Severe Misuse: The King Of Town

"Real but purely symbolic title" is either A) not a trope or B) something that can be launched from YKTTW without any connection to this. That is off-topic for this thread.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Then what is?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Rename. Not redefine. Definition was settled within the first few posts.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Whether it should keep its current title or not, and what, if any, branches of misuse are worth expanding into tropes of their own.

My whole point since the beginning of the thread has been that I think that redefinition was too hasty. It generally takes more than twenty minutes to come to a consensus on a topic. (First post: 8:18:40 PM. Post that you linked to: 8:40:54 PM.) That's why we've been going in circles, because half the thread is saying "alright, we got the definiton, now let's get a name" and the other half is saying "wait, I don't think that's actually the definition".

But whatever. I guess I'll just go YKTTW the rest of the definitions we've come up with. I'm just annoyed at the fact that action was taken before anyone had a chance to weigh in on the subject.

edited 10th Jan '11 11:09:54 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

There was no redefinition, just a tightening of the existing definition.

Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.

Just putting it here that Permanent Elected Official has been launched.

And there's been no going around in circles. The whole thing has been very simple and straight forward. First we tightened the definition and cleaned up the handful of bad examples. There was never an argument about what the definition was. That much was clear from the get go. Then we started a rename process to make sure that the misuse doesn't happen again. While we were doing that we took the handful of bad examples and YKTT Wed new tropes for them to be a part of.

edited 10th Jan '11 12:41:34 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

The current definition (and that post that supposedly resolved the issue) contains:

This is two tropes crammed together; it's a bad definition. And the page contains examples of both. Therefore, it needs to be split — the primary issue here is the definition, which is why nobody can agree on a name. People think that they agree on the definition, but do not — it needs to specifically exclude characters with a "purely symbolic function with no actual power" for it to work.

Most of the examples, looking over it, are "character is given a real but purely symbolic position which they believe has more power than it actually does." This is a distinct trope from "crazy character puts on a Burger-King crown and starts giving orders" — there are some vague similarities, but they're almost always going to serve a totally different purpose in the story, so they're distinct tropes.

edited 11th Jan '11 4:13:13 PM by Aquillion

I was going to rename this, but it looks like the definition was never agreed on. Since this thread's been open for five months, we should probably get this settled.

edited 15th Jun '11 10:33:23 PM by KrisMahai

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Yeah, okay. Looking back the the thread, the definition was fixed and all that was needed was a rename. There's consensus with the Alternative Names crowner, and I recall this going through a Single Prop, so I'm just going to rename it now.

Done.

edited 17th Jun '11 12:54:23 AM by KrisMahai

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Barely started actually: The King Of Town has 69 wicks.

^ Ah, sorry. I meant that I was done with the actual renaming. I'm still going through the wicks. I didn't realize the thread needed to be open for that.

Checking the wicks, though, a lot of them are misuse due to the old bad name.

edited 17th Jun '11 1:36:14 AM by KrisMahai

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

All right, the trope is now completely renamed. It's been posted on Renamed Tropes, re-indexed, all wicks are moved (ghost wicks aside), all subpages are moved, all old subpages are cutlisted, redirects are fixed, and there's no discussion to move. I think this thread can be locked now.

edited 17th Jun '11 3:12:40 PM by KrisMahai

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Thanks Kris, good work.