Ask The Tropers - TV Tropes

Bounce that vandal's account to oblivion!

Is there a secret message that can be deciphered from that mess of text?

Nah, just spam.

Reverted and suspended.

Yes, Satoshi. The secret message reads:

"BAN ME PLEASE!"

More like "I might be a jerk or careless. Ban me to find out".

Could also be "I let my cat edit on my account".

Clearly, it is some sort of performance art, inviting the viewer to reflect on the futility of fiction and the true transient nature of tropes.

(/half-joking mode) Now now, it's not polite to ask for people to be banned. :p Just ask the mods to have a talk with them.

Even though in some cases it's obvious what's going to happen.

^^^^ Of course, it makes perfect sense!

^^ There's a name for that type of art. It's called shit.

"Removed accusations of spyware given lack of evidence". That is an edit summary.

Well it's also either ignorant or Blatant Lies — the client has been reverse-engineered, and its malware underpinnings are well-documented.

Normally this would not be relevant to our mission, but I think a PSA about downloading the thing is in order in this case.

I swear that summary wasn't there when I reported this...

It is a kind of fiction -pretending to be something it's not. (Being somewhat goofy.)

And don't feel too bad. People miss things that are right in their face all the time, particularly if something distra- (cat walks in front of keyboard)

...what was I saying?

But I don't see a problem with having a page on a real, provable, established threat to computer users, particularly since I can see it or fictional versions of it being used in works. (I do have a problem with lying edit reasons, and that one is a lie.)

Because "Voldermort" is back again?

Screwed by the Network gets a LOT of abuse. Basically every time a show gets cancelled or un-aired for a bit, some fanboy will come on to rave about how it got "screwed." That is NOT what that trope is for - shows get cancelled all the time. Nothing lasts forever.

Screwed by the Network is for when the network clearly had it out for the show - they aired episodes Out of Order, relegated the show to the Friday Night Death Slot, subjected the show to Invisible Advertising, cancelled halfway into the first season, et cetera.

The only time a mere Cancellation would count is if a) it's very early into the show's run (think Firefly) or b) it's so abrupt that the series creators don't get to give the series a proper ending (think Futurama).

As for this particular case... the series was already cancelled and they just stopped airing re-runs for a while? Yeah, eff that. That's blatant Square Peg Round Trope.

Steven Universe isn't even cancelled(it's one of Carton Network's most popular shows, right up there with regular show, uncle grandpa, and adventure time), so this is extra complaining about just not being able to catch reruns. /lesigh

I doubt it's "Voldemort" — this isn't his style of OCD.

^^ It's not even really cancelled? Geez. Yeah, cut that example.

I think it's not the first time this question has been debated. (Though that might have been about Nodwick rather than Girl Genius.)

If I remember well, the argument was that, if PS 238 is slowly released online, the comic version is ahead of it, and thus it's primarily a comic book and should stay in this namespace. Examples that are found in the Webcomic folder should just be moved to "Comic Books".

Girl Genius, on the other hand, may have started in print but the publication stopped, thus the larger part of it is solely available online, making it primarily a webcomic, hence justifying the Webcomic/ namespace over the "first serve" rule.

Okay, thank you. I'll get on to it.

Yep, I was behind the Nodwick query, for the same reason. It's a bit different with PS238 since the main plotline is being advanced exclusively in webcomic form, the print comic is over. Give it a few more months and it'll be in the same boat as Girl Genius.

There is nothing to cutlist on that page.

Sorry if I was a bit unclear. I'm referring to ptitles redirects such as these. It's been said before that old ptitles are to be cutlisted, but the sheer number of inbounds with some of these make me unsure on how to proceed.

I'd say cut it. Yeah it has 2,000 inbounds... but the actual page has almost 87,000.

(And yet the mods think 30 inbounds is too many to delete a wrong namespace redirect. *eyeroll*)

Bumping this because I feel lonely in doing this.

As I recall, someone did that before and it didn't last long.

Well I have it all planned out. I just want people to comment on it and see what changes have to be made.

The issue is that it's not good organization to give certain works pages completely different character pages.

Yeah, I'd oppose this overhaul on this ground.

Well, the Star Wars character page is done similarly. I can't tell which character is from the movies or which character is from the novels or which character is from the TV series, but it doesn't matter since it's all the same universe.

The primary reason for this overhaul is because it's a shared universe. For example, there is an overall S.H.I.E.L.D. page listed on the main character page, but there is also a different S.H.I.E.L.D. page listed on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. character page. Then there is a S.H.I.E.L.D. section on the Captain America Films character page. It's all really awkward in my opinion. Plus, there are characters who appear in multiple films but are not a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. so they are dumped on the main character page (again, Howard friggen Stark).

All in all, it's a shared universe uses Continuity Lockout, so we should just make things less confusing and go with that lockout rather then trying to separate it all.

I do see your point, but I still have reasons for wanting to go through this. However, I will back down if the majority doesn't see it that way.

I disagree, and think that Characters.Star Wars is an example of a franchise character page done wrong.

For the fans that have only ever watched the films, there's too much information.

^ But again, it's all one continuity. The Clone Wars, Rebels, and the novels coming out around now are canon with the movies. It wouldn't make much sense to separate character sheets that are part of the same canon.

The worst I've seen is Halo, which has the Master Chief - i.e. the central character of the entire franchise - somewhere near the bottom of a fairly lengthy subpage that otherwise consists entirely of background characters and at no point lists the name of the work any of these characters appear in. I don't CARE if it's all one continuity, they are different works and should be treated as such. We don't have a page for the comic Marvel Universe characters that sorts them into heroes, villains, bystanders, etc, even though the comics cross over far more than the films do. We sort them by their primary title so that people can actually find things.

Currently, I think the characters are placed on the page of the film they first appeared in, with a few exceptions (Coulson and Peggy have their own shows, so they're on those pages). That mostly works, with just a few like Howard Stark first appearing in one (Iron Man) and having major roles in others (Captain America and Agent Carter). So far, that problem is handled by giving them a stub character entry that points to the page they're actually on.

^^ Well, the ship has already sailed for Characters.Star Wars. It would be too much of a mess to try and change it back. For the Marvel Comics, I would actually prefer for them to stay how they are now because that would make the pages really big. I honestly have faith in my plan to redo the MCU character page. I know you don't agree with me, but there does seem to be people that do agree with me on the discussion page.

Maybe we should go to Wiki Talk about the whole "Work vs. Continuity" character sorting.

^ ^ Stub redirect sheets are what really bug me the most. It's especially frustrating when for people like Alexander Pierce, who has a stub redirect under Characters.SHIELD to Characters.Captain America Films, where his folder is under the S.H.I.E.L.D. section. That has always bugged me.

