Tropability standards

My concern is that we'll be flooded with these sort of faux-creative works that have zero literary merit and whose main value is as "come gawp at the freak show" bait. But if they manage to get published and tropes can be found, there's no prima facie reason to block them.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 11th 2022 at 10:46:24 AM

The concern with AI content seem to have grown again recently (artists publish more artworks in a day than many do in their lifetime and even sell them on Patreon), so if we get spammed with multiple automatically-generated stories, we may think of something when it happens.

Edited by Amonimus on Nov 11th 2022 at 6:49:41 PM

What do we mean by "works that primarily focus on fetishes"? That seems to describe Ecchi, which has 488 wicks.

I'd put AI generated works and works written by memetic communities into the same group. There's no central group of humans making decisions.

Perhaps should have said "primarily focus is a fetish". Ecchi is a Fanservice work, Fetish is non-normal turn-ons. If say, the work's story is about someone collecting others' puke, it may not be pornographic but it's unlikely it'll get a page.

The current standing is that AI generated works do have a human making decisions, it's the one who gave input, reviewed the result and published it. If the works go online uncredited then it's an issue.

Edited by Amonimus on Nov 27th 2022 at 10:13:56 PM

Right, a lot of people are underselling the amount of human involvement in AI-assisted works. But discussing those details is more suitable for OTC.

Bumping. How's progress on this?

I'm a bit apprehensive about this one. I agree that e.g. an encyclopedic work that just lists examples of tropes throughout literary history is not tropable (though it could be a useful source for Analysis pages). On the other hand, I think Discussed Trope examples that add analysis (e.g. how the commentator thinks the trope affects the experience as a whole) are valid. I'd even say they tend to be more interesting than examples that amount to "in work X, the trope happens". I definitely think pages on works that focus on these should stay. Of course, the examples need to explain how the trope is discussed — just writing "Trope: Discussed in episode 5" is not enough.

Edited by MathsAngelicVersion on Jan 25th 2023 at 7:14:18 PM

Another big bump. Any other issues with the Sandbox we need to go through before we move this to Administrivia?

Having cleaned up a few fic pages with snark/outright drama importation, I have to ask: Are websites devoted to Sporking (i.e. riffing and critiquing fan-fiction) tropeable?

Websites are normally not tropable in general unless they have enough narrative themselves.

How do we handle stuff like Goanimate, which produces a lot of tropable material (in this case, it's mainly troping the various "Grounded" videos) but isn't tropable itself?

There was an argument months ago that hosting websites can't be in work namespaces (specifically Fanfiction Archives) because they're not works themselves and at best should be at Useful Notes. Or we make Website/ an exception.

I don't particularly care, but I don't think Goanimate really counts as a work, we just don't have a good way of sorting "multiple works without own pages". There are also entire sections of examples that start with "in some videos", which runs afoul of Examples Are Not General anyway. If possible, examples with specific videos should be checked if these can be made into own work pages.

The newly decided Platform namespace wouldn't help?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16774558610A31578400&page=4#100

Ah, yes, this sums it nicely.

I definitely think the site should have room somewhere to document works that primarily deal with trope analysis. Even if they need their own namespace, or are mostly relegated to being sources for articles in the Analysis namespace. Again, that stuff is interesting — frankly more interesting than just listing instances of a trope.

If we use narrative elements as a qualifying factor but otherwise allow discussed examples, we could end up with silly cases like this: Analysis With Alice and Dissection With Dave are similar analysis shows, with the main difference being that Analysis features characters who perform skits now and then, while Dissection doesn't. Analysis qualifies for a trope page because its skits count as narrative content, and the page can also list its discussed examples, while Dissection is deemed not worthy of an article. So I at least don't think that's a good policy.

We would still need a lower limit for what's considered tropable. Otherwise we would get pages for Twitter threads or think pieces that discuss tropes.

If all that's going on is Discussed Tropes, then there's nothing even remotely narrative-like to be talked about.

We don't trope forum threads, unless there's deeper narrative like a Forum Quest or something instead of just talking between forum members?

"A think piece that discusses tropes" just sounds like an Analysis page but done by someone else?

Or the even narrower line where whether Dissection with Dave is considered tropeworthy depends on whether the audience knows enough about Dave's actor to judge that Dave is "sufficiently fictional". (This is not a hypothetical situation, either - comedians and musicians especially are known for developing their stage personas into distinct fictional characters, and both Worst Muse and Terrible Writing Advice discuss tropes under the premise that their implied authors are comically wrong about everything.)

