Do you have trouble remembering the difference between Deathbringer the Adorable and Fluffy the Terrible?
Do you have trouble recognizing when you've written a Zero-Context Example?
Not sure if you really have a Badass Bookworm or just a guy who likes to read?
Well, this is the thread for you. We're here to help you will all the finer points of example writing. If you have any questions, we can answer them. Don't be afraid. We don't bite. We all just want to make the wiki a better place for everyone.
Useful Tips:
- Make sure that the example makes sense to both people who don't know the work AND don't know the trope.
- Wrong: The Mentor: Kevin is this to Bob in the first episode.
- Right: The Mentor: Kevin takes Bob under his wing in the first episode and teaches him the ropes of being a were-chinchilla.
- Never just put the trope title and leave it at that.
- Wrong: Badass Adorable
- Right: Badass Adorable: Xavier, the group's cute little mascot, defeats three raging elephants with both hands tied behind his back using only an uncooked spaghetti noodle.
- When is normally far less important than How.
- A character name is not an explanation.
- Wrong: Full Moon Silhouette: Diana
- Right: Full Moon Silhouette: At the end of her transformation sequence into Moon Princess Misty, Diana is shown flying across the full moon riding a rutabaga.
Other Resources:
For best results, please include why you think an example is iffy in your first post.
Also, many oft-misused tropes/topics have their own threads, such as Surprisingly Realistic Outcome (here
) and Fan-Preferred Couple (here). Tropers are better able to give feedback on examples you bring up to specific threads.
For cleaning up examples of Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard, you must use their dedicated threads: Complete Monster Cleanup, Magnificent Bastard Cleanup.
Edited by Synchronicity on Sep 18th 2023 at 11:42:55 AM
Zzzzzzzzzz
Longer pages are not better pages.
As Fighteer said, "Having more tropes is not a badge of honor."
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Lost in Space
Specifically, if you have to shoehorn trope examples just to make your article look longer, you're doing it wrong.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
In Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive," the singer experiences empowerment after "the apocalypse" causes him to awaken in "a new age." In the music video, a young woman rescues Imagine Dragons from Lou Diamond Phillips, by sending her teddy bear to slay a puppet monster. It still delivers themes of empowerment, just not in a way that takes the song's lyrics literally.
Does this count as Lyrics/Video Mismatch?
Now a lurker. See you at the forums.
I want to add a criticism for the Dethroning Moment Of Suck for webcomics. In the So... you are a cartoonist section. Can someone help me with this?
Alright...
"Tom Preston is called mediocre in the internet. I never really had a problem with him, I just ignored his publications. A while ago, however, he decided to posts his "Strips" called "Things I wish comics would stop doing".
His complains are basically things Linkara and other have complain about, fair enough, you can defend him... but, tell me how the hell is the saving a child from a crash a badly time sexy pose? With the rest I can you see the point, but that one have nothing sexual besides a good looking woman. What the hell Tom preston, do you even search your stuff?" Not only that, but every strip of these things have been completely boring!
edited 29th Mar '14 12:50:09 AM by Tomodachi
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.Question: if an example of Protagonist-Centered Morality follows the morals of a real life culture, either the culture of the author(Values Dissonance) or of a culture that he is replicating,(Deliberate Values Dissonance)is this a correct example?
Question: What is the difference between Determinator and The Unfettered? I can't see the difference.
Lost in Space
They are highly distinct. The Determinator is a character who cannot be stopped by anything. Shoot him, stab him, break his legs, make him cry, he's still coming, and he's coming for you. The Unfettered is a person who recognizes no ethical or moral restraints in pursuit of a specific goal.
edited 31st Mar '14 12:38:03 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh okay, thanks.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Does this unnamed British sniper managing to (rather unintentionally) kill multiple enemies with a single bullet because his actual target (who did die from the shot) was wearing a suicide-bomb vest, whose trigger switch the bullet struck and thus caused its detonation, count as an example of One-Hit Polykill (which does have a real-life section)?
I attempted to insert the Informed Attractiveness trope into an entry but it was removed. The reason was: "it requires more than just saying someone is attractive—they have to be wrong, or at least not exceptionally attractive compared to everyone else." Is this correct?
Lost in Space
Edit: I just reviewed the trope.
