So Bad It's Horrible and So Bad It's Good: Can They Overlap?

This is a debate that's been happening multiple times on the SBIH cleanup thread and has since been carried over to this TLP thread. The basic question is... Can So Bad, It's Horrible and So Bad, It's Good overlap? As in, can a work be considered both at the same time?

I have my own arguments about this, people who've seen me debate it on the cleanup thread will probably know my stance, but for now I just want to get this OP out of the way... and try making it as neutral as possible.

• So on one hand, SBIH and SBIG are still subjective concepts at the end of the day. There'll never be a SBIH entry that doesn't have at least one fan left unaccounted for, and that fan might find the work to be SBIG. A work might be SBIH for certain issues, but SBIG if those issues become appreciated by an audience.
• On the other hand, SBIH has some pretty strict rules. One of those rules is that all works have to fail to find an audience, even in a niche. Technically speaking, this rule means that ironic audiences should disqualify a work entirely, but we have made some rare exceptions before for things people only like for ideological reasons (like certain Neo-Nazi works). Whether or not we should make exceptions at all has also been a subject of debate, of course, so it's not something we can rely on to allow SBIG overlap to exist.

So, let's finally figure this out.

I personally feel, were I defining them, they would be separate.

So Bad, It's Good is IMO in its own category—while the work is awful, it's awful in a specific way that can still be enjoyed. Even if its atrocious, at least the audience can laugh at its failures.

So Bad, It's Horrible, meanwhile, is IMO a work that cannot be enjoyed, even as a joke. It's a work that is actually hard to watch because of how bad it is. At least a So Bad, It's Good work can be watched, even if only as a joke. A So Bad, It's Horrible work is painful to watch and fails to entertain in any way.

That's just my thoughts though.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 17th 2022 at 5:43:01 AM

I'd agree with that, yeah. I've always thought that the overlap broke the rules. It's never made any sense to me that a work could be both. If it has an audience that enjoy it, even ironically, it should be disqualified IMO.

I also think they should be separate. The purpose of SBIG is for works that are not good, but fun to watch; the purpose of SBIH is for works that are neither.

Count me as someone who would prefer the two to be mutually exclusive.

The idea behind So Bad Its Horrible is that there is no fanbase for a work. If significant group of people like a work, even if they "like it ironically", I would consider that a fanbase.

My current stance is that they are separate after I finally stopped spinning myself in a circle over how they work.

I really can't say what to do for the rare cases of overlapping at the moment.

Edited by INever on May 17th 2022 at 3:39:33 AM

In my opinion, the big thing that can make the difference between something being laughably bad and infuriatingly bad is whether or not you paid for it.

If you pirate Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing or are watching a video of someone else playing, you can have a laugh at the sheer amount of Game Breaking Bugs it contains which led you drive backwards at the speed of light, go through walls, and out into the infinite void while your opponent crawls forward slowly and stops short of the finish line.

But if you actually paid for it, you wouldn't find it funny, you'd be disgusted at the thought that someone decided to release this pre-alpha mess into stores and charge for it.

IDK, if you pay for it knowing what Big Rigs is and play it specifically to laugh at it, then you won't really be angry, would you?

And plenty of people pay to go to SBIG movies and the like all the time, so I don't really think that's the difference. Or at least, it's not as simple as "bought it / didn't buy it".

SBIG works are the ones people seek out because they're so atrocious. SBIH works are the ones people either feel dirty for having witnessed in any form, or hear about and avoid.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 17th 2022 at 7:44:02 AM

The justification I see for SBIG and SBIH only makes sense to me in terms of interactive media, i.e. video games. It might be enjoyable if you go in and try to exploit the game's bugs, but if you try to play it straight, you won't have a good time at all.

Yes, some works are SBIG in a way where the laugh is worth the price. And some are only funny when experienced for free.

Nowadays, almost everyone knows that Big Rigs is the worst game ever made, so the scenario I gave is unlikely to happen. But for it to get that reputation, there has to have been some people who got fooled, and I don't think they'd find it funny.

I mean, opinions can change. We don't need to pretend that all audience reactions are fixed- a work can start out considered SBIH and morph into SBIG as people come back to laugh at it. And I don't think the initial "this sucks" phase is enough to completely doom these works to SBIH if history has declared it as something else.

