Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Cleanup

This project is for the franchise page Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the many related film/series/creator pages.

For the franchise page in particular and pages regarding yet-to-be-released works, we need ongoing monitoring for rumors and speculation. In the short term, we need to address example quality issues like shoehorns, Zero-Context Examples, and Example Indentation. We also need to discuss what should be included on this page/only the works pages/both.

I created Sandbox.Marvel Cinematic Universe, initially for use on the franchise page but it could be reused later if that helps.

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

Regarding which films get listed on the franchise page, I think we should follow the rules for Creating a Work Page for an Upcoming Work and only allow things to be listed if they're allowed to have trope pages. As I said on ATT, we're TV Tropes, not TV Gossip, and I don't see the point of listing things on the index if we can't trope them.

I agree with that. The unreleased works keep accumulating rumors and the listings look like an obvious place to put them. And as ~lu127 put it, "The page literally gains nothing from the addition of speculative nonsense" / "the entirety of the MCU pages need a well-aimed electric chainsaw aimed at all the overzealous editing going on".

We can do it! We can be that chainsaw!

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

Also, I think the character tropes on the main work pages should be moved to the appropriate character pages on Characters.Marvel Cinematic Universe to avoid potential duplication.

Edited by gjjones on Sep 26th 2020 at 3:45:45 PM

He/His/Him. No matter who you are, always Be Yourself.

We haven't reached a clear consensus on the Franchise thread over whether tropes that appear multiple times throughout the franchise should be duplicated on both the Franchise page and individual work pages.

However, there are several entries on the Franchise page that center on a single work, and I feel pretty comfortable calling for those, at least, to be cut (and moved to the appropriate work page if they are not already represented there).

I don't mind having the work name listed, as long as it has officially and formally been announced. Instead, I want to take the chainsaw to the cast and crew/production status sections. I've said it a few times before, but I don't see why we're keeping track of that stuff. Just give a title, a release date (if one exists), and maybe a link to the comic book it's based on; that's it.

Yeah, the vast majority of edits to the page these days are people posting upcoming news about the film, the same way people used to clog up the And the Fandom Rejoiced Marvel Cinematic Universe page before dsnybuf and I took a chainsaw to that page and had to shove a big fat header to keep people from doing it more:

We should probably leave something similar on this page as well, as it seems to have done a lot of good in stemming these sorts of updates on that page.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 27th 2020 at 1:06:16 PM

How about if we only allow tropes on the franchise page if they apply to the setting as a whole or they show up in at least three films with different characters? And by that, I mean that if a trope shows up in the three Thor films and nowhere else, then it shouldn't be on the franchise page, as it's not part of the franchise as a whole, it's part of the Thor series.

Agreed with the idea that there should be a lower limit on how many films the trope appears in before it qualifies for this page, but I'd be slightly more flexible on that end. I'd set it as something that appears in at least two films from distinct franchises. I imagine that would already get rid of a large chunk of misuse, and we can raise the limit later depending on how much we have left.

Additionally I think we can remove a bunch of the incredibly detailed extraneous fluff, even the confirmed stuff, to a Sandbox page until the work is officially released/has a page made for it, whichever has it first. For example I don't think we actually need to know the full list of every confirmed actor and character, including that Batroc the Leaper will be in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, on the overarching page.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 26th 2020 at 9:05:01 AM

I cut the mention of Batroc since that came from a leak. I also question the What If? section including plot premises for some of the planned episodes, but haven't done anything there yet.

Thank you, and I will gladly distribute chainsaws to any who wish to wield them.

We can dump as needed to the Marvel Cinematic Universe sandbox. It sounds like several of us share the opinion that listing cast, crew, and/or plot is just causing problems, and a smaller number of us would go as far as not even listing anything that doesn't merit a page yet.

But since we just opened this thread, I'd like it to age a few days to collect more opinions before we call it.

