Did we "Accentuate the Negative" too far?

This is a major concern about the trope Accentuate the Negative. Upon looking at the page, I noticed that, with very few exceptions, most of the examples are dedicated to bashing a creator with no remorse. I already went through the cleanup with Chris X a year earlier, but it's time we need to discuss whether we should add an In-Universe Examples only rule for this trope or just clean it of whatever examples.

The examples are a complete mess. Some are actual in-universe examples, but a huge amount are either bashing works, or bashing critics of works.

My only suggestion is to make it in-universe only so it can actually be a trope, not a load of smug complaining about "feminist critics HATE this comic because Starfire's breasts are too big" or whatnot.

Yeah I don't really see the point for examples that aren't in universe. The laconic even says that it's extreme complaining. This feels like a weird mix of a trope and an administrivia page, given the bizzare "TV Tropes Wiki" section for examples. Many of the In-Universe examples could probably go under Caustic Critic, unless we define a key difference like "Accentuate the Negative is for one-time occurrences of complaining by a character, but Caustic Critic is when it's ongoing or the person is actually a professional critic"

I kind of associated Accentuate the Negative with a specific subset of Caustic Critic who was more interested in snarking at a movie than they were seriously critiquing it. I think of the Nostalgia Critic, Angry Video Game Nerd, and Cinema Sins, who would often engage in bad faith criticisms for the sake of comedy.

Edited by SharkToast on Jan 6th 2024 at 10:21:55 AM

I'm actually surprised to find it's not YMMV, and while it appears on 32 YMMV pages, even on the YMMV pages of Caustic Critics it's not used as an example. Not sure how it can work as an objective trope without being IUEO or reliant on Word of God.

Tbh, I feel like it works best as an In-Universe only trope, given what others have described so far. That being said, I'm not sure why we should merge some of the non-in-universe examples into Caustic Critic without edging into ROCEJ territory.

I'd prefer just cut them, or handle them on a case-by-case basis on the TRS thread.

Bumping