TRS Discussion: About Discussing Other Tropes on Threads

So, I accidentally sparked a small debate on the TRS meta thread by asking if it was an actual rule that people are discouraged from bringing up tropes that aren't the main topic of discussion. Not everyone agreed with me that the issue is an issue, or at least, that the issue is an issue in every circumstance; there was also confusion over what I meant, and it basically needs a spin-off. So here we are!

First, I'll clarify the sort of thing I'm talking about. On a lot of TRS threads, people have brought up other related concepts and asked if we also need to work on them. Typically these tropes are either similar, have a supertrope / subtrope relationship, or work off of the same concept. Basically, they're like the trope being discussed, but they're not the trope being discussed. In my experience, in most cases, the answer is: No, we're not working on this trope in this thread, please do a wick check and queue it up separately. So I was under the impression that it was against the rules to do this, as it tends to derail threads and often leads to people suggestion repairs for tropes we don't even know are in need of a repair.

However, it was pointed out that there's also many cases where the other tropes have been folded into the discussion. In addition, I stirred some confusion because bringing up related tropes is also a part of a normal TRS discourse, the main difference being the specific context (such as suggesting things for a disambig vs trying to expand the thread's scope).

So... yeah. Let's discuss.

Based on experience, I'll comment on a couple of scenarios:

• Bringing up potential ways to expand a thread's scope, such as when the thread for Pastimes Prove Personality was expanded to clean up other parts of the No On-Page Examples index (since Pastimes Prove Personality's problem was that on-page examples were forbidden completely arbitrarily), as well as my recent proposal to expand the thread for The Hero to rename the Heroes index while disambiguating Main.Heroes afterward, can be fine depending on what's being proposed. There can be valid reasons to bring other tropes into the mix.
• Bringing up hypothetical scenarios about what to do with subtropes/supertropes/sister tropes is often unnecessary (e.g., "Now that we're doing [course of action] with trope X, what's going to happen with trope Y?"), because the fact that we do something with one trope doesn't automatically mean we have to touch related tropes. I recall people bringing up whether we were doing anything with the group of tropes associated with Five Bad Band in the thread that cut it, and Septimus accurately pointed out that they can exist without Five Bad Band (and indeed, they weren't touched in that thread).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 27th 2023 at 9:20:35 AM

The example I brought up was my "Blind Idiot" Translation thread getting derailed by people discussing Translation Trainwreck. It was difficult because people were intent on discussing both tropes, even though BIT was already pretty large and complicated, and TT had no wick check or anything. And in my experience, these are the sort of cases that get the "stop discussing X" treatment.

And that's just a recent example, I have clear memories of it happening elsewhere but don't have the trope names memorized; I do remember that Loads And Loads Of Characters was temporarily derailed by a discussion about Minimalist Cast, for another example.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 27th 2023 at 10:23:33 AM

Agreed, and adding on to your point I can also think of when a thread I wrote the OP for for Link Blog got broadened into one about the Blog Tropes in general.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Apr 27th 2023 at 10:24:40 AM

this was the point I was making in the TRS meta thread and why I'm hesitant to put a ban on bringing up other tropes in a TRS thread as possible tropes to bring into the discussion/consider, since Situation 1 of Gaston's post is good practice IMO. It's annoying having to tell people to cut it out in Situation 2, but I don't think the suggested policy is good because it discourages Situation 1.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 27th 2023 at 10:44:32 AM

See, that's why I asked at the meta thread and not the Outdated Pages; I didn't even know if it was a policy yet lol

It was less me suggesting a new rule and more me scoping to see if this was already a rule we just didn't have written down.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 27th 2023 at 10:45:33 AM

What suggested policy? I wasn't suggesting any policies. I was giving my thoughts on what I've seen from existing TRS threads. That, and I said that it's often unnecessary, not that it's unacceptable, or that it should be forbidden.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 27th 2023 at 10:18:50 AM

I think they were referring to me bringing it up as an amendment to the page, but again the reason I took it there was to see if it was even a rule at all

OK, got it. We can tweak Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop if this thread determines it's necessary; I suggested this thread because it seemed to merit more discussion than the TRS meta thread was built to handle.

I think we can have some general recommendations (interpretation from observation):

• When making a wick check, keep in mind the related tropes. If the trope has subtropes or snowclones, the discussion may slow down because of "and what to do with those" questions. The answer is normally "nothing", but you may want to address it ahead of time.
• "Batch threads" that cover multiple tropes are allowed, but only when all tropes are closely related, wick checked and have the exact same issue, so the discussion wouldn't be much longer than any other. A thread scope can be expanded if that is fullfilled and it's early enough.
• A TRS thread cannot reasonably address what to do with related tropes without a wick check or if they're not small. At best the description can be expanded when the merge is on the table, but please don't discuss the problems with other tropes if the thread isn't about them.