Edited by ImmiThrax on Sep 26th 2020 at 12:34:52 PM

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

I'm not sure if this is the time for this, but I suspect that there's going to be a split between "canon" MCU content and "non-canon" content eventually, akin to what happened with Star Wars Legends a few years ago. I don't think that there will be an official announcement, but I do think that certain characters seen in the Marvel TV adaptations (mainly the Inhumans and the Netflix characters) will see canonical reboots courtesy of Marvel Studios — and in the event that that happens, it might be worth making separate page for the works that I'm dubbing "MCU Apocrypha" and have some big redirects ready. So yeah, just something to think about for years down the road, if we're still fixing things up by then.

BTW, I goofed up with the Batroc thing. It was my bad and it won't be happening again.

It's fine, I do think that kind of trivia is potentially worth documenting from a pure geek standpoint, even when it comes to rumors (what gets rumored and what turns out to be true can be fun information in its own right), and that we should have a repository for those kinds of facts, but too much will start to rub up against the Signal To Noise Trainwreck issue.

The Sandbox would be a good compromise for keeping that information for the sake of making writeups for future pages a little easier, without making the published work too chaotic.

Please chainsaw

Also chainsaw

Ugh. Remove every single mention of this kind of thing from the notes and everywhere else. There are a million sites you can look at to find the production crew. We are not it and production crews change all the time. Just burn it.

"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer

To be clear, since you didn't activate the mod mode for posting, is that your personal take or a mod majority opinion? (Happy to dual wield the flamethrower and chainsaw if the latter is the case!)

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

For now, I've dumped the listings to the sandbox, then chopped off the notes other than the official release dates and what comic books things are based on.

Removed the She-Hulk rumor from Tatiana Maslany for the second time.

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

Serac wrote:

How about if we only allow tropes on the franchise page if they apply to the setting as a whole or they show up in at least three films with different characters? And by that, I mean that if a trope shows up in the three Thor films and nowhere else, then it shouldn't be on the franchise page, as it's not part of the franchise as a whole, it's part of the Thor series.

I agree with that. I don't think two films/series are enough, but three constitute a pattern.

Edited by Asherinka on Sep 29th 2020 at 2:04:25 PM

I like that. Good ol' rule of three, and wherever the quote originated that twice is coincidence but three is a pattern.

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

... Okay. I think I've hit the "flamethrower for everything unreleased" point since yet again someone re-added the ever-changing Spider-Man 3 "release date" (that Sony Pictures never made a press release for since, as noted, it keeps changing, heck, they aren't even rumored to have entered production).

---

This is informal, but since I'm unclear on whether Lu was expressing mod versus personal position, let's at least have an informal consensus vote:

Listing films that are not yet tropeable: or

Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.

I took a pass through the A-B folder cleaning up for entries that refer to only a single work, plus Word Cruft, ZC Es, shoehorning, Examples Are Not General, and all the usual suspects on pages that see a lot of action from eager tropers.

But she wasn’t referring to “listing films that are not yet tropable”, she was referring to the listing of rumours and production crew news.

It seems to me that since the two things that we list on the page are a film's title and its release date, the two things it needs to be listed on the page are... a title and a release date, both officially announced by Disney / Marvel.

Anything without both of those should be axed, and a comment-tagged note added to keep people from re-adding it if necessary.

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 29th 2020 at 8:01:09 AM

My vote is to keep announced projects, even if they're undated. Besides the fact that it's my personal preference, I don't think it's worth the hassle to maintain a stricter policy — I think people will get that we don't track casting anymore and stop trying; it'll be harder to communicate why certain work titles aren't allowed even whey they're official, and we'd be stuck repeatedly cleaning the page whenever news comes out.

Thrax, I know you're frustrated, but the page history seems to show that this is only the first or second time someone has tried to add the Spider-Man date since the big cleanup. It's not like the She-Hulk casting where multiple people tried to add it in the span of a few days. We hadn't even added a "don't add; this is unconfirmed" warning note; I just posted one so that might help.

Edited by DragonRanger on Sep 29th 2020 at 7:23:51 AM

That might be your preference, but policy disagrees.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

IMO announced release dates shouldn't be mandatory, just because those are the ones the most subject to change and back-and-forth edits about. Just a formally announced title, the confirmed director (as they're usually more stable than release dates), then a release date if it's available.