Needs Help: Mentos Finger

Mentos Finger. Absolutely not thriving.

What the hell does Mentos have to do with the trope? Or fingers?

The page asserts that this is an established term and culture shorthand for Deus ex Machina. Google, That Other Wiki, and Urbandictionary confirm that it's clearly not.

Basically this appears to be a page someone wrote on a topic he thought was cool, without considering whether anybody else had heard of it, or whether it's a trope in the first place.

I'd say cutlist this and send it to YKTTW.

Um, what? The page is poorly written, but I think it's pretty clear on what it's about: advertising Catch Phrases. Deus ex Machina never comes into it.

Edit: I found the sentence in question, but it's saying that about Mentos, not about the alleged trope in general.

edited 20th Aug '12 1:50:23 PM by nrjxll

Complaining and an audience reaction, not a trope. Could possibly be reworked to be Ad Catch Phrase or something.

edited 20th Aug '12 1:54:11 PM by ccoa

Read it, and I think it's a subtrope of Totally Radical, with some Gone Horribly Wrong (or right, depending on the intent).

PS. If you guys want to make this into something like Deus ex Machina, I'll not going for it. At all. Besides, I don't see that here.

edited 20th Aug '12 2:21:18 PM by spacemarine50

Agreed on both counts. I think what we have here is something similar to the "prescriptivist" attitude that many early tropes suffered, where the page's creator not only describes the trope, but editorializes on it (often based on their feelings towards a myopic Trope Namer). There's a real trope here, but in its current state it's buried beneath personal opinions and Trope Namer Syndrome.

edited 20th Aug '12 2:41:32 PM by nrjxll

Added a crowner. Feel free to add more options.

Vote for a rewrite and rename. The definition is about catchphrases/gestures that fall flat for some reason; a bunch of the examples are just Mentos parodies in which the protagonist can get away with anything as long as they smile and flash the product at the camera. The current title is encouraging that sort of misuse.

"Redefine the trope to be about ad catch phrases"? What does that mean, and what does it have to do with this trope?

Vote bump!

This "trope" isn't actually a trope - it's an audience reaction and a vehicle for complaining. However, there is a germ of a trope within it that may be salvageable, and that's the ad catchphrase.

...I'm not really sure how to define an ad catchphrase for you if you don't already understand it. It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin - a catchphrase that is repeated in most of the ads for a given product.

So, instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt, you assume that I'm too stupid to understand what "ad catch phrase" means? Thanks for that.

What I was asking is what it would entail to redefine this trope to be "about ad catch phrases." Half the examples don't even involve a catch-phrase. If you want to make an Ad Catch Phrase trope, just YKTTW it. Don't pretend like you're salvaging any part of this page. You'd have to rewrite the description, get rid of almost every example, and then completely rewrite the ones you have left.

I'd try to explain what this trope actually is, since it's obvious that you didn't put much effort into trying to figure that out, but the crowner's basically over, so, whatever, just do want you want.

Abk, you asked a question that is reasonably interpreted as "how is this going to be defined." You have no right to be offended when that question is answered.

It seems that the only reason why you couldn't (and still can't) just come forth and put forward your objections clearly was so that you could make a passive-aggressive, whiny post about the issue without actually having to contribute anything.

You've previously been banned for trolling in the TRS. Consider yourself on the brink of being escorted out again.

Crowner called. Redefine to be about ad catchphrases and rename.

It looks like it's also deserving of the YMMV banner, considering it's about a phrase being irritating.

Why would advertisements need their own Catchphrase page?

Yeah, don't we already have Tagline?

A tagline is not^* (necessarily) a Catchphrase; it's a piece of marketing.

E.g: "In space, no one can hear you scream."

edited 12th Nov '12 4:47:40 PM by Stratadrake

Yes, that is correct.

Which would in fact make it an advertising catchphrase.

I'm sure there's another term for ad catchphrases, and it's called Slogans. It turns out we already have a page for the "advertising catchphrases" at Slogans.

Is there supposed to be a difference between what everyone's going to do with Mentos Finger and the Slogans page, because I'm not quite seeing a difference.

So maybe we should disown the old crowner and start afresh?

I think at this point we can just redirect this as a duplicate if it has wicks and cut it otherwise. There's no point in wasting days on a crowner.

EDIT:Never mind what I said earlier.

If we're going to keep this around, we'll have to rename it and make it a YMMV trope.

If we're not going to keep this around, we'll just have to cut it.

I'm for cutting it, personally. It's needless complaining about annoying ad catchphrases if it's made a YMMV trope.

edited 15th Nov '12 12:01:57 AM by WaxingName

To be fair, if we judge solely by the first two sentences of the article, the page seems to be about "showing the product in a way meant to look cool, but which comes off as cheesy or annoying" - not the same as any old advertising catch-phrase, but still fairly subjective anyway. Without the subjective parts it's just Advertised Product Makes You Cool ... which we've probably got somewhere already.

The "deus ex machina" part only comes in as an afterthought - i.e. "it's so cool you could get away with anything!" (like the Strong Bad example).