It is when a work goes out of its way to call out how attractive a character is, regardless of anyone's subjective interpretation of that character.
I can't judge whether your example was accurate without more context, like what page it's on.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That one looks like we'd need to expand the the trope definition. As written, it's strictly about overpenetration, not chain reaction kills.
edited 1st Apr '14 2:11:38 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Informed Attractiveness: Alice is constantly referred to by Bob as a pretty lady, called a number of things by numerous Charlies, etc.
The "it requires more than just saying someone is attractive—they have to be wrong, or at least not exceptionally attractive compared to everyone else" bit comes from the fact that every other woman in the setting is grotesquely deformed. Does Alice have to look the same as the other women? She is indeed the only undeformed character, but the reason I placed the trope is because the work goes out of its way to call out how attractive Alice is.
edited 1st Apr '14 2:27:09 PM by CookieFiend
Lost in Space
I don't know the work in question. It sounds like a case where she is genuinely more attractive than the other characters, and so the "informed" part is not valid.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Ah, so Alice must indeed be roughly the same in appearance with the other characters? It would be helpful in the future if the Informed Attractiveness page points this out. I got confused because I thought the trope applied whenever the work informs the viewer of a character's attractiveness, regardless of the appearance of Alice compared to the other characters.
edited 1st Apr '14 2:44:33 PM by CookieFiend
You need to remember that the trope (and the converse, Hollywood Homely) was originally written with live action tv in mind, where everyone is attractive by default. Unless they use lots of makeup, the only way to tell who is supposed to be more/less attractive is to tell us, making it an Informed Ability or Informed Flaw.
In other mediums, such as video games, it's easier to show different levels of beauty. We can objectively say that this
◊ is more attractive than this
◊.
In the final episode of The Walking Dead, two parts of the main cast join up when they are both being held prisoner in the same shipping container.
Is this an example of You All Meet in a Cell?
Zzzzzzzzzz
Not as you describe it. You All Meet in a Cell is a trope about gathering a group together at (or near) the beginning of a work by placing them all in a common imprisonment, in order to justify why this disparate group are together. It's not simply having people imprisoned together.
edited 2nd Apr '14 8:06:02 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.Beyond my question in the post 581, i am wanting realize other question, about an Recurring Element example in Pokémon: Generation II Families:
- Recurring Element: They started the trend of having a Rattata-like Pokémon in each game. They didn't start the trend of actually replacing Rattata, though.
Is this a correct example?
Okay, so I have another question: Difference between Platonic Cave and Lotus-Eater Machine (Sorry if it's dumb, but I just plain can't see the difference).
Zzzzzzzzzz
Platonic Cave: The setting is revealed to be artificial. The characters know this, and generally are trying in some way to find the reality at the heart of it. Total Recall, for example — there's the memories he has, and the real world; but the real world may be a memory that was implanted in the really-real world; but that really-real world may still be just a memory that was implanted in the really-really-real world...
Lotus-Eater Machine:The character is in a place or setting that is absolutely perfect to them. They usually don't know how they got there. They don't know that it's fake at first. They may find this out later or they may not. If they do find it out, they need to give up the perfect world in order to get back to doing what they are needed to do. The realities aren't nested, there's the real world and the fake world. A Lotus-Eater Machine is a prison, intended to keep the character from doing something (usually saving the world). A Lotus-Eater Machine may take the form of a Platonic Cave.
edited 5th Apr '14 4:31:56 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Oh, thank you. It was pretty much that last part that cofused me.
Is General Failure specifically about inept, villainous leaders? The description makes it sound that way, but then it has Zapp Brannigan from Futurama as the page image, and whole list of examples about him. Zapp isn't exactly an evil villain from what I can recall (though he's sort of a Foil sometimes). It kind of confuses me. Does it also apply to inept, leaders who are good guys? Neutral Good maybe?
edited 5th Apr '14 6:14:43 PM by xanderiskander
The core concept doesn't require "villain" at all.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Except there is a clear correlation between popularity and page size. Frickin' Dragon Ball Abridged has more tropes on it than hundreds of other series and it's only because DBA is much more well-known.
If people really wanted to I bet a lot of the character pages and trope pages could be expanded to twice or three times their length.
edited 25th Mar '14 8:47:17 PM by Nikkolas