BrokenAesop and YMMV/Audience Reaction

I’d say the specificity of And Knowing Is Half the Battle as a particular tag-based format for TV could technically be a subtrope of Amathieu's proposal, though it’s still require lots of cleanup as it appears there are many entries that misuse the trope in that way (such as messages that happen in the middle of the episode), and others would be interchangeable with Amathieu‘s proposal.

I still think it's not optimal as an option, and I still stick with my proposal of splitting An Aesop into “tropes on moral matters/themes” and “tropes on the storytelling mechanics of delivering moral lessons” (And Knowing Is Half the Battle would fall in the latter and doesn’t have any immediate conflict of redundancy as far as I can tell).

Any further objections to this proposal? I still believe that tropes on moral messaging have a place in the wiki, but there needs to be a lotta tweaking on what counts as “just a theme with moral implications” and “the means in which morals are told and handled”.

Those both do sound like workable concepts but IDK if splitting An Aesop really works. At least, we sort of need to give An Aesop a wick check before we do anything.

I'd also like to see An Aesop examples checked for "acknowledged in story", "literally spelled out" and "context doesn't specify that's what the story was going for" before commenting what to do with it.

Done! Aesop wick check here. Here are my findings based primarily off of Amonimus' criteria but with some necessary specificity:

• Moral message literally spelled out (3/104) (3%)
• Moral theme acknowledged/discussed in-story (4/104) (4%)
• Gives some, but not enough context to specify that's what the story was going for (14/104) (13%)
• "Aesop" used synonymously with in-universe "lesson", not huge theme (4/104) (4%)
• ZCE (Gives NO context in specifying that the "aesop" is what the story was going for) (63/104 (61%)
• ZCE (doesn't even mention what the "aesop" is to begin with) (11/104) (10%)
• Other (misuse or misc. potholing) (5/104) (5%)

Over HALF of the wicks I checked simply provide a moral and provide zero context whatsoever on the story/narrative itself that explains why it's relevant. People are far from the idea of An Aesop meaning "explicit text/dialogue explaining the moral at the end of the story" or even anything about the storytelling of the works at all. Even most of those few that do at the top don't provide any substantial context or expand on how it is relevant, not just something they pulled out of their rear.

Again, even if we don’t end up agreeing on a split between “aesop” definitions, there is at least gonna need to be a cleanup just to address all the ZCEs.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 19th 2023 at 6:50:48 AM

Looks like this will need a split or two and a complete cleaning.

Sorta-kinda playing Devil's Advocate here, but would there be harm in expanding to fit some of the misuse so that it's not as much of a headache trying to clean it up? Obviously we wouldn't want to go overboard, but to make it broad enough?

To what degree? The fact over half of the wicks are very much zero-context examples anyway (especially in Recap pages, it appears) means a lot will need to be scrubbed out anyway; what paradigm are you basing the idea of preserving some of these entries on?

Eh, I'm not arguing anything so much as posing a discussion, because IDK if that wick check poses a strong case for splitting but it does make me wonder if allowing any manner of "work has a moral to tell" examples would help. Essentially, ditching any such requirements for it to be the main theme, or explicitly spelled out, or what have you: Just to have it be as basic as possible without allowing for the unintentional examples to slip through.

Is this a good idea? IDK, it's very flawed. Could make it much easier for misuse to slip through. However, it'd still be an option we could pursue based on the results of the wick check (with the caveat that we put a strict limit on how much we're allowing).

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 20th 2023 at 10:15:24 AM

I will add one more concern.

If we're splitting An Aesop but keeping some of the entries under the supertrope and some under An Aesop, should we worry about a repeat of the situation with The Cameo where the combination of massive wick count + complicated cleanup leaves the thread sitting in TRS for months with no activity? An Aesop has 10,000+ wicks and I don't want a repeat of The Cameo's situation.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Apr 20th 2023 at 10:17:34 AM

That's also my concern. I'm not sure if a split is actually workable, especially since to me I'm not sure the proposed trope ideas are really necessary to have as separate concepts, and I'm not sure we have enough evidence to prove it'll be useful

^This is part of the reason why I'm in favor of being more restrictive than less in our interpretation of aesops and consequently with Broken Aesop. Expanding the idea of aesop to mean "any theme or lesson the audience can interpret a work to have" is redundant with just listing the relevant trope; these two examples are functionally the same:

• An Aesop: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Bob and Alice donate their money to charity only to learn after that the charity was a scam and their bank accounts were wiped.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Bob and Alice donate their money to charity only to learn after that the charity was a scam and their bank accounts were wiped.