Also, we don't want to trick people into thinking there is no Continuity Lockout, as there is. My choice for character sheets prevents the harshness of Continuity Lockout.

Your choice for character sheets has been roundly, eloquently, and justly opposed. You're really gonna have to come up with something better than, "but my version will work better!"

As it is, I think the MCU character pages are examples of a set of franchise character pages done right. Stub entries mean that you're directed to the right place, and organising characters by the films they first appeared in — except for characters like Coulson and Carter, who later became lead characters in their own shows — makes them relatively easy to find.

^ Look, I see your point and I saw all of their points. I'm not denying any of their points. And what do mean that I'm saying "but my version will work better!"? I actually did provide legit points. It helps control Continuity Lockout. And there are some of us who don't like stub redirects and want to minimize them as much as possible. The less stub redirects, the better. And now all of this is even more awkward with the creation of Characters.The Avengers Age Of Ultron, whereas characters like Thanos, the Other, and the Chitari don't get their own Characters.The Avengers page (since they first appeared in that film).

I will see your point, but I also want you to see mine. Please do not pull the strawman and say that I'm not giving any reasons, because I really am trying.

Is their any way to have a crowner outside of the forums? We should have a crowner deciding this, because there are people who agree with me on the discussion page, but I will willingly back down if the majority is proven to be against.

Wait, why isn't Howard Stark on the S.H.I.E.L.D. page, considering he's a founding member of the organization?

Because he wasn't revealed to be the founder until Iron Man 2, and so far has yet to be depicted running SHIELD. It's the same reason Peggy Carter also isn't there as co-founder. He's yet to appear in any SHIELD media.

Folks, not a general discussion thread. Please?

This might be pertinent, from Needs a Redirect: "There is also this forum thread for Needs A Redirect questions."

If you're after blanket rules, this won't help, but for a specific question about this YKTTW, maybe that thread would be helpful.

Edit: Although that thread has managed two pages in 4 years and hasn't seen a new post since last August. Not quite sure why someone thought it was significant enough to warrant mention on an Administirvia page...

"How strict are the rules for redirects?"

Not very strict at all. Redirects Are Free.

They should, however, be sane and serve some useful purpose.

^ Of course. Just off the top of my head "Spamburger" would make a horrible redirect for Everything's Better with Princesses.

So on that note, how does "Quality Swap" look as a redirect to How to Pick a Good Image?

^ It looks okay, IMO.

But really, I made redirects Only Like Can Cut Like and Our Monsters Are Differently Named without asking and nobody's complaining...

Why not take "Swap" as a financial asset?

And "Quality" is, first of all, a polyseme or homonym, it can be either of semantically different things: adjective or noun, can mean an object for the action, a qualifier for an action, a characteristic of an object.

The word combination bears no privileged connection with image nature of its intended shorthanding target. There's as much viability for quality swapping a text paragraph of description, a laconic, a page quote, folderizing markup, phrasing of example context, order of examples. Interpretation of the "quality swap" towards, precisely, *draws breath*... "getting rid of artifacts and other limited list flaws in tv tropes article page image—and if you say that 350px-wide image will nearly always have compression distortion, I maybe will eventually manage to evade that by saying that the flaws to be done away with are those that disrupt informativeness of the image—while staying true to the source material" — is, is, freaking, possible. Because people can envisage other people peculiarities in thought processing. Doesn't mean they deserve to have the task non-chalantly pushed onto them, as part of supposedly an improvement in wiki operating procedures.

I think I've let it on quite a few times in that discussion: the fact that the proposed predefined message candidate (and the action that the message would come hand-in-hand with) happens often (which would translate into feasibility of making fleshy-flashy means of labelling both) — is not shown to be true. Several empty statements by the ykttw sponsor are just that, empty statements, they snowball the apparent haphazardness of logic same troper shows in other aspects of discussion, in other discussions too. Even worse, you can't give advice on that easily for four reasons: 1) (s)he's never asking you about that kind of advice, 2) further snowballing, (s)he likely wouldn't be able to discern specifics of attack on his/her structure of logical argumentation, 3) even with people most-obviously-wrong, it's hard to convey the seriousness of "you're wrong, and this element here is where your problem is" in such terms which can't easily be interpreted as personal attacks, 4) there's always a possibility of potential preacher being wrong instead.

With all that in mind, a discussion of "stop your games, just tell me how do I satisfy your picky redirect-hating tastes?"? :/ Check your castle foundation first, window glass and bedsheets come later.

And the "<...> I agreed any info on that ykttw could be folded into that page, <...>" part of the original query here is a glossing over things too.

"The word combination bears no privileged connection with image nature of its intended shorthanding target."

Who's saying it does?

I should hope you are, considering you're the one fighting so hard for using it. I've never seen "quality swap" used as an edit reason. And if I did I'd want significantly more information out of an edit reason than that. "The image was bad, here's a list of reasons the old image might have been bad" doesn't tell you anything. If you're removing or replacing content, wiki etiquette states that you declare your spesific grievance with the original content in the edit reason.

You were already told by three people in this discussion that the redirect was unnecessary and the information you proposed adding to How to Pick a Good Image is already covered on that page. I don't see what the point was in bringing this to ATT.

If you desperately need a predefined message redirect to How to Pick a Good Image it should evoke the fact that it is about images. Off the top of my head:

• Needs A Better Image
• Find A Better Image
• Low Quality Image
• That Image Isnt Working
• That Image Sucks Whats Wrong With You <—Joke, in case anyone missed the sarcasm

I'm more puzzled by some of you being adamantly against a redirect than "desperate" for this to be used.

"I've never seen "quality swap" used as an edit reason."

Okay, is there some kind of way to search for edit reason text? That would honestly be helpful for many reasons.

"I've never seen 'quality swap' used as an edit reason."

It's been my edit reason dozens of times, though the phrasing I use is different: "same image, better quality" (or "same image, brightened", etc).

^"Same image, brightened" is a much better edit reason because it actually elaborates on what the problem was, though.

^ No, that's too narrow. Swapping the picture can be for many reasons.

Plus are you saying that edit reasons have to be written to certain standards? We have not being rude, and of course being relevant to the page, but we don't go "better edit reason".

Hey would Image Quality Swap be fine?

Or Picture Quality Swap, since my argument is about making this easier to search for.

^I still don't see a real need for them to be blue linked but those two at least pass the clarity test, which was the primary complaint.

But where does it say that for redirects?

The situation you are asking about is extremely unusual, and as such there are no hard and fast rules. In these situations what we fall back on are community discussion and consensus.

^ How is this extremely unusual and thus requires a fallback?

