground, tries to drag itself towards Penny while still reaching out and then "dies" (her body was irreversibly hacked by one of the villains). It's the first time Penny's very human-looking body is ever portrayed as pure, unliving technology to highlight that it no longer has a living soul and really is just a piece of dysfunctional equipment now.

There is another entry on the trope page for this work, but I think that particular entry will be an example of Creepily Off Model, if that trope eventually gets made.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Dec 10th 2022 at 3:21:19 AM

Look, I could only go by the text itself, and the text just talked about her having weird, wrong mannerisms. If she counts, then it would need to be rewritten from scratch. You and I agree on that part, and given the details I think it could be salvaged however I could honestly go either way. Alternatively, it could be a deconstruction of Ridiculously Human Robot, assuming she's not already troped as such.

The example remains on the trope page because I don't check for crosswicks when cleaning.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 10th 2022 at 1:57:05 PM

Hm. Not sure myself. I've removed her from the trope page (and the other example, too). Penny can always be added back at a later date if someone comes up with a decent rewrite that fits the proper trope.

Whew. Characters/ is done.

Small update. All that's left is the A's and Main/.

Honestly the reason I haven't been able to pitch in on this one so much is that I open a couple wicks and am promptly confused as to whether or not its usage is correct. Uncanny Valleyhood, I know thee not.

It basically boils down to "so realistic but so fake that it freaks out your brain". Think clowns, robots, bad CGI humanoid cats, bad CGI blue hedgehogs, and realistic-looking animatronics at a pizza joint.

Anyway, it's cool if it's confusing to you, I understand. It's not that much left anyway and at the pace I'm going it shouldn't take too much longer to wrap up the wick cleanup.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 21st 2022 at 8:25:35 AM

Great job.

(tfw I prioritize working in wikitalk maintenence and miss a planned work here.)

No worries ^^

I don't mind tackling large projects on my own because it feels more rewarding when it's done.

YMMV.Mortal Kombat 11

• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • In an intentional case, Geras is practically a walking Uncanny Valley, between having some part of his flesh held together with metal while others having perfect cracks in between, his voice being artificial sounding yet emotional, and coming back to life by unwinding himself perfectly, he is one of the most unsettling characters in the franchise.
  • Frost invokes this, being a Cyborg who looks generally human enough that the specific ways her body moves, twists, turns, and separates will make you constantly go "HER BODY SHOULD NOT DO THAT". Her Friendship, in which, after skating on ice for a while, she starts spinning her entire body while her head is completely still makes her look surprisingly creepy.

• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: In designing and animating the E.M.M.I., the developers have somehow managed to apply this trope to non-humanoid robots. An E.M.M.I. essentially has a head, a "torso", and four long limbs, so you'd expect it to move more-or-less like an animal, right? Wrong. That thing bends its limbs and "spine" in all the wrong directions, performing unpredictable and anatomically impossible feats that even on a robot look just plain wrong. It looks less like what you'd expect of a robot and more like an unearthly Mechanical Abomination, making a foe that's already frightening enough in gameplay alone even scarier. Unlike most examples of Uncanny Valley, however, this one works in the E.M.M.I.s' favor, emphasizing how unnatural and dangerous they are.

ATT said that per this thread's decision intentional (or likely intentional) examples should be non-YMMV and go under regular Uncanny Valley. But it said that it should be taken here for discussion. Looking over the moved deliberate examples I believe these count but am asking to be sure. "Dread" I have questions about the threshold for judging it intentional (the E.M.M.I. were designed to be horrifying so it seems it would be the case here).

Like I said at ATT, those should be fine to move, I might've just had a brain fart when editing the YMMV pages.

Question:

These entries were added to the Uncanny Valley page about a week ago. I haven't been closely following this project so I'm not wholly familiar with the ins and outs of the current definition, but these don't really strike me as matching the "in-universe examples only" clause:

EDIT: Actually, looking through the edit history some more, the page seems to have been very heavily edit by a single troper over the past month or so who has added a lot of entries that really don't seem to be meant as in-universe examples.

Like, for example:

They've also added a lot of already-commented-out ZCEs, which I'm fairly sure we aren't supposed to do.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Jan 30th 2023 at 1:08:08 PM

I think it's IUEO and Intended Audience Reaction examples. Idk if either of those actually count, but...