By expanding An Aesop in this way, it doesn't really have a distinct meaning since just about anything can be a theme or a lesson in a narrative. And as Morgan Wick pointed out, we do already have Central Theme which probably covers the vast majority of the ZCE (Gives NO context in specifying that the "aesop" is what the story was going for) and Gives some, but not enough context to specify that's what the story was going for categories on the wick check (Central Theme even notes this in its description).

Splitting An Aesop into two tropes, one of which is just "a theme/moral in the story" would just be moving this same issue of redundancy to a new trope.

I think the question of how this would be different from Anvilicious and/or And Knowing Is Half the Battle should we limit the scope is a good one. For Anvilicious, that focuses on the audience's reaction to the presentation of the moral whereas the more narrowed version is just describing the form the moral takes in the story. In practice that will probably mean that there's heavy overlap since people don't often like to have their hand held by the work, but I would imagine this isn't the reaction people have to most works with an aesop that are targeted to children since being heavy handed = simple to understand for kids. And also, works without An Aesop (as in, a clear moment usually at the end when the work directly tells the audience what the moral of the story is) can still be Anvilicious.

As for the overlap between the more narrow idea and And Knowing Is Half the Battle, I agree that the two would be virtually the same. But if that's the case, then I don't see an issue with merging the two.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 20th 2023 at 11:15:01 AM

Mmmm, I think that's why I brought up the idea of just making these pages def-only. I know we essentially made up our own trope definition, but if they're def-only then we won't have such redundancies in the example listings or with definitions; because An Aesop (and others) would no longer get to be paired alongside other tropes anyway. It would be an exampleless, def-only supertrope.

Again, it's not perfect but I think it's the best option we have that wouldn't force us to alter a million definitions. And we'd have to do all the cleanup anyway so that wouldn't change.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 20th 2023 at 11:15:47 AM

The number of other tropes that have run with the "aesop = any perceived lesson/moral in a work" interpretation is the only thing that gives me pause, not because they can't be retooled (all of them can just be renamed to the specific lesson—like It's Okay to Cry and Revenge Is Not Justice—and have their descriptions edited to remove mentions of aesop and continue to exist more or less ok), but because of the amount of work it'd take to do so. It'd be a massive project spanning no fewer than 20 tropes, though I suspect some tropes like Script Wank and Golden Moment would be up for merges (the split option would also face this issue too, depending on how the split is done).

And it feels weird to make something def-only when it's something we created. Having so many things on the site be based on a concept that doesn't really mean anything outside of it/in the broader literary analysis world feels...odd? bad? wrong? One of those words.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 20th 2023 at 11:36:24 AM

I do get you on that last point, but it's become ingrained in wiki culture and I really don't know if retooling all of these tropes is an option. Not just because we would need wick checks and valid solutions for each and every one of them, but also because the issue is more about wiki culture (as in, the way people perceive the trope) and has less to do with an issue surrounding the trope itself (as in, I don't think An Aesop is fundamentally broken, it's just horribly misused).

This is the issue I ran into with Uncanny Valley, where I was spammed with notifiers about how I was deleting misuse that everyone assumed was correct. These people had become so convinced of the "uncanny valley means anything creepy" definition that it made my efforts to fix the problem a massive slog (and I'm not lumping our PM chat in with this; there may have been a miscommunication at one point but I think we both understood the situation once you clarified the usage. It was everyone else that PM'd me that I had an issue with).

I just can't see us retooling all of these tropes, making the new definitions stick, and getting it all done without causing even more confusion and chaos. That's why I'm in favor of methods that don't involve trying to narrow the concept or split the trope up.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 20th 2023 at 11:43:28 AM

The issue of how wiki culture affects the ability for TRS to function in general could probably use its own thread.

Fail to see how retooling/splitting would be more confusing than what's already presented.