Edited by Amonimus on Apr 28th 2023 at 5:05:43 PM

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between people going "if you're messing with trope X, what about similar trope Y?" (basically the equivalent of WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS), the case where doing something with a page will necessarily have knock-on effects on other related tropes, and the case where a trope under discussion can't be looked at in isolation from another trope with similar, interconnected issues, or can't have anything meaningful done with it until we look at the case of the broader trope.

In the case of the "Blind Idiot" Translation thread, nrjxll raised the point that the distinction between that trope and Translation Train Wreck, while clear in theory, was muddled in practice, and that it wasn't clear what sort of space it occupied between TTW, Lost in Translation, and other similar tropes, so setting out a well-defined space for it could potentially mean cutting into space currently occupied by those other tropes. Messing with Translation Train Wreck wouldn't be kosher without that page getting its own usage check, but it wasn't clear that BIT was tropeworthy on its own without messing with Translation Train Wreck, so either the thread's scope would have to be broadened or, as actually happened, the whole thing would have to be kicked to Trope Talk to clarify the scope of the problem. A more recent example would be how the discussion of Broken Aesop and Clueless Aesop turned into a discussion about An Aesop more generally.

I'm not sure either of these threads were wrong not to cover other tropes to begin with, necessarily; the issues with the scope of "Blind Idiot" Translation weren't brought up until the thread went to a crowner (and it has a terrible name no matter what), and I personally probably wouldn't have thought to look at An Aesop when looking at the problems with its subtropes. But it does suggest that it would be helpful for thread creators to get as close to the root of the problem as possible, and make less work for the thread later by roping in other pages if they have sufficiently interconnected issues.

Here's how I would put it, though it can probably be made less long-winded:

I'm not familiar with the use of "snowflakes" in reference to tropes. Do you mean Sister Tropes?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 28th 2023 at 7:54:27 AM

I think they mean Snowclones?

Correct and that was quite a mistake on my part.

To be clear, my issue pertains specifically to when people attempt to broaden the thread's scope without doing the necessary work for it and in the middle of discussing the actual trope. So my issue with "Blind Idiot" Translation is less the reason why the other tropes were brought up, and more about the whole "Let's change the other trope" stuff. That's really where I start to get concerned, not when other tropes need to be discussed but when people suggest we start altering or cleaning those other tropes at the same time, or ask things like "if we're doing The Chick, shouldn't we also do The Dark Chick?" Usually, even after being told we can't work on these issues, the question repeatedly pops up on the thread, where people would rather discuss other tropes than the actual problem child.

In other words, I'm not against what actually happened at the BIT thread, where after a while of discussion we all agreed that moving to Trope Talk was the best play. I'm more just against the mentality of "we have to do every related trope at once, and let's derail the discussion to do so".

I also think part of my issue is that multi-trope and multi-scope threads tend to be very complicated to not only set up, but to pull off and enact. So I just get inherently frustrated when people attempt to turn every thread into a batch thread without having work prepared, usually forcing us to grind to a halt so someone else can make the wick check for the trope none of us were originally interested in discussing. It just takes a lot more time, energy, and work to pull these things off and while sometimes I agree there really is no other choice, I also think that in a lot of cases people are just better off making a new thread for their concern.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 28th 2023 at 2:02:13 PM

So here's how I would modify my draft based on , though it's still long-winded (much more so than the actual TRS page):

I also took a stab at drafting something up and used some of what ^Morgan wrote as a basis: Potential TRS Policy Write Up

I am going to be my usual self and say that we should probably merge Trope Renaming Guidelines into whatever page comes out of such a new policy page. Trope renaming is just one of the various jobs TRS does.

I'd originally pictured the info being a paragraph or two on Trope Repair Shop, not an actual separate page. I like the two versions, don't get me wrong, they're just far more extensive than I originally assumed would be necessary.

I'm fine with boiling it down to a paragraph if someone can find a way to do so. That being said, having some of the "rules", suggestions, and cultural norms of TLP being more explicitly set out, on this page or somewhere else, might not be a bad thing, as the current page doesn't have much of that and is pretty light on content in general. I'm not sure where such a paragraph would go on the page if it's supposed to be about participants in a thread as much or more than thread creators, or if it would come off as overly emphasizing one particular bit of more-annoying-than-anything-else behavior if it were added to the page with no other changes.

Edited by MorganWick on May 1st 2023 at 10:10:12 AM

Merging the renaming guidelines in

I'd be fine with having it on the same page as the renaming guidelines if we need more text than just a paragraph.

What should we call the page? Administrivia.TRS Guidelines would parallel Administrivia.TLP Guidelines, but we could also spell it out as Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop Guidelines.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 2nd 2023 at 1:44:18 PM

I like Administrivia.TRS Guidelines.

Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop already acts as TRS guidelines doesn't it? I think it's better to merge the suggested guidelines on discussing other tropes with that page.

Alternatively, we could remake Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop to be similar to Administrivia.Image Pickin, move the contents to Administrivia.TRS Guidelines, and list that page and related pages/forum threads.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 3rd 2023 at 3:59:48 PM

I like the latter option.