(she/her)
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
Paging ~Tropers/number9robotic since the ping didn't work
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the Retromancer
This sounds like YMMV, but first wick check showing more than half of them supposedly overlapping with Harsher in Hindsight, Clueless Aesop and Overshadowed by Controversy bothers me.
Edited by Amonimus on May 7th 2022 at 8:03:02 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
Professional Wick Checker
Should we disambiguate between the aforementioned tropes?
![[tup]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png "[thumb up]"){kind=small}
moving to YMMV at least
The overlap section... aside from the ZCE folder, that's 100% of examples that overlap with other articles, right? Since they also fit other things, nothing is uniquely Undermined By Reality?
Ah good morning to the folks who pinged me! I just got up haha
I do think there might be a place for Undermined By Reality if you think of it as maybe a Doylist/meta- version of Broken Aesop — rather than the work itself messing up its own moral message, it's directly about something out of circumstance affecting it.
I don't believe all the cases of overlap between Aesop tropes in my first wick check are strictly wrong for this kind of thing, beyond the sense of trying to moralize things and in some cases take it kind of personally. For example, I think the Kung Fu entry would be a reasonable application: Much of the show deals with the folly of racism and the importance of the wisdom of the east, which gets undermined a fair bit by the fact that the producers went the Yellowface route when choosing their lead star and cast the lily-white David Carradine, who did not actually know martial arts, as a supposedly half-Chinese martial arts expert.
However, I do still see 2 problems, the first being that this would end up meaning that Broken Aesop should also be looked at as a YMMV trope as well, which I also believe it should (and kinda glazed over above), alongside Lost Aesop and Clueless Aesop. They end up falling into the same issues of being based around analysis and judgement calls that make more sense for YMMV than main page stuff, and that may need a lot of additional TRS work on its own, just so that a YMMV-placed Undermined By Reality doesn't just come across like "Broken Aesop but now there's more room to complain about IRL stuff".
The second is relevant to the second wick check, in that there is still the concern of like, "where does it stop?" I was pretty bothered by the degree that most of the UBR examples cite things that tend to be tangential at best to the actual controversial aspects of a given work, but I'm not sure if there really can be a limit placed. Maybe it would require some kind of citation of reputable sources making the connection like Unfortunate Implications? I dunno what sounds too draconian or too lenient as creating avenues for complaining, would really wanna know what yall think of these.
Thanks for playing King's Quest V!
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
I'm honestly in favor of disambiguating. Other, IMO clearer tropes already cover this concept. I don't think a YMMV move alone will solve the problem.
I also noticed that this trope is somewhat similar to Moral Dissonance, which was about a character's moral code not aligning with their actions (similar to this trope where the message of the work is undermined by the real world person's behavior), and that trope got disambiguated due to overlapping with other tropes. Furthermore Undermined By Reality may simply be too subjective to keep as a legitimate Audience Reaction IMO.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 7th 2022 at 1:17:30 PM
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Oh yes, I'm also in favor for disambiguation :D
Thanks for playing King's Quest V!
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Then count me as being in favor of disambiguating.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
How sweet it is
Another vote to disambiguate.
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Showtime!
to Disambig
RJ Savoy
I would like to avoid disambiguating, largely because the examples would have to move to Harsher in Hindsight, which is itself a constant source of trouble as to what qualifies. But I can see the problem that it is ill-defined. I would prefer if we could set down guidelines for what qualifies. It is in principle a narrow concept, while the Hindsights are catch-alls.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
Professional Wick Checker
Only 12 examples fall into the Harsher in Hindsight, though. Also, consider that we might delete an example if it doesn't fit any of the disambiguated tropes
That said, by setting down guidelines you mean like we did for Unfortunate Implications?
RJ Savoy
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
With UI, the big change was to require reputable citations. I don't think we can that here, because it's less often talked about by critics. I would think something closer to how we run Complete Monster, with particular conditions that must be met, like:
- The "undermining" act must be done by the same people, or as part of the production. Not the same company, as they are large organisations with no moral or artistic intentions.
- The contradiction between the two must be direct, not tangential. And this requires the work to take a clear stance on the matter.
