Misused: Fridge Logic

Fridge Logic's supposed to be about plotholes one only realizes later on. Yet whenever I've seen it on a wiki, other tropers tend to treat it as an alternative to Headscratchers and add Natter to the Fridge pages in spite of it not being allowed. Example here.

The fact that some fridge logic are phrased as questions as if they expect others to answer them does not help in this matter.

While this can be fixed simply by moving the problematic examples to Headscratchers, the fact remains that many people are using it as a secondary Headscratchers even though that's not the way it's meant to be.

edited 27th Nov '14 3:26:21 AM by KarjamP

My assumption of the difference between the two was that WMG is for guessing future things in works that haven't happened yet. Fridge Logic is for when people are explaining things that have already happened in the work. Fridge Logic should definitely have all the questions rephrased as statements. It's not so much that people post unanswered questions in Fridge Logic that's the problem; it's that people are posting statements in a "question/self-answer" format when all they really need is the "answer".

IE: People write stuff like: "In universe, why doesn't the phlogistinator have an airblast? It doesn't have an air tank!". When they should be writing it as "In universe, the pholgistinator doesn't have an airblast because it doesn't have an air tank."

Using the former approach leads to people wanting to answer the self-answered question.

The other problem is that the very nature of Fridge Logic simply begs for a forum-type conversation that the wiki pages just can't handle, but that's it's own problem. The WMG pages suffer from it to; so much so that I never go to them as they're so hard to navigate. Actually, the WMG pages suffer from it more as they're even set-up to have the main question everyone's trying to answer.

Does it have to be about plot holes? I thought it could be about any aspect of the story that you don't get until afterwards.

It doesn't. If anything Fridge Logic more often suggests a fix for plotholes then it makes.

Please read my post properly.

I'm talking about Fridge Logic being used as an alternate means of Headscratchers, not Fridge Logic's getting confused with WMG.

edited 28th Nov '14 2:10:07 PM by KarjamP

Then again, a lot of people (nit-natterers) tend to add WMGs as their "answer" to Headscratcher and Fridge Logic entries as well, so this is indeed an issue.

The best fix is to do a mass-cleanup just like we did when we moved IJBM to Headscratchers. Not sure whether a rename would help, but removing the existing misuse would be beneficial to the wiki.

You mean what we already do, with moving fridge that attracts natter to headscratchers?

I also suggest we should educate the offenders as well, like putting a message on Fridge Logic that it's not to be confused with Headscratchers, for example.

By the way, I've opened this thread not to figure out how to clear out the misuse (as that's very easy to figure out), but to discuss how to deal with the fact that a huge amount of fellow tropers still confuse this with Headscratchers.

And of course, there's a problem of people trying to shoehorn a WMG answer to the questions.

edited 30th Nov '14 7:38:47 AM by KarjamP

Clock is set.

Clock is up with no progress; closing.