Ron the Death Eater Cleanup

Hey guys, both wick checks for RTDE and DILP are done.

Now we can analyze the results and prepare for TRS.

So wait, what do we do about the examples on RonTheDeathEater.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic that cite an example? Do we zap those too?

Huh? Why would we? What did I miss?

Someone said we should move all of those examples to Adaptational Jerkass or Adaptational Villainy.

Or were they just talking about the examples that said "L gets this a lot from people who love Light." to use an example from the Death Note page.

Well...that's why we did the wick check. Because these tropes need TRS before we can do any changes to them. We can't just start moving examples willy-nilly.

Yeah, let's wait for TRS before removing or deleting examples.

Did we ever send these to TRS again? There's no particularly recent TRS links on their discussion pages so I assume no.

Personally I would rather have them describe general fandom trends than specific fanworks as the latter feels redundant with Adaptational Jerkass and similar tropes. And no, "general fandom tendency" is not the same as a general example in the context of "here is a specific fandom attitude towards this specific character" as a YMMV item, and it's definitely more noteworthy than "Adaptational Jerkass but for individual fanfics." And the requirement to cite specific fanworks would only invite more bashing towards specific artists, as opposed to analyzing a trend in depictions of a character.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 6th 2021 at 5:29:37 AM

I guess I'd be fine with it being used to describe a general trend.

I'm under the impression it NEEDS to be cited, otherwise it didn't happen.

Having general examples will lead to misuse such as "Misa gets this from yaoi shippers because they hate the idea of a straight DN ship".

Simply put, I feel we should axe the general examples, and only keep the cited ones.

Also AJ is for heroes of canon works that were made mean, but what about examples that completely rewrote the character like Rainbow Dash from Rainbow Factory who claims she was only pretending to love Scootaloo, and all the numerous Scootabuse things on derpibooru involving stuff like RD cooking Scootaloo in an oven or something. Yes, the fandom can be THAT fucked up.

Or, to use a non-pony example, the Death Note fics that turn Soichiro Yagami into a homophobic monster who says stuff like "I don't have a son, I have two daughters."

Also can RTDE be played for laughs? Because if not, we might need to cut the Death Note Abridged example of Mr. Yagami.

Edited by Klavice on Jun 6th 2021 at 3:26:51 AM

At the same time, Draco in Leather Pants apparently doesn't need a citation and that's Ron the Death Eater's sister trope. Speaking of people harassing fans, the other day I stumbled across a Harry Potter story where Ron was portrayed as evil and a death eater. I went back to look at the story again and found the author took it down because there was such a backlash.

These haven't had TRS AFAIK. We made Wick Checks for them but...

I remember asking about starting a TRS thread for this I was told there was a massive backlog and we should wait to start something. Is there still a backlog?

I do think that whatever course of action we take, it should be applied to both tropes since they are sister tropes. So if we require citations for Ron the Death Eater, we should do the same for Draco in Leather Pants. If Draco in Leather Pants is supposed to be a general fandom trend, so should Ron the Death Eater.

Technically yes there's a backlog, but it's because we're limited to 50 threads now and all 50 spots are taken.

There are completed wick checks, if we want to start the thread.

Well until the backlog clears and we can start a new thread, I don't know if we can do a cleanup. It's not clear what the trope' s definition or usage should be.

Yeah, let's wait for a spot and make the thread.

Will we do a combined RTDE / DILP thread? That sounds like the best move IMO.

That makes sense since they have similar problems.

With the TRS thread for RTDE/DILP being completed and deciding to make the tropes about general Fandom portrayals the objective of this thread as shifted a bit but cleanup will need to be done more than ever.

From My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:

• In Rites of Ascension, Twilight's mother Twilight Velvet went from the benign nonentity seen (briefly) in canon to a tribalist, neglectful harpy of a Social Climber, for the sake of realism and a Freudian Excuse for her daughter's neuroses. Although some of her social obsession was (at least according to her) in order to defend her daughter from jealous attacks, and she gets better after her daughter banishes her to Ponyville to learn about friendship.
• Popped turns the backgrounder Pokey Pierce into a brutal Serial Killer who has been killing and torturing mares for a decade.
• Princess Trixie Sparkle ramps up Trixie's villainous traits to the point where she wants to harm Twilight after what she's done to her.

The first two seem one-off vilification as opposed to a widespread (compared to other FIM examples) trend. Trixie is far more often subject to Draco in Leather Pants which seems mutually exclusive. As DILP and RTDE are overall fandom trends should one-off/at odds with mainstream fandom examples be cut?