^Because per Administrivia.Creating New Redirects

STOP!: Do not create redirects (or pages) for the following: ...snip...

• Variant names for tropes that don't improve clarity, but are simply a way to disguise a Pot Hole.

The original suggestion did not improve clarity or searchability. Therefore how it has seemed to me is that the only reason for the redirect is so that it can be used as a Blue Linked Predefined Message.

It only takes a little more effort to type Quality Swap

I don't really agree, but it's at least an argument I can understand.

But still, I think someone on the ykttw said that "Quality Swap" alone could be used for its own trope, but didn't say what it would be. I'd like to know.

Self-demonstrating is allowed on non-SD pages, as long as it doesn't detract from conciseness or clarity.

As for that example, I'd cut it, but then again Deadpool annoys me so I'm probably not the person to ask.

I wasn't going to cut it, just edit it to be standard wiki format.

You know what I mean. :p

I'm pretty sure it's wiki policy to not have Complaining About Shows You Don't Like plastered all over the top of the page. I've seen it in page quotes, image captions... I'd remove it.

...

That's a blatant violation of What Goes Where on the Wiki. Not only is it not OK to put YMMV bullshit on a main page, Base Breaker is explicitly about characters, not entire works.

I removed it.

I think the trope he was looking for was either Contested Sequel or Love It or Hate It. Even then, though, that doesn't belong on the main page, much less in the image caption.

Also, I was under the impression Pokemon Ruby And Sapphire was the biggest Contested Sequel in the series.

I've messaged them.

^^ Ruby and Sapphire got Vindicated by History to an extent while Diamond and Pearl didn't. As far as I can tell the demand for Sinnoh Remakes isn't nearly a high as the demand the Hoenn ones got (at least yet).

Also, I kinda liked the first part of the caption with the time and space bit. Can I readd it but edited to be this?

"From the depths of time and space comes a new adventure."

^ I don't see why not.

EDIT: In case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about the suggested Diamond and Pearl caption, not the rest of the post. ^^;;

I don't know, but a lot of those examples are more along the lines of Easily Forgiven than Protagonist-Centered Morality (even if that character has made a legitimate Heel-Face Turn).

I looked at the example and watched the show of reference.

In my opinion, they do have a point. Kayaba created the situation that did kill thousands of people, however, he never intended to live. He knew and wanted to die within the world he created and accepted his fate with grace. In the East, that is a form of redemption and does falls more under Easily Forgiven as Satoshi Bakura pointed out. Also, it is only the main character and his group that really forgives him. He's seen as monster everywhere else.

Also, the second villain is worse, but that's a different story.

Ban evader. Here comes the banhammer.

I've posted about the links in moderator Skype.

In this case, is a revert in order?

Reverted. Pretty sure it count as spam.

This is in the page's source:

%% This page is a self-demonstrating article that shows what circular redirects are and gives the screen to break them. Please do not remove or change the redirect as it's the whole point.

[[redirect:CircularRedirect]]

For what it's worth, mod Telcontar put it up.

EDIT: Personally, I think it would be more helpful to have Main.Circular Redirect be a regular article explaining what circular redirects are and how to avoid them, and then have a separate SelfDemonstrating.Circular Redirect page if people think they need to experience it first hand to understand it.

It's been self demo since a long time. You cannot save a circular redirect article without either generating that disambig page that asks you to fix it or generating an "Infinite loop" error in your browser. With that in mind, I find it pointless to turn it into a regular article.

I think there used to be a customized error page there explaining why it's a problem. The fact that said customized error page is removed (resulting in the generic error message provided by the brower itself) is most likely a bug of the new website layout.

Yep, and it's been reported as such.

The problem with portrayals of depression and anxiety in media, is that not everyone goes through them in the same way.

For some people, depression is smiling cheerfully while inside you stew in your own angst. Others lash out wildly and drive their friends away. Still others shut themselves in their rooms and never leave, or take to drinking.

Getting over it is the same too. Some people really do get over it with a single kick-to-the-britches epiphany moment (I know, I was one of those), while others require years of love and support. For some people medication is the only thing that makes them feel okay, while others complain that meds make them feel "dead" inside, and only get better after they STOP taking them.

The problem with this example of Unfortunate Implications, is that it's only presenting one side of that. A couple of people looked at Elsa's anxieties and said, "That's not how I went through depression! It's offensive to me!" A couple more people looked at it and said "Yes, exactly! This is exactly what I went through!"

...but only one side of that argument is allowed to speak.

...and that's why the entire entry is Not an Example.

Let me explain. You may remember, Unfortunate Implications recently went through an overhaul, and it now requires citations. Well, the reason why it went through that overhaul is because absolutely anything can be an unfortunate implication to the right person. Under that definition, I could call Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as having Unfortunate Implications on the grounds that it implies playing in toxic waste will give you super powers. Obviously, we can't have people cluttering up the wiki with nonsense like that, though.

We want citations to prove that the Unfortunate Implications are not simply a tiny minority's Single-Issue Wonk, but something serious and real, that a majority of people agree on. What we see here, is that there is no majority consensus. Some people, who we linked to, believe that Elsa's portrayal is offensive. Other people, who Fairy Dreamer linked to, believe that it's accurate and uplifting.

No consensus means it's not a legit example.

My advice: change the whole thing to Broken Base. That trope actually is for when some people find it offensive and some don't.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you there, wrm. UI by its very nature is going to have people on both sides; the fact it's accidental implications means the writers themselves weren't trying to make the implications.

The link Fairy Dreamer has is the Intended Audience Reaction. The writers expected the audience to find it uplifting, so of course some did. But a not-insignificant portion found it unsettling. Which is this trope.

Now, I'm not saying it's not also a Base Breaker; it apparently is. But that doesn't negate Unfortunate Implications.

I'm sorry but since when is tumblr a valid citation for UI?

Suspending that user. But I agree that Tumblr is not a legitimate source of UI citations.

So should the example be nuked?

Unless someone can find a better citation, probably.

Out of curiosity, what is the general rule for what makes a UI citation valid?

We'd like it to be a reputable source. Someone's blog doesn't count. Ideally it would be a noted journalist or recognized subject matter authority. We kind of have to apply standards of notability here because otherwise you could support a UI example with your own Tumblr post and nobody would know unless you doxxed yourself.

^We should probably add a note concerning citation "Legitimacy" to the Unfortunate Implications page, since the description doesn't say anything about it. If we don't want people uses blogs as their citations we should probably make it clear for people reading it.

I think if it's a blogger who has achieved some level of respect or is considered a reasonable authority about the particular issue in question, they should be considered as a possible source -but it has to be something they earned and can be noted by whatever means are accessible.