- The act must be indefensible, in the sense that a case cannot be made for its defense (to avoid things like the aforementioned "he is against student loan relief").
It would require a dedicated cleanup thread, but I'd like to see this considered.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
No longer active.
Speaking from experience, Undermined By Reality seems like the kind of trope that can attract gossiping about scandals, even ones that fizzled out too quickly to count as Overshadowed by Controversy. Case in point, during the height of my drama-importation phase (an era that I heavily regret), there was a brief period of time where I was obsessively troping about a mangaka's seldom-remembered scandal back in the summer of 2020. When I cleaned up all that a year later, I removed a point on Undermined By Reality that I'd added, only for another user to add it back months later.
Edited by bowserbros on May 7th 2022 at 3:53:43 AM
Be kind.
Bonnie's Artistic Cousin
Complete Monster's thread only works because of how large it is. We don't want to make EP threads for every trope that has an issue, because it's been proven that the only ones that do it properly are CM and MB. Because it's the same crowd for both, and a large crowd at that.
This trope kind of struck me as Broken Aesop (a trope that already suffers from complaining) applied to Real Life. To me, most legitimate examples of this trope fall under Harsher in Hindsight.
Showtime!
There's also the fact that a trope that has to be locked/go through the locked pages thread causes a lot of work for the mods, which is why I've heard there aren't supposed to be other EP tropes.
I don't like the idea of nixing this in any capacity. It's my understanding that the page was created to catch misuse of Broken Aesop (which applies solely to in-universe actions/depictions). If we get rid of this, that misuse will likely flare up again.
HoMM Fan
Except that all that's happening is that this page of full of rot and misuses itself.
I'm not denying Broken Aesop may have misuse problems, but that doesn't mean we need this ill defined and overlapping mess kept around.
"Grandmaster Combat, son!"
Might this be worth splitting?
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
Splitting into what?
Professional Wick Checker
So far we've 2 options: disambiguation and setting strict guidelines. And now there's splitting as well?
the Retromancer
I'd say disregard splitting until that's elaborated.
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
Crown Description:
What should be done with Undermined By Reality?
NOTE: The following OP was made by ~Tropers/number9robotic so please give credit to them for it.
First and foremost, I believe Undermined By Reality is presently the wrong type of trope. It's currently listed as Trivia, but I believe it fits more as being YMMV as it's not exactly providing an objective trivia fact, but rather illustrating a disconnect based around analyzing the moral of any given work (a subjective issue) and whether or not out-of-text circumstances "undermine" them (also a subjective issue). It's fundamentally built on value judgements, and while it was originally suggested to be moved to Trivia
In terms of the matters being covered, many entries tend to fall somewhere between Harsher in Hindsight (or possibly Hilarious in Hindsight) and Overshadowed by Controversy, as well as the Broken Aesop/Lost Aesop/Clueless Aesop trifecta, which are also due for repairs as they have similar conflicts of subjectivity. While I don't think Undermined By Reality is a necessarily invalid trope, it may need some extensive rewriting as not only does it tend to functionally repeat those tropes, it's also a magnet of bad-faith complaining over matters that sound scandalous, but may or may not be strictly relevant to the work, its narrative, and its aesops/morals.
Did two wick checks linked here, the first to evaluate whether the entries were overlapping with other tropes. Bear in mind, several of these entries blend into each other, and were largely quantified from how the entries themselves were written:
The second wick check (using the same sample group as above) was to see how how the entries describe certain real-world acts/scandals/controversies and how the work was "undermined".
In terms of the functional purpose of a trope, Undermined By Reality reminds me quite a bit of Offending the Creator's Own, which similarly touches on controversy but tends to be less of a bad-faith magnet and generally comes off as neutral, partly because it requires some knowledge of the context of both sides. I don't know if there's a way to entirely fool-proof this trope so it avoids being inflammatory, but it definitely needs attention as it tends to carry a lot of the unconstructive "Hey did you know John Lennon actually beat his wife?
" vibes. At the very least, it should be shifted over to YMMV.
Wick Check 1
Wick check 2
Edited by MacronNotes on May 15th 2022 at 6:56:19 AM
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