Americentrism

This isn't American-centric but English-centric, but I found this on Accent Slip-Up where it lists the reasons it could happen.

2. A speaker who speaks "standard" English due to assimilation, but isn't actually how they speak natively.

English isn't the only language that has a "standard" variant, this seems to be assuming the trope would only be used in English works when the same situation could be used for any language.

You can change that to a "standardized" language to be applied to other languages.

Now back to The Mall. I would say globalizing The Mall to other non-American settings would risk it to become a Setting trope at best or a chair at worst.

I can see that after further discussion. I’m tempted to wick check it when I get home but the TRS Queue is getting really long and I don’t want to clog it up.

On Affectionate Gesture to the Head:

This is mainly true of North America. In some Asian countries, this may be considered rude, due to spiritual connotations, though in Japan it may have romantic implications. Many people, even in North America, also dislike the patronizing implications.

Not specifically US-centric, but seems to treat it like North America and Asia are the only continents in the world. Are affectionate head gestures really only a North American thing, or are they seen in other places like Europe as well which the writer seems to not acknowledge the existence of?

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The trope description for Oireland treats it as if the trope is only for American works that stereotype Ireland in a way inspired by old British series' depictions, with the description very focused on how the USA sees Ireland. But if those British series were the Trope Codifier for this, I don't see why they shouldn't count for the trope as well and be mentioned in the description beyond a brief note to how they inspired the American examples. The whole page is written as if we only trope American works and British works only exist to provide context for how American works got their tropes.

Edit: found another one from The Future Is Shocking:

John Smith is a goodhearted farm boy from sometime in the past - but not earlier than the 13th century (as modern English would be near-totally incomprehensible to a speaker of that time or earlier.) But then he foolishly plays with the mystic Nazi time portal or there's a temporal equivalent of the Teleporter Accident, and ZAP!, he falls, screaming, into the Present Day (whenever that happens to be).

This assumes for no reason that time traveling characters are always going to be English speakers who end up in an English-speaking place, I feel this could just be written as "sometime in the past (but presumably not so early that he wouldn't be able to understand the language people are speaking in the present)"

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And another one, this is not America-centric but "English-speaking country centric: from Character Perception Evolution

In the later half of the Hearts of Iron IV era, this viewpoint fell under more scrutiny due to the large amount of National Populist regimes that were associated with the Entente, along with the fact that even the least authoritarian endings for National France included colonial subjugation of French Africa. These more critical interpretations were also influenced by a greater awareness towards the end of The New '10s of the legacy of British Imperialism, the prevalence of rampant apologia for said Imperialism along with rampant transphobia and classism in British society, growing anti-monarchist views towards the British Royal Family, as well as Canada's mistreatment of its' First Nations population.

Seems odd that a faction based on France and its colonization of Africa would be criticized due only to increased awareness of British but not French imperialism, what were French-speaking fans saying about this?

Edited by molokai198 on Sep 17th 2023 at 11:06:38 AM

Yes, it does seem odd that the example focuses so much on how French colonization affects the Anglosphere specifically.

Agree with all these (don't have enough knowledge to help with the third).

Affectionate Gesture to the Head is definitely common in Northern Europe and the UK.

In Circumcision Angst: Want to make a Very Special Episode that no one has done before? Simple! Have a character angst about being uncircumcised. Naturally, this is Always Male, and is mostly restricted to Eagleland(but not exclusively). In Eagleland, characters who angst about this are typically (though not always) of backgrounds which are typically uncircumcised. Because circumcision is most common in African, Jewish and Muslim cultures and in the USA (and American cultural satellites such as South Korea and the Philippines), this trope is a prime cause of Values Dissonance.

This doesn't make sense, the page clearly states there are a whole lot of places besides the USA where circumcision is common so this trope can happen, but somehow the trope is considered mostly US-exclusive and not shared by all those other countries. Charitably you could say that only the US has the right combination of circumcision being common and expected for a lot of people and backgrounds that are typically uncircumcised (other countries might have too many or too few people being circumcised for this to work), but I somehow doubt that the USA is the only one that fits the bill in this way, and this just seems like a case of "countries that aren't the US" in the context of media being just read as "the UK and Japan", with the trope writer not considering that fiction can in fact come from African, Jewish and Muslim cultures and American cultural satellites.