If they're just mudraking or pounding out their opinion, they can go hang.

The point of the citation is to show that an opinion has at least several supporters. I think "reputable sources" are both out of point and a Pandora's box that is better off sealed shut.

I think the way this trope is going, it's better off removed. After all, TV Tropes is not Wikipedia, and if something needs the citation rules there, it doesn't belong here.

I'm just concerned that if UI were removed, people would start adding these entries to other pages instead. Having UI as an audience reaction at least channels this contentious material to one place.

A page as Wall Banger?

I can't believe that petulant temper tantrum is leading to this discussion.

Anyway, I do agree that a Tumblr as a source is basically no better than one troper's opinion. But in this case, there were several cited Tumblrs, indicating that it was an opinion shared by at least several distinct people. Which is the point of the citations.

Thing is, though, at least one of those blogs were a bash blog, and everyone has different reactions and experiences with depression (as the controversy with Depression Quest, pre-a-certain-other-controversy, showed). The tantrum thrower did have the decency to link some counter-arguments, too.

Depression is one of those complex topics where there are several valid reactions, because the condition itself is complex and variegated.

Cracked did an article where they interviewed a guy with depression, and both the comments section on the article and on the FB post show there is a HUGE variation of reactions. Thing is, the majority are valid reactions, since "depression" (really a misnomer name to describe the murky blackness of the engulfing mud of misery) has a wide range of symptoms and treatments; except for the 'think happy thoughts and try to feel better' people, most of the comments actually saying something had a point.

We should call it dementation.

But that'd offend the Dementors!

We really ought to have a central Unfortunate Implications issues thread where we can hammer things like "is this a reputable source in relation to this issue?" out.

I decided to add Fighteer's post about acceptable citation sources to the description on Unfortunate Implications. If you disagree with the idea or feel I stepped out of line, feel free to remove it. Just doing my best to help out.

Hey, not sure if I should move this to a seperate ATT topic, but Septimus Heap reverted Very Melon's edits. Doesn't look like there's a mod consensus, can we get one?

Yeah, the source being reputable is not particularly important. It needs to show several people's opinions, first and foremost.

^ But that makes absolutely no sense. I mean, I could put up links to my own blog and two or three of my buddies' blogs that we put up five minutes ago just so I could have citations, and you'd never have any idea.

If UI is going to require citations, then the citations should matter. If the validity of the citations means nothing, then why require them at all? It still allows abuse, it just makes abusing the system slightly more complicated to pull off.

It IS a YMMV trope, after all. But it IS a very contentious one, as the edit war in the OP shows.

Yeah, but asking for "reputable" sources doesn't help at all. Far too contentious a standard. By requiring "several people" one has at least an idea that there is an actual controversy going on.

Wait, so who's in the right, Fighteer or Septimus?

I would say Fighteer, but that's because I agree with him. ;)

I say we settle this the old fashioned way: a professional wrestling cage match. Fighteer vs. Septimus!

Um, does the controversy of Kristoff looking white despite being of the Sami people count as unfortunate implications?

As for Elsa, would that count as Epiphany Therapy?

^ Kristoff was supposed to be a Sami? I totally missed that plot point.

Also, I think Kristoff's skintone would be either Race Lift or a non-anime use of Mukokuseki.

^^ But Sami people do look pretty much like other ethnic Scandinavians.

^ The controversy includes things like that as arguments and counterarguments.

Apparently, there's been a whopping four films named that. I can't tell from a quick scan whether they're related.

Just looking at the trope lists and the brief blurb about the older film on our page, they don't seem to share any character names, and the tropes described seem to portray the plot pretty differently.

All of which would seem to suggest that the two films already on that page should be split off into separate pages. I think the preferred practice would be to call them Film.Moulin Rouge 1952 and Film.Moulin Rouge 2001, and then turn Film.Moulin Rouge into a disambiguation (this would also allow for pages to be added on the 1928 or 1934 films - neither of which seem to be related to the 1952 film, but for all I know they're tangentially connected to the 2001 film).

It's the problem with the current wiki software that articles are identified by title. The big site overhaul will change it but until then we are stuck (save for mlsmithca's suggestion).

^ and ^^ That suggestion is exactly what I had in mind. Isn't that the standard for this kind of situation?

Um, it worked for me.

^^ Are you maybe typing the formatting wrong? I don't think the Cutlist requires the curly braces markup for single words, but I'm not positive.

That'd do it.

On a related note, there was a link to that page from WMG.Music. I've removed it. In the future you should clean up wicks before cutlisting a page. I mean, it's only the one, but still, cleaning the wicks beforehand is good prep work.

Image issue, not formatting.

I see. I'll have a go at fixing it when I get home this evening, if no one else deigns to do it before then.

...those are both the same thing. Cartoon Crossover is a redirect.

^ ...wtf is the point of Cartoon Crossover? [flippant]Should every trope have redirects for medium-specific versions of it? Should we have Anime Big Bad? The Literature Reveal? Film Plot? The Only Series Regular Allowed To Defeat You?[/flippant]

Jesus.

Edit: it has only one wick. Looks like somebody created that redirect just so they could wick to it from a single page. My hands are literally itching to cut it. Somebody please tell me that's okay to do.

No inbounds. Change the wick and cut it.

Done. Good to scratch that itch. <_<

FWIW, I seem to recall that "Cartoon Crossover" used to be a distinct trope that was merged into Crossover a while back. (Just explaining how the redirect came to exist — I agree it's not a useful thing to keep.)

^ I don't dispute that, but it does make me wonder why it had one wick. If it was just merged and kept as a redirect, no one would have bothered to clean the wicks, so there would have been more; and if it was merged and someone did clean all the wicks, why was that one left?

I mean, maybe it was added later. I dunno, maybe I'm overthinking it.

If you're talking about the one on The Harlem Globetrotters, I actually thought it was still a valid redirect, going by the initial response to this ATT thread. Sorry about the confusion. XP

Ohhhhh. Lmao, I didn't even look at the history or I should have noticed. Well, no harm done. :p

Get thee to the Fixing Zero-Context Examples thread!

Also if by all-white you mean totally spoilered, just nuke that nonsense. IMO anyway. If the entire page needs to be spoilered out, just add a spoiler warning and make it Spoilers Off.

Considering the nature of the Scooby-Doo plot formula, I'd do a complete spoiler strip-out and warn for spoilers. Most of those characters have some major plot twist to them that will spoil the movie if discussed. There is absolutely no excuse for that Zombie Island mess.

That is true. I was just running on autopilot and didn't even consider that Scooby Doo is a mystery-based franchise. No reason for spoiler-tagging on its character sheets, any reader should know those pages are going to be full of spoilers. Even more reason to make them Spoilers Off.