And should we start removing DILP/RTDE from fanwork pages and moving them to Adaptational tropes if applicable?

That seems to be what we would have to do with the definition changes.

In this thread, most people say Adaptational X tropes cover fanfics, too, while RTDE is about general fandom trends now. So, I think these three can be moved to Adaptational Villainy because they are about specific fanfics.

Edited by Tenebrika on Jul 17th 2021 at 4:17:00 PM

Can I bring in these Draco in Leather Pants examples? A lot of these feel like Complaining About People Not Hating The Character.

YMMV.The Owl House

• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Amity gets this treatment in her debut episode ("I Was A Teenage Abomination"). Many paint her as an Unintentionally Sympathetic Designated Villain because Luz helped Willow cheat in her Abomination project, but they forget she was also shown to be a vain bully towards Willow and her method of exposing Luz was to have the principal dissect her alive, knowing full well she was pretending to be an Abomination, which is enough to warrant her as an antagonist in that episode. The later Hidden Depths and Alternative Character Interpretation that her subsequent appearances brought up don't help matters.
  • There are also some fans who, after "Covention", were immediately ready to join Team Lilith in regards to The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry between her and Eda due to how utterly charismatic Lilith is, ignoring that we don't have enough information to fully determine who is right or wrong on what counts in this rivalry and that Lilith wanting to force Eda to join a coven is wrongful behavior no matter what the reason may be. Though given that she was revealed to have cursed her sister, and bargained Luz's life to get Eda to come with her, those might have jumped ship. As of "Young Blood, Old Souls," Lilith has attempted to pull a Heel–Face Turn by sharing Eda's curse so the leather pants may no longer apply.
  • The twins have gained a sizable amount of fans who give them a pass for teasing Amity and some of their more dangerous pranks. It helps that they Took a Level in Kindness immediately afterward and haven't been as mean to her as they were in their debut.
  • Boscha is canonically a Hate Sink who's an even bigger Alpha Bitch than Amity used to be and without any of the sympathetic traits, and she's so bad that Amity only became friends with her because her parents forced her to. However, many fans, especially ones who ship Boscha with Willow, will often downplay her negative traits and depict her as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, at worst. A lot of this died down after "Wing it Like Witches" showed just how terrible a bully Boscha can be, but at the same time, it also reinforced the trope for some people with how the beginning of the episode implies that Boscha puts a lot of pressure on herself to succeed, not unlike Amity, herself.
  • Alador Blight. Before he properly appeared in "Escaping Expulsion", there was nothing to indicate that he wasn't just as bad as his wife, Odalia, but after Dana Terrace said that he was fun to write and that the two of them might not be completely bad, coupled with Odalia often being hit with Ron the Death Eater, some people started downplaying the antagonistic traits he had shown in "Understanding Willow" and started acting as if he was A Lighter Shade of Black, at best.
    • This trope got even stronger when he properly appears in "Escaping Expulsion", as the episode depicts him as a Cloudcuckoolander Henpecked Husband who cares more about his inventions than anything Odalia does, even feeling that there was no need to let his Abomiton kill Luz and acting as a Reasonable Authority Figure by making Odalia keep her word about letting Luz and her friends go back to school. Thanks to that, many people treat him as if he's a kind and goofy dad, even though it doesn't erase his actions from "Understanding Willow", which now has him guilty of inaction at best, and it doesn't change that he didn't object enough to killing Luz to actually stop it from happening, and his reasoning for pushing Odalia to keep her word could easily be him simply acting on his own agenda.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jul 18th 2021 at 11:47:06 AM

The Boscha one seems fine to me, but the other ones need to be rewritten at least.

I feel like the Amity entry is one-sided. it's not so much that people don't see her as an antagonist as it is just Informed Wrongness and Unintentionally Sympathetic being at play here.

Yes, her plans were quite overkill for what she wanted to accomplish, but it just the story treats her as wrong for opposing Willow using Luz to cheat on her assigment; and getting the top student star taken away from her which she worked hard for in favor of the person who only passed one assigment with flying colors (which she cheated to do so) was treated as karma for being a jerk to Willow, but ends up being quite unfair treatment when you consider her angle.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Jul 18th 2021 at 2:22:03 PM

Personally, I don't think either DILP or RTDE should apply to individual episodes. It should be about the whole of a character's actions.