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
User dasuberkaiser deleted a lot of examples from Did You Just Romance Cthulhu? as they decided "If examples have to be non-humanoid, then all these have to go, too.". Nowhere in the description or in any edits was it ever stated that examples need to be humanoid, some deleted ones involve beings that are explicitly described as eldritch, including several Lovecraft works, and I'm struggling to find out what their justification is referencing. I don't want to get into an edit war, so if anyone can give me advice I'd appreciate it.
Regarding both The Smurfette Principle and The One Guy. Do they only apply for the entirety of a story/work, or does it also apply to specific groups or categories within a certain story/work (e.g. an organization, team, contestants, finalists, etc.)? I'm pretty sure the latter counts, but it's still better to ask right.
I don't think dressing lightly is covered by Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind. It's not just having a personality not indicated by the way of dressing, but where the expected personality is some form of hostile or aggressive. Sexy isn't opposite mild.
I think it doesn't necessarily need to be about non-human appearance. Non-human behaviour or way of thinking would probably also qualify, although it would still need A Form You Are Comfortable With or some form of shapeshifting where the true form would be non-human.
Yeah, it doesn't apply for groups of four or fewer.
Check out my fanfiction!Super-Trope. Someone with a personality you wouldn't expect from their way of dressing is a more general form of Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind.
Although I wonder if it's not just a specific form of subversions of stereotypes.
Maybe Stereotype Subversion would work as an index, if we don't have something like that already.
edited 26th May '15 11:53:28 AM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!I see. If you don't mind, I'd appreciate sending suggestions for a potential names for this possible supertrope via PM, so that I can at least use it as a working title for a YKTTW in the future.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.Well, specifically a sexy fashion for a proper character would be a sister trope. A subversive fashion sense would be a super trope. Just to clarify.
edited 26th May '15 12:05:53 PM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!Noted. And I would still appreciate suggestions via PM, anyway.
On a different note... A character has a posthuman father who was artificially engineered from an ultimately human source, and a hyperdimensional Cosmic Entity that took a human form to interact with the living as their mother. What kind of Playing with a Trope is it w.r.t. Human Mom Non Human Dad?
edited 26th May '15 1:50:42 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.Well, it sounds like genetically speaking, the father is still human. So I'd just call it a really weird Gender-Inverted Trope. Unless we have a more specific Human Dad Non Human Mom trope that already exists as the Gender-Inverted Trope to Human Mom Non Human Dad.
Edit: Er, HDNHM is a redirect to HMNHD, so that's not very promising.
edited 27th May '15 11:46:15 AM by SolipSchism
Need to know if this example from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for Police Are Useless is Played With or Subverted, as I'm not sure.
- Looker, the International Police officer, doesn't accomplish much besides telling you where Galactic is so you can go beat them up. In Platinum, it's subverted: he appears out of nowhere at Stark Mountain with a squad of cops and drags a Galactic commander off to prison before you can fight him.
None of the above. Police Are Useless is for when somebody seeks help from police officers and the police dismiss their legitimate concerns. It's not for the police showing up but being ineffectual, or showing up and... doing their jobs.
Deleted it.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?So I'm trying to put together a page for the advice podcast If I Were You. On the podcast, the hosts will frequently tell stories about their coworker, Jon Wolf, going to absurd lengths to inconvenience others, solely For the Evulz. I'm going to post a few examples, and I'm wondering whether Jon Wolf is an adequate example of Evil Is Petty:
- When Jon Wolf goes to bars, if he sees someone carrying a big plate of drinks over to his friends, he'll purposely back into him, causing him to drop the glasses. He'll then apologize profusely and tell the guy to go back to his friends' table while he buys the table another round... and then he just walks out.
- One time, when Jon Wolf was walking by a guy on a hunger strike, he dropped some fun size Snickers wrappers next to him and immediately called over the nearest reporter to show him the damning evidence.
- Jon Wolf will frequently go to old folks' homes and tell all the patrons that their grandchildren are there to see them, just to disappoint them when they go down to the lobby and see nobody there waiting for them.
Yeah, I'd call that a fair example of both For the Evulz (specifically because the actions serve no purpose other than to be evil) and Evil Is Petty (specifically because the actions are incredibly petty).
I've across a few Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfics in which, within the span of the first 2 chapters (usually the very first one, even), the Butt-Monkey protagonist Shinji either turns out to be the long-lost scion of a wholly different family than the one he knows (some retain Yui as his mother), or he makes a wistful wish that he'd actually have a good family, and it comes true in the form of said new family (comprised of characters from multiple other works) coming to find him one after the other within mere hours of his wish. Do these qualify as examples of Long-Lost Relative (with a dash of in-universe Reality Warping Retcon for the wish-based variant)?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.I’ve been cleaning up the page for Convergence and after checking their respective trope pages I’m not entirely sure the following examples are being used correctly, but since I’m not 100 % certain I thought I’d check here to get a second opinion.
- Batman Gambit: In Convergence: Nightwing and Oracle #2 Oracle's entire plan is revealed hack Telos's drones for destroying the Thanagarian's robot army. Before she also uses the Canary Cry (courtesy of Black Canary) in the Hawkgirl and Hawkman helmets, where they had communicators, for weaken and distract them.
