Reality TV Show cleanup thread

So reality shows are a tricky thing to trope since they involve real people, but there are a few things that can certainly be fixed.

(I am mainly referring to the pages for the show Big Brother for this, as that is the franchise that needs the most fixing (to my knowledge) and will be the source of several examples.)

• Information added during a season should be updated to present-tense, or (more commonly) removed since opinions can drastically shift from episode to episode.

• YMMV tropes (particularly ones like The Scrappy) should be kept to a minimum unless there is readily available/understandable reason for being listed. Opinions on real people can differ easily and drastically.

• For some reason these shows tend to attract a lot of misused tropes, which need to be fixed.

• And most of all, the character pages need a long look over because they're essentially a dumping ground for whatever's on the troper's mind, and are almost always added during the season proper (leaving their trope descriptions left in past-tense).

• ^{Click if you need to see the transcript} Too Dumb to Live: Why did Derrick choose to become aligned so close with Cody? Because Cody's too stupid to think Derrick could possibly be a threat. He's thought of pretty much no major moves by himself. To wit: Cody won an early Head of Household. He used it to target Brittany, who had no intention of getting him out. He never stopped to question whether or not she'd actually target him. Joined in on voting out a lot of people who would have taken him further in the game like Christine and Nicole. Not once stopped to think that Derrick had never faced the block until the final 50 minutes of the game, missing the obvious red flag of that and how he was just following Derrick's word. When confronted with the chance to bring Victoria, who would have gotten him a guaranteed win, to the finals, he chose to take Derrick. Guess who won?

• ^{Click if you need to see the transcript} Idiot Hero: Cody comes across as one of the dumber and less intelligent houseguests of the season. He has proven time and time again that he is not smart in terms of strategy and he strongly depends on Derrick in the strategic department. Cody won the Final HOH of the season, which meant that he was able to choose or decide who he wanted to take to the Final 2 with him. His options were either the biggest threat and most dangerous player in the game yet his closest ally and friend (Derrick) or the most useless, terrible player in the game who is considered to be the ultimate floater who got dragged to the end but whom Cody doesn't personally like (Victoria). Who does Cody ultimately end up choosing to take to the Final 2 with him? That's right. DERRICK. Cody actually took Derrick, the most dangerous player in the entire game, to the Final 2, somewhat feeling confident that he could beat him, instead of actually taking Victoria, the ultimate goat, someone whom he 100% knows he could have beaten. When it came time for the jury to ask the two of them questions, Cody was both shocked and surprised to hear how the jury really viewed him, which was basically as Derrick's loyal lapdog or puppy. It was at that point that Cody realized that he made a half a million dollar mistake and realized that he had no shot at beating Derrick. Cody ended up losing to Derrick in a near unanimous 7-2 jury vote. Cody, did anyone tell you that Big Brother isn't about loyalty when you get to the Final 3 and even more, the Final 2? You're in a game to win $500,000! What. an. idiot.

• ^{Click if you need to see the transcript} Bait the Dog: Frankie appeared as though he would be a likeable, upbeat and happy gay houseguest. Turns out that he is really extremely narcissistic, hateful, vile, attention seeking, and self absorbed. Shouldn't we have all remembered Andy from last season?

• ^{Click if you need to see the transcript} Jerkass: Mixed with Bait the Dog - it starts off as a nice and well-mannered house, but once Paul enters the fray, all hell breaks loose. It also rivals BB 15's rotten apple cast. Big Brother 15 gave us bigot city, Big Brother 19 gives us Spoiled Brat city mixed with Crazytown. All the thoroughly nice people except for Kevin (and arguably Mark) are gobbled up before the game reaches the halfway point. So many of them are gonna have to go into hiding post-season and freeze out their detractors on social media. If your name isn't Cameron, Megan (Public service announcement: please don't harass the PTSD sufferer, or you're scum), Jillian, Dominique, Ramses, or Kevin, you gunna get it!

• ^{Click if you need to see the transcript} The Bully: Many of the houseguests used intimidation tactics and bullying to further their games. But this had more to do with having a group or mob mentality more than anything else. Houseguests such as Paul, Alex, Christmas, Josh, Cody, Jessica, and Raven had no problem partaking in the bullying of other houseguests which caused a lot of animosity and tension to rise in the house. Paul was the centrepiece of pretty much all of the bullying in the house as he was the one who was encouraging and inciting it for the most part. His targets were primarily Cody and Jessica, but he would also use other houseguests such as Josh to also bully them as well. Cody and Jessica bullied people such as Christmas, Alex, Paul, and Josh at various points in the game. Cody verbally attacked and physically threatened Paul after he had nominated him in Week 5. Cody also bullied Josh in Week 6 that he was going to physically beat up Josh outside of the house and make his life a living Hell. Jessica also did her fair share of bullying when she humiliated Josh in front of everyone after not voting to keep Jillian by calling him a crybaby victim. Josh ended up crying hysterically afterwards and the other houseguests had to comfort him. Jessica also personally attacked Josh numerous times by fat shaming him (calling him fat ass, widdle-waddle, fat f-ck, etc) and insulting his intelligence by calling him a moron and the dumbest person she's ever met. This also resulted in Josh crying and the houseguests having to comfort and support him. Christmas also did her fair share of bullying but most of it was towards Cody and Josh. She attacked Cody by calling him a disgraceful marine and questioning has military service. And Christmas would also act as a Big Sister Bully to Josh whenever he ended up doing something that she didn't like or approve of. Alex bullied people like Jessica, Cody, Elena and Kevin unnecessarily. She constantly bashed them behind their back and antagonized them by starting fights and conflicts with them. Josh also frequently resorted to using intimidation and bullying towards other houseguests such as Cody, Mark, Elena, Kevin, Jessica. He has personally attacked all of them, insulted them and has resorted to banging pots and pans in their faces in order to torment them all while singing a circus tune. Raven also got into the mob mentality of bullying when she yelled and attacked Jessica by calling her endless derogatory names and consistently cursing at her and Cody during the house fight that took place in Week 5. At some point, everyone has come across as a bully and this is definitely a season where bullying took centre stage in the game. The last recent season to showcase bullying to this strength was Big Brother 15.

Edited by Happyfrybreath on Jan 25th 2021 at 9:34:46 AM

Remember, we trope reality show contestants as portrayed onscreen, not as portrayed by real life. Information about contestants from outside the show should only be mentioned in examples if it's relevant to the show.

How do we distinguish troping the contestants in-show and out-of-show? How would No Real Life Examples, Please! apply to contestants?

I also note that there are a number of potholed trope entries, which is even worse.

Let's start with the Big Brother tropes across all versions:

No real life examples is especially hard with this show because technically every. single. thing. they. do. is part of the show until they leave it, it's in the nature of the show.

Julie Chen stuff is hard to gauge since she's both the host and an outside perspective, but I'd keep most of her stuff too.

...I think we can safely cut post-show stuff though.

- The thing about Ascended Fanboy is that for whatever reason, almost everyone in the later U.S. seasons counts, so a list of them would likely consist of over fifty people. Cool House (and possibly Scenery Porn) has the same issue, especially since it's an important aspect of the setting. How should we handle this?

- (Natter cleanup): Audience Participation: On the original Dutch format and the popular UK version, evictions (and ultimately, winners) are determined by an audience vote. This is also true of the first U.S. season, though this format was quickly changed for future seasons.

-(For the U.S. folder): Audience Participation: The show will often have an "America's Vote" poll to determine various factors within the game, most notably "America's Favorite Houseguest", who receives a cash prize.

- No idea what to do with Fanservice, it's not a trope I touch or use, and I've not seen the versions mentioned.

