I think some background is needed here.
Bile Fascination used to be on No On-Page Examples. This was due to concerns over Natter, per the entry
in the past:
Notice how that edit removed it from the page. You can thank that on a younger, more impulsive, and more obnoxious version of me, who took it to TRS
back in 2020 for complaining issues, complete with a poor quality wick check and a questionable proposed solution. Not only were those problems not fixed, but the thread actually led to the restoration of on-page examples (due in part to a crowner entry that probably shouldn't have been added IMO, and in part due to my total TRS inexperience at the time — this was literally my second TRS thread ever). Since then, more complaining examples have predictably followed, with some calls to restore the previous status of disallowing on-page examples, as argued in the discussion page
and a failed cleanup thread
I also started.
While I'd like to take this back to TRS someday, I've been advised against it in the past as no one knows what could actually be done here. Although if this Trope Talk finds significant concern, I'm definitely on board.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 22nd 2024 at 7:20:19 AM
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallI remember seeing a similar back-and-forth in the past regarding whether Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was So Bad, It's Good (the experience of someone watching someone else play it), So Bad, It's Horrible (the experience of actually playing it), or if it somehow qualifies as both despite the latter page nominally prohibiting it.
I get the sense the issues raised
are a bit orthogonal to the ones raised in the OP. I wonder if there's room for, say, a Failure Fascination page for things that become such spectacular failures that they attract much more attention for that than they ever did in life, or if that would be The Same, but More Specific to Bile Fascination. It's probably telling that the first examples to come to mind other than this are things that aren't tropable works, like Fyre Festival or Dashcon. I could see it being used for a TV show that's canceled after one or two episodes, but such things might just fall under regular Bile Fascination as well, especially if you can still watch the extant episodes.
My personal take on
is that such a concept would be redundant. Usually if something was a failed short-runner (or One-Episode Wonder or some equivalent tropes), it's because of low ratings/audience retention/sales, and that usually manifests from being controversial or people just generally not liking a thing, which would be grounds for Bile Fascination for me (or perhaps a neutral form of Audience-Alienating Premise if issues are rooted in broader concept).
If one were to make a Failure Fascination for something that didn't last as long as it wanted but doesn't have the stink of negative reception attached to it — usually because people actually liked it, it just didn't do enough in the ways that matter for longevity — wouldn't coverage of that already belong to stuff like Acclaimed Flop and Too Good to Last?
Edited by number9robotic on Sep 24th 2024 at 1:37:32 AM
Thanks for playing King's Quest V!

Short version: Do people actually need to play a negatively-received video game for Bile Fascination to count?
There's been a bit of a kerfuffle surrounding Concord, specifically its YMMV page, where due to the game's infamy as a prolific but short-lived, currently defunct live-service game, some back-and-forth edits (though not on the verge of an edit war) have occurred surrounding Bile Fascination. PlasmaPower removed the entry
with permission from forum consensus
due to it coming off as complaining, with the edit reason being that "Barely anyone played that game, not even to see how bad it is. And now you can’t play it anymore." Another user re-added a tweaked Bile Fascination entry shortly afterwards
.
Both versions of the entries, while worded differently, ultimately touch on the same subject matters: the game was highly pushed by Sony, became a major flop due to low player interest, but got Bile Fascination by way of people learning just how badly it failed at its goal of finding an audience — the interest is less about the game itself, but rather understanding what led up to such an unprecedented level of failure for something that took 8 years of development and millions of dollars in production only to die definitively in two weeks. While I don't condone the excessive complaining in the Concord pages and do wish it to be trimmed down, I don't think this inherently crosses the line in terms of negativity — the game objectively flopped and was such a big deal that it caught a lot of attention, and I don't think that's inherently vitriolic. However, there is a matter raised of whether that's a phenomenon Bile Fascination is designed to document, and I'm struggling to find an answer to it.
Bile Fascination's description right now makes it a bit unclear as to what counts as "seeing" a work in the context of "to see how bad it is." It's sort of implied in the first paragraph — specifically the bit about how the bile "[fills] you the masochistic urge to rush out and buy it just to see if it's that bad." — that a purchase (and presumably, playing) a work is necessary, but this seems more like a thesis-as-description bit and not necessarily a requirement. Otherwise, the language of everything else focuses around "watching" a work, but not necessarily playing it.
This is interesting to me because while video games are uniquely distinguished by their direct interaction as being a medium defined by player interaction, the thing is that in practice, right now (and for pretty much the decade past at least), we're in an era of Let's Plays, streaming, community-built fan wikis, and Youtube video essays where it seems like there are tons of viable avenues to absorb video games and discuss them without actually ever needing to buy and play them for yourself. The fact that very few people bought Concord doesn't deny the fact that there are an absolute buttload of content creators and gaming magazines examining it, its negative reception, and its sudden shutdown with interest (whether they are valid, tactful, and done in good faith is an entirely different issue), and that would constitute Bile Fascination to me for sure, but if it requires the consensus of people who are meant to interact with it "the intended way" — ie, spending $40 to play a game within the 2-week window it functionally existed — it would not... but the description doesn't distinguish it.
So what are your thoughts? Do people need to play video games for negative reception normally constituting Bile Fascination to count? Is Bile Fascination imperative on "hate-watching" or whatever other action relative to the respective medium like, or do we just need an agreement that people are talking about it from a distance?
Thanks for playing King's Quest V!