Not Tropeworthy: Fora

Jerkass is far broader than Troll, simply meaning someone who is unpleasant or not nice. This could be for many reasons, most commonly due to being selfish or inconsiderate, but their meanness doesn't have to be deliberate.

Whereas Troll is about someone who specifically enjoys getting a rise out of others through deliberate harassment and insincerity. The trope most similar is The Gadfly, the difference is that the Troll is online, doesn't have an ongoing relationship with the targets, and their antics are more extreme.

I don't think it should be merged.

I support keeping Forum Pecking Order in some capacity, though I'm not sure whether useful notes is the right place.

Trolls don't have to exist online necessarily; real-life interactions can be considered "trolling" too.

While the term was created to describe a pattern of behavior most easily found on the internet where anonymity and easy audiences reign supreme, the behavior itself can occur anywhere.

x3 And the biggest difference between a Troll and The Gadfly is that the Troll is outright malicious, while a Gadfly actually likes his targets, and knows when to rein it in. He might miscalculate where the lines are, but does try to stay inside of them...

I think a good way to describe the difference is that Trolls are the type to be a dick followed by brushing it off using a "Just Joking" Justification, while The Gadfly actually is just joking.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 28th 2021 at 9:03:27 AM

I think that Troll needs to be discussed elsewhere, it's too big for this thread.

Otherwise, the main hang-ups are:

• Whether Sandbox.Orwellian Rewrite and Sandbox.Internet Jerk sandboxes are tropes.
• Whether we can make a trope from the examples on Sandbox.Mediator.
• What to do with Forum Pecking Order.

That's what we need to settle to get this thread resolved.

Based on a quick look, both seem like valid tropes to me.

I think that it should be feasible; a quick look turned up at least three valid-looking examples, I believe, and that was without checking a significant proportion of the folders.

It doesn't seem like a trope, as such, to me, so I'm inclined to support having it be a "Useful Note". It also seems to me to be distinct from "Troper Types", and thus I'm inclined to keep it separate from that.

To be honest Internet Tough Guy (guy who acts tougher than he really is due to anonymity) seems more tropworthy than Sandbox.Internet Jerk, which seems covered by GIFT and Troll.

Agreed, unless we merge GIFT and Troll into Internet Jerk.

That'd be some seriously Procrustean merging; GIFT is a trope in aggregate about a general pattern of behaviour and troll is a very specific harassment technique.

Does GIFT actually count as a Trope? I always used it more as a definition page about real people on the interwebs. I mean, I know these are technically all "web tropes", but in what way is GIFT a trope and not just fanspeak?

Re-reading the description, maybe it's GIFT and Internet Tough Guy that should be merged. Though I'd also like to try broadening the latter to be about any form of anonymity used to get away with dickery or positing you can't in real life.

GIFT could probably be reworked to cover "anonymity makes people jackasses" more generally. To the extent even that isn't already covered by What You Are in the Dark...

G.I.F.T. seems to be not a trope —It's explaining a theory regarding why Trolls, Internet Tough Guys and other similar species exist. I'd think that a trimmed-down version of the page would fit nicely on Forum Speak, since the acronym is something known out in the wider web.

On another note, any objections to my adding on-page anchors to Forum Speak for each term, and trying to set a couple of the redirects to target them? Or is this so unlikely to work that it's not worth the trouble?

You can try, but if we recall correctly, anchor links do not work in redirects.

GIFT has significant usage on works pages (inc. Characters/), fwiw.

Edited by Synchronicity on Mar 29th 2021 at 5:27:11 AM

Good point. Do we have a rough idea of how many of those are actual entries, though? I just grabbed four at random, and three were potholes. The fourth could probably be troped under Beneath the Mask.

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Mar 29th 2021 at 5:44:18 AM

What ArsThaumaturgis said regarding Septimus's question sounds right. I was going to look into that earlier today, but I was tired at the time (I've slept since then).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 29th 2021 at 6:46:04 AM

OK, I take we can proceed with Forum Pecking Order and Useful Notes.

Regarding GIFT, I've listed all the wicks on Sandbox.GIFT Wicks and it seems like a rather large amount of wicks are properly Internet Jerk and don't discuss the concept. So perhaps a merge of GIFT into Forum Speak and Internet Jerk may make sense; as a separate TRS maybe?

That'd leave Sandbox.Orwellian Rewrite; I think it might have enough examples to be launch-ready but if memory serves ~crazysamaritan had some tropeworthiness concerns.

And the MeToo wicks. I think that most of them are accidental wicks and should be changed to [=MeToo=] so as to unlink them.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Mar 30th 2021 at 4:27:20 PM

Having it refer to the rewriting of records In-Universe assuages my concerns. We already have rewriting reality with the Cosmic Retcon trope.

Hmm. Cosmic Retcon is about the authorial version, Orwellian Rewrite is more about an In-Universe censorship. I think there is a bit of overlap, but how much?

Sandbox.Orwellian Rewrite mentions that it can involve changing reality itself in addition to merely changing records of events, and I think the former type of example sounds too similar to Cosmic Retcon (which involves retcons being carried out via in-universe events). I think narrowing Orwellian Rewrite down to simply changing records (for example, if a story features an authoritarian government that censored history books) would remove the overlap with Cosmic Retcon.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 30th 2021 at 10:17:34 AM

I'd second that Orwellian Rewrite seems like it should focus on re-written records no matter what actual reality underlies them.

See also the existing trope Internal Retcon, which seems to be covering the same ground. (only 111 wicks, and not actually listed under Retcon)

—Actually, the entire subset of retcon-esque tropes seem to have some odd interrelationships, but that would be another project...

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Mar 30th 2021 at 11:54:14 AM

Discussion about the relationship between Retcon tropes would probably be a better fit for Trope Talk than TRS.

I don't have much to add, save that I agree with x6, and with Orwellian Rewrite being restricted to in-universe documentation.

(Cases in which reality is also changed could perhaps be modelled as Orwellian Rewrite + Cosmic Retcon/Reality Warper/some-other-such-trope.)

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 31st 2021 at 11:14:16 AM