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Pannic2011-12-22 17:09:06

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Batch 1, or, How Not to Write a TVTropes Entry

I said that there wouldn't be any set theme for these, but this one will.

This installment just consists of two entries. I picked these because they were mind-bogglingly awful. I don't know if there's any mention of this piece on the website where the entry is this bad, but I had to save these. These are what I consider to be the prime examples of how not to write a TV Tropes entry.

The first one was from the page "Our Werewolves Are Different," until I trimmed it down substantially. The entry was later excised entirely on account of a wider cleanup of that page, due to the fact that the entries were becoming less about werewolves and more about... "weres." But I'm getting sidetracked. Here is the entry pertaining to the Whateley Universe in that article.

The Whateley Universe features all kinds of characters who could be considered 'weres' of some kind or other. The 'regular' ones were created by the Sidhe in ancient times to serve as warriors in the fight against the Great Old Ones; their community near Whateley Academy (which is in fact built on their tribal territory) includes feline weres and at least one werebear in addition to plain old werewolves, and there are others scattered at least over the US. They are capable of infecting humans and most mutants by way of a quick-acting magical virus transmitted by biting, but this isn't currently common practice. At the school, one might also run into Harry Wolfe a.k.a. Techwolf, who's basically a wolf-man due to a family curse, or Bloodwolf, who's about as easy to get along with as his name indicates and seems to be getting his powers from some kind of wolf spirit. A secondary character living at Hawthorn Cottage is actually a wolf who turns into a human. There's the supervillain Lycanthros, who looks kind of caveman-ish normally, and can turn into a massive werewolf when he wants; he wears a bunch of pelts that might be wolves or maybe even werewolves, so he may fall into the 'deal with the devil' category of mythology...and finally (for now) we have the creatures nicknamed 'Voodoo Wolves' or more generally 'Voodoo Weres', who are part-regular were, part-Eldritch Abomination, serve somebody who goes by the meaningful title 'The Bastard', and can actually infect 'normal' weres and transform them into their own kind.

When writing a TV Tropes entry, one should usually try to keep it concise. That is not fucking concise. That is a huge dump of shit nobody cares about. That entire paragraph could be easily trimmed down to:

"The Whateley Universe has characters who draw on many different 'were' archetypes commonly seen in fiction."

Or something like that. Not that huge disjointed piece of word vomit. Of course, while long and rambling, at least I have to give it credit for being relatively coherent and it was at least on-topic. I can not say the same for the Laser-Guided Karma entry.

Now, the Laconic entry for Laser-Guided Karma is as follows:

When bad things happen to bad people (or vice versa) at opportune times.

Now, Whateley is plugged on this article. What does the entry say?

Invoked in the Whateley Universe. A powerful sorcerer commits heinous, heinous deeds. Then, she gets one of her spells rebounded at her, using the rule of three. She now has a black hand approaching her, that is all her misdeeds. When it hit a previous character who allied with her? HIS FACE MELTED OFF! She's done far, far worse.

It'd be nice if I could understand what the hell this was supposed to mean. Or how it even relates to the trope in question. I mean, look at the given definition - it's when "karma" hits the character in the story at the best/worst possible moment. How, exactly, does that given example for Whateley fit? And how the hell is it "invoked?"

So, that's the first batch - two entries I found so aggravating that I felt the need to preserve them in a word document. Now that I've posted them here I can delete that thing. I don't know if I'll be able to find any more entries that bug me quite that much, but there are a lot of Whateley entries on this site.

Comments

twasBrillig Since: Dec, 1969
Dec 25th 2011 at 1:11:26 PM
Very briefly in defense of the Whateley stories: they're a mix of good and bad parts, ranging from quite good to downright wince-worthy. There's significant inertia, such that while the worst authors do improve there was clearly not a lot of effort put into improving their early (and not so early) work.

No idea about who's responsible this mess, but even as a fan of the stories most of these entries are pretty obnoxious. If you think comedy might be served by context, send my a message and I'll try to get back to you.
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