Also regarding the examples I posted earlier, I edited the pages for The Future Is Shocking and Affectionate Gesture to the Head, but for Oireland I would love if I could find a British user or at least watcher of many British shows who could provide information on how British media stereotypes Ireland and how it differs from how the USA does, and for Character Perception Evolution I would love if a user from France or a former French colony could give me something to cite on how French colonialism is evaluated in modern times in those countries, and I would also like information about how much, if any, of a Francophone fandom for that video game there are and whether they had a similar perception evolution (it might be the case that the game has next to no French-speaking fans, though even if that's the case I imagine some Anglophone fans would have still related the situation to the actual French colonialism it is referencing rather than the equivalent in the UK or Canada, unlike what the example implies. I would be happy to edit these pages if I could get more information on these things.

Edited by molokai198 on Oct 15th 2023 at 8:48:24 AM

This has been scratching my head for so long. Circumcision in my country is quite normal, mandatory even. In fact, the comic strip Pugad Baboy has a hippie character named Bab being mocked for not getting circumcised.

I've brought up before how a lot of Values Dissonance entries take a very liberal American viewpoint, but I've no idea how to combat that issue and it may be too big for this thread.

I think a major issue is that since its taking that view. It views the "abormal of that view" as the "norm" of the country of the it mentions.

I see that in a lot of the the lgbtq entries for japan which state they "view it a phase" when actual polss they are pretty pro lgbtq.

It also runs into an issue That the US South is pretty conservative so is It really "values dissonance" if the views are similar in the country it comes from.

Tbh I think this requires trs. Since it deals with the tropes foundation

What's Up, King Dude? seems pretty Eurocentric with how it takes events like "the Renaissance" and "Colonialism" as represented changes in how royalty interacted with the public everywhere, I was wondering if the page could be updated to talk about royalty in all different places in the world though I don't have the requisite knowledge to do it.

Now that I think about it, Values Dissonance does sound Americentric.

I dunno about What's Up, King Dude?.

Edited by alnair20aug93 on Mar 11th 2024 at 11:54:40 PM

I'm unsure if this has been discussed before, but I've noticed that often when it comes to American studios, creators, movies, etc, pages neglect to mention where those people/things are from.

It's a case of assuming that America = the default, so it doesn't need to be mentioned because it assumes it's not necessary... But I find it annoying as someone who doesn't have that mentality. I was just reading a page for a video game studio and I kept wondering where the studio was from.

I wanted to ask if there's some sort of policy about this and if it's cool for me to just add the nationality to the descriptions.

Ultimate Authority Mayor assumes that the mayor is going to have state authority in addition to county or federal that might overrule them, when not all countries have states and may have provinces/territories/etc. instead.

Hollywood still has a huge cultural grip, I can say.

That could be changed to state/province/territory. I mean the Ultimate Authority Mayor can even apply to cities.

Edited by alnair20aug93 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 2:50:08 AM

Well, yeah, Values Dissonance is mostly written from the viewpoint of a Liberal American, but I can't see how this could be rectified. To provide bullet points for every socio-political group from several countries would be too unwieldy. Also, liberal American values aren't exactly "provincial": for instance, lots of progressive movements worldwide are at least inspired by the Americans, for good or for ill. The huge influence of American culture is a fact. By the way, I speak all this as a center-left, moderate Liberal.

I'm actually a bit more bothered by how "time-centric" Values Dissonance (and its cousin, Unintentional Period Piece) are. Unintentional Period Piece didn't need to be, of course. Used correctly, the trope simply describes that a piece of fiction feels like an exaggeration of the time it was made, and shouldn't be about how it differs from the present time the viewer is watching it from.

Values Dissonance, on the other hand, by its very nature is as rooted in the values of the "present" the troper is writing from as the original work was rooted in the values of its time. I kinda wonder what will happen when values in the 2030s turn out to be different from our 2020s values, and so will future tropers go back to all those movies and add/delete/edit the Values Dissonance entry?

Edited by renenarciso2 on Apr 25th 2024 at 10:23:30 AM

Values Dissonance needs a separate discussion. It's too big an issue to tackle here.