Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

Playing with a trope doesn't really work that well in real life, since real life doesn't follow tropes the same way fiction does. However, if there are tropes that exist in real life, you can expect them and do stuff about it, or plan for them, or stuff, so an outright ban doesn't seem right.

Those examples examples are pretty much people sit on chairs. "War happens", which is what they're trying to defy, isn't a trope.

In any case, I deleted the RL folder for not being examples.

Re: Boldly Coming; Shouldn't this fall under "(Currently) Impossible in Real Life"? Either that or "Sex Tropes"?

Either way, upvoted.

Also, can we edit the Defied Trope vote to be "Impossible in Real Life"? The way it's currently worded could hurt someone's feelings...

Nope, couldn't keep a straight face.

edited 6th Jul '15 6:49:25 AM by Ripsaw

Deader Than Disco has a Real Life subpage filled with walls of text, examples that aren't actually examples (Krispy Kreme, for instance, which is definitely still around), and potentially Flame Bait-y stuff (the Politics folder, the example about the Confederate flag and Southern pride, any entry regarding something that still has fans out there somewhere, etc.). Should we add this one to the crowner?

Probably a good idea to add it. I read through some of it, and my impression is that it's mainly used about stuff that's less popular than it used to be, but still in use or otherwise not dead. Another bunch of non-examples are just companies that went out of business. Not the same thing. Oh, and the same problem as usual with generic "examples".

Considering some of the stuff going down under articles on Facebook, discussing the Confederate flag stuff could easily devolve into edit wars and flamebait. Plus there's the whole real life drama thing.

Added Deader Than Disco to the crowner.

Deader Than Disco seems to be a somewhat odd example, because all (or at least most) of the examples are about Real Life, in that they are about genres or works that have gone seriuosly out of fashion in real life. The examples are not in-universe; there is (as far as I can see) no example about a story where disco music is dead.

So the Real Life section seems misplaced in that all the examples are Real Life.

And the sub-pages are divided into "general" and "specific" examples, which seems to violate the "no general examples" rule, but actually seems to mean "Genres that are Deader Than Disco" vs. "Individual works that are Deader Than Disco".

Come to think of it, as it is, it is not a trope. It's not a storytelling convention, but more a cultural phenomenon. There are other "tropes" like that, such as Pop-Cultural Osmosis. As such, it actually is about real life and should have real life examples.

I'm voting "no" on this one, since making it NRLEP would mean removing more or less all the examples, and I think that would be too radical a measure (I don't think the flame-bait potential is large enough to merit it, but I could be persuaded otherwise).

On the other hand, if the vote is just about removing the Real Life section, I'm all for it, so maybe this is just me misinterpreting the proposal.

It definitely needs cleaning up, though, since there seem to be many dubious examples.

edited 7th Jul '15 4:17:19 AM by GnomeTitan

I was just proposing we get rid of the Real Life section. Looking at the other pages, most of the examples are technically "real life" but are actually more of an Audience Reaction to works. The Real Life section doesn't even have the excuse of being about actual works. The whole thing probably does need to be cleaned up if not reworked.

Edit: Deader Than Disco is listed as an Audience Reaction, so that's probably why so many of the examples sound like Audience Reactions.

edited 7th Jul '15 9:52:58 AM by phoenix

Yes, that makes sense (being listed as an Audience Reaction).

Which brings up a question: what counts as Real Life in an Audience Reaction? Should that be taken as "the public reaction to real-life events"? In that case, the Deader Than Disco examples that deal with art genres wouldn't be Real Life, and my objection to making it NRLEP would be moot.

edited 7th Jul '15 12:19:37 PM by GnomeTitan

I would think an audience reaction trope would, by definition, not be able to be real life in the vast majority of cases, since an audience needs something to react to, a performance, a work, an event of some kind. Granted, you can have impromptu occurrences and a crowd that gathers and reacts, greying the RL/work line, but mostly, I just can't see it in RL.

I would say, rather, that Audience Reactions are all inherently Real Life phenomena, because they involve real people reacting to things. It just so happens that some of the things being reacted to are in media and some are in reality. It is entirely possible, for example, to ship real people.

With that in mind, the reason we would not permit Audience Reactions about Real Life topics is that they are very likely to violate the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment and at the very least constitute gossip.

edited 7th Jul '15 7:34:33 PM by Fighteer

That sounds reasonable.