Would've been great to know about that feature ^^ before I just went and did the whole thing by hand... ah well, something to store for the future.

Oh shite. I didn't know we had a spoiler-nuking machine or I would have mentioned it. Sorry about that. <_<

It was linked in ATT a while ago and I bookmarked it precisely for situations like this. By the time I looked back at the page you'd already stripped out the spoilers- sorry about that.

People are spoiler-tagging Scooby Doo pages? Scooby Doo? Good Lord. There should be a rule or something—if the target audience is less than eight years old, you probably don't need to be spoilering things.

Scooby's also what, thirty years old? And I wouldn't call the "13 Ghosts" series as one for little kids.

Thing is, anything with a Big Reveal Per Episode is going to have spoilers galore all over the place, which pretty much hollers for a Spoilers Off and a warning of there be spoilers.

^ This.

I'm not a fan of using age to justify Spoilers Off, unless it's so old it's in the public domain, but I agree with the rest of this post.

Sorry, I referred to the age as an indication of that not all the fans were kids, not as a reason for no spoiler formatting. :)

No no, I should have used a less ambiguous word. My bad. I meant I'm not a fan of using the age of a work. i.e., it shouldn't matter if a work just came out last year or if it came out thirty years ago. Now, a 400-year-old play is one thing—Spoilers Off, all the way. But for anything that's not in the public domain yet, unless It Really, Truly, Unequivocally Was His Sled, there are more important concerns than the work's age to determine whether it should be Spoilers Off.

I'd say target age for a work is also an incredibly poor reason to declare something Spoilers Off. Just because something is aimed at children doesn't mean that there aren't people reading the wiki who would like to enjoy the work and not be spoiled.

There is only one way to deal with these interminable arguments about spoilers on and off or how much to spoil. Kill the spoiler code. It has no place on a general site anyway, once we moved away from being a small group of fandoms dealing in the obscure minutiae of storytelling which involved technical information that people might not expect, then yes it had a place. Nowadays, everyone knows what tropes are, and that tvtropes deals in the twists and turns of fiction. No one who comes here and gets spoiled can reasonably claim they didn't know what they were walking into, tvtropes is mainstream. It is time to tell the Spoiler Code, You Have Outlived Your Usefulness!

As for Scooby-Doo in specific, yeah, it is never going to need spoilers. It is probably about as famous and ubiquitous as you can get.

And now I'll be quiet on the matter.

I tend to agree. If nothing else, spoiler blanking is applied so inconsistently that you both constantly run the risk of finding unblanked spoilers, and risk reading blanked-out spoilers when trying to decipher innocuous-looking swiss-cheese entries. I've turned spoiler blanking off by default since I've found that it hurts me more than it helps. But YMMV...

^^ Um. Well. My problem with that is that there is a lot of discussion of works on this site that is not confined to the work page. I don't want to be reading the trope page for an apparently-harmless and unrelated trope and suddenly have the ending of something I was planning on watching spoiled for me.

tl;dr That's a massively blanket solution that I feel is way too broad and extreme for the "problem" it's meant to address.

This is a decision that will not be made in Ask The Tropers or in an obscure forum topic. Clearly it's dear to the hearts of many wiki users, who appear on both sides of the issue. The moderator team is talking privately about whether a vote is warranted.

Spoilers are fine if used in moderation, you just need to apply logic as to where they're going. On a Scooby-Doo character page, it makes sense to warn for spoilers and leave them off, because of self-fulfilling spoilers and all that jazz. On the main page there's no reason not to spoiler tag the big reveal, because it's easy to do. Joe Troper doesn't deserve to have the crook's identity spoiled for him just because he happened to read the page before he decided to watch the movie. TV Tropes is a site for people interested in media and storytelling. Not people who want the sparknotes of every work known to exist.

Ninja's by Fighteer while I was thinking long and hard on this issue. Whoops.

^ Yah.

Looking forward to seeing a mod decision, if any is reached.

What could help is a set of clear guidelines for when to blank out spoilers and when not to. The problem as I see it is not the spoiler blanking itself, but that it's so inconsistently applied. Sometimes you even see one example on a work page where some fact is blanked out, and another where exactly the same fact is there in plain sight.

We had a detailed set of guidelines in Handling Spoilers, but Eddie vetoed them in favor of a simpler policy. I can't necessarily say that it's been an improvement, but the old rules were definitely way too bulky. It still leaves the definition of "what constitutes a spoiler" up to the individual troper, which is part of our problem.

Some people don't mind knowing everything up to the very climax, and some people get freaked out if they see so much as a trailer.

Here's my thoughts on the spoiler debate: Don't like them, turn them off. Keeping spoilers costs that side nothing. But for people who do care about spoilers, having the feature removed would make the site much less enjoyable.

As some other people have said, we already have an option to show all spoilers by default. If you don't like spoiler tags, use that option. What little there is to be gained from forcing all users to browse in spoilers-off mode is far overshadowed by the downsides.

I did see something in the Edit-banned suspended thread I think should be an actual guideline: If something occurs less than halfway through a work, than it usually is not a spoiler. (Unless it's something like the Deverry series, but that is a highly unique case.)

Now, the definition of what constitutes "halfway through" will likely need a discussion and vote. Is it one issue, is it an arc, is it the trilogy? How should it be adapted for different methods of storytelling? That kind of thing.

I run permanently spoilers showing because I normally don't care. I do appreciate that others (like my son) really do not want to be spoiled about endings and whatnot.

As for the trailer business -that can be a case of Trailers Always Spoil, or someone being oversensitive. Either way, it's not worth getting worked up over.

I saw one case when editing the page for Hill Street Blues: one example blanks out the Reveal of the first episode (of more than a hundred), a fact that's well known in the rest of the series and also mentioned without spoiler tagging in other examples.

I left it in then because I was unsure about what to do, but now it sounds like it should be OK to unspoiler it. Would that be OK?

Edit: Going ahead and making the edit. It's easy to undo should it turn out that I was in the wrong.

Yeah, remove that. Ridiculous.

Can I ask a specific example about a book series? In Rivers of London there is a character who is a Walking Spoiler due to to events of book one, we're now on book five of the series, do we still have to keep spoilering the thing that happens in book one? The character is a major part of the series and the thing that happened is pretty much the major driver of a lot of the motivations of the other characters. It is getting difficult to talk about any event in the subsequent books without mentioning what happened to that character in book one.

Sounds like a case of Late-Arrival Spoiler. Just go ahead and un-flag that stuff.

