Misused: Ambiguous Situation

To-do list:

The following changes have been made to Ambiguous Situation:

• Turn into a Super-Trope to several other "Ambiguous" and "Unclear" tropes that better fit the current use, similar to what TRS previously did with Hate Sink, requiring examples to be moved to subtropes that fit
• Set a requirement for the work to imply that the situation may or may not have happened (or other possibilities), with some degree of In-Universe merit for either.

Thus, the following need to be done:

• Update the description of Ambiguous Situation to match the revised definition.
• Clean any wicks that don't fit.

Ambiguous Situation is a trope existing since 2010 which has gained inflationary use in the last couple of years (see chart).

This trajectory can be explained by a decay of its original meaning over time into something broader and fuzzier.

The definition started out as: A trope is in play but it's not made clear which one. The narrative purpose is most likely to induce a sense of mystery. It required the examples to spell out which alternative tropes a situation is playing with. Obviously this limited its use.

The definition successively loosened up, the original requirement to have alternative tropes in play was dropped and now we have: A scene is open to alternative interpretations. The transformation was completed two weeks ago when a troper changed the Laconic from the original to the new definition after I opened a discussion on Trope Talk.

Let me get this straight, I don't like the trope in either old or new form for the following reasons:

1. it has a strong subjective component, not everyone brings the same level of expectations to a scene
2. the fact that a work has limitations and simply cannot spell out everything in every scene even if it wanted to
3. unintentionally sloppy storytelling can be mistaken for this trope

But it's really the current definition that opens itself up to all kinds of speculations and trivialities beyond any actual situation or moment.

---

Wick Check notes:

• 75 examples were checked
• Of the 5,724 listings of the trope almost half of them appear on character sheets although one would assume this to be a plot trope.
• 24% of the examples are potholes for speculative comments or things like "maybe" or "possibly".
• This is one of the tropes you better experience rather than read it up. Hence, my categorization is subjective. And also not mutually exclusive.
• It was not apparent from the examples if the mentioned ambiguity was noteworthy, meaning if it had any impact on the experience of the scene.

Results:

• 5% comply with a loose take of the original definition, meaning "a trope is at play or maybe it's not"
• 20% cover situations where a plot point is unclear while a scene plays out
• 24% describe unclear character motivations (it's unclear why X did this)
• 13% describe uncertainty about a character's identity independent of any scene
• 17% describe unclear aspects from a character's past or things that might or might not have happened off-screen
• 12% were other tropes, mainly Uncertain Doom or Ambiguous Ending
• 9% I could not make sense of

I struggle to come up with a proposal here. If it was up to me, I would trash this because of my complaints listed above.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 28th 2022 at 8:10:54 AM

Yeah, we've got a mess here. I'm leaning toward disambiguating because I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to be (the description is a mess and seems to be describing both objective and subjective aspects), so I suppose you could say we have an ambiguous situation on our hands.

If tropers want to talk about things in works they aren't sure about, we have Headscratchers, Fridge Logic, and Wild Mass Guessing subpages for that.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 8:56:46 AM

I thought this trope was for when there's multiple in-universe explanations for a particular incident and the story never confirms which one is true. e.g. a character dies, apparently of accident; the possibility that it's suicide or murder is brought up but the true cause of death is never really confirmed.

Edited by Adept on May 18th 2022 at 10:08:10 PM

I thought this was the case as well, and it seemed to make sense for me. If it's something that definitely happened in a story, but no given cause actually exists for it in-universe, that seems like something tropeworthy.

So long as the entries don't get too speculatory, I think it's possible to salvage this trope without disambiguating it.

Edited by MatthewWayne on May 18th 2022 at 7:18:07 AM

If it's to be salvaged, it should probably have a clearer name. This sounds very broad. If not, disambiguate.

&Those things sound like they could be taken to TLP or the Salvage Yard. Multiple in-universe explanations is tropeworthy, but this is apparently about multiple explanations in general, regardless of whether they're in-universe.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 9:37:33 AM

As has been proven time and time again tropers can't tell the difference between intentional ambiguity, Implied Trope, and Speculative Troping, so I don't want to leave this as is.

I agree one way to salvage it is to make it IUEO, ie. one character posits a situation with different possible explanations, but that might be more trouble than it's worth without a rename.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 18th 2022 at 9:38:00 AM

I could get behind a possible rename and IUEO.

Side note, but this is one of those tropes I see a lot in character pages even though I am not sure it counts as a character trope. Is there a cleanup thread for that?

I'm not quite advocating for IUEO. I'm just saying that if something strange or unexplained happens in a story that isn't explained in the story, that seems like something that can be salvaged.

Making it IUEO would severely limit how the trope can be used imo, since it would hinge on a character saying something among the lines of "WHAT A STRANGE SITUATION THIS IS, HOW DID THIS POSSIBLY HAPPEN", in order to set this trope up, which is a pretty situational scenario in my experience.

