TV Tropes meta thread

It's because that was back when TRS cleanup was more a suggestion. To my knowledge the thread closed with very little stuff done.

To be honest as much as mislabelling bothers me I love the "misuse" in this case.

Serial Escalation has a lot of holdovers from when it was called Beyond the Impossible, and was used as a catch-all for "would you believe it!" stuff. Take a look at the Warhammer 40K entry in particular. I would do some cleanup, but I'm not quite sure what a proper example there should look like for a franchise that I haven't seen grow over time.

I guess our "I Am Not Making This Up" phase never truly left...

Just realized that I almost never check my 'followed pages' anymore

That thread was made in 2021 (the same year I became a mod, though it was closed before that happened), and the original page was split between Success Through Insanity and Crazy Is Cool (with Essential Madness being folded into the former), with every single wick being moved between those two. What happened is that not every wick was moved correctly.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 7th 2024 at 11:16:37 AM

I am the exact opposite, I only learned about the feature recently but once I learned about it I never stopped checking.

Maybe I was thinking of something else, then. I just associate that thread with sloppy cleanup, and specifically cleanups taking forever. But I could have gotten some wires crossed.

Saw for the first time the message that shows up when you try creating a redirect page for something that's already a redirect.

In today's episode of "try to guess what the trope is about by name alone": One True Sequence. No wonder it has 47 wicks and only 2 pages worth of edits since 2010.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 9th 2024 at 10:22:01 PM

Was talking about TV Tropes lore with a few friends of mine on Discord, thought you guys might like this

I assumed it'd be something related to romance or shipping, because the name sounds like it's playing off the term One True Pairing

I don't go on the Complete Monster threads, but that made me laugh.

I agree, I dont care for Complete Monsters but that's awesome.

Complete Monster is one of my favorite tropes. Mostly because of how cool it is when they get defeated.

Oh god YES!!!!!!!!!

I have to admit that it's kinda fun to make an EP. I'm no regular but I get the appeal

I can't really get into Complete Monster because I primarily watch comedies that are basically blanket-banned from having examples.

I have pulled off a Magnificent Bastard entry a couple times, but I find that fixating on whether a character counts as a CM or MB narrows my enjoyment of a character, because their compelling flaws or comedic bits feel like disappointments rather than interesting layers in their own right.

I don't see how the CM thread is comparable to the dialectic of Platonic idealism against Aristotelian materialism. To me it's more like a law case, where everything relevant to the character is brought up, and a well defined set of criteria have to be addressed before a verdict is given, and due process is very important. And this inevitably creates a need for experts familiar with the process, hence the problem with the thread becoming insular.

I haven't really been following a lot of works closely enough lately to consider taking part in Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard threads, but I do like the idea of CM's and MB's being villains that stand out in some way and knowing what they do that makes them stand out as villains. Neither concept is inherently cool or boring; CM's and MB's really just have to pass their respective checklists to qualify for those titles.

When it comes to trying to write CM or MB villains, I feel that writing a Complete Monster is relatively easy if one has a dark enough mind (especially if it involves subverting or openly rejecting redeeming qualities), with the biggest challenge being the heinous standard when one wants more than one monster in the work (they might be monstrous in different ways, but one may have a higher body count than the other).

Writing a Magnificent Bastard may require a lot of creativity when it comes to trying to find the right balance between "magnificent" and "bastard" to make the villain bad but not too bad, as well as finding out how they can stay ahead of the hero for most of the story yet still be stopped in the end without needing the Idiot Ball if the MB is the Big Bad. And that's not getting into ways an Anti-Hero or another morally grey character can be an MB.

Edited by AnotherOnlinePersona on Apr 9th 2024 at 7:59:54 AM

Eh, you need a dark enough mindset to show enough nasty stuff, but in some ways I think making a heinous villain with some humanity is a darker approach than a villain with no redeeming traits, especially if most of the cast fall clearly into a hero/villain dichotomy.

In any case, you shouldn't try to make a CM, you should aim to make the right sort of story and use tropes to serve the story.

Edited by Reymma on Apr 9th 2024 at 4:06:59 PM

Really, I just kinda stumble upon them in works I was already going to watch/read anyway. They're conducive to genres I like, so it's not hard to just pick up a story and say "oh, I think there's a CM here". Or to re-assess characters from works I already knew.

Writing one isn't hard really, but it has to work for the story. Like with any trope.

Similar to mightymewtron, I've also had trouble with Complete Monster entries because I tend to prefer light hearted works. Ironically, I've proposed MB's from works with CM's (eg - Psych, Final Space, The Adventures of Tintin, and Alex Rider - The Last Of These Is Not Like The Others). Whenever I try to propose a candidate for CM, they usually end up getting downvoted because the gravity of their actions isn't emphasized on enough.

However, I think that another reason why I've had a better time finding MB's than CM's is because the MB thread is much newer. When I proposed my first candidate in 2021, the thread was only 3 years old. By contrast, the CM thread was 11 years old, so even if I had someone in mind, there was a pretty good chance that someone already got to them. This was not as big an issue for MB. Someone may have binged through Tintin or Psych to look for CM's but because the MB thread wasn't as established back then, no one got around to doing the same for MB's.

Edited by Paperfly on Apr 10th 2024 at 2:15:52 PM

I do have a CM in mind, but I never finished the work, so I put a pin on that.

I still think it's weird that people can reserve works for Complete Monster.