Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

Re: Supervillain Lair: the trope is not "bad guy who happens to live in super-fancy digs". It's about a lair that is, shall we say, somewhat villainous itself. There's a long list of features such lairs tend to sport, and the RL examples display few or none of these features. (Many of them because nobody in RL would ever build such features into an actual residence!)

There's a couple that are borderline, but most, I think are simply bad examples.

And, of course, it's calling real people villains.

To be picky, the fact that the real-life examples are shoehorned is not reason enough to make the trope NRLEP.

But calling real people villains is, and that's the reason stated in the crowner, so the argument is moot, really.

edited 30th Sep '16 5:25:30 AM by GnomeTitan

The exact definition doesn't really matter, as long as it includes someone or something being villainous. That's applying morality to it, which we don't do.

edited 30th Sep '16 7:28:54 AM by AnotherDuck

My point, exactly.

Calling Supervillain Lair.

half of the examples in the real life section in Free-Range Children were removed recently because of their status as generic examples. And, if i am remembering well, the folder in question was a generic example magnet in the past.

Opinions?

The two examples currently in there are viable, so maybe a note asking not to put generic examples can do?

I removed two examples. Saying "half", while technically correct, kind of makes it sound like there were a lot of examples removed.

Likes Older Women has a Real Life section and probably shouldn't. It's a just a list of celebrities who dated/married/slept with older women as well as a few generic "examples" on the popularity of MILF porn. Some of the age differences aren't even noteworthy, like "This actor is five years younger than his wife."

Gossip, then?

Definitely warrants a run through the crowner.

Gossip, yes, as well as being a dating/shipping trope.

I call Likes Older Women.

A thing i noted: Hypocrite is No Real Life Examples Please but Hypocritical Fandom is not.

edited 20th Oct '16 12:45:54 PM by MagBas

I honestly think Hypocritical Fandom should just die in a fire. It's just asking for trouble, plus it's ignoring how different facets of fandoms can have differing opinions that are only visible when said fans as loud enough.

edited 20th Oct '16 12:49:05 PM by Karxrida

We really don't need a trope like that about a fandom anyway. It would only be useful as In-Universe(and unless the trope shows up really often, well...), because otherwise it's just complaining about other people.

That would be another thread, though. All we can do here is shut down the RL section.

It is an index, so it is not useful to list it there.

I suggest that Invading Refugees gets labeled as "historical examples only" (I've seen this on a few trope pages), because this page will attract Edit Warring and political bickering alá Too Soon and I also think that the current statement about the Refugee Crisis is a massive oversimplification, but going into detail about it would be a treatise in itself, so IMHO it would be better to just disallow it.

The real life section of Meaningful Name is quite problematic. Not to the point where it requires outright deletion (meaningful names do exist in real life), but reading it just feels wrong.

The page almost exclusively deals with "Aptronyms", names that are "aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner".

The problem is, these are not Meaningful Names.

Aptronyms are like coincidences, things that could happen but is not engineered. Nominative determinism hypothesizes that some aspect of these names do lead to people having lives that "live up to them" later in their lives, but is still a hypothesis. Worse still, we started making up convoluted connections between the name and the life that feel more and more contrived as we go on, to the point where nominative determinism couldn't justify it anymore.

Let me give you an example from the page to demonstrate:

• Roger Tory Peterson is best known for his popular field guides to birds. Tori is the Japanese word for bird.

In this example (of which I consider is one of the most contrived examples on the page), bird guide author "Tory"'s name is linked to his profession via the Japanese word Tori. Nevermind that Mr. Peterson is not from a Japanese family and that the name "Tory"'s actual meanings (as found after a quick search) are "From the knolls/Lives by the tower/derived from Irish tóraidhe which means outlaw", all of which has nothing to do with birds.

The example has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the name. It's a lucky aptronym (a contrived one still), and nothing more. Examples like this are better as examples of Stephen Ulysses Perhero or Prophetic Names (though for which one I am not sure as the distinction between the two is incredibly vague and is worth a clean-up of its own)

A meaningful name is about the name's "meaning". Be it brutally direct or delicately hidden, the name's meaning is bestowed on birth. In fiction characters are named at creation instead of at birth, but for real life the meanings of the names are assigned at birth and is not designed to be appropriated to a later life event.

And names can and do have meanings in real life. Many Eastern Asian names (esp. Chinese and Japanese) are indeed named with significance. I myself (a Chinese citizen at birth) has a personal name engineered in a way to be an oblique homophonic reference to "With Fortune".

And it's not just that, I've seen names that reference classic poetry, siblings names that reference rain and snow, real-life Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom. (For some reference, the name descriptions for characters in Thunderbolt Fantasy would give you a rough idea of how the East Asian languages associate meanings to individual characters and create entire meanings to names by stringing the characters together)

Names in western countries also have their meanings. Surnames derived from ancient lineages, given names with meanings of their own, and Germanic surnames that include entire stories in a single word. These are examples that would fit the title Meaningful Name better, rather than coincidental aptronyms. Unfortunately, I had yet to find a single example about things like these on the page. All examples I have read yet are aptronyms.

edited 2nd Nov '16 11:17:45 PM by Wuz

Yeah, that page needs a lot of scrubbing. I think the basic requirement is (or should be) that the name comes after what it references. If the name comes first, it's a coincidence. Even if it's a name the parents hope will fulfill itself, it's still not a meaningful name, since it's not given to a person who has that trait at that time. Unless the name actually is "Hope", since that's what the person symbolises at the time.

Some old surnames are almost more plainly descriptive than meaningful, but would probably fit (which is the origin of names like Smith and Potter).

Real people can still have taken names that are meant to be meaningful, especially stage names and pen names.

I agree. In general, a name given before the fact can (as far as we know) only be meaningful in a work of fiction. I can think of exceptions, though: suppose somebody is really determined to do something, and to motivate himself takes a name with a meaning related to that ambition.

I would say if someone takes a name in that way, it's a vocalisation of that person's own ambition, so it is symbolic in that way, at the time the name is taken, even if it's not fully realised. I wouldn't accept the same reasoning for someone who was given the name by someone who isn't fully aware of the named person's ambition, which is always the case when naming babies.

Agreed.

edited 4th Nov '16 2:11:37 AM by GnomeTitan

Good ideas. I agree with everything we've discussed so far.

edited 4th Nov '16 5:03:48 AM by Wuz