Also, just because people know a product's gonna be bad doesn't mean it's gonna be SBIG. Like The Emoji Movie, people were hoping it was gonna be an entertaining trainwreck during the marketing campaign... but the general consensus is that the movie was just annoyingly bland and poorly-written, with little that was amusing even from a "this is so bad" perspective.

That too. A lot really depends on the discourse after the dust settles. Do people want to come back to it for the wrong reasons, even if they initially hated it, or do they want to forget about it entirely?

I will defend Big Rigs as being both to the maximum extent I can. As yes, it is hilarious to watch in action and/or play if pirated due being so unfinished that Obvious Beta is too generous a descriptor. However, it's still very offensive to me that any company thought that the game was acceptable to release in that state for money and the fun content is so limited that a player would run out of ways to squeeze out enjoyment from it after a few hours.

Furthermore, part of why the game became so infamous was that games that are that level of unfinished and somehow still released were an extreme rarity and even novelty in 2004 when the Gamespot Review came out and propelled the game to internet infamy. Hundreds of similarly unfinished games with even less content have been released on Steam and nobody pays any attention to them.

That said, Big Rigs is an exceptional case that comes up in these overlap discussions almost without fail for a reason, and I do generally agree that the two tropes are best treated as separate. I'd say Big Rigs, along with any other examples that could possibly be agreed upon, would be best served with an exceptions list and all other works not on that aren't allowed to be listed as both by default.

Edited by DDRMASTERM on May 17th 2022 at 7:33:35 AM

I think the distinction (and possible overlap) between SBIG and SBIH is like Narm and Narm Charm. A dramatic moment becomes cheesy and cringe-worthy because of poor execution, but in the latter can still like the scene for its unintentional comedy, while the former just finds the scene bad because it just drains all the tension it's aiming for. Both SBIG and Narm Charm has people like the work/scene, but with the caveat that they still acknowledge it's bad. If people find a Narmy scene unironically dramatic don't count as Narm Charm, and likewise someone who unironically like a bad movie won't make it SBIG.

That being said, if there's a sizable part of the audience who think a work is SBIG, it doesn't have to be listed as SBIH, since SBIG tends to be about niche audience reactions anyway, and for the majority of the audience, the work might qualify as SBIH better.

YMMV tropes by their nature are not going to be universally accepted, and even beyond that various concepts will change over time. Either there is a revaluation of the work a couple years later or an ongoing storyline pays off on things that were originally criticized. It's why the same character can be both The Scrappy and Rescued from the Scrappy Heap.

Actually, since Rescued is a subtrope of The Scrappy, none of them should be listed as both...

The idea behind Rescued from the Scrappy Heap is that a character was once viewed as The Scrappy, but now isn't. So I don't see the contradiction in a character being both. Regarding opinions changing, I think it is possible for something to be seen as SBIH, but then be seen as SBIG later on. I don't think a work can be both at the same time, simply because SBIG implies that there is a fanbase for it.

Edited by RustBeard on May 17th 2022 at 8:34:01 AM

Hunt Down the Freeman is also on both tropes

Rescued from the Scrappy Heap already implies the character was The Scrappy and requires context on that front, so you don't need a separate entry for The Scrappy. That's what she means.

That, and if a character was rescued they aren't currently a scrappy, so listing both is just redundant even without the subtrope/supertrope issue.

Well, yes, that's what subtropes mean. An example of a subtrope would by default be an example of the the super-trope, but there's no need to list the super-trope if the character if a more specific subtrope qualifies.

ETA 'd

Edited by Adept on May 17th 2022 at 11:33:13 PM

At first glance it seems like a straightforward "No they can't", but I can think of a few examples that legitimately might fit both.

Hunt Down the Freeman was brought up and I would have a hard time only putting it under one. It's got a So Bad, It's Good storyline with comical voice acting and bizarre casting choices, but they're sandwiched between So Bad, It's Horrible levels that aren't remotely funny and are Grade A examples of how not to design levels. So while there are a lot of entertainingly bad moments, they're placed between painfully bad moments.

The western animation subpage says that So Bad, It's Horrible doesn't apply to episodes or seasons. So I'm gonna interpret that the trope only applies to entire works, not just moments inside a work.

...But why doesn't this requirement exist for the videogames subpage when games can be split into not only levels, but entire DLC packs?

Edited by INever on May 17th 2022 at 11:01:02 AM