Do we really need examples?: Panty Shot

Agreed. And it will cut down on a lot of the issues with this page.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

That's as much a point for removing examples on the pages of other visual, nearly meaningless tropes as it is for letting panty shots stay. Although it does, as you say, serve a purpose to people who are interested in a particular work.

You are a blowfish.

That's true. I'm of the opinion that while those tropes are overall not as useful as the plot relevant ones, they are interesting to enough people to warrant their place on the page. I also don't believe that trope examples like these would only belong on the work page, and not on the trope page.

Cutting direct references would be enough. Cutting examples is overkill.

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

After taking a look through the examples listed, I have to disagree with the notion that there is nothing to be gained from having them on the trope page.

To be sure, some examples give so little information that they are pointless... those of the "a Panty Shot happens when X character is running through a Subway tunnel" variety. Those can be safely axed, because they don't really tell me anything about the work in question.

Other examples, however, do give detail about how they affect the work and/or play with viewer expectations. Take these:

These examples tell me that the scene is obviously there for more than just viewer titillation. They are both played for laughs in different ways, with the Evangelion example using the scene as an excuse for Asuka-on-stooges violence and the corresponding Toji reaction, and with the sheer absurdity of the situation in the A-ko example.

Those types of examples I personally find interesting, and not in a "hurr durr that sounds so hawt" way, but in how this particular type of fanservice is used to facilitate communication between the author and the audience. This is pretty much the entire reason we do catalog examples of tropes on this site, and I don't see a particularly good reason to tie our hands in this instance simply because the subject is something associated with sex.

That said, any examples that don't give the reader any useful information, or those that (as Eddie put it on another subject, I believe) "sound like they were typed with one hand off the keyboard", have my 100% support for removal. There's no reason why the page can't be presented in a tasteful manner, but in the process let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

edited 18th Jan '12 8:09:06 PM by Meeble

Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!

Out of curiosity, do we have the "sexual situations used for humor on prudes" super trope thingy yet?

Fight smart, not fair.

I support cutting the examples for this trope too, partly because I am not sure what they really do for the wiki.

From what I can tell, there is definitely precedent for cutting examples from a page if they are complaint magnets or invite flaming. I think that policy should also apply to tropes that invite gushing, especially "gushing about people/situations you find attractive" like this one does. I personally find it annoying to have to wade through what amounts to drooling next to this trope *

and I feel like people who are new to the wiki would be especially repulsed by it especially when it appears on trope pages for works that are not really focused on fanservice.

I think that it would be difficult to police the examples if we keep them and just tried to clean them up and I am not sure that trying to get rid of the bad examples would really end up dealing with the problem I mentioned earlier.

It seems to me that fetish fuel was dropped from the wiki for similar reasons, which I believe adds support to that argument as well.

I think just taking out the problematic examples might work somewhat and I acknowledge that such a solution may be more popular than the deletion approach. If that is the decision here, it seems to me that we should at the very least cut out unintentional examples (i.e., non-fanservice ones). In any event, I hope I am not coming across too strong here because I certainly do not want to restart a heated argument.

Anyway, I think that we might as well have a crowner on this, since there has been plenty of discussion about it. Unless anyone is strongly opposed, I would be willing to make one.

edited 27th Jan '12 7:18:09 PM by LouieW

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

Sure, we can cut unintentional examples. That leaves everything animated left in, and probably everything that isn't broadcasted live. If it's been in any kind of post production, you can assume it's been deliberately left in. Maybe excluding some pause-and-zoom-in-to-catch examples.

Fetish Fuel is one thing (mainly because it's so subjective); cutting this is just excessively prude. I think most arguments that say there's nothing to gain really means, "I have nothing to gain from this."

Personally, it's helped me avoid some series so I didn't have to waste time on them when I had little. The important part is how a work uses the trope, not where.

The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.

I don't support any move towards removing the intentional usage of tropes, from trope example lists.