- We can just snip the Genre Blindness. It's the wrong trope, ridiculously specific, a subversion, and not even correct.

- Grey-and-Grey Morality can go to YMMV right?

- Hobbes Was Right seems completely accurate to Hobbes's original intention (as detailed at the end of the trope), but misuse as far as the actual trope goes.

- Don't think there's really much context to be given for Numbered Sequels, all sequels in the franchise are known for their numbers and (very) rarely given names.

- (I would very much like a second opinion on this) Transgender applies to the character on the show, as well as the person outside of it, so I feel that this is keepable. I also feel that the Fair for Its Day notice is a good thing to have for something that controversial. The "they came out outside of the house" is remove-worthy though.

- The Twin Switch mentioned is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, though the fridge part is removable, perhaps we can change it to:

• Twin Switch: Big Brother 5 US had this as one of the twists; Adria and Natalie switched places in and out of the game, bamboozling everyone. The producers also intentionally cast several other contestants (Drew and Diane) that had twins outside the house as well.
  • Big Brother 17 US revisited the above Season 5 twist with one contestant switching places with a twin.
  • In one of the Australian editions; this same twist worked for three weeks until one of the twins cut himself.

I otherwise agree with everything

For Ascended Fanboy, if we're going to have it on the main work page at all, it would probably need to give information about how casting these "fanboys" impacted the work at large. Otherwise, it's off to the Characters page.

Audience Participation is fine as you wrote it.

Transgender, for contestants who are actively portrayed as such on the show (i.e. it doesn't count if they don't mention it in the house), should go onto the Characters page.

For Twin Switch, watch your example indentation.

I honestly think BBUK and BBUS should get their own proper pages. The BigBrother.US Tropes thing is clunky and the split would allow the subpages to be split as well.

We could split it as Series.Big Brother US And Canada and Series.Big Brother UK (with the other countries' versions remaining at Series.Big Brother)

US and Canada probably shouldn't be on the same page. They're not the same series.

ugh sorry for not posting here for awhile. I fell into a rabbit-hole of IRL issues.

Where would one posit splitting the pages like mentioned?

Honestly though I think the Character and YMMV-trope pages need the most immediate work. The Character pages in particular are loaded with YMMV stuff and are effectively just a means of complaining about characters they don't like.

See here for prime examples.

The real trouble I'm facing with this particular aspect is that I do not have access to the show and it's really hard to tell what tropes are simply made up (and believe me there are a few) and what aren't even with research.

Edited by Happyfrybreath on Apr 25th 2021 at 11:28:02 AM

One thing I notice about Big Brother during the later seasons is the synopsis bloat in examples on character sheets.

Here's one example I found and brought up in the Wall of Text cleanup thread, with a couple more in a following post.

...in fact, a lot of Hated by All (formerly under 0% Approval Rating) examples had a lot of synopsis bloat.

Edited by Berrenta on Jul 5th 2021 at 8:05:34 AM

Apologies if this is necroposting - this thread was brought up a few days ago in the NRLEP Game Shows thread as something we should revive to mitigate RL troping in Reality TV subpages, so I figured I'd get the ball rolling.

Anyway, while browsing RuPaul's Drag Race's character pages, I came across some entries that gave me pause. For context, this contestant performed well in the competition proper, but was accused of abuse before the season was broadcast, resulting in her being disqualified and edited out of the eventual season. Obviously, this happened outside of the show, but since a. the average viewer would likely notice how Out of Focus she was and b. each episode began with a disclaimer about the matter◊, my general rule of "it's RL troping if someone who doesn't follow contestants outside the show wouldn't know it" is hard to apply. There's a few entries on her season's character page that concerned me, foldered below with my commentary in bold.

Where do I draw the line? Maybe it's just me, but the fourth wall seems uniquely flimsy here.

The Ambiguous Situation example seems like it's fine, because it doesn't appear the incident actually affected things.

