Strong overlap with ArtMajorPhysics.: Physics Goof

Okay, so recently the article You Fail Physics Forever has been renamed to Physics Goof and to Artistic License – Physics (specifically, the article's URL is the former, and the header on the page says the latter). That is not the issue.

The thing is, there is this other page, Art Major Physics. Is there really any difference between "artistic license physics" and "art major physics"? If there's not, then the two pages ought to be merged. If there is, then either page ought to be renamed for the sake of clarity.

edited 26th Apr '11 4:18:35 AM by Spark9

Unless something happened that I missed, what was supposed to happen was not only a rename of the You Fail... "tropes", but also a merge of all the You Fail and Art Major pairs and turning the resulting pages into a catching ground for proto tropes.

Did we decide not to do this? I'm confused as to why we went 1/3 of the way and then quit.

That was the intent. As to why it stalled — the same thing that causes a lot of largish projects to stall: a combination of short attention spans and not enough people who will or have the time to do the tedious work of shifting stuff.

So if I start on it, I won't be banned for vandalism? I'll start a Special Project for it first thing tomorrow when I get home, then. I know I can do some of them, but probably not all.

Nope. Not Vandalism. If you want to, add a pointer to the discussion thread in your edit reason. In this thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=e16ao8skfsr7q24s8vso04hz&page=3 . Posts #61 and 62 address consolidating the "Somewhere an X is crying" tropes with the "You Fail..." tropes. Posts 83 & 84, 179, 207, 210-212, 255 & 256 address the "Art Major X" tropes. #255 and 256 are the clearest statement that a merge is approved.

edited 26th Apr '11 12:48:10 PM by Madrugada

Do you think the thread should be unlocked, or a new thread addressing the change be made?

Not really. As you can see from the posts I cited in my last post, it was brought up several times and agreed to. The argument was that Art Major X was "They got it wrong because it's cooler this way" and the You Fail tropes were "They got it wrong because they didn't know any better." The difference is A) subjective, B) impossible to know without Word of God saying which one it was, and C) irrelevant to cataloging tropes.

Fair enough. Is there any reason why the page's URL should remain "physics goof", though?

But if we merge those two tropes completely, we're losing a very important in-universe trope. If a character says "oh, I'll just cut the bullet in half before it reaches me," and his friend says "you're a moron, physics doesn't work like that," we need somewhere to put it. Yes, if he then proceeds to cut the bullet in half with no difficulty we can put that as a lampshaded Artistic License – Physics (still don't like the name), but the in-universe part still has it's place.

No it's Artistic License – Physics either way. The only functional difference between the You Fail and the Art Major tropes for the same subject were "wrong because they didn't do the research, and bad", and "wrong because they decided it was cooler this way, and good." Without Word of God, we can't know whether it was not doing the research or choosing to ignore it, and "But Good" and "But Bad" distinctions are completely subjective.

edited 27th Apr '11 8:33:02 AM by Madrugada

And I'm saying 'in-universe'' is a very different trope than Did Not Do The Research (or ignored the research because it's better that way).

Going back to the cutting the bullet example, let's say the character doesn't get called out on it. He says "I'll cut it in half before it hits me," and someone else says "well, then here's your sword," and then he does it. Falls nice and squarely in Artistic License – Physics. Maybe the author really thinks its possible, maybe he doesn't, but it doesn't matter.

However, the in-universe version has nothing to do with Word of God or Did Not Do The Research—it's just one character saying physics does not work that way. They could even be wrong, it doesn't matter. But characters lampshading each others' mistakes is a real trope that we're going to lose if we merge these.

I mean, we could YKTTW a whole new set of tropes, but we already have these, so we should at least see if there are enough purely in-universe examples to salvage.

That's simply a lampshade. That's all. One character is acknowledging that a trope (Artistic License – Physics) has been used.

Artistic License is about the work itself. The author is quietly ignoring things to make the story better. A character making a mistake is something different.

We're currently softsplitting the examples so that in-universe is at the top. All non-in-universe examples on works pages will go on trivia. It's not really an issue unless the in-universe section gets really large, then we could talk about a hard split.

Created the Special Efforts thread. Help would be appreciated.

edited 27th Apr '11 10:55:17 AM by ccoa