What to do with : The Worf Effect

This would be a fun place to Guess The Trope. Even if you know that Worf is this alien guy from Star Trek TNG (a series that ended seventeen years ago), what do you suppose the Worf Effect is? Is it the rubber forehead makeup? The "token alien" on a human crew? The notion that a popular character gets transferred to the next show?

(The answer is D, or none of the above).

Anyway, to me this is clearly a trope about fiction, and yet it has one of those ubiquitous real life sections. In this case, it's mostly about bashing Acceptable Target the French. Yes, I know that Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys is a funny name, but isn't it getting old by now? More to the point, does it even make sense for a trope that's basically Informed Badassness to have real life examples?

1) The name is bad, 2) I'm not a huge fan of Real Life examples in general, and this isn't one of the exceptions.

Definitely support a rename and cutting the Real Life section.

Doesn't need a rename or a real life section. No real life section because its not relevant to real life, and no rename because a rename wouldn't fix anything at all. I don't think there's even a problem, but it there is its overuse which isn't related to the name.

Let's axe the real life section, shall we?

I've never understood why a name couldn't be bad if it didn't actively cause other things to be bad as well.

I honestly didn't have any idea what to expect from the trope name, so...

We've brought up a thousand times why tropes should not be renamed unless the name is causing problems. I'm not bringing it up again.

However, this has no redirects, and it could use a few. Badass Who Gets Defeated?

And I've never seen one that convinced me.

"Doesn't actively break other stuff" and "good" are not the same thing.

It is impossible to have this trope happen in real life, as it has a specific narrative purpose. This isn't merely "alleged badass gets beat up a lot", it's "alleged badass gets beat up a lot to demonstrate how tough the bad guys are". As real life is not a work of fiction and can't have narrative devices, the examples are not only controversial (reason enough to cut a real life section), they're wrong. Give 'em the chop.

I agree with a rename, on the grounds of clarity above all, which I think it's something the wiki needs to take into account with all the names.

As for the Real Life section, cut it.

Overhyped And Underperforming?

If you don't like the current renaming guidelines, please bring up a special efforts thread on the subject. Please. Having this argument in fifty places isn't helping anyone.

Under the current rules, the name is fine.

EDIT: Redirects are always nice though, and that one sounds good.

edited 11th Aug '11 9:42:39 PM by Discar

Ax real life

doesn't work this shows "ok the bad guys are really a threat if that guy got pounded" that just sounds like a Ted Baxter with good publicity or Fake Ultimate Hero... like an under performing sports team losing to last place is not this.

edited 11th Aug '11 10:46:28 PM by Raso

I see vague merit in the real life section on France in early WW 2, as it is true that before the war they were considered to have the best army in Europe, and if handled well could probably have beaten the Germans in a number of different ways.

...however after that it gets pretty wanky and it will be impossible to keep clean.

edited 11th Aug '11 10:38:30 PM by Night

Nuked Real Life.

Alleged Badassry. Badassery Tare.

"Badassery Tare"

Okay, I have no idea what the heck that is supposed to mean. Anyone?

The problem here is that The Worf Effect doesn't have to cause Badass Decay. That's why we cut-listed Worf Effect Survivor. So things like Informed Badassery don't work because the "worf" falling victim to the effect can be a legitimate badass who's having a rough day. This isn't really Informed Ability, though it can overlap if the "worf" in question succumbs to this with every villain.

I have no constructive names, though. This really does need a redirect, if nothing more.

Tare

My logic being that it's done to "zero" the weight of badassery present in the badguy.

Well, we've recently renamed several other tropes named after a character, such as The Mario and The Libby, so we can certainly discuss renaming this one. The "worf" part of the name is pretty unclear (and that show ended a long time ago). The "effect" part of the name is simply wrong: the trope is about a character, not an effect.

I'm thinking this would fit in our "Informed" line of tropes, e.g. Informed Bad Ass: the character is stated in-work to be badass, but whenever the situation calls for it, he instead gets beaten up in short order. The point is that this doesn't just happen once, it happens often: the trope description clearly says so. A badass who loses once is not this trope.

Personally, I think the definition is wrong. It says it has to be a pattern of this happening, but I don't see a useful distinction here between "Trope happens" and "Trope happens repeatedly." Looks like an unnecessary restriction from where I'm standing. If someone came to YKTTW with the trope "A powerful character gets beaten up by a new character to show how powerful the new character is," I would call it as a duplicate.

And I'm willing to bet it's getting used that way already, too.

I'd much rather shift the definition around than the name. (Also, 28k inbounds, holy crap.)

I'm not sure how our inbound counter works technically, but that number strikes me as misleading. "Worf Effect" gets only 6,000 google hits, so it's clearly not a well-established term outside of T Vtropes.

Well I throw in the "the" and I get 41,500 so a) Google hit results sound like an unreliable pile of ass and b) that's still tens of thousands of people dropping the name out there in the world and Google still misses stuff. Not to mention that this doesn't actually include the link.

The Worf Effect has about 30,000 inbounds, Xanatos Gambit brought in about 44,000. 1 year ago The Worf Effect had 11,336, Xanatos Gambit had 24007 so they grew by about the same amount (20,000) but proportionally The Worf Effect grew more.

The Worf Effect was 127th out of 84173 in terms of inbound links- the top 0.15%

75% of pages had less than 23 inbounds.

Inbounds are the only dependable method of judging spread and growth outside of the wiki we have.

edited 12th Aug '11 5:26:38 AM by SomeSortOfTroper

What's the term for a standard you hold something to? Badass Measuring Stick Character?

The Worf Effect is another objectively bad title (and if we rename it, we have to rename The Worf Barrage as well), but on performance statistics it's staggeringly effective. This is probably because it's memetic. However, the concept itself is much Older Than They Think.

Before we even attempt to rename this let's see if we can come up with any acceptable alternate titles.