Personally, I feel like a spoiler is finite, as in it should apply only to the season/book/movie that it appears in. Like if you're talking about season 2, anything that happened in season 1 is fair game. (on that work's page of course, elsewhere is different). Same goes with books and movies and anything else that has discrete "partitions". So on the work pages that are sectioned off into folders or pages per season/book/movie etc then anything happened in previous sections should be fair game.

^ I'm tentatively in favor of that.

Dude, Not Funny! is In-Universe Examples Only, meaning that the only valid examples here would be if he, in his work, took offense at something meant to be funny, or if, in his work (i.e., not in comments or announcements, etc.), he Discussed the concept, or Lampshaded his subscribers taking offense, etc.

His subscribers or the public reacting this way in Real Life are not examples, so I say nuke them all. Nicely avoids the original dilemma while still answering the question.

Alright, that pretty much takes care of that, then. Removed Dude, Not Funny!, and consolidated Crosses the Line Twice. Here's the cleaned-up Sandbox: Sandbox.The Amazing Atheist

... is it? The page itself is, but from what I can gather it seems like it goes onto the YMMV page just fine (the banner just says don't put it on the trope list, same as any YMMV item).

If it's really "In-Universe Examples Only" site-wide, it shouldn't have a YMMV banner at all.

Well, it has an In-Universe Examples Only banner on it, and it's indexed under In-Universe Examples Only.

It needs a better note. Right now, the header for the examples section is the note. How many people actually look closely at the header for the examples section?

EDIT: Also, good point brought up: if it's in-universe, then it's not YMMV.

It also needs a better description if that's the case, since as written it's entirely about the audience reaction and the common causes of that reaction. Alternately, you could just strike the in-universe only condition for listing it on other pages.

If Dude, Not Funny! is meant for "In-Universe Example Only", then we have a whole lotta YMMV pages to sort through. Like, easily over a hundred wicks.

Might need an extra digit on the end of that estimate.

Perhaps they meant for the trope page to hold In-Universe examples only (the invoked plays). The rest of examples then, actually appropriately YMMV, to be kept on works subpages. On the other hand, could it work with Complaining About Shows You Don't Like in mind, I'm not sure.

Dude, Not Funny! was voted years ago to be made IUEO. But as in many cases, nobody was willing to to the wickwork.

Well, about the sandbox, what should I do with it now? Will a mod take care of it, or should I take it to the Edit Locked Pages thread?

^^ Why not ask nombretomado?

(this is some good timing considering I don't regularly frequent ATT) - I can make an attempt of it, as a born sucker for long-term projects.

Note to self: PM nombretomado once the Genre Savvy fiasco goes into cleanup mode.

^ *snicker*

Honestly, I'm not seeing what the difference is between those two tropes anyway. Just look at the laconics.

As near as I can tell, they're both the same trope with different wording, with the only difference being that Butterfly of Doom outright says it involves Time Travel, while For Want of a Nail merely very strongly implies it.

Butterfly of Doom involves more than such a simple change - said change has to have "horrifying consequences" and has to involve time travel (both of which aren't required for For Want of a Nail).

The Butterfly of Doom probably comes from a story (that I don't know the name of) where hunters are taken back in time to hunt dinosaurs that would have died at that time and place anyway. They have a levitating path the travellers must stay on.

One guy doesn't. He puts one foot off the path.

When they get back, everything is different, the most immediately obvious being the signs are an entirely different language. There are many societal, cultural, and other drastic changes.

The guy looks at the bottom of his shoe -and there is a single butterfly.

Flip the redirect, yes. The misspelled one can be cut, as well.

Butterfly of Doom sounds like a subtrope of For Want of a Nail, then, that both explicitly involves time travel and horriffic effects.

I suppose For Want of a Nail can apply to situations without time travel, for example parallel timelines (no time travel, just observing that "in this alternate universe, where X never happened, everything runs on steam rather than gas or electricity").

"The Butterfly of Doom probably comes from a story (that I don't know the name of) where hunters are taken back in time to hunt dinosaurs that would have died at that time and place anyway."

A Sound of Thunder.

^^ It can apply Time Travel when stuff turns out for the better. (an example would be at the end of Back to the Future where the protagonist's unintentional meddling of the past actually made his family better).

That is still Butterfly of Doom being a more specific version than For Want of a Nail.

You're sure? If I remember correctly, Butterfly of Doom is about when things go wrong, not when things go right.

A supertrope is like a rectangle, and a subtrope is like a square: The rectangle covers the same area as the square, plus more. The square is a more specific form of the rectangle. Butterfly of Doom is more specific than For Want of a Nail, then.

~Gnome Titan said that "things change" is more general, and "things change for the worse by time travel" is more specific.

As I understand it, these are the key sentences from the trope descriptions:

• For Want of a Nail: "One small change has a ripple effect, resulting in massive changes."
• Butterfly of Doom: "Any and every change made in the past will always have an unintended and horrible side effect."

Butterfly of Doom is not necessarily a subtrope of For Want of a Nail, because the change doesn't have to be a small one.

I think it's implied by the "butterfly" in the name that "any and every change" means small changes. And now I'm perhaps thinking as a mathematician, but the description of "For Want of a Nail" doesn't exclude large changes to the past - they are just less interesting from a narrative point of view. What I mean is that just because the trope description of For Want of a Nail talks about a small change, the trope can still apply if there change is a large one - it will only make less of an impact on the audience ("Of course blowing up the moon i 2000 B.C. will change our timeline, what did you expect?")

I remember doing some work on the definition of Butterfly of Doom. It's more of a narrative intent trope than it is a plot trope. The idea behind it is that any time you try to change anything in the past, it will make things horribly worse in the future, for no more apparent reason than that time likes to fuck with people.

Save a girl from being run over by a car? She becomes a drug addict. Fix a squeaky floorboard? Your parents don't hear the burglar in their house and get murdered. Put in a bet on a sports event whose outcome you know to help out a charity? It gets taken over by a madman. Save that butterfly from being eaten by a bird? It flaps its wings and starts an ice age.

It's a form of Diabolus Ex Machina that guarantees that nothing you change in the past will ever turn out well; indeed, will have the worst imaginable outcome, as if the universe is out to punish time travelers.

And the very threat of this happening is often used to explain why a civilization with time-travel technology doesn't use it to change the past: it's forbidden, because any attempt to do so would lead to catastrophic changes in the present.

The idea is interesting, but if we're trying for Self-Demonstrating, then let's do actual Self-Demonstrating. That's not a Lucky Charms Title, that's just a regular title with symbols next to it. The Lucky Charms Title trope requires the symbols be a part of the title, not just next to it.

How about something like...

£ucky ¢harms ʈitle

But that might be more annoying than anything else. Maybe something more subtle, like just...

