Change Description (New Crowner Jan 15): Super Weight

The examples on the page are rather messy and almost entirely inaccurate from what I've seen. They're also largely unnecessary to describing the trope when there are examples in the description itself such as Galactus being level 4 and God being level 5.

Is there any real point to keeping the examples or can we just cut them entirely?

The inaccuracy's unfortunate, but the good examples are pretty interesting. Not necessary to illustrate the trope, but interesting in themselves. Maybe they should go on work pages rather than here? Show experts would then more likely see each one and offer corrections.

I have a feeling that this might cause edit wars if the examples are moved to the work pages.

Come to think of it, this feels more like a Just for Fun page than an actual trope.

I think this would become more manageable if it was split into sub-pages per medium. Furthermore, it needs some more reviews; the list of examples is huge and (just as with other popular tropes like Five-Man Band) no doubt contains numerous incorrect ones. For example, it tends to attract the notion that if character A beats character B, then A needs to be in a higher "tier" even if that clearly isn't what the trope description states.

Why is Galactus a level four and God a level five inaccurate?

Galactus hits all the categories for level four but he's far from the biggest mover in his own universe, much less an author weight.(The Living Tribunal is more of a five but its still a little debatable thanks to the Worf Effect and the fact he has a bigger boss)

God, that really depends on the story I suppose but in religious text he can do anything and the best you can do is ask really nicely and hope he reconsiders if you're favorable in his sight. He is a solid type five.

I don't think Arha called that inaccurate. That was just an example from the main description, which the post said leaves further examples redundant.

Why are they redundant?

No, the main examples given of Galactus at four and God at five are fine. It's just the examples list that is inaccurate. One of the most glaring errors I saw was the same character (Kishua Zelretch being listed twice (he 'appears' in two different works) at two different levels, and both of them are wrong.

And I don't think this is a Just for Fun page exactly, though it can be fun to see how it applies to series. However, the page is apparently too fun, leading people to do some major shoehorning and power level wanking without proper justification. I don't see how you can keep it from being drowned in those kinds of example.

edited 19th Oct '11 9:25:22 AM by Arha

I'd support work pages for the examples. Would we make a namespace for them?

An entire namespace for a trope that takes only six bullets to list? I don't think so. Putting it on the work page should be fine.

So what are we doing about this? It either needs a lot of cleanup and probably a lot of cleanup in the future, or it needs to have examples cut. I could also see us doing a one time cleanup operation and then locking the page.

I agree that it needs one hell of a cleanup. It seems that people like to imagine characters in fiction they like as being a lot more powerful than they are.

I honestly don't see a need to scrap examples, although I think it shouldn't be linked to too many other tropes.

This is more something Just for Fun than a legitamite trope.

I don't think we need to cut anything, just clean up the examples. I see way too many Level Fours misplaced as Level Fives just because a troper likes the series they're in.

I also agree that this is Just for Fun and shouldn't be locked.

edited 28th Oct '11 3:05:41 AM by pyr0h1tman8

Maybe we should just cut the dubious or incorrect examples, and keep an eye out for people who want to put them back in; the page seems to attract a fair amount of gushing about characters people like.

I think the Dragon Ball Z listing is a good example of how this page should work: it doesn't enumerate all the characters, just points out that all the big fighters are Type 3, and that even if one of them is clearly stronger than the rest, that doesn't make him Type 4.

I think the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is a good example of how this page should not work: it tries to enumerate all the characters, has several of them listed twice depending on "form", has examples with weasel words like "probably", and tends to attract lines for "type one-and-a-half" which the page header says shouldn't exist.

This isn't a Just for Fun page. If we only clean up the examples, there are going to be a lot of bad examples again later. This seems like a trope destined for decay to me.

Agreed on both counts, this page's examples will probably require at least some curating even after cleaning (which I'm up for, even if I don't particularly relish it). It may work to cut down on work to migrate the cleaned/approved examples to the new page one by one, and note at the beginning of the example section on the main page that that's what's going on.

I think that the problem is that people tend to want to spread their favorite work across the entire spectrum, resulting in a lot of things getting put into Tier 5 when very little fiction actually uses it. (Eg. the Exalted example put Ligier in it — while he's one of the most powerful demons, he can be bound and summoned by players and compelled to do their bidding, and if he were actually Author Weight the entire game would collapse. Though really, nothing in that setting is Tier 5, since part of the point is that everything is beatable.)

I think another issue there is that Tier 5 is described as "living force of nature" — it's possible to become a living force of nature long before you reach Author Weight.

But to generalize a bit more — the tiers need to be better defined, with descriptions of the sort of things they can and can't do. The examples given in the list are totally useless, because most people aren't going to be familiar with them (some of them are from extremely niche series, and very few are from what I'd call really mainstream media.)

edited 2nd Nov '11 9:34:28 PM by Aquillion

Adding a fourth row for abilities wouldn't be too hard, and would probably help make the distinction clearer. I think you have a good point about the "forces of nature" bit, it would be more accurate to say that type 3's can be smallish nature spirits, elementals or "gods" in the Greek sense, type 4's are forces of nature in the vein of Winter, Light, etc, who have vast power over a narrow specrrum, while type 5's are universal facets of creation, the kind of thing every other tier depends on. (Not discounting the other type of characters who can occupy those tiers.)

I have to disagree on tier 5's being unbeatable, though it does depend on the details of the setting. The Sandman has a bunch of type 5's that have various strengths and weaknesses; some are universal facets (the Endless) while others like Lucifer or God are both stronger than (probably) most individual Endless.

Okay, so, how about this. First, we expand the description to say clearly what each tier has to be capable of. Tier five is basically Physical God, and not in the watered down sense. One is normal, fit humans with no particular super powers, but still competent etc.

Then, after that, we either clean up the examples as best we can and check back in six months or so or just cut them.

Recommendation: limit examples to characters from Trope Overdosed works.

Do you mean examples in the description? I'm not sure how much that would help since, for example, Negima is an incredibly Trope Overdosed work but is pretty niche despite its tvtropes popularity.

Which is why we have multiple media to pull from. Negima is an overdosed anime, so you'd need to find a couple other media before just filling in another anime example.

Edit: nvm this

edited 3rd Nov '11 10:56:29 AM by crazysamaritan

I strongly oppose having any examples in the description.

Also, for the record, Trope Overdosed isn't really a measure of anything but how popular something is at TV Tropes itself - it really has nothing to do with what's widely known by the general public.

edited 3rd Nov '11 10:57:36 AM by nrjxll

^^ My point is that being trope overdosed has little to do with how popular something is with the internet going community at large.

^ Well, I think it might help to weed out obviously silly examples. Like saying for tier five "If you cannot come up with a reason for why this character is on par with the Christian God (tier five) then you probably need to look at a different rank."