- Brains Evil, Brawn Good: Invoked and subverted in Convergence: Harley Quinn #2. Harley trick Capitan Carrot claiming that she have (fake) superpowers and that she has just killed Pig Iron. At the end, Pig Iron is actually alive and, when the "fight" is over, Harley talk amicably with his opponent.
- Ret-Gone: An interesting one happened in Convergence #8 as its ending ends up erasing Crisis on Infinite Earths. Brainiac attempts to set everything back to normal but realizes the events of the Crisis is too strong. His original plan was for him to just send the Barry Allen Flash and Kara Zor-El Supergirl to their deaths, only to find out they knew they would die. The pre-Flashpoint Superman decides to join in, along with Lois Lane, their son and the pre-Zero Hour Parallax. They go back in time to stop the Crisis and succeed, restoring the Multiverse once more.
- Villainous BSoD: Deimos reveals to Telos that he was never a living planet from the beginning but was in fact a normal human being who lived with a family on the planet that will be the Blood Moon until Brainiac came and forced him to serve him in exchange to spare the lives of his family and forsaking his real name. Telos was too shocked by this revelation that allowed Deimos to usurp his powers.
Grammar helps. I gave up trying to parse those halfway through the second example.
For Base Breaker in YMMV.Game Grumps:
- Suzy, some fans like or are neutral to her, others don't find her as funny or interesting as the other Grumps. It got even worse after a controversy on reddit regarding the hand-made jewelry she sells on etsy allegedly being just cheap ebay finds with much higher prices.
The example is legit (I've seen the comment sections), but is the last part necessary? It's disconnected from her appearances on the show.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?Yeah, that verges into troping people, rather than characters people play in web videos and such. And that's assuming she isn't herself to begin with, in which case she shouldn't be troped as a person.
However, the first part implies there are lots of people who kind of like her or find her kind of meh, which is too little for the trope. It's love or hate, with nothing in between (or nothing significant, anyway). It's not, "some people like this character, some people dislike this character, and some people are indifferent," which seems to be the case.
edited 8th Jun '15 11:47:46 PM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!In All Gays Are Pedophiles, is it just me or are the entries in the "Languages" folder just generics (thus deletable, allowing for needing a mod to edit the page)? Or do they have enough value as far as being examples to not nuke the folder?
All your safe space are belong to TrumpAndrix: Your examples:
- Batman Gambit: In Convergence: Nightwing and Oracle #2 Oracle's entire plan is revealed hack Telos's drones for destroying the Thanagarian's robot army. Before she also uses the Canary Cry (courtesy of Black Canary) in the Hawkgirl and Hawkman helmets, where they had communicators, for weaken and distract them.
Not an example as it's currently written. There's no indication that Oracle's plan "relied on the targets reacting in a specific way because to do anything else would be out of character."
- Brains Evil, Brawn Good: Invoked and subverted in Convergence: Harley Quinn #2. Harley trick Capitan Carrot claiming that she have (fake) superpowers and that she has just killed Pig Iron. At the end, Pig Iron is actually alive and, when the "fight" is over, Harley talk amicably with his opponent.
Nope. It may be invoked, but I don't see any subversion, or even any use of the trope as it's written. There's nothing in that example to indicate that physical strength is treated as a signifier of good or that mental ability is treated as a signifier of evil.
- Ret-Gone: An interesting one happened in Convergence #8 as its ending ends up erasing Crisis on Infinite Earths. Brainiac attempts to set everything back to normal but realizes the events of the Crisis is too strong. His original plan was for him to just send the Barry Allen Flash and Kara Zor-El Supergirl to their deaths, only to find out they knew they would die. The pre-Flashpoint Superman decides to join in, along with Lois Lane, their son and the pre-Zero Hour Parallax. They go back in time to stop the Crisis and succeed, restoring the Multiverse once more.
Do those characters cease to ever have existed in an existing timeline where they originally did? Are they gone as thought they never were or do the others remember them? That's what makes Ret-Gone different from simply being written out or killed.
- Villainous BSoD: Deimos reveals to Telos that he was never a living planet from the beginning but was in fact a normal human being who lived with a family on the planet that will be the Blood Moon until Brainiac came and forced him to serve him in exchange to spare the lives of his family and forsaking his real name. Telos was too shocked by this revelation that allowed Deimos to usurp his powers.
Again, it may be an example, but the entry doesn't give any indication that that's the case.
edited 11th Jun '15 3:17:53 PM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.Can Retcon be subverted if a Video Game Remake with signficant plot changes is later explained to be an Alternate Universe of the game being remade?
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?I don't think so... a remake is explicitly supposed to reset continuity, is it not? There's no trope to be subverted.
Edit: I may be wrong; I was thinking of a reboot. Remakes may or may not stick to the actual story of the original game; when they don't, it's considered a retcon. So yes, if it turns out that the changes are in an AU, then it would be a subversion.
edited 12th Jun '15 5:43:01 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Does having a female character dressed in a blatantly Stripperific way in spite of the evident fact that her personality is nowhere near the kind that would make such a fashion choice make sense — and not from a practicality point, but rather because she's too demure, modest, and/or ladylike to think of wearing such a thing, period, and there's no suitable in-universe Hand Wave like being a Love Goddess or being forced to wear it by a Dirty Old Man — make her qualify for Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind?
Examples include:
edited 25th May '15 3:01:50 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.