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"No Real Life Examples" gets confused by Let's Play YMMV

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Pyrarson Everybody's dead, Dave. from NaN Since: Nov, 2013 Relationship Status: Hugging my pillow
Everybody's dead, Dave.
#1: May 20th 2016 at 8:31:01 PM

I imagine everybody here has run into the No Real Life Examples rule at some point. It prevents editing wars by banning harsh judgement of real people who are probably respected by wide ranges of other real people.

Let's Plays are a medium of internet entertainment that I once compared to The Avatar due to their unusual and rather interesting nature of being a "bridge" between the totally-fictional-videogame-world and the real-human-being who's making the video. Despite being web serials about a chosen game that sometimes have the commentator roleplaying constantly, most of the time it's a human being acting like himself.

And that's where the problem is. If somebody uses a YMMV item like The Scrappy, Creator's Pet, or Anti-Sue in a Let's Play section, they could very easily be carelessly talking down a real person, just like going to Justin Bieber's YMMV and putting The Scrappy in there. What's the difference?

I'm not just making this up, either. I've seen it before. Take this for example:

That's a real example from the Mindcrack YMMV, talking about a player on a server who wasn't roleplaying or making comparatively worse content. Basically people looked down on Shree because of his young-person's voice. Three years later Shree returned to Mindcrack, obviously a bit older and therefore with an updated set of vocal chords (and then he basically got kicked out by the owner). So not only is that example outdated, but it's probably rather offensive and/or confusing to that commentator and his fans.

There are other places this kind of thing can happen, but those are usually pretty well moderated. The Reddit YMMV, for example, has The Scrappy in it, but instead of referring to specific people it aims at a broader, more vague group of people: some unpopular subreddits. The Tumblr pages were locked because they couldn't quite match this level of caution.

I don't know how to fix this problem, but the best thing I can imagine is a "No Let's Play Examples" thing. It's either that, or people don't see the difference between the fiction of the gameplay or the Real Life of the person playing it.

H.B. Ward
AnotherDuck No, the other one. from Stockholm Since: Jul, 2012 Relationship Status: Mu
No, the other one.
#2: May 20th 2016 at 10:08:52 PM

If you see the phrase, "Some viewers see X as..." then you can in most cases just delete it. It's Word Cruft. If that's all there is to the example, it's a Zero Context Example and should at the very least be commented out.

The Scrappy and Creator's Pet have their own threads, so examples of those should be brought up there. Anti-Sue doesn't allow examples at all.

Bratty Half-Pint isn't a YMMV trope, and YMMV entries of non-YMMV tropes should be deleted anyway.

Check out my fanfiction!
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#3: May 21st 2016 at 1:03:07 AM

Not sure why this was put in Trope Talk so moving.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
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