What would making this IUEO entail? IUEO means the trope would be restricted to character reactions instead of Audience Reactions, but what would the reaction(s) be in this case?

Edit: And ninja'd by someone else who was questioning the IUEO proposal.

Edit: Also, do we even have enough examples that involve in-universe reactions? As I've said several times in the past, we can't make something IUEO unless there are enough in-universe examples to make it work.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 10:04:51 AM

Hence my 'more trouble than it's worth' comment. But a character positing a question/situation that never gets resolved is the only way I can see the concept (not the current usage) working.

A recent example from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: The hero Doctor Strange suggests that his rival set him up, and we know that the rival is morally ambiguous, but whether or not said rival actually did it is left unanswered.

That kinda thing.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 18th 2022 at 10:17:09 AM

I'll counter that with the usage of the trope in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Bruce Banner suddenly being human in The Stinger isn't explicitly commented on in-universe, but it's clear that something happened to make him that way, even if we don't know what. By making this IUEO, we would lose an example like this.

We don't need to explicitly comment on what could've happened that resulted in his new appearance, since it would be pretty speculative, but we can at least acknowledge that this unusual thing happened within the context of what's going on.

Edited by MatthewWayne on May 18th 2022 at 8:29:47 AM

I would actually be more than happy to lose the Banner example because like I said tropers suck at distinguishing intentional ambiguity from speculation from "well that will probably be explained in a future installment like say the She-Hulk show that just started its marketing rollout". Keeping it restricted to something brought up in-universe stops it from spiraling like it already has.

That is assuming we don't toss the entire thing, which I'm also fine with.

We still might not have enough examples to actually qualify this for IUEO though. That Multiverse of Madness example might work, but I can't think of any other moments like that off the top of my head.

I'd prefer to not disambiguate/cut any tropes if possible, but if push comes to shove, I will put some heartfelt flowers on this one's grave.

That sounds like "anything the audience doesn't know" is fair game, which speculative troping. In the mid-credits scene of Movie, X happens, which could mean Y, or Z, or even AA. Having someone wonder in-universe would eliminate such entries.

Edited by Tabs on May 18th 2022 at 8:43:16 AM

yeah im much more in favor of tossing the entire thing since even the ideas being brought up don't seem to have much backing by the current examples anyway

None of the 75 checked examples acknowledged the ambiguity in-universe.

In that case, I'm now even more in favor of disambiguating. The proposed IUEO trope can be Yarded since we can't rework this into it.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 11:23:50 AM

So if this is cut or made IUEO, where would this leave the "deliberate ambiguity" examples? Psychological Horror often use this in order to play up the Mind Screw and Nothing Is Scarier factor.

An example I recently came across is His Face All Red. The protagonist murders his brother, and the brother comes back a few days later as if nothing happened. The protagonist then decides to check the hole where he had hid his brother's body, and finds the murdered corpse still inside. The corpse then turns around before the story ends. The story itself never attempts to explain what happened, not even a hint or suggestion.

Edited by Adept on May 18th 2022 at 11:37:17 PM

Are there any examples like that in the wick check? And if it's an ending, isn't that a Cliffhanger?

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 11:54:06 AM

I think "deliberate ambiguity" is too loose to be its own trope without some more qualifications. Trope Decay will set in fast.

I agree, plus we may need Word of God confirmation to know whether it's deliberate unless there's some other way to know, as opposed to allowing Death of the Author.

And according to the opening post, Trope Decay is the reason why Ambiguous Situation ended up being such a mess to begin with (or more of a mess, depending on what examples looked like before the definition change).

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 18th 2022 at 12:01:59 PM

I'd like to point that we have a long list of Ambigious X tropes that may or may not do a better job of dealing with ambiguous information in a work. Can they teach us something relevant to this discussion?

• Ambiguous Clone Ending
• Ambiguous Criminal History
• Ambiguous Disorder
• Ambiguous Ending
• Ambiguous Gender
• Ambiguous Gender Identity
• Ambiguous Innocence
• Ambiguous Robots
• Ambiguous Syntax
• Ambiguous Time Period
• Ambiguously Absent Parent
• Ambiguously Bi
• Ambiguously Brown
• Ambiguously Christian
• Ambiguously Evil
• Ambiguously Gay
• Ambiguously Human
• Ambiguously Jewish
• Ambiguously Related
• Ambiguously Trained

(Nice chart)

Yard "The story suggests more than one version of the event could have happened and supports either (like Never Found the Body or Or Was It a Dream?)".

This can be redirected to This Might Be an Index, as tropers basically put Ambiguous Situation as a catch-all "there's some plot trope but I'm not looking up which one", I believe most uses would be covered by one of these.

Edited by Amonimus on May 18th 2022 at 9:05:51 PM

Yeah, let's redirect to This Might Be an Index instead of disambiguating.