If it isn't already in the policy, perhaps it should be written down that NRLEP for Audience Reactions means "reactions to real people and specific real-life events" so people don't misunderstand it in the same way as I did (i.e. "all audience reactions are real life, because it's real people reacting in real life")?

EDITED: with that interpretation, I'm withdrawing my "no" vote to Deader Than Disco.

On a tangent, do we need to do anything about the "general" vs. "specific" categories on the subpages? It's confusing, because we have a policy against general examples, but the "general" examples here aren't really general in that sense (they are examples of entire genres being Deader Than Disco which I think is entirely appropriate - I interpret the policy against general examples to be that we don't want examples like "Trope X often appears in high-school movies").

edited 8th Jul '15 1:38:19 AM by GnomeTitan

Seems like Andyxdr added another entry to the crowner and didn't say anything about it. Again.

It's Those Two Bad Guys, by the way, which has one real life example that's probably a shoehorn anyway, villain trope aside.

It's a tricky distinction, but I think the important detail is that no example should ever start with "This trope happens frequently in..." (at least, not unless that sentence is followed by at least two sub-bullets with specific examples, preferably more than two). Because if that's the case, then surely you can think of at least one of those "frequent" examples to actually describe.

On the other hand, when a particular genre has a notable way that it tends to play a trope, you could note it in the description. For instance, Chiaroscuro's description explicitly notes that Film Noir is fond of the trope—but the trope list does not include an example that is just "This trope is used a lot in Film Noir."

edited 8th Jul '15 9:29:57 AM by SolipSchism

Solip: Yes, I agree with what you're saying, and that is the reason for disallowing general examples for tropes.

However, I was talking specifically about Deader Than Disco, where I think that it's OK to have examples that apply to entire genres, because it's not a case of "this happens frequently in <genre>" (which is a lazy way of avoiding specific examples), but "this entire genre is out of fashion" (which can actually be a true, factual statement, in which case it would just be silly to list specific works in the genre)

And the specific question was this: should we rename the examples labelled as "general" (the ones declaring entire genres as dead) to avoid confusion with the other kind of general examples ("This occurs frequently in <genre>")?

Oh. Yes. Yes, I think we should, if only because it's misleading to call them "general" examples.

If it's a genre, it's not a general example—the genre is Deader Than Disco. That's not general. I mean, after all, the title of the trope is referencing a genre, so...

Except in most cases it's just "not as popular as it used to", with no stigma attached.

edited 8th Jul '15 10:22:34 AM by AnotherDuck

Aye, I agree those should go. "Deader than Disco" is a pretty superlative descriptor. If you wouldn't describe a thing's deadness as "superlative", it doesn't belong on that trope's example list.

I have no trouble with genre examples in Deader Than Disco, so long as they are actually examples of the trope.

A little late to the party, but calling:

• Boldly Coming: Added 5th Jul '15 at 09:19:02 PM, 17:0
• Defied Trope: Added 6th Jul '15 at 02:09:49 AM 15:1 (16)

Deader Than Disco clears the minimum requirements pretty easily, but given that what would actually get cut is still being discussed, apparently, I'm holding off on that for the moment, and just grabbing the figurative low-hanging fruit.

On Deader Than Disco, at least people, politics, and religion should be cut. Those are usually the worst items. A lot of the other things under the Real Life category there are just non-media examples, like products and types of businesses and stuff. I'd also delete examples that are about something otherwise acceptable, but refers to a person in a way that wouldn't be accepted otherwise. Haven't checked in detail how that applies, though.

Trying to allow some real life examples while disallowing others might mean more maintenance and clean up in the future. If we're gonna cut real life examples from Deader Than Disco, we might want to get rid of all of them (meaning everything that's not a reaction to a work). Though even if we didn't cut them for being real life, most probably should be cut for not actually being examples. Also, are multi-paragraph examples allowed? This page has quite a few, but I don't think I've ever seen them anywhere else.

Multi-paragraph entries anywhere are usually a prime sign of out-of-control natter.

I'm more or less in agreement with about allowing some examples but not others, personally. Sad to say, but tropers as a whole tend to have trouble with "X is okay, but Y is not, even though they're both in the same folder".

And like Candi said, multiple paragraphs is a warning sign. Also, third (or more!) level bullet points should be grounds for a virtual flogging in most instances.