Thud And Blunder and complaining

I brought this up on the complaining clean-up thread, but I'm going to bring it up here because I suspect the problem is built into the trope. Thud And Blunder seems to be a trope complaining about a subgenre of Heroic Fantasy. Here's the laconic:

• Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery trying to be like Robert E. Howard's Conan and doing it poorly, resulting in an emphasis on the action at the expense of depth.

Here's a section from the description:

• But after Howard's early death in the 1930s, the original stories were continued by many other authors decades later, and then adapted into other media like comics. Under the worst of these other authors, the character of Conan was subject to Flanderization and acquired much of the stereotypical image described above. Outside the franchise proper, Conan became a Fountain of Expies for many other barbarian-type characters riding the wave after Conan pocketbooks illustrated by Frank Frazetta became bestsellers in the 1960s. The 1982 film adaptation was In Name Only but it kicked off a similar wave of sword and sorcery movies. Thus, Howard's original concepts have been, perhaps inevitably, Lost in Imitation and subjected to Pop-Cultural Osmosis.

And here are the examples:

Also, this trope has been around since 2010 and only has 5 wicks at the moment.

It's because it recently had a TRS to cut down on complaining. I did much of the cleanup for that and cut it down from 30 or so wicks.

Is that clean-up still going on, because many of the on page examples are written very passive-aggressively? Not to mention the laconic and the description seem to imply that this trope is inherently bad.

No; as you can see in the TRS thread people gave their s to the edited description/examples and it was closed. What's on there now is already much less negative than previous.

If you can rewrite the examples to be more neutral go for it.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 17th 2021 at 12:18:18 PM

I don't know if this is salvageable as a trope, since the original term is meant to be purely negative, and we don't do that here.

My ideal solution would be to scrap the page, turn the name into a redirect for Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery (I tend to think of the two as synonymous, but I see they go to different pages), and (since I do like the analytical bits) salvage the more historical stuff (and the phrase itself) into a paragraph or two on the page for Heroic Fantasy.

Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Apr 17th 2021 at 1:21:49 AM

How's this for a reworked laconic:

• Heroic Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery taking influence from Robert E. Howard's Conan with an emphasis on the action.

Edited by RustBeard on Apr 17th 2021 at 2:20:09 AM

I went ahead and updated the laconic.