£ucky Charms Title

...again, if this is acceptable.

^ I like the first one better than the second, I don't think it's annoying at all

Reminds of Leet Lingo too strong for my taste. So I'd consider a tamer thing like a star or heartmark plopped in the middle. After which consider what is the need for that. Self Demonstration? Not a source of good experience that thing was so far, no, sir.

Experience has shown that making article titles self-demonstrating out of a sense of whimsy rarely has good results. I would deny that custom title request because it serves no purpose.

It looks like the distinction, from the descriptions, is supposed to be that No Big Deal covers situations in which there are very frequent Unusually Uninteresting Sights but the populace still passes it off as no big deal, whereas UUS is an isolated incident.

I'd think from the name it's "someone tries to brush a major event off as not that big" but as written... yeah.

The stubbly description is cause for concern as well, despite being pretty old.

^ I'm not convinced that was the intent, since the description doesn't say anything about a character's actions or dialogue, it just seems to be describing a situation as with Unusually Uninteresting Sight.

^^ Even if this were the case, I don't see how "Trope about a situation where X happens" versus "Trope about a situation where X happens frequently" justifies having a separate trope, especially when the offshoot is so unhealthy. It just seems like a poorly-done The Same but More.

^^^ How's that different from Weirdness Censor?

^ No clue, I'm just reading the trope as written here. I'm not saying it's a good trope; just that that's what I got out of the description.

I believe Weirdness Censor is more "We see it, but we Double Think ourselves out of actually seeing it/acknowledging it. That was not Godzilla, that was a mass hallucination."

Unusually Uninteresting Sight is more "I see it, I'm just not impressed/intimidated/surprised. So what? Godzilla's not that big of a deal." They understand what it is, it just doesn't faze them.

That's why I didn't initially mention WC—No Big Deal seems more along the lines of UUS.

Put that in the YKTTW Crash Rescue.

Why don't we have a process in place to prevent tropes from being rolled out without going through YKTTW first?

Because YKTTW ISN'T compulsory. Not yet, anyway.

@eroock: How exactly would that work? I mean, I guess the mods could put a code in place that requires a page to be "launched" to be created, but that would be obscenely obnoxious, ESPECIALLY for Works pages, which are supposed to be a free launch and which come with YMMV and Trivia pages, not to mention the possibility of Fridge pages, Heartwarming and Tearjerker pages, Character sheets... imagine having to go through the entire vetting process for each and every page you wanted to create. What a nightmare!

The best answer is to just do what we do: watch the recent launches, and when something like this appears take action.

No I don't mean coding compulsory, I mean it isn't wiki policy for a user to run a trope through YKTTW before making one.

Ah.

Also, I feel like Too Lucky To Die is probably unnecessary anyway. Seems like it's already covered by Born Lucky and other tropes.

EDIT: The Trope was put up by cutekittenlady, if anyone's curious.

^^^ Sorry, I was specifically talking about trope pages under Main. In order to prevent half-baked trope ideas to go live without peer review, the launch should only be possible via hatting process at YKKTW. Other namespaces are not of my concern.

That gives us a problem when trying to create indices.

What kind of indices would need realization on-the-fly?

@The One Who Tropes: Yes it is. That's on Welcome to TV Tropes.

^ Huh. I've never seen that before. Good to know it's stated somewhere on this site.

These comments do to some degree contribute to the discussion.

I've always wondered if Headscratchers is better off as a discussion forum or as a Q&A venue. It should probably go to Wiki Talk - if we want to use it as the latter, some comments ought to be refractored to make it a more Q&A-like.

Concerning the current state of the pages, though, is there a point at which the argument->counter argument->counter-counter argument chains should be consolidated, or should they be left alone as long as they continue to bring up valid discussion points? (Not trying to argue, I'm just genuinely unclear here. I don't visit Headscratchers pages very often.)

They are functionally indistinguishable from forum threads as they are currently used. I think that our future site revamp will reformat Headscratchers, WMG, and similar articles as threaded discussions similar in concept to the current Discussion pages.

Sure, if those have not actually happened in fiction, kill them.

On it.

• Way of the Dragon: Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris. Bruce wins in the movie. Norris, like Li above, says that Lee would have destroyed him had they fought for real.

Stuff like that, where it's two popular actors cast in enemy roles. I'm on the fence whether that's legit?

Switch the names from actors to characters, and remove the reference to a different example. Then it should be fine. Casting two popular combat actors was likely intended to draw in the "showdown" crowd.

Well, except that doesn't count. Chuck Norris wasn't a big name then.

But, say, The Forbidden Kingdom would count, as it's basically a movie pitched as "Jackie Chan vs. Jet Li."

EDIT: Ninja'd. Well, if it doesn't count due to something outside the Showdown-ness, then ignore my post. Otherwise I'm just addressing the wording of it.

I feel like it should still at least name the actors upfront, though. Otherwise, a martial arts ignorant rube like me would have no idea who those characters are.

Something like:

• Way of the Dragon features a meta example; Alex, played by Bruce Lee, faces off against Bob, played by Chuck Norris. Alex wins. Norris says that Lee would have destroyed him had they fought for real.

Just changing the actors' names in the first sentence would make it confusing:

• Way of the Dragon: Alex vs. Bob. Alex wins in the movie. Chuck Norris says that Bruce Lee would have destroyed him had they fought for real.

The first is exactly what I had meant, although I think the Humble Hero pothole is unneeded.

Okay, on the topic of Way of the Dragon, though, I feel like I need to say something.

It wouldn't have counted at the time, since Chuck Norris wasn't a big name then, he was just one of Lee's students. HOWEVER, since Chuck Norris' career took off the company that owns the movie has since played up that aspect as if the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny was intended from the start, clearly in an attempt to get that crowd to come watch. Norris is given top billing despite not having a major role, and descriptions of the movie play up the fact that "this is the one where Bruce Lee fights Chuck Norris!!!"

So I'd say it counts through Retcon.

Not really a Retcon, since the "Con" half of that trope is continuity, and the continuity of the film hasn't changed. It just has retroactive relevance.

^^ Fair enough, it's more a Real Life instance anyway. I just threw it in for some flavor.

No one ever complained about the "con" in Parody Retcon. :p

That affects the continuity, though.

Technically, so does this. The continuity of reality (yes, there is such a thing) and the continuity of the work. Just as viewing the movie as a parody will cause you to experience the work differently, being told that a certain actor has greater significance than he does will cause you to experience it differently, usually along the lines of Only Here For Godzilla.

I don't think the continuity of reality is relevant here. By the definition of a Retcon, it's impossible for reality to be Retconned. The movies don't retroactively get perceived differently. If a director states in 1990 that his 1980 film was meant to be funny, that doesn't mean that 1985 audiences were retroactively already watching it as a comedy.

