This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Real Fandom Believers: From YKTTW
Blork: I'm not sure The Da Vinci Code shoud be here. Dan Brown's attitude to research has its own trope, but the fact remains that the backstory (the bit people actually believe) is a conspiracy theory that predates the book and which Dan Brown seems to believe himself. The trope description says that this is only for stories that were fully intended to be viewed as fictional, if we include conspiracy theories that were honestly believed by the writer but not supported by evidence then we might as well go all the way and include every religion ever.
Darktalon posting from work: Doesn't The Da Vinci Code have a disclaimer that it is in fact fictional? My copy is in a box somewhere so I can't easily check.
Scud East: I'd be surprised if anyone believed the events of the novel really happened. What it apparently has convinced some people of is that the conspiracy that underlies those events—and the history it attempts to suppress, with Mary Magdalene and the Grail and all that—really exists. Dan Brown didn't make that part up, and the people who did, didn't present it as fiction.
Nornagest: Cut —
- Though admittedly, This Troper is kind of a part of that whole circle. Yes, we are quite delusional! Weeeeee!
...because the lead specifically tells you not to add This Troper examples. It's also meaningless without a working link to a contributor page, although I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Scrounge: Not deleting without a consensus, but does the Discworld example really belong here? These people only hope that when death comes to take them, he's an affable fellow with no skin, rather than being totally convinced. Plus, making fun of the terminally ill may qualify as Dude, Not Funny!.
Freezair For A Limited Time: I was wondering that myself. The word hope, as opposed to something like "believe," threw me off. And that strikes me as more of a compliment: "Since I'm going to die soon, I'd like to think that the 'real' Grim Reaper is as nice and funny a fellow as you've made him out to be."
"if there are infinite universes out there, at least one of them must resemble the one from the TV show/movie/book/video game, right?" 'Actually', if there ae infinite universes which are not identical to ours, then the nature of infinity would mean that there are an infinite number of universes exactly resemble the show as well as an infinite number which closely resemble the show, etc, as long as the show is possible according to the limits of the nature of the universes. Modern physics does not, thankfully, posit infinite universes, merely an unimaginably large number of them.
"it should be noted that even slightly altering physics is more likely to result in Earth (or even the entire cosmos) as we know it not forming at all rather than giving us a universe just like our own, only with superheroes or black mages."
- Wouldn't the best way to achieve a universe with black mages or super heroes be to have vastly different laws of physics say for instance ones that don't rely on everything being made out of very small pieces.
Mullon: Does believing in Santa Claus count? How about believing in him past a certain age?
Would the members of the official Nintendo forums who actually believed they were video game characters from the Mario series count? I know one admitted he was role playing, but the other would be in like, 300 page arguments about the probability of being from a fictional universe, and apparently thought of him/herself as having their account shared by about ten characters from Mario, Donkey Kong Country and Banjo Kazooie.
Red hair is a mutation? Really? I hope the editor that put that didn't actually mean to insinuate that everyone with red hair mutated it, rather than inheriting it from their parents. If the assertion is that at one point, the human gene pool lacked red hair, and it spontaneously appeared.. I'd like to see you prove it. Not to mention that, if you go by mainstream science, everything on every living thing is a mutation from a previous simpler version.
BritBllt: It seemed to me that the troper's only point is that the word "mutation" can be applied to every individual variation in humans, which is the same thing your last sentence said. Anyway, The Other Wiki says...
- The genetics of red hair, discovered in 1997, appears to be associated with the melanocortin-1 receptor (MC1R), which is found on chromosome 16. Red hair is associated with fair skin colour due to low concentrations of eumelanin... Eighty percent of redheads have an MC1R gene variant, and the prevalence of these alleles is highest in Scotland and Ireland. The alleles that code for red hair occur close to the alleles that affect skin colour, so it seems that the phenotypic expression for lighter skin and red hair are interrelated... Red hair is the rarest natural hair colour in humans. The pale skin associated with red hair may be of advantage in far-northern climates where sunlight is scarce... Estimates on the original occurrence of the currently active gene for red hair vary from 20,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Nothing about it specifically being a mutation of blonde hair, but in short, it's a mutation of the MC1R gene that first appeared in Northern Europe sometime between 20,000 - 100,000 years ago.
berr: I Added extensive new content to distinguish "casual" Daydream Believers from more extreme versions. The page formerly lumped "casual" versions under Literary Agent Hypothesis, which really is just a subtrope of Recursive Canon, and devoted only two short paragraphs to those casual versions. So I had to expand that section which misidentified these believers as Literary Agent Hypothesis.
And Recursive Canon isn't really an index of tropes where the author postulates the reality of the work; it's more narrowly defined as only those works that introduce a Story Within a Story Mind Screw, regardless of the mechanism used (Literary Agent Hypothesis, The Multiverse, whatever). So I didn't want to take the new content off this page and lump them on there where it didn't belong.
If the page is not too long, it will be cool to keep the new content on here, in two sections; if it makes the page too long and/or too broad, I'd be willing to create a separate trope for the "casual Daydream Believer". (Although they are The Same But Less, it could be argued the Subtle Trope Distinctions are sufficiently detailed to simply port that section I just created into its own page.) Good title for the "casual" subtrope would be Willing Suspension Of Reality or True In Some Sense.
I'd YKTTW it, but I did enough TV Tropes "research" writing the new section that I'm pretty positive we don't have it, and could use it as a subtrope containing the section on "casual" Daydream Believers I just added. —berr