A few reasons:

• People not "in the know" will continue to use the trope as if nothing had changed, unless we make it a disambig, which I highly doubt will happen (but I suppose isn't impossible)
• The more tropes we make / involve in this effort, the more complex things will become. The Cameo was mentioned above; I personally couldn't contribute to that TRS because I didn't understand what we were doing, and that was much less confusing than this trope is.
• The more new concepts we have to make, the more we'll have to keep track of. If we stick to what we currently know, or at least to what allows us the most freedom, then we won't have to juggle as many conflicting definitions, and we won't have to spend as long trying to hash out the nuance of each trope, since for most of them the current definitions aren't the issue or the thing that people are questioning. This "too much to juggle" thing was an issue that made a previous TRS for various continuity tropes die in the discussion phase.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 20th 2023 at 1:12:47 PM

If nothing else, it would be long. Even if we put this in a bulletin, Personal Appearance Tropes and stuff like A Date With Rosie Palms are exceedingly easy efforts, making their cleanups smoother. Even less complicated stuff like The Chick and Bonus Boss took/is taking a long time because the only cleanups advertised in bulletins that really work are efforts easy enough for the general TV Tropes populace to handle.

Even if An Aesop's cleanup doesn't turn out to be that bad (which I think it will—see Jay's response) it will still be long enough and with enough wicks that splitting still probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Apr 21st 2023 at 2:11:27 PM

Okay, to be clear on some things because I think folks might've gotten confused: I wasn't saying directly "splitting" An Aesop itself as a singular trope, I was recognizing it more as it currently stands as a Super-Trope with its own extensive index of derivative tropes, and am pitching more along the line of disambiguation to sub-indexes of "tropes detailing moral-based themes" and "tropes about the storytelling and delivery of moral themes".

I think I am honestly into the idea of making An Aesop as a Definition-Only Pages, where if the term "aesop" has become too ingrained in the culture of the site, we can relegate the raw trope to being DA so it doesn't invite cheap potholes or low-effort entries that provide no narrative context, while still providing a more or less intact standard on what the site means when using the term. I do believe that amathieu's earlier reply illustrates the validity of transferring redundant trope entries (moving An Aesop about how No Good Deed Goes Unpunished to just a No Good Deed Goes Unpunished entry), and at this point, it would just be helpful in zapping natter while still preserving the critical idea, just with other tropes.

From there, we could shift around the various subtropes on the An Aesop page into those two aforementioned categories: the whole block there of "Specific Aesops" could just be honestly merged into the Stock Aesops index (especially since the headline already potholes to there anyway), while others could go into a new, separate index directly revolving around the storytelling and mechanical aspects of the trope, with probably a necessary category for more subjective matters like Anvilicious, Alternate Aesop Interpretation, and yes, Broken Aesop.

PS: it turns out there actually is a general trope already for when characters/text directly spell out the moral message of the story that isn't within the strict confines of And Knowing Is Half the Battle: It's Script Wank. Has surprisingly only 64 wicks.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 21st 2023 at 7:11:54 AM

Any further objections to this? Honestly, the more I think about it, the more it seems right to keep An Aesop as a Definition-Only Page, but probably requiring some rewriting of the main body to acknowledge that moral messages tend to be only implied and are this subjective. If we want to categorize “messages literally spelled out in the text”, that’s what Script Wank is for (again, it seems like an extremely forgotten trope that covers the concept An Aesop and its derivative tropes are supposed to cover in order to warrant staying on the main page).

From there, we should also continue further conversation on where the likes of Broken Aesop and others fit within the wiki; I still believe not only should it be YMMV, it needs to have some kind of contextual qualifier (similar to how Foil requires comparisons to be directly alluded to in the work, not just an arbitrary fan observation).

Hmmm, I'm still not sure I understand what what sort of tropes you'd be splitting into each category... but yeah I agree with An Aesop being def-only and Broken Aesop being YMMV

I've actually read Script Wank before but had totally forgotten it exists until just now. I think that's 99 percent just because it's a rubbish name, though.

Yeah, probably. It's one of those "valid concept, horrible name" things.

What would our definition of a definition-only An Aesop page be? Right now the description is really narrow (moral stated at the end) but the subtropes are super broad (lists Central Theme, which seems to imply An Aesop is just "a theme").