As part of the campaign to make the tropes distinct.: Nightmare Fuel

in this thread

Um, what just happened to the page?

Vandalism happened.

How long does it usually take before the page is back to how it originally was?

Someone has it out on an edit-lock.

I've dropped a ban on the person who vandalized it. Revert as soon as possible, please, whoever gets there first.

Here's the creep's edit history. There are already people working on cleaning up behind him. I suggest you start at the bottom and revert his edits.

edited 29th Jul '11 9:32:17 PM by Madrugada

I have an idea how to start solving the natter and such. Delete it all and move it to the discussion page for reference if anyone wants to reinstate the entry without natter.

@Dont Call Me Wave In that thread, I don't see any crowner on what to do with High Octane Nightmare Fuel. Granted, it doesn't seem like most people agreed on renaming High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

that thread started as an attempt to get HONF renamed.The first crowner showed that consensus was for keeping High Octane Nightmare Fuel as it was and changing Nightmare Fuel into Accidental Nightmare Fuel]]

^ I don't see any crowner saying that in the thread. There's one saying to rename one or both, and one saying to rename Nightmare Fuel to Accidental Nightmare Fuel, but neither have an option saying to rename HONF.

edited 21st Sep '11 5:16:57 PM by ading

And "rename one or both" actually won the crowner. We responded by renaming just one.

edited 8th Sep '11 9:01:33 AM by Routerie

Here's what I think should happen. Most of the links I seem to find to "Nightmare Fuel" are simply things that people found frightening, and since the name change nearly every instance I see of "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" aren't accidental at all, and it makes for a lot of nonsensical reading. So I think "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" should go back to just "Nightmare Fuel" and just mean things scary moments, just like the CMOA or Tear Jerker or whatever. "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" should be renamed Intentional Nightmare Fuel to make the distinction. And the trope that Nightmare Fuel currently describes should be renamed something else. (Maybe still leave an "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" trope, but make it and the Intentional one subtropes of "Nightmare Fuel"). I think that would clear up a lot of the confusion surrounding this trope and its counterpart.

Even if that crowner rejected renaming HONF, I still think that "Nightmare Fuel" should still be a CMOA-type trope that has "Accidental" and "High Octane" as subtropes, which would make all the forced changes from "Nightmare Fuel" to "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" all over the place make sense again. That, in my opinion, is now a bigger mess than the problem that was supposed to be fixed by the change.

edited 30th Sep '11 2:40:39 PM by MisterKerr

No crowner rejected renaming HONF. The crowner didn't have that option. The nearest thing ("rename one of both") actually won the crowner.

We shouldn't make Nightmare Fuel and High Octane Nightmare Fuel subtropes of the same trope because they are not subtropes of anything, no more than Narm and Crowning Moment Of Funny are subtropes of Laughing So Hard.

edited 30th Sep '11 5:14:32 PM by Routerie

Well, whether they are subtropes of anything or not, I think a rename of the rename is still in order. Almost every time I see "Nightmare Fuel" it's referring to "something scary", and its misuse probably won't stop, since I still see it used that way even after the "Accidental" rename. Even if some sort of "Crowning Moment of Scary" is created it probably wouldn't stop the misuse of Nightmare Fuel as it stands.

How about this: Change "Nightmare Fuel" to mean something like "Crowning Moment of Scary" (much like Tear Jerker is like "Crowning Moment of Sad"), and make Accidental Nightmare Fuel its own separate trope. HONF might be able to stay as-is, but may need some tweaking to put more emphasis on the "intentional" part rather than the "scary" part.

So your idea is:

1. Leave Accidental Nightmare Fuel as it is. 2. Stop shifting "Nightmare Fuel" to Accidental Nightmare Fuel. 3. Direct "Nightmare Fuel" links to a moments/tearjerker style page.

This sounds perfect to me. Since High Octane Nightmare Fuel is currently the sort of page that you suggest in 3, I take it that would mean renaming High Octane Nightmare Fuel to "Nightmare Fuel"? That sounds good.

Yes, I think that solution would be the best.

The thing is, we don't want a direct move from HONF to NF because there are existing links to NF that should go to ANF. NF should be a disambiguation.

If we make it a disambiguation page, we should redlink it, because we never want people potholing to disambiguation pages.

But if Mister Kerr's right, most of the current Nightmare Fuel links refer to actual horror. Then they should link to a horror page, if to anything. We'll have to clean all the NF wicks eventually. It'll be easier to change all the ones that mean Accidental Nightmare Fuel than to change all the ones that mean "scary."

IIRC, links to the phrase Nightmare Fuel were replaced with Accidental Nightmare Fuel in the hopes that seeing certain things referred to as it would make people fix the misuse. This apparently hasn't been very effective so far.

Quite frankly, I think we may as well scrap and redlink Accidental Nightmare Fuel at this point. Its misuse is rampant, and even adjusting the definition to fit the misuse is not an option when different kinds of misuse aren't even compatible with each other. It is decaying like long-expired food and needs to be thrown away.

"Nightmare Fuel" really is a terrible name. "Nightmare Fuel? Why, it's something that fuels nightmares."

"But can't anything fuel nightmares?"

"Good point. Let's make two pages, so that everything has a spot on at least one of them."

I don't know, but something about "High Octane" sounds really menacing. While I had a trouble understaning NF page when I was new, I almost immediately understood what HONF page would be about.

Yes, but if you understand one but not the other, the names have failed. I don't doubt that people realize "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" means scary. People think "Nightmare Fuel" itself just means scary, and that's the problem.

There's reason to start over with High Octane Nightmare Fuel and Accidental Nightmare Fuel alike, but especially the latter. They're each infested with natter fit to rival troper tales, but the latter had a name that yielded more misused examples than used-right examples, and renaming it, in the hopes that people would fix it in light of the name, has not worked.

At the very least, I think we should scrap Accidental Nightmare Fuel's examples, redlink that phrase along with Nightmare Fuel so that everything crosswicked with those examples will also be red links, and decide later what (if anything) would be used for accidentally scary material.

I think one thing that illustrates the futility of forcing the phrase "Nightmare Fuel" to display as "Accidental Nightmare Fuel" involves the fact that it appears that some people found the phrase on YMMV pages, and saw it not as an opportunity to separate the accidental examples from the intentional ones, but instead to move examples of both kinds to the tropes beginning with the letter "A". I find it pretty embarrassing.

Yeah, ANF is pretty much broken beyond repair.

edited 26th Oct '11 12:46:37 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

As I recall, this trope was previously called "unleaded" nightmare fuel, which had nothing to do with trope, but it was a vague fuel-related term that people thought meant "extra strong".

Turns out it didn't, so the trope got renamed.

The only problem is, the new name "high octane" again has nothing to do with the trope, and again is a vague fuel-related term that people thought means "extra strong". Turns out it doesn't, either.