Capital letters and multiplied letters for screaming: ANNOOOYIIING!!!

I hope this is the right forum to post. In a Long-term project forum for fixing Zero Context Example, someone mentioned the page Say My Name.

I was going to comment out the questionable entries. Sadly, most of the entries mention only the work and the name that is screamed, or at best it has also the name of the character who screams it. It has also screwed up Example Indentation and there are/were a lots of potholes to YMMV tropes, but that is a different story.

What really bothers me is that nearly every name and every line on that page is written in capital letters, often in bold and with multiplied vowels. Now, I get that this is an effective way how to capture that the character was screaming, but who wants to read that? It hurts my eyes.

To illustrate:

LIIITEEERAAAATUUUREEE!

• Book X: Boooooob! — AAAAAAAAAA-LIIIIIIIII-CEEEEEE!
• Book Y: CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARLIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
• Book Z: Big "NO!" DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!!!!!!!!!!!

When editing and commenting out, I could cut out also the unnecessary letters and bold letters or italics.

In my opinion, it should be just one of those things: either in bold or capitalized, but not both. Three letters should be the limit. For those screams that went memetic I would allow five. And by memetic I probably mean just: KHAAAAAN!

Do I get approval of the tropers' hivemind for this action? What say you?

I am bring it to short term projects because Punctuated! For! Emphasis! has similar problem. I haven't noticed it elsewhere though.

edited 7th Mar '13 6:40:41 AM by XFllo

I agree with the three-letter limit, and that it just looks stupid. Kind of like people who say "OMGZ!!!!!11!!!"

Also, silent e:s at the end should be extended just as much as plosives and other sounds you don't actually say long out loud.

edited 7th Mar '13 6:25:58 AM by AnotherDuck

I personally find the CAPSLOCK reeeally irritating. Fire away, I am not going to weep any tears about it.

I'm glad you approve. I agree that some of them don't even make sense. Whoever wrote this FIIIILM ANIMATTTTTED!!! I dare them, I double dare them to pronounce ANIMATTTTTED and not sound silly. Facepalm.

Keep in mind that both Say My Name and Punctuated! For! Emphasis! is indexed in Self-Demonstrating Article, so we should allow some self demonstation in the examples.

I stuttered.

Ok, I got my first trope hate mail. One troper accused me of spoiling all the fun with troping and defacing a good trope.

However, I really just commented out zero context examples, trying to help. I truly do want to help. Uncommenting them should not be that hard if you know the work in question well.

Reading stuff like GGGGGGRRRRRRRAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCCIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!! without an explanation who said Gracie is, who screams her name and what is the drama is not helping me to understand the work.

What sort of "hate mail"? Rudeness is not acceptable behaviour and ought to be reported in Ask The Tropers.

It was not a rude PM. Just an accusation of spoiling fun troping and enforcing useless stuff like "Zero Context Examples" and "Weblinks Are Not Examples", which are according to the troper two of the worst admin "rules" on TV Tropes. Should I report this? When I think of it, if they edit with this approach, it can't be good.

EDIT: OK, it's done. I've posted the screenshots on Ask the tropers. Hope I won't get banned or anything. ;-)

edited 8th Mar '13 1:07:42 PM by XFllo

edited 8th Mar '13 12:13:09 PM by SeptimusHeap

Probably should report it. As it's a PM, the best way to go about it would be to holler from one of the posts in this thread and copy and paste the contents of the PM, as well as type up information about the context, into the holler.

Or screenshot it, and upload it to imgur.

No, please don't use screenshots for a report like that. Post in ATT or PM one of the mods directly, or holler a post of your own and explain that it's not the post referred to in the Holler that's the concern, but that you wanted to report problem PMs; tell us that it was in PM's; give us the name of the troper who sent it/them; and don't delete the messages from your inbox.

Fast Eddie can read the PMs directly and we'll act or not based on that. Posting screenshots makes the whole thing dirty laundry in public.

But please do report rude or abusive Private Messages; the civility rule applies to PMs as well as forum posts, edits, and edit reasons.

edited 8th Mar '13 1:56:41 PM by Madrugada

I admit that my post was in poor taste. I felt very ashamed for it and it will not happen again.

edited 10th Mar '13 6:43:13 AM by XFllo

Back on topic: This phenomenon seems like a bad case of Excessive Emphasis to me. Problem is, finding all instances of Excessive Emphasis floating around might be kinda hard, since it's not words we're searching for here, so if we're cleaning this up, this thread needs moving to Long Term.

May be justified in literature—if the original work is in capslock and has repeated letters, then it should be posted that way in TV Tropes.

In media,such as TV, where the dialogue is heard rather than read...it gets a lot more subjective.

Agreed that examples should give a little context. Something like: [Work]: Character A (grieving at character B's gravesite): "CHAAAARRRRAAACCCTTTEEERRR B!!!"

edited 22nd Mar '13 2:29:37 PM by DCC

As for justifying it, I'm not entirely sure, because nearly all if no all media have it (to certain degree): Comic Books, Literature, Webcomics etc in print, video formats like Film, Live Action TV, Western Animation in subtitles.

I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of copying it exactly as a quote because I think they are normally more toned down, but that would be extra work and it's not really necessary.

The strongest argument for allowing multiplied letters and capslock is that it's Self-Demonstrating. We probably need some consensus on what is allowed as maximum.

Context-less examples are easy to figure out as we don't want any Zero Context Example entries on the wiki.

If you tropers think we should move this thread to Long Term/Perpetual, let's do it. However, I don't think it occurs all that often. At least I haven't noticed it.

edited 8th Apr '13 1:09:22 PM by XFllo