FoeYay and it's half-disambig half-trope status

So I noticed today (not for the first time) that Foe Yay is supposed to be a disambiged trope. Despite that, it has subpages, a laconic, and nearly 4K wicks.

So, uh... what do? Do we need a massive purging party here?

Well it has this message on the main page:

Please change any wicks to refer to the actual meaning, and sort the examples listed below.

Do not add any more examples on these pages or any other.

So I'm guessing it still needs to be de-wicked.

Yeah, the subpages are sending mixed messages here. Is it supposed to have examples or not?

Apparently, it's been a disambig since at least 2013, but I guarantee people have added examples to the subpages since then. Which is, you know, something the page explicitly says is not allowed.

I think the subpages should be cut, but if they must be kept, they should be locked to enforce the "no new examples" edict.

Edited by Serac on Aug 29th 2021 at 1:29:37 PM

I'd rather just cut them. And all the wicks while we're at it.

Would this need a designated project thread? I doubt it'd need TRS since it boils down to "doing cleanup".

This is the past TRS thread. I think we need to consider whether this change is actually worth doing at all. If not, we might want to roll it all back.

Gonna read the thread when I have time, but for now I'll just comment that following from the naming pattern and definition of Ho Yay, Foe Yay and Foe Yay Shipping should logically refer to two different things. Foe Yay: moments between hostile parties that fans read as subtext; Foe Yay Shipping: shipping characters perceived to have Foe Yay. Since the actual definition of Foe Yay Shipping does not require the shippers to perceive subtext between the characters, only for the ship to exist, I would've called it Foe Shipping instead.

Edited by Twiddler on Aug 30th 2021 at 4:20:09 AM

That's an interesting idea. Foe Yay is such an easy parallel to Ho Yay and I'm not willing to do the wick change work, so maybe Foe Yay Shipping can just be put back into Foe Yay and the actual concept for shipping foes can to the new name.

So I read the thread, and it consists of the OP pointing out a problem with the Yay tropes in general without any evidence, a few lackluster discussion that barely touches on what the cause of problem actually is, before a crowner is made without any consideration of the required clean-up or even whether the proposed solution would even fix the problem.

If I understand the discussion, we used to have Foe Yay as a "deliberate subtext between enemies" and Foe Yay Shipping for when fans ship enemies regardless of actual chemistry/subtext; but because Foe Yay is a snowclone to Ho Yay, it was often confused for the latter definition, thus making them practically duplicates. The thread then decided to create Foe Romance Subtext to cover the first definition, and disambiguate Foe Yay.

Edited by Adept on Oct 18th 2022 at 7:57:18 PM

So...huh. Maybe this does need to go back to TRS. For now we can at least throw it on Tropes Needing TRS and wait for some of the more pressing issues to be resolved though; this has been this way for years and I don't think waiting a bit longer will kill the wiki.