Over-Inclusive Trope Examples

This has been bothering me for some time, and I want your opinions on whether it's something that needs to be actively addressed or not.

Plenty of times I've encountered pages where the examples are... well, grasping at straws, to say the least. There are so many, in fact, that one would quickly assume that everyone and his grandma qualified for the trope. In a few rare instances, this is actually the case. But most of the time, it really waters down what the trope really is, what it means, and the examples that really and truly reflect it.

I think we, as a community, need to be more frugal about what does and does not qualify for a trope example, at the very least once a trope reaches a certain size or number of examples.

Example: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Woobie/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic

According to this page, every single character in MLP, bar none, is a woobie because someone somewhere decided they qualified. What my motion would do, in practice, is effectively say "one or two sympathetic scenes over the course of a series does not a woobie make" and clean up the examples that are not cases of characters who are, at their very foundation, qualifiers. If that were done, the series wouldn't even need its own whole page (which already I find pretty ridiculous).

This is just one example of many, so don't take it as the purpose of this thread. The purpose is to clean up this sort of over-inclusive example posting all over the site.

Thoughts?

edited 10th Jun '14 5:44:20 PM by XelrogT.Apocalypse

I know you're not focusing on The Woobie specifically, but it and several of its subtropes have been TRSed before for exactly this sort of thing. And the argument against doing anything from those threads is still valid here: The Woobie (and most other tropes that have this sort of thing going on) is YMMV. Yes, the examples frequently read as ridiculous; I openly sneer at 95 percent of Nightmare Fuel entries. But I just don't see how we're supposed to impose limits on what can or cannot qualify for a subjective trope beyond basic factual accuracy.

"TR Sed?" I'm not as familiar with this site's terminology as I'd like to be.

Anyway, I understand that it's a big project with a hazy border. But that said, most quality standards are subjective, so it's not really unprecedented. The most I can suggest in terms of making the distinction clear is as I wrote in the example above: In the case of someone qualifying as a "woobie," it would have to be an inherent, foundational part of their character. Simply having a sympathetic incident in which they are involved does not qualify. Making that distinction alone, the number of character examples on YMMV would be cut in half.

Most tropes already have statements in their descriptions on what does and does not qualify for the trope. All I'm really suggesting is that we try to make those a little more specific, and add them where they're missing. I know full well that it would be impossible to make any sort of concrete rule on the matter, much less expect anyone to try to enforce it.

edited 10th Jun '14 6:55:20 PM by XelrogT.Apocalypse

TRS: Trope Repair Shop. The section of the forums were tropers decide if a page is broken or not and if it is, how to fix it, or if it's fixable at all.

Pages that are in the YMMV namespace, like Nightmare Fuel, or Moment Of Awesome or pages like The Woobie, which have a notice at the top of the page that it goes on the YMMV subpage of a work rather than the main page — the ones that tend to have lots of examples, many of which may not seem to be a good fit — are in that namespace or tagged that way because there is not real way to establish objective criteria that most people will agree on. What scares the bejabbers out of one person may leave another yawning in boredom; a character that some people feel is unfairly put-upon by other characters may, to other people, be nothing of the kind. That's what YMMV means: "Your Milage May Vary", or, in other words, not everyone is going to agree with you.

We only put pages into YMMV when we've established (usually through repeated clean-up and redefinition efforts) that we simply can't make them objective.

Now, since we know that it's impossible to make everyone agree on any of these, we've established rules that the only reasons allowed for removing someone else's entry is that 1) it's factually inaccurate or 2) it's flamebait, trolling or rude. Otherwise, what we'd be doing is saying "<This reaction> is valid and acceptable, but <this one> and <that one> aren't. You didn't really feel that way. That scene didn't actually scare you. You're just saying that you related to that character that way; you didn't really."

edited 10th Jun '14 7:35:29 PM by Madrugada