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for ongoing cleanup projects.
Having looked over the page, I’m going to speak up in agreement here; in particular, referring to a real life murder-suicide as a “twist” and spoiler-tagging the heck out of it makes it difficult to initially tell the page is about a documentary at all.
I haven’t seen the work in question, so I don’t know how much help I’d be in a potential cleanup, but I agree that one is needed.
🏳️🌈I think there IS a thread where we handle treating Real Life like this, I just couldnt remember it. And we may not need to do any clean up, this is so blatantly troping real life the page may just be deleted entirely.
Discord: Waido X 255#1372 If you cant contact me on TV Tropes do it here.Agreed. Per Real Life Troping:
- Examples for Non-Fiction works (especially Biography, Documentary, or Talk Show) must describe either a staged performance (e.g. a documentary Crime Reconstruction), the setting, artistic elements, or the commentary on other works. If a work has none of those, it does not belong on the wiki. Examples are written in the context of the work, not as if these are undisputed historical facts.
I agree; the whole page treats it like a mockumentary.
I would even use "documentary" loosely in describing the film, as the origins of it as described on the page make it feel much more like a home video (albeit one released publicly) than something with a noteable creative direction. I would not object to seeing it removed.
Edited by OctoyaI'd be fine cutting the whole work. While it is a notable documentary, the page is littered with real-life troping. It's a large problem with troping documentaries, but especially with this page.
First things first would be to just remove the spoiler warning for a movie showing real-life murders.
I’m sorry, but you have Stage 9 Animes.The YMMV page is particularly tasteless about it too (especially the Nightmare Fuel entry that talks about the killer with lines like "the scariest part? there are real people like that in the world" about a real person in a documentary.) I'd cut that if nothing else.
Nightmare Fuel is NRLEP, so I'd cut it
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure PurenessI think there is some narrative merit to keeping the page — the documentary is explicitly framed as a story made of a child, for that child to explain to him when he's old enough to understand what happened to his parents, only for it to have gone off the rails due to real-world events as it was being made, with it being purposefully framed as a twist that Zachary will never live to see it (the narrator speaks entirely in second-person as a message to Zachary; there's never an implication that he was already dead until it gets to that point in the timeline).
That being said, this absolutely needs a cleanup, because yipes, it is weirdly shameless about treating these not as actual people.
Edited by number9robotic Thanks for playing Kings Quest V!Pretty overdue, but I finally got to doing some cleanup to Dear Zachary, removing some of the more targeted editorializing about people in the documentary, and removing spoiler tags on account of this being about real events.
Thanks for playing Kings Quest V!
Dear Zachary
This is a documentary that while using some tropey (As when Zachary's death is announced and the screed turns red and an scream is heard) stuff to convey the horror of what happened, is pretty much just the Real Life case with absolutely ZERO narrative reframing. It's just the case being conveyed with no narrative re enactments.
And tropers naturally could not resist treating like a piece of fiction in really ghastly ways, most notably the "DONT READ BELOW IF YOU WANNA WATCH UNSPOILED" and commenting on factual footage from Real Life as if it was a horror movie.
I was going to bring this up in the thread but I dont know what thred we use for this.
EDIT: Guys I REALLY appreciate the thumbs up I got but I have to remind you it does absolutely nothing. Please just post here and help me figure out what to do here.
Edited by AegisP