Rewrite Her Heart Will Go On?: Her Heart Will Go On

What support is there for taking the long-winded, distracting filler story out of Her Heart Will Go On and replacing it with something concise, that gets to whatever the point of the trope is?

edited 10th Sep '11 7:50:15 PM by Citizen

Somebody fixed the tag before I got here.

You have my support.

I almost always favor direct descriptions, but I think this one works well now.

The quote adds surprisingly little though.

I think it's fine the way it is.

That's what Self-Demonstrating is for.

I'm all for it.

Edit: Rewriting, that is, not keeping it as it is.

edited 11th Sep '11 12:41:18 AM by nrjxll

I say rewrite it, only because if banning Self Demonstrating and writing articles as in-jokes you need to know the source material to understand is going to be a thing, it should be a thing across the board, without exceptions. It's too much of a slippery slope to start deciding that some things are well known enough that Self Demonstrating is excusable.

Yes, I know I'm probably the only person on this site who hasn't read a Discworld novel and didn't know that Pratchett has a convention of writing Death's dialogue in capital letters. But that's not the point.

edited 11th Sep '11 6:11:18 PM by raisingirl83

I think it does a good job describing the trope; it's not overly opaque if you're used to checking potholes.

Well we can move the current discription over to the selfdemonstrating namespace and rewrite the current one to the selfdemonstrating page.

Its done for a few pages like Brian Blessed and BRIAN BLESSED

That's also good too.

Oh please, please change it.

Is this actually self-demonstrating, or is it just some sort of weird in-universe way of describing the trope? And, oh, by the way, what is the trope? I guess it has something to do with the female lead losing her love interest? Is that all there is to it? What's with the references to ghosts? Is this a fantasy trope? is pregnancy required? Or sex? I'm really confused.

"[W]e want to show how strong she has become" seems to be the core of the trope.

@Xtifr: It's the trope about when the male love interest dies during the story in the aid of character development/motivation for a female main character, and it is either explicitly stated or heavily implied that after she has killed the big monster or overthrown the dictatorship or whatever the hell the story is about, she will carry his memory in her heart and live a full life in honour of his memory. Kind of the male counterpart to The Lost Lenore, but predated the creation of that trope by quite a bit. Named for the 90s film Titanic because the title of the song pretty much sums this trope up. It's a good trope and totally worthy of an article, but I'm confused why so far it's being treated like an exception to the No Self Demonstrating Or Writing Articles As In-Jokes So You Have To Know The Source Material in Order To Understand The Page rule.

edited 11th Sep '11 7:48:18 PM by raisingirl83

Ah. So ghosts aren't required, but death is? Boy, that's not very clear. And all that stuff about sex and pregnancy is just flavor text, and totally optional? Yeah, clear as mud.

I still don't see how it can claim to be self-demonstrating. It seems to be from some bizarre third-party perspective, which really doesn't help, and actually made me wonder if a third party had to be involved somehow, just because it claimed to be self-demonstrating.

I suppose the song might have helped if I had any idea that it was connected to that movie. Which I've seen, but not for a long time (and I didn't pay any attention to the music when I did see it, except to note that it seemed annoying at times).

I occasionally joke about how a trope description confused me, but this case, no joke—I only had a wild and somewhat incorrect guess. I'm really perplexed by the people saying this is clear. I had to read it three times to get as much as I did. Rewrite, please!

I don't think the current version belongs on self-demonstrating, but if someone wanted to move it to Just for Fun, I probably wouldn't object.

@Xtfir: The article's been written as a dialogue between the dead male love interest and fantasy author Terry Pratchett's characterisation of Death as speaking in capital letters. No idea whether the article was originally written and launched like this, or whether someone did it later as a thing. So the article has kind of been framed as an in-joke for people familiar with Terry Pratchett's work. Which might be a lot of people, but still breaks the "rule" (if it is even a rule, but I've noticed lots of pages have been altered recently to read as more straightforward and comprehensible) of not making article pages incomprehensible in-jokes.

Oh. Right. Well—speaking as a huge fan of Sir Pterry—it sure didn't work as an in-joke for me! Probably because there didn't seem to be anything comedic about it. (I'm tempted to say "or funny", but I acknowledge that humor can be subjective.) So I never even thought of a possible connection.

I assume this article is a relic of the days when clarity was the last thing we wanted?

Here's what the original YKTTW has to say about the definition (thank you, Archive.org!):

"A lot of male love interests seem to exist to do two things. Provide a romantic moment, and possibly sire a child. After they finally 'do the deed' the male love interest is entirely disposible (it's more romantic that way). Unlike Girl of the Week, the love interest is unlikely to be replaced (even if the heroine eventually marries another)."

The last line confuses me (how can he not be replaced if she marries someone else?) but it seems to amount to "male love interest provides sex and dies".

Hmm, "disposable" is pretty vague. Sounds like it could just be referring to the guy she dumps. Seems like it was pretty confusing from day one. I wonder if we should check the examples and wicks to see what other people thought it meant. Not that I think it needs a rename — I'm just curious how many other people have been confused or even misled by the description.

I'm also perplexed by the sex requirement.

edited 12th Sep '11 1:16:58 AM by Xtifr

What I got out of the trope (from just the examples) was "The love interest dies, but the survivor becomes a stronger person."

It seems to me it's like an Old Wound Romance something bad happened but she is an Iron Woobie because of it and toughs it out. Even if she is a widow, left at the alter, abused yada after she put her all into the relationship she doesn't let it get her down.

(Iron Woobie is curently YMMV sadly... But I mean all the objective parts fit.)

Yeah this is pretty annoying, please write a new one.

Write a new description that doesn't try to be funny. Why is this even using a Discworld in-joke when this trope never appeared in Discworld?

Should we start by just deleting the potholes to Discworld and The Grim Reaper? There's no need to associate this with Discworld or to picture one speaker as the reaper to understand the current description.

And again, the quote: Those are lyrics from the trope naming song, but nothing about that particular extract says the man has DIED, which is the most important part of this trope.

Since no one else has anything to add, I went ahead and changed it to something else. Further rewriting I leave as an exercise for the reader. I'm not entirely satisfied with the trope or the suitability of all the examples, but whatever.

I'm not sure the old article really counted as self-demonstrating, so someone who does and actually thinks it worth saving can copy it over from the history to a Self Demonstrating namespace themselves.

edited 17th Sep '11 10:54:14 AM by Citizen