The line between fiction and analysis is also thin where Example as a Thesis is concerned. For example: The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is Diana Wynne Jones' depiction of the generic setting of every pulp fantasy novel, whose stock locations the "Management" (author) arranges to escort the Audience Surrogate through on shallow escapist "tours" (plots). Structurally, it's a travel guide that names tropes and explains how to identify them and their most likely outcomes. Does it have narrative content? No more than the trope description for Teleporting Keycard Squad... but its sequel Dark Lord of Derkholm certainly does, set in the tourist season when the role of evil overlord has been assigned to an absent-minded wizard dad and Fantasylanders are preparing to overthrow Management and de-gentrify their home.

, I mean, I can name at least two pages for Twitter threads with tropable content without even searching for them - Midnight Pals and makeupaguy. ^note Worst Muse doesn't count because I found its page while looking up Terrible Writing Advice.

The fact that we draw a lot of analysis material from other Books on Trope is one of the best reasons we should have an index of pages for them, where we can describe their focus, what tropes they're relevant to and how their approaches differ from our site policy. That's just source citation. There aren't a lot of Books on Trope entries on the wiki to begin with, so I'm sceptical that they could be a significant source of either real-life troping or stub pages. The "(textual) narrative content" definition isn't actually used as a universal standard of pageworthiness anyway, or else there's a long, long list of unquestioned non-narrative tropes and work pages that shouldn't exist - a list which is purely hypothetical, because we don't typically even index them separately from narrative pages.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Jul 14th 2023 at 7:23:14 PM

I know there was a Web Video that was cut for just being Top Ten List, but not sure if that's because the writer of the page didn't put enough effort to analyzing the lists for tropable content, or the lists weren't giving any reasons and therefore weren't tropeworthy beyond the facts of "This guy made a list and has X, Y and Z as 1, 2 and 3, and didn't explain why."

That sort of thing might be where we can determine where to draw a line between what's worth making a page and what's not, since it's either right on it, or clearly on one side? Goodnight.

That's reasonable. I don't think we want pages for everyone's top-ten lists either.

• Works about tropes should be held to at least the same standards as works that use tropes - three tropes minimum with full context. In this case, tropes like The Hero or Big Bad are not "free", and "full context" means that whatever it has to say about each trope should be more than just our own definition. It doesn't stop being a ZCE just because it was a ZCE in the original, and "I think [trope] is good/bad" doesn't add anything either. Original analysis-page-worthy content would, however, or even just assessing how those tropes pertain to each other... provided it isn't so simplistic that our page would amount to repeating the same example three times. (I can also imagine some good arguments why the minimum should be higher than three when someone else is making the list.)
• Conversely, a source that identifies a trope well enough that its name and/or description informs the basis for our own page seems like it should instantly qualify. I'm not entirely sure how well this would apply to, say, a standalone essay focused on a single trope; the example that came to mind was Women in Refrigerators, but it turns out the site that named Stuffed in the Fridge also touched on Disposable Woman, Double Standard, and probably a few others that aren't actually on the page like De-power, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Trans Tribulations. I find that assuring - it suggests that anything significant enough to identify a trope must necessarily relate it to multiple others in the process, even if the original is as simple as "a fairly basic observational letter and a long list of examples".

I'm liking the sound of that.

That sounds like a great idea. It has a lot of advantages:

• It's consistent with the rules for other works involving tropes, whether they're narrative tropes or something else that can substitute (gameplay tropes, music tropes, etc.).
• Requiring three (or more?) trope entries with substantial content will weed out most of the stuff we don't want, like random opinion pieces or even random tweets. (Note that the Rule of Three already prevents stuff like "let's make a page for a thread of joke tweets that happen to involve a couple of Comedy Tropes".) This should also keep out top-ten lists that don't bother to do more than "in work X, trope Y happens".
• It avoids the problem of arbitrarily deciding whether an analytical piece can have its trope analysis listed on TV Tropes... based on whether its creator bothered to create a mouthpiece character who can arguably be deemed "sufficiently fictional" (or, worse, isn't really related to the analysis itself).

Edited by MathsAngelicVersion on Jul 4th 2023 at 2:25:11 PM

and I agree, I really like this idea! It establishes clear guidelines for Books on Trope-type content, and might be able to save some pages that otherwise would be cut for being non-tropeworthy. I also agree that (especially with these guidelines) Books on Trope are absolutely worth documenting—we are a site about tropes and media analysis, so I think it's perfectly fitting and on-mission that we document non-fiction works about both.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jul 4th 2023 at 8:28:56 AM

Came here per the Web Video thread and agree with the proposed guidelines

I agree with the proposed guidelines