Acceptable Targets Discussion Thread

I had brought up Acceptable Political Targets in the ROCEJ thread, and I was told that Acceptable Targets and its subtropes were something that the sitegoers don't really understand. Looking at the tropes themselves, the overall picture I get is that they are just negative media depictions of various groups of people. Personally, I don't think portraying people in a bad light by itself is tropeworthy. However, that's just my understanding and opinion. Perhaps some other viewpoints will help me better understand what Acceptable Targets really is. What do you think it is?

I believe it's supposed to be about "groups that people are fine with being portrayed in a negative light", i.e. the work can get away with portraying certain people or people groups badly without getting significant backlash from the audience. Of course, most entries simply stop at "X group is portrayed as evil/dumb/etc." with no mention of audience reaction.

Edited by Adept on Nov 4th 2022 at 5:30:43 PM

Semi-recent TRS thread that stalled.

And to clarify, a major reason that thread stalled is because the "solution" was to make it "IUEO"... which meant nothing and nobody knew what we were actually meant to do with that change after it got upvoted. We were all just sort of throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick. None of us actually had a solid idea for how to tackle this "trope", especially since the way the trope pages use it isn't the same as how work pages use it.

Better we hash all that out when there isn't a ticking timer, then.

To me, on top of what I've said already, it feels like there's a multitude of tropes being smashed together into just a few here, and some categories are redundant with existing tropes. Maybe it would be better to turn Acceptable Targets into an index?

Edit: Disambig would work, too.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Nov 4th 2022 at 2:28:58 PM

Is the intended definition (group of people the audience is okay with being portrayed negatively) tropeworthy? It's really a lack of a reaction, which is hard to prove.

Or a disambiguation. We (finally) got rid of Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped a year ago, so I don't think it's impossible for this trope to go.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Nov 4th 2022 at 3:29:38 PM

The issue is that while the Acceptable Targets pages are about groups that are okay to make fun of, the examples are just groups that individual works make fun of. So I don't even know what the actual definition is.

That's actually an even better argument for a disambig IMO. If we can't figure out the definition, is Acceptable Targets really worth having?

If you look at the Archived Discussion, this page is so old it predates our having a dedicated YKTTW system as opposed to just a page. Originally, it was just a list of targets with explanations, but then it started to grow sub-bullet points, which started to turn it into a weird sort of example section, and eventually just got completely out of hand. This resulted in the page being split into its subtropes.

Sometime in August or early September 2011, someone added to the end of the main article "In short, everyone except for Unacceptable Targets." I think this gets at what the problem here is. Among its many other Wild West qualities, the very early wiki tended to run on "vibes", where a trope was anything the fairly small wiki community could agree on and amounted to pretty much anything that you could start to describe with "You Know That Thing Where...". What started as a list of things that media likes to make fun of (and note that it was originally more about media, not the audience) was pretty much guaranteed to spiral out of control. To the extent it was a trope in the sense of having definable examples, it was a sort of meta-trope in aggregate consisting of anything made fun of enough to be an Internal Subtrope. But between the mores of acceptable targets changing with time and place, and the existence of "take-no-prisoners" comedies that make fun of anything and everything, just about anything could be called an acceptable target, rendering the page pretty much meaningless. This is probably partly responsible for the back-and-forth about whether or not this is an Audience Reaction: people will disagree about what qualifies as an acceptable target more than whether or not a work is targeting one.

Edited by MorganWick on Nov 5th 2022 at 3:55:57 AM

Another good argument for a disambiguation or index. I'm tempted to wick check this and argue for that actually, but I've got other projects in the pipeline first.

I guess if someone wants to start one without me, I'll drop a possible link —> Sandbox.Acceptable Targets Wick Check

With the arguments presented here, I officially think disambiguating/indexing would be the best choice.

This trope is going to get deleted huh?

It's probably going to TRS eventually. Sometimes, other solutions do come up. If you have ideas, do chime in.

I've mostly seen seen this trope used to mean "Someone or something a work likes making fun of a lot." Maybe we could rework the trope to be about that? Maybe rename it to Authors Whipping Boy or Creators Whipping Boy.

I like that idea.

Ditto

I fear that idea could attract stealth complaining but it does seem like a thing.

The question then becomes... what's the difference between that concept and Take That!?

The way I see it, it could be for when a creator makes repeated jabs at another work/creator.

Edited by StewieGriffin34 on Nov 5th 2022 at 4:49:00 AM

...Eh? Both are about creators, though. They're the one putting these things into the works...

It seems like the proposed idea is basically Take That! but repeated against the same target by the same creator, which could be The Same, but More Specific but could also be an idea with something to it. Personally, I lean towards the latter.

I was thinking of it being a counterpart to Author Appeal. Where that trope is "thing the author likes and frequently includes in their work", this trope would be "thing the author dislikes and constantly takes jabs at." The thing is, currently people treat Acceptable Targets as the latter. My idea was to simply rework the trope to fit the common usage. The other thing is that Take That! is apparently supposed to be exclusive to jabs directed at works of fiction.

Only if you stop at the first few paragraphs. There are a ton of subtropes that have nothing to do with other works.

I saw it like this:

• Take That!: A work makes a jab at something.
• This proposed trope: A work repeatedly makes a jab at a specific thing.

It could be The Same, but More Specific, but of note is that it was recently discovered that Take That! specifically refers to a work of fiction being made fun of by another work. A TRS/expansion was suggested. Don't know how an expanded Take That! would mesh with this new trope, so make of that what you will.