Crapsack World suffering from Merge Bloat.

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I can't say I'm happy with the present state of Crapsack World. Somewhere back in the piece some lumper got their way and had it nom World Half Empty and Sick Sad World.

The trouble is that it's now one term describing several rather different thematic concepts, resulting in an article that is long-winded, confusing and frequently contradictory.

Now, perhaps the old names sucked, but I think there needs to be some tropes dealing with certain key concepts.

A world that cannot be saved: This used to be addressed directly by World Half Empty. It was about a world that wasn't just a terrible place to live, but one that simply could not, in the whole, be improved.

This is actually very thematically important. There are quite a few works whose interpretation hinges on whether the world can be saved or not. For instance, much of the controversy surrounding Atlas Shrugged is based on this. If you think the world of Atlas Shrugged can be saved, then John Galt comes across as a colossal prick with genocidal tendencies. If you believe it can't, then he's something of a tragic figure who is making the hard choice of saving what little he can.

Deck stacked against Good:

The trope Sick Sad World used to deal with this. It is a frequently unacknowledged trope in fiction that heroes often succeed in stories where they'd realistically have no hope because the very nature of the world has been written to favour the heroes - the deck is tilted in their favour, so to speak.

But some extremely cynical worlds are the opposite. You can have worlds where the heroes can be willing to bust out the Genre Savvy, Combat Pragmatism and even Shoot the Dog and it's still not enough. Everything about the setting favours the villains.

There's a few more shades of meaning I'm looking to tease out but I haven't quite got the time this morning. The reason I'm posting this here instead of YKTTW is I'm trying to get a feeling for whether there'll be any support for bringing back, in some form, some subtropes of Crapsack World that got lost in the merge.

I fully agree. Crapsack World should be limited to "The world sucks, the vast majority of the people in the world suck, there's no chance that it's going to get better short of complete destruction and a fresh start. Nothing anybody does that makes it better (even locally) is going to last.

It functions better as a Super-Trope than anything else.

The lumping of Crapsack World was poorly handled at best, a fundamentally bad idea at worst.

There's a variety of distinct and thematically relevant ways and reasons in which a setting can be a fundamentally sucky place. I feel a splitting (of sorts) is in order.

There may be a number of ways in which a setting can suck, but all of the ones that got lumped under Crapsack World were insufficiently distinguished and bled into one another to the point where they might as well have been one trope. And even with the merge, there are still plenty of other ways to have a setting suck, such as Dystopia, Inherent in the System, Black-and-Black Morality, etc.

As it stood originally, the distinctions were: "Hopelessly awful setting, Played for Drama"; "Hopelessly awful setting, Played for Laughs"; "Hopelessly awful setting with occasional Throw the Dog a Bone".

edited 10th Nov '10 12:55:18 PM by Fighteer

Hmm, well the way things are, I definitely think I need to start a trope about a world that, fundamentally cannot be saved.

It's rather important because western literature, being greatly inspired by The Bible, tends to have a huge boner for the Messianic Archetype. There is a hero and it is his job to go and save stuff. It's so pervasive that all you need to do is spend long enough as a hero and Messiah starts sticking to you.

Given this, for a setting to avert this and say "No, this world cannot be saved, even Incorruptible Pure Pureness will not cut it" is very significant. It doesn't pop up terribly often because "this world eats Messiahs for breakfast" is a notion that causes many audiences to break out in hives of I AM NOT UNDERSTAND! So when it does, I feel there needs to be a trope to explain it.

I say just break it back into two tropes. World Half Empty, about horrible worlds that are played for drama, and Crap Sack world, horrible worlds that are played for laughs.

Sick Sad World was an unnecessary split, so leave that one out. The titles may be different but perception toward horrible worlds should be the defining division. We then have world half full for places that should be horrible but manage to retain an optimistic view and crap-saccharine world for attempts to sugar coat a rotten place.

That would leave us with four tropes about different takes on the same thing. Plots where the environment is clearly not under control, or at least not under the control of the "good guys", should any exist.

edited 18th Nov '10 9:46:50 PM by Cider

I never liked that split at all. "The same, but played for laughs" and "the same, but played for drama" is a horrible distinction; we don't have that for most tropes, and what do we do about ambiguous cases? Tibetan Fox's OP list of trope distinctions is pretty complicated (in my opinion), but is at least narratively different.

edited 19th Nov '10 1:33:02 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

And what do you do when a story will sometimes play the crapsackiness for laughs and sometimes play it for drama?

What was the reasoning behind merging them in the first place?

There must have been some reason, but I can't understand it.

Apparently because comedy wasn't a good enough distinction to keep the tropes apart.

Never mind we have a bunch of tropes consisting of when "Rape" is okay, which have equally then distinctions. I'm pretty sure we encourage a brief explanation on why a work is on a trope page.

And for the sake of the massive amount of pot holes it gets. War Hammer/40K are a good example for where both apply.

Looking through more than one codex, its clearly a parody on the typical awful future sci fi/awful past fantasy worlds you see from Stephen King and Doom/And "Bronze Age" Mythology. The 40K main page even explained the difference and why it listed both. Crap Sack World and World Half Empty, but even if it does list both, most places tend to choose drama over comedy, as they tend not to last long enough for multiple interpretations outside of cash cows and long runners.

The difference wasn't "Played for laughs vs played for drama." before the merge. The merge was hard-fought, but in the end there were 'enough' who thought that they were "too similar" and got the merge. The difference was Crapsack World: utterly bleak and nasty, virtually everybody in it is a shithead and there's no possibility of repair vs World Half Empty: bleak and depressing, few people are nice, but a hero can maybe make it somewhat better at least temporarily. Ithought the names were quite indicative of the difference. A sack full of crap is a sack full of crap, no matter how hard you try to make it better. A world half empty at least has the potential to be filled.

edited 19th Nov '10 11:13:35 AM by Madrugada

Yes it was, the distinction of Bad vs Worse was changed to comedy vs serious before they were finally merged together...but now that I think about it, they must have merged Crapsack World and World Half Empty to any horrible world where optimism is always wrong simply because people continued to confuse the two, and World Gone Mad is now the comedy version.

I apologize for missing that and talking about an argument that's apparently been settled. But the examples still don't really match up with the trope descriptions. Guess clean up is in order.

edited 19th Nov '10 11:47:10 AM by Cider

Maybe if someone came up with a sufficiently good name/description that wouldn't cause the "new" trope to blur with Crapsack World (as I'm sure pre-merge, there was a lot of misuse), this might get done faster, and perhaps encourage a direction of thought.

Here is a fragment of the past discussion, the forum page most of it took place in has since gone away.