Evil Overlord List

"Trope" talk, I guess, since it's in the main namespace.

Why on Earth is this page in the "Main" namespace? It seems to me to be more "Web Original" content and should be a work page, except it's not got any tropes associated with it. It's just a list of the original list.

This definitely isn't a trope, it's not wicked anywhere, it's just old and under Admin Lock for...some reason.

Can anyone help me make sense of this before I draft a TRS post for it? It's indexed as JFF, but it and its subpages are not there.

Edited by Eiryu on Sep 15th 2021 at 1:24:03 PM

I think it's just one of those things that's been around for a while because it's been around for a while. It's entertaining, sure, but it's not our content, even if it's posted here with permission.

There's no way something like this would be approved today. It would be one thing if it were an actual work page like Skippy's List, but it isn't. And I'm sure some people are going to complain that the site will lose its soul if we cut it, but I really don't see the point in keeping it around.

I think it can just be moved to JFF. It's still a joke thing, copied (with permission) content or not.

Given that discussing/lampshading tropes is the whole purpose, I think it is also possible to retool into a work page. For example, instead of:

1. I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero's rugged countenance and she'd betray her own father.

You get:

• High-Heel–Face Turn: Defied, in Rule 19 the Overlord says he won't sire a daughter because of the tendencies of villains' daughters to betray their fathers for the heroes.

Or something.

That could work too.

Yeah, I guess I'll add this to the TRS to-do list when a slot opens.

The reason why it's in the Main/ namespace is because we don't have a Tropology/ namespace which is where it would fit, and because it's discussing tropes even though it's not a trope itself.

It doesn't go in WebOriginal/ because we are not treating it like a work, and it doesn't go in JustForFun/ because tropology is not "just for fun".

Do note also that because of the agreement under which we are hosting the list, we cannot modify it except for potholes. That's why the page is locked.

Then why is it indexed as JFF?

Probably because people tend to use Just for Fun (index and namespace) as a dumping ground for things that don't neatly fit elsewhere.

But I mean, in this case JFF actually fits. It's a fun page for laughs. I'm not sure how it'd be "tropology". Care to explain that part? It's discussing tropes in a funny joke context, not to actually teach people things.

...And if it's not JFF, why not make a Tropology namespace for it and other pages?

And we can totally make a separate work page for it in a work namespace; that won't be modifying the list at all since the real page will remain unaltered.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 15th 2021 at 12:22:23 PM

You probably know that this tendency of people to ignore the "just" in "just for fun" goes on my nerves, but an analysis of the behaviour of characters in-story - and how to modify it - is more like a study in tropes.

Out of curiosity, what is the agreement under which we are hosting the list?

I guess I just never saw it as a character analysis, Sep. I always liked the meta-ness, but to me the list always was JFF, especially since the list doesn't directly mention specific tropes until we add the potholes.

Archived version of the discussion page where the terms are mentioned.

We will need to keep the Main/ page for access to the permission granted, but I think that we should move the work itself to a dedicated namespace, such as EvilOverlordList/List001to050. The Pantheon project and Avatar-Slayers Fellowship (defunct) project were both put in dedicated namespaces because they aren't part of the main wiki and they are/(were) works in their own right.