Homeschoolers Hate Topicality: A Metagame Story (Part 2)
This post is a continuation of our conversation with Danielle. If you haven’t already, read the previous parts here:
Reader Question: Tiny Affirmatives
Why is it so Hard to Run Disadvantages Against Tiny Affirmatives?
In the last article, we told you how topicality went from a popular mainstream argument in homeschool debate to one so hated that some judges vowed never to rule on it. To some, this was a positive development. The air was cleared of tedious definitions skirmishes. Now, debaters had to discuss the “real” issues.
But as one problem faded, another arose.
Without topicality, affirmatives had a blank check to run any case they wanted. A few tested the limits of this by running bizarrely non-topical cases - the kind of non-topical you hear about when you’re learning what the stock issues are. For these extreme examples, topicality was called out of retirement, only to be relegated to obscurity again as soon as the round ended.
The more common and insidious side effect: affirmative cases started to shrink to make it harder to run negative arguments. This is a weak strategy for reasons we’ll discuss in a future article. But it is also intuitive and easy. The negative beat us with a powerful disadvantage? How do we learn from this? By modifying the case so the disadvantage doesn’t apply. We’ll make it smaller, but in the same topic area.
Cases tended to start out representing what the framers had in mind, and gradually shrink into inane sideshows by nationals.
Affirmative in October: Ban this fishing technique.
Same team at nationals: Ban fishing a specific species along a specific 300-mile range of coastline.
This problem isn’t crippling or universal, but almost everywhere in the country, we see it to some degree. Cases become less and less substantial as the year goes on. This isn’t a wording issue; the framers have shifted from “significantly change” to “substantially reform” in a desperate plea to see cases at nationals that would make an impact on the lives of everyday Americans. It makes no difference.
The cases are a side-effect of topicality’s fall from glory.
Today, topicality doesn’t have the stigma of the past. You won’t lose a round for running it. It’s just an unpopular argument suffering from a vicious cycle: it rarely wins, so no one runs it, so no one learns how to run it well, so it rarely wins, and on it goes. Topicality is considered a last resort. Even against very weak affirmatives, the result is a toss-up at best.
Run badly, topicality is like listening to Roz from Monsters, Inc give a history lecture.
Run well, topicality is a compelling argument that wins rounds and forces affirmatives to run more interesting cases.
The good news: topicality is far from dead. Whether or not it ever sees another resurgence in the metagame, you can still win rounds with it.
Tips on how to do that are coming soon.