If some badly-written examples are gushing too much, or offering image links, they need to be rewritten.

But in the end, this is TV Tropes. Panty Shot is a trope. It's not even an omnipresent trope, like The Protagonist. The majority of anime that I saw, have no panty shots at all. It's a specific sub-category of works, that choose to go that way.

We are not "plot tropes". We collect hundreds, if not thousands of Spectacle, Personal Appearance Tropes, Stock Phrases, video game gameplay tropes, and several others, that are not part of a strictly defined, important "plot", just add something to a certain atmosphere, or make a random reference, or something.

I mean, yeah, listing all panty shots ever isn't exactly a huge contribution to human culture, but neither is listing all works that use the Vertigo Effect camera trick, or for that matter, listing any tropes at all, even plot tropes. Many would say, that the idea of collecting tropes is, in and of itself, a useless activity.

I disagree with them.

Actually, it's just 345 examples, not thousands.

It's not our fault that the trope happens to be commonly used. It's one thing to try to avoid looking creepy by using more appropriate phrasings, but an entirely different to do it at the expense of listing trope examples, that is the main function of the wiki. The kind of people who find collecting lists of a trope's usage obsessive and psychotic, are probably mostly coming from the group that would find the idea behind TV Tropes inherently obsessive.

edited 28th Jan '12 5:07:41 AM by Ever9

You provide a compelling argument for getting rid of all of those other useless "tropes." Why should they remain when they have as little reason to be here as Panty Shot?

Because they bring people to the wiki. No matter how 'useless' Vertigo Effect might be, it has more than two thousand inbounds. Panty Shot has near four thousand. And those are just two pages we may call useless. We do not cut pages with such inbounds because they may serve no purpose.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

I am sure if we hosted hardcore pornography on here we'd get more inbound links. We don't do that because it is not honest to the site or part of the site's purpose. So yeah, dump those useless tropes. If it improves the wiki, then why the fuck wouldn't you do it?

As seen here, we usually abstain from cutting pages with high inbounds and when we do, we make them redirects.

And the site's purpose is to document tropes. I don't recall we ever made the distinction of cataloguing only useful tropes. Threads have been locked because people stated we should cut tropes on the grounds of being 'unnecessary'.

edited 28th Jan '12 7:43:18 AM by lu127

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

When did anyone bring up "paedo anime" in this discussion?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Marq, I'd leave this up to the mods.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

About to it be listed here, it is listed here because it is a trope- and this wiki is a catalog of tropes. All the "tropes" with the examples removed are subjective or omnipresent.

You'd concede that yourself was correct?

Regardless, as silly and fetishistic as the trope is, it's still a trope. I understand cutting many of the Fetish Fuel tropes, since they basically came down to "I find this sexy". But this one isn't like that. If we were all asexual, we'd still have to acknowledge this trope exists. There's no reason to remove examples. Cut unnecessary creepiness.

edited 28th Jan '12 8:36:08 AM by helterskelter

Asking for a troper to defend "useless tropes", is like asking a humanitarian to defend "useless people".

It's just coming from fundamentally incompatible starting point.

Collecting ALL tropes is the site's purpose. If you say that this very idea is "not honest to the site or part of the site's purpose", then you are talking about an entirely different site.

The only things that TV Tropes doesn't cover, are things that are not used by artists as building blocks of a work. This isn't the case with Spectacle tropes, Personal Appearance Tropes, Stock Phrases, etc, including Panty Shot.

edited 28th Jan '12 8:38:44 AM by Ever9

Just wait for the mods, guys. They'll handle this.

Oh, and there they are.

edited 28th Jan '12 8:49:26 AM by Discar

If you wish to debate this, you will do this civilly without swearing, attacks, or derails.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

After some careful thought, I am going to lock this thread. It seems that people are not capable of discussing this in a mature and civil fashion at this junction. It is better to table this matter for a time. If this is to come up again, it will be in a new thread without the insults, swearing and sniping.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick