Trope Incarnate! Needs killing

Oh my god guys!

X is totally this trope incarnate! 167 results, so apparently a lot of our tropes are walking around incarnate. Curiously, glancing over the list, it seems like currently-popular works are more likely to be tropes incarnate, especially recent popular anime, TV shows, or videogames...

Should something be done about this? Should those be cleaned up a bit?

edited 23rd Oct '10 3:42:15 PM by Aquillion

It's always ok to clean up stuff like that. And "How can X not have been mentioned yet!" and "X epitomizes this trope!" and other variants.

It's classified as either X Just X or Word Cruft depending on actual text, orders are to purge on sight, preferably with fire.

Perhaps this calls for a new trope for those examples where someone plays the trope so straight or appears to be that they could be seen as not quite the namer or codifier, but anyone that wants to exactly see the trope's prime example should see X person.

WTF thread necro? No, just no.

I've unlocked this thread because the problem has only gotten worse since the thread was originally made. There are now almost 500 hits for ["trope incarnate"].

However, we aren't going to "fix" it by declaring that it's OK. Sorry, darkpowrjd. That's not an option.

edited 24th Mar '13 6:47:39 AM by Madrugada

I've knocked off 20 of them,just now, but the search is still showing them. If you want to help clean them up, start on the third page of results, please.

I shifted through page 3 all the way to page 10. So, I guess we're done (for now, anyways)?

Well, using the main Google search, rather than the one hooked on the wiki , I got these results; about 200 more.

I guess we can assume that they're coming up in the same rough order, and pick up on page 11... I finished to the bottom of page 10 of the results (Sym-bionic Titan)

edited 25th Mar '13 6:43:23 PM by Madrugada

Just as an FYI, I just removed a load of "Trope Incarnate" Word Cruft from 20-odd examples. In places where it constituted a Zero Context Example (and when I didn't know enough to edit it myself), I hid the example as a % % comment after removing the cruft.

I cleaned up pages 12-17. Probably missed some, but I just don't have the patience to double-check right now.

Yeah, I should perhaps have been more specific. I cleaned all the links on the first five pages of the Google search Madrugada posted, except for YKTTWs, forum posts, troper pages and places where it was clearly appropriate (such as admonitions on how not to write an example).

edited 6th Aug '13 2:12:57 PM by KorKhan

Do we still need to remove such lines if the example tries to provide a decent context?

If you're talking about the phrase "Trope incarnate", yes, please remove it in all circumstances. If the example provides a further description of how the trope is used, calling it "this trope incarnate" is just word cruft, gushing about how very much the work uses it. If the example doesn't provide any context, the phrase is useless, since it doesn't provide any context either.

edited 27th Sep '13 10:47:30 AM by Madrugada

Mod Hat ON

I asked Eddie to generate a list of all the pages that contained the phrase "trope incarnate" so that we could wrap this up once and for all. He did so (using a back-up copy of the database that was a couple days old, so as not to slow up the current site), and it only showed on 47 pages. I've gone through that list and cleared it from everywhere except individual Troper pages. So this is now done. Presumably all those other hits from Google are on history pages or edit reasons

If you stumble across one, please clear it. And thank you for the effort.

Mod Hat OFF

edited 27th Sep '13 6:04:30 PM by Madrugada

Great stuff! The more irritating, crufty catchphrases we can nip in the bud, the better. I'll check the search function now and then to make sure it doesn't come back.

Thank you for taking that on, m'dear. I'll lock this thread up as "completed", then.

edited 27th Sep '13 6:35:22 PM by Madrugada