Made Of Forum Win

Seems this wouldn't be the thread to bitch about that kind of thing though.

Yeah, you're right.

It's just that the whole situation is making me sympathise very much with Bobby. And also, since in the last 2-3 days I've read a couple of semantics derails at least a dozen times each, I have to say that your post about not liking a technical term we've invented hit a note, you know?

Can I just give a made of forum win to all of the mods?

You guys are handling this extremely well. I know I bowed out of the relevant threads whenever people just started repeating the same arguments and not reading what came before. This recent stuff makes me ashamed to even admit following some manga and anime.

I'm pretty sure most of the mods don't know who I am, and I lurk more in the policy threads than post, so this might not mean much but I have to say it: for all of the mods' faults and stuff that's been messed up or ignored in the past, you're handling this situation right so far. Seriously, good job guys.

I mostly object to "Paedoshit" because it's used out of context in the rules post in the Anime/Manga thread. Maybe it makes more sense in context, but in the context it's used there, it comes off very much as "If you're the type of person that likes Lolicon and Shoutacon, we don't want you on this site go away" (rather than just "This really isn't the site to post or talk about that crap-seriously, keep it in the closet")

My main problem with "paedoshit" is the British spelling. Thanks to Latin class, wherein we always use classical pronunciation, I keep thinking it's pronounced "PIE-doh-shit." Man I hate how dumb classical Latin sounds. I know that an a or o before an e usually means nothing in English or ecclesiastical Latin pronunciation, but Latin class denies me the ability to read it correctly.

I did a search of the forums, and as far as I can tell I was the first to specifically use the term "pedoshit," with the American spelling, naturally. So you can spell it that way and the ae problem goes away.

@Tomu - I'm really not sure why that's a problem. But, this is becoming a derail.

edited 17th Apr '12 6:52:19 PM by Martello

I won't go into detail, but basically, I think it's a bit needlessly dehumanizing.

Well anyway, we locked that thread to stop the vacuous arguments there, so we shouldn't have them here, either.

Yep.

Oh, and thanks for the , Autumncomet!

Now that you mentioned it, a lot of people in that thread seems to think the coining of "paedoshit" a MOFW in its own right.

We JUST got off that unpleasant topic, can we please not bring it back up?

I was just adding what seems to be a MOFW entry.

Best Of, go to engineering school. They insert a chip in your brain that gives you a shot of sweet sweet endorphins every time you see redundancy.

Also program it to whenever you're in the middle of running or some other physically strenuous activity.

See I'm late to the party, but was also going to give a MOFW to Bobby for handling that thread, and especially for his "nickname" for Kn J.

This made me laugh for like ten minutes for some reason

QC

A Librarianof Babel explains why stories are not "built out of" tropes with the most mindblowing analogy I have seen in a very long while.

The math major in me wants to buy him a drink...or a Coke, depending on age.

edited 20th Apr '12 6:07:30 AM by Willbyr

A Coke is a type of drink, and, even if (s)he is of age, (s)he might not drink alcohol...

Though the Fridge Horror is, you can say that Huxley was able to that because he had no concept of tropes as we understand it. Once you discover tropes, it's hard to write originally like he did.

Thanks, everyone! (For the record, it's "he" and underage.)

Being aware of tropes isn't the problem. Famous authors obviously didn't obsessively catelogue every recurring thing in fiction, but they were generally well-read, intelligent, and fond of contemplating and discussing literature; they were still well-aware of recurring devices in fiction. That didn't stop them from writing organically.

The problem is that young tropers often come here, read this wiki, and think this really is the height of literary analysis - that all of fiction actually is best viewed as a collection of tropes, perhaps with various "Whatever-verted" qualifiers tacked on. They get the idea that this really is the best way of breaking down fiction - and, more importantly, that fiction ought to be built up in the same way. Lurking here, I've seen far too many troper writing projects begin by making a list of character names and describing them as a list of tropes, as if the best way to write a character were really to take a handful of trope names and splice them together. The result is that the characters are artificial, not organic; forced, not natural; derivative, not springing from a new seed. It's a phenomenon that results not from analyzing recurring trends in literature but from thinking making lists of things that happened multiple times in literature is really the end-all be-all of analysis.

That's why what horrifies me is just how many posts in that thread use metaphors like "tropes are atoms, works are molecules". They seem to believe that works cannot be built out of anything but tropes and that every work is merely a complex arrangement of tropes. And that's not a good way of reading or writing.

edited 20th Apr '12 2:36:59 PM by ALibrarianofBabel

for A Librarian of Babel, that analogy was mind-blowningly perfect. I always saw fiction and tropes the way you said, but I couldn't get it into words.