Anyone else think we should cut the TheScrappy.Big Brother page as most of this devolved into complaining about certain houseguests like Todrick Hall and Cynthia Bailey, and there's a mention on Azah's entry that she had to close her Twitter and Facebook account with several like Aaryn Gries being "rescued" and the What An Idiot page needs a cleanup too since some of it seems to less be about the act and more about the Player. Or rather keep the houseguests that were Politically Incorrect or people like Justin Sebik and delete everyone else?

Todrick can probably stay though, even among supposed Scrappies he's hated, but given that he was hated by the Celebrity Big Brother House too, wouldn't that make him a Hate Sink?

Edited by Klavice on Aug 6th 2022 at 8:51:12 AM

I don't know about cutting it, but it could use a serious cleanup. A lot of BB's subpages do, actually; I've poked around the character pages and noticed an odd tendency to list every example of someone fulfilling a certain character trope, including from the (non-edited and thus non-tropable) live feeds, which results in hellishly long and complainy entries like the first one on this page. The The Scrappy page seems to be suffering from that too. As for Todrick, I agree he should be on that page - I don't even watch BB and I was well aware of the shitstorm he created - but it looks like the entry was added on February 23rd when the season began on February 2nd, which is not kosher (The Scrappy entries can only be added 6 months after the character's debut). Is that grounds for removal?

I think Todrick fits more under Hate Sink, as he's given the worst possible edit imaginable, is Hated by All including fans and Houseguests while most Scrappies are only hated by the fans, and he came in the game "inspired" by Kyland Young intending to play an equally scummy game and he succeeded. Nicole Franzel Arroyo along with Robert "Memphis" Garrett should stay too as unlike other houseguests, the only people who rooted for them were their significant others. As for Kyland himself he was arguably rescued in The Challenge USA where he admitted he was playing a character and really isn't that mean especially when he doesn't have someone to manipulate.

Edited by Klavice on Aug 7th 2022 at 2:03:42 AM

Fair enough, but I'm not sure if a character originating from one show can be Rescued from the Scrappy Heap on another show entirely, so Kyland should probably be a Hate Sink like the others.

Characters.Sixteen And Pregnant has really thorough multi-paragraph descriptions for each character, some of them mentioning things that seemingly did not happen on the actual show. They're written like Creator/ page bios and discuss things like Farrah Abraham's porn career and Amber Portwood's criminal history as well as the stars' appearances on other shows. This isn't kosher, right?

Characters.Myth Busters all just real-person troping?

Depends. Are they playing characters, playing an exaggerated persona, or real? The first one is tropable, the second may not be if we're using Web Video/Let's Play rules, and the third isn't, AFAIK.

As far as I'm aware MythBusters aren't playing anything, it's just a team of engineers testing the validity of tropes and movie gimmicks.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 20th 2022 at 11:29:26 AM

In that case, the page can probably be cut in my opinion.

Trivia.Tiger King contains a bunch of updates about the featured people after the show. Remove?

It's in Trivia, so it's probably fine. The problem is that the section got a bit bloated.

Signposted here from this ATT, as it looks like RuPaul's Drag Race may need a thorough rewrite.

As posted on the ATT, there's a strong argument that drag queens are constructed characters when in drag - but it's also troping judges and other people working on the show, including No Real Life stuff, Age-Gap Romance for one judge and tropes like Token Minority for the one Pit Crew member who's said he's straight.

Where do we start with this?

Edited by Mrph1 on Feb 28th 2023 at 8:59:31 PM

Mmmm... that is troublesome. If they're troping real life people and not the characters they should be cut. I swear on Survivor every time a black contestant is evacuated/voted out first they get the Trope Black Dude Dies First which is at best Unfortunate Implications and at worst, random troping. The rule the mods came to with troping Let's Plays, we don't, unless the person is playing a character like an actor.

Edited by Klavice on Mar 9th 2023 at 9:42:08 AM