Trope Description Improvement Drive

Correction: The issue is not how it treats them as commonplace terms (I'm fairly sure that "mandible" at least isn't an obscure word for laymen), it's that it treats them as if they only refer to the arthropod mouthparts by the same names, when they're actually generic terms in vertebrate zoology for the upper and lower jaw(bone) respectively, and which just happen to be defined differently in invertebrate zoology (for the obvious reason that invertebrates lack any sort of bones or anything remotely homologous to the vertebrate mouthparts).

edited 1st May '18 12:46:23 PM by MarqFJA

Yes, all of that. Though, there are also a lot of young people on this site, and I don't expect every (at least American) 13/14-year-old to know the word "mandible", honestly. Sometimes technical terminology is unavoidable, but it could be expanded up (even just to say "mandible - that is, lower jaw") as a teaching opportunity.

edited 1st May '18 1:32:10 PM by lakingsif

So, anyone against turning Added Alliterative Appeal into a trope page for alliterative phrasing?

And then making an Alliteration Index or something, to hold Title and possibly Name, as those might not be phrasing?

Yes, I want to list Antagonist Abilities as a trope related to The Antagonist. Any reason to not list it?

Is Medical Monarch a subtrope of Healing Hands? Or is there other ways to express their medical nature, making it just highly correlated?

edited 20th May '18 7:35:49 PM by Malady

Gothic Horror seems far more interested in describing a 18th–19th century historical movement than in actually defining the genre.

There's already a cleanup of the Alliterative Name pages, with some TLP drafts for other things. I can't remember if you're part of that, but I think letting it run its course is better than jumping into action right now.

Antagonist Abilities being listed seems reasonable.

I wouldn't say it's a sub trope. A Medical Monarch can have Healing Hands, that's about it.

Move that stuff to UsefulNotes.The Gothic and rewrite.

- I made Alliterative Phrasing TLP to eventually handle what people think Added Alliterative Appeal is.

But Added Alliterative Appeal is currently being used like a trope, while the page looks like an index, what with having a list of tropes, without an examples section, and is typed as a index, with indexing.

Added Alliterative Appeal is in some ways a super trope, but is more of an index page that also describes alliteration in TV Tropes articles. It's an old page, and I think it's pretty much grandfathered by now, so you should just move the appropriate wicks to that TLP draft, and remove/comment out on work pages, because AAA should not be listed on them.

No feedback regarding the Monstrous Mandibles issue?

Personally I'm much more familiar with the word "mandible" as referring to things like the human jaw than to the insect-like mouthparts the page seems to be referring to, so I was a bit confused on seeing the title and the first few lines of the description. At the very least it should be made clearer which "mandible" it's describing.

Shattered World says "If the pieces are somehow hovering in an atmosphere with gravity, that's World in the Sky."

But is that indicating Exclusiveness? Or is it right that Literature.The Shattered World is on both both tropes?

You should always try to use the most specific trope for any example.

Despoa altered the description of Designated Hero:

"Jerkass" was altered to "lazy doormat" and "or highly ineffectual FailureHeroes that barely accomplish anything, heroic or otherwise." was included after "superficial virtues".

Opinions?

edited 31st May '18 12:06:28 PM by MagBas

Revert and warn. If they keep it up, a suspension is in order.

- I'm not sure if both tropes can happen at the same time, though.

Promptless Branching Point allows equipment branching, right?

Certain items, in VideoGame.Dawn Of Sorrow (Mina's Talisman) and VideoGame.Eternal Senia (Cross Necklace?), are needed to be equipped to access certain endings.

edited 1st Jun '18 4:42:48 AM by Malady

From Queer Show Ghetto:

"Genres like Yaoi, Yuri, Josei, and the Bara Genre are often designed specifically to be consumed by LGBT people, and therefore are not in a queer ghetto."

How accurate is this? Most yaoi and most yuri are aimed at straight people.

Perhaps that needs rephrasing. I presume from your comment that Josei and Bara are designed for LGBT+ people not in a 'ghetto' sense but as a target demographic? Then, we could say that Yuri and Yaoi are designed for straight people to watch queer romance, with Yuri often featuring gay males who are pretty and fawned over by straight female viewers. Is that more accurate?

There have been a number of posts on the Is this an example? thread with confusion about Knight of Cerebus. Specifically, we've had to repeatedly affirm that Cerebus Syndrome is a requirement for Knight of Cerebus, and that both cannot take place within a single installment of anything (a single movie, single book, etc). This is consistent with the current description, but I'd like to rewrite Knight of Cerebus to make it more explicit about single installments. The current description could also better articulate the trope's relationship to Vile Villain, Saccharine Show and omnipresent tropes like The Climax.

There is also a lot of misuse along the lines of people just adding any serious villain in a single-installment work, will try to make a separate thread for that clean-up.

good thread idea, and I would love to see drafts but they’re probably not needed for the kind of change it would be

It seems the Phony Newscast page goes straight to what the trope is used for. It skips the definition completely. I think this is the main reason why one example is a wall of text and most of the others are zero context examples or examples stating only that the show contained a newscast. I think the definition is a show containing a newscast that you are supposed to think is real, or something along those lines. I'm really not sure.

Son of an Ape says:

"all humans are in fact apes (belonging to the family Hominidae, or great apes)"

Should it be mentioned that Hominidae is derived from the Latin for human, implying that apes are human-like instead of the other way around?

I think that line should be removed for being factually inaccurate.

Phony Newscast seems to refer to anything that pretends to be a newscast. This seems to include several sort of different things:

1. Comedy newscasts that ape the style of a news show, but are clearly satirical. E.g. The Daily Show. Not clear to me how this differs from News Parody.
2. In-universe newsclips for storytelling purposes. Important events are told though news-clips that are presented as exactly as real as everything else in-universe, but not more. I think most of the commercial examples fit this (they're using the news clips to further the narrative about how great the product is) as well as examples like The Dark Knight.
3. Hoax newscasts, works of fiction that are entirely in a news show format and purport to be true. The trope maker would be The War of the Worlds. Found footage horror like The Blair Witch Project seems like a similar idea.

&

If that line is being removed, the line after it also should be removed:

The comparison being made is extremely inappropriate and not at all accurate to the point that they're attempting to make. It's also irrelevant once the 'humans are apes' part has been removed.

I'd also like to ask if this sentence is accurate:

Back when I was involved with primate conservation, anthropomorphism was a giant no-no. However, I've been out of the field for many years; I can't imagine this attitude would have changed but I feel it's worth double-checking.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jun 29th 2018 at 2:00:07 PM

I'd definitely remove that paragraph. It has a very nasty undertone to it.

Yeh, telling people that if they think 'ape' is an insult then they're stupid is very bad in general.

Actually, after reading, most of that page doesn't seem relevant to the trope at all. It basically says "in SF, non-human characters use ape as a slur for the human race" and then goes off on anything about comparing apes to humans in real life.