Americentrism

Mighty Whitey definitely should be cleaned.

(This thread could also be used to clean usage of MM/DD/YYYY, except when necessary. For example, rewriting 12/6/21 as December 6 2021 or 6th of December 2021)

Edited by callmeamuffin on Oct 10th 2021 at 6:49:02 PM

Also, 12/6/21 would be read as 12 June 2021 by a British person, since numerical dates are written as DD/MM/YYYY in British English. However, if you write the month out in full, there's no risk of anyone misreading the date, regardless of which side of the Pond they're on. So maybe there should be a rule that the name of the month must be included if an entry requires a specific date.

I think Cicadian Rhythm is a bit too focused on United States on its description. It starts saying the sound of cicadas on anime can be considered a cultural gap between Asia and the western world, but I am from Brazil southeast and every summer I hear cicadas non-stop. I don't know if it is just in north america, but cicadas singing is a phenomenon that goes way beyond anime culture throughout the world.

I'm thankful this page exists, makes dealing with some problems difficult to describe way easier.

Edited by good-morning on Nov 16th 2021 at 12:07:29 PM

Loud cicadas are common in all hot climates - southern Italy and Greece can be quite loud in summer.

As discussed in this Ask The Tropers page, Raised Catholic has perceptions only protestant countries like the US have of catholics. The trope is about non religious characters who still carry cultural traits and habits of the religions they were raised on, but the description mostly talks about catholics, who in the USA are seen as way more strict and religious (in Brazil, for example, catholics are seen as more secular, and it is evangelicals who are stereotipically seen as this, showing how these perceptions vary), and most of the examples are about catholic examples as well, even though the description says this trope isn't restricted to this religion.

I haven't done a Wick Check yet, but from a quick look I think the trope also has some misuse about people using it to refer to any christian characters in general, not just non religious ones who were raised as religious. This is subject for the Trope Repair Shop though.

What should we do? Make it a sister trope specific to catholicism in the US and then make a supertrope about religions in general? Or make the description broader? Maybe should I take it to the Trope Repair Shop first?

Edited by good-morning on Nov 28th 2021 at 11:34:26 AM

The first step is to do a wick check and find out whether or not there's misuse, and if so how widespread the misuse is/what type of misuse it is. If you try to open a TRS thread for it without having done that first, it will just be locked. Raised Catholic has 607 wicks, so the minimum wick number to look at is 50.

Ok, thank you

I am now making a Wick Check: Sandbox here. It seems the biggest problem is some people thinking the trope is about any catholic character at all, which I think it has relation to how catholicism isn't as common in the protestant USA.

Edited by good-morning on Nov 30th 2021 at 3:02:49 PM

I noticed many examples on the Creator Provincialism page were really describing examples of Americentrism. This stood out to me:

• Independence Day: Even though the alien invasion provides an existential threat to the whole world, we only follows Americans throughout the story, and America Saves the Day. The final attack takes place on American Independence Day, and the American president, who states that America's Independence Day will become a global independence day. Film director Roland Emmerich intended the speech as a call to universal brotherhood, but to many non-Americans, it sounds more like a call for Americanization.

The thing is that Roland Emmerich, the film's director, isn't American. He's German.

I think it's more that Emmerich makes movies with an American audience in mind (the second sentence of his Wikipedia article even starts with "His films, most of which are English-language Hollywood productions"), and it's possible for a non-American to make something that can be interpreted— intentionally or not— as pro-Americanization. That said, it indeed doesn't fit the definition of Creator Provincialism, so it could probably be cut.

On a related note, this point highlights a confusing aspect of Creator Provincialism in that on paper it describes "If the creator lives in X, the setting in the work they created will be X," but most examples I've seen are more along the lines of "work includes elements rooted in the creator's place of residence/upbringing/base of activity/etc." regardless of whether or not they're actually set there.

Edited by bowserbros on Dec 5th 2021 at 4:43:44 AM

Perhaps a wick check may be needed to determine if it needs TRS. The trope may need an expansion if the misuse outnumbers the correct use.

I think The Presidents should be renamed after on of its redirects, such as "Presidents of the United States", just like the list of French presidents is named The Presidents of France. What is the benefit of naming it like that? There are dozens of other countries using presidencialist systems after all.

Another user already mentioned it in the first page, but it is good we come back to that, since it seems pretty easy to solve.

Edited by good-morning on Jan 6th 2022 at 9:01:19 AM

I vote to move the page to The Presidents of the United States, and turn The Presidents into a disambiguation page between the two pages mentioned above.

Edited by callmeamuffin on Jan 8th 2022 at 7:42:40 PM

That's a good idea, after that we could rewrite the The Presidents examples into The Presidents of the United States of America

Edited by good-morning on Jan 8th 2022 at 8:42:08 PM

I've started a discussion is Wiki Talk to decide what should be done with this situation.

Done, The Presidents is now a disambiguation page and the list of american presidents is The Presidents of the United States.

So I just found about this thread, and I wanted to ask regarding this example from OverSimplified:

I mostly think on the idea of a good deed. The video outright points out he only did it as revenge against the UK, not for actually wanted to help the colonists themselves. So it seems to imply that just helping the Revolution is by itself a good deed.

That example is also tricky, because it is applying storytelling devices to real life events. Stopping to think of it, a large number of the tropes there is troping historical events, which I think it shouldn't be allowed unless the creator directly mentions and compare these tropes to the events (and even then, it should have "Discussed" first).

Edited by good-morning on Jan 27th 2022 at 11:11:31 AM

Does City People Eat Sushi sound Americentric to you? I had asked this before, and I still feel like this is an Americentric thing.

Yes, even if it seems to be a real stereotype, the description could maybe be a bit clearer I guess.

Agree on that.

Like I told you in that ATT, it not being a thing in the Philippines doesn't mean it's Americentric. I think it arose out of America and can reasonably be called a Western media trope, but that doesn't make it that. It is based on cities being more culturally diverse in general (so that would include cuisine), and America is one of the most melting pot countries in the world by reputation, so it's not "Americentric" to note that it would show up there first and most.

The description goes into a weird tangent about sushi specifics however.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 6th 2022 at 11:51:35 AM

The Aliens In Cardiff Wick Check notices how a problem in Aliens in Cardiff, a trope about fantastical events happening in small and little known towns, is how many tropers consider non-European or American cities to be unimportant and not well-known, even the ones that are famous worldwide — the user who made the wick check mentioned an example which used Lagos, even though it is the second largest city of the entire African continent. Is there any other trope you feel like treats non-Western cities in this way?

Edited by good-morning on Jul 10th 2022 at 5:23:45 AM

In that thread, Ontario was included in that trope. The province of Ontario, where about 40% of Canada's population lives in and that province's capital is also Canada's most populous city (Toronto).

That is clearly misuse.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jul 8th 2022 at 11:57:42 AM

I mentioned this on the discredited/dead horse etc. thread since I didn't know this one exists, but on the Undead Horse Trope page the description for Sympathetic Slave Owner seems to assume all media is from America. It describes events like "emancipation" as discrediting the trope in all media as if there was only one time in history slaves were emancipated everywhere, while citing "lost cause myths" as reasons the trope still has persisted as if that also applies everywhere in the world.

Edited by molokai198 on Jul 9th 2022 at 12:49:41 PM