The movies get perceived differently when the Parody Retcon is stated, or when the no-name gets famous. In-Universe, a parodyRetcon is "retroactively" made to be a parody, but that doesn't change the fact that, in the real world, the movie wasn't meant to be funny until the creator stated that it was.

Anyway, does Retcon actually need to be mentioned here? A Retcon is a deliberate change to previous continuity by a creator. A no-name getting famous and thus making his earliest movies more popular than they were at the time of their release is not a Retcon, it's just a no-name getting famous and thus making his earliest movies more popular than they were at the time of their release.

Which is just covered by Retroactive Recognition; the work itself isn't changed by Chuck's later fame.

^ There, that covers it. It's an Ultimate Showdown via Retroactive Recognition.

Ah, yeah, that works.

... I cannot believe Retroactive Recognition wasn't on the YMMV page. Adding it.

re Chuck Norris on the cover of Way of the Dragon I think that you're looking for Billing Displacement.

I personally think that's not enough to warrant its own page, as it's only 6 examples that could be trimmed after fixing what looks like improper Example Indentation/Natter/Main page convo. Then again I don't know what the minimum example requirement is for splitting off a subpage dedicated to one trope.

(note to self: stop being a compulsive editor)

I know it's YMMV, but with six entries I'd probably give it a pretty critical eye. Six characters for a single movie? Looks like jabberwocky1996 is Complaining About The Movie Not Using Every Minor Character The Way I Think They Should Have Been Used. Several of those examples are misuse, besides.

I'd be very skeptical of this, especially for that film because of its general reception.

I agree, that looks extremely sketchy to me. I'd say just chop that

Go directly to the URL, in this case:

...and...

That should take you to a page saying something like "this page doesn't exist, did you mean..." with a bunch of options for the other pages for that anime.

At that point, click "Edit Page", do your edits, and hit Save.

Also, Getting Crap Past the Radar is a widely misused trope. I'd be careful about adding anything of it, especially a subpage.

Is it misused because people list instances of "crap" where there was no radar to get past?

That and instances of "crap" that are only "naughty" by the extremest stretch of the imagination.

I was wondering that too when I saw that thing that's supposed to be an edit reason.

Pretty sure that's not something that would get one in trouble, but a PM would probably be in order with an explanation and a link to Edit Reasons and Why You Should Use Them.

On an unrelated note, I need to use Edit Reasons more often when I'm purging pages of misused tropes and bad example indentation.

It's a flag to me to check the edit. Sometimes the edit's okay, sometimes a long edit reason is an early warning sign there will be Issues. Checking the edit can't hurt and might head something off before it heats up.

I sent a PM and figured out that the "edit reason" is 742 words.

The edit reason does do a very good job of explaining what the example is and how it's an example. ...the thing is, it's supposed to be up to the example itself to explain how it fits as an example.

Yes - there's absolutely no point in explaining the example in the edit reason, because almost nobody will be reading it...

Shouldn't an example be more concise than those hundreds of words?

^ That too. Clear, Concise, Witty - in that order. That edit reason violates all three.

I hate to say it, but "finding a citation to provide is difficult" doesn't mean you can add an example without a citation. It means, sorry, that example should not be added.

Okay, thanks.

From what I can remember from different sources, both factors played a part - humans did hunt some animals to extinction, and others couldn't handle the climate change. I think the jury is still out in most of those cases.

But it sounds like we may have a case of soapboxing here. Useful Notes shouldn't be the place to promulgate "Inconvenient Truths". Just the choice of headline smacks of conspiracy theories...

^ Good points. Should I remove it, or wait for more opinions about this?

Remove that. We aren't a soapbox, and besides, "truth" (along with "the X don't want tyou to know") is an indicator that the statement of question is of dubious accuracy.

^ Done.

Just to quote a single sentence from the now-deleted material: "Their [the megafauna's] disappearance is among the most hotly contested topics, but if you examine the evidence,it becomes clear humans were responsible (...)"

The very fact that it's a hotly contested topic should ring a warning bell when somebody claims to have the Truth, and that the issue really is "clear".

It is also very obvious soapboxing when the text starts: "Before your read the individual folders, the following should be carefully noted." Apparently, the troper's views on extinction are so important that they take precedence to any other fact about the animals in question...

BTW, didn't the troper who wrote this Wall of Text just come off a suspension?

I feel sorry for people who try to break down complex factors into simple cause-and-effect. It denotes either a lack of education or willful tunnel vision. :(

Jean Auel (whatever you think of her Mary Sue-ish main characters and very precise descriptions of everything) did extensive research on the animals of the Ice Age, their environment, and how the conditions nudged species towards certain adaptations to cope and thrive, and how those adaptations worked as the climate changed. Reading up on further material is a very interesting exercise and brings up the sheer complexity of the world in any era.

I have to say, as the trooper that wrote the above piece, that this (what I wrote) was based on actual studies.

Let me hasten to add that I don't doubt that. But as you yourself wrote, the issue is still contested, so why the need to label it as "Inconvenient Truth"? And why the need to urge readers to read this before they read any of the other folders?

To me, it seems as if you have some sort of conservationist agenda. Nothing wrong with that (I'm all for conservation and if we can learn from historic extinctions not to repeat that it's good), but I feel that this is not the place for soapboxing, but just for pointing out the facts and letting people draw their own conclusions. Unless I'm mistaken, the purpose of Useful Notes is to provide factual background for troping, not to try to influence people, or to preach about the Truth as you perceive it.

Note: this is just my opinion as a private troper. I can't speak for the mods.

Well in fairness, I'm pretty sure that's just a joke about An Inconvenient Truth and don't read too much into that.

That said, as your edit mentioned, this is contested and hardly entirely agreed upon. It's certainly not cut-and-dry, and definitely not obvious enough to merit being the opening to the page. In fact, it's utterly irrelevant. As a Useful Notes page, it's about the portrayal of these creatures in fiction. Arguments on what killed them isn't really pertinent.

Yes, that title was a pun.

But this is no longer so contested, and most works normally have people as the major cause nowadays, due to the fact climate change seems to have played little impact.

And yes this is relevant, because that page was about these creatures in general, not their depiction in media.

If you look for the articles and works done for research and information, they're still divided as to the cause of the extinctions, and many cite multiple factors as potential causes. If you go with sites and publications that are by or can be traced to those with an agenda, there is a much higher percentage claiming humans alone are responsible.

Now, the Native Americans did chase whole bison herds over cliffs and chop down ridiculous amounts of trees, among other not-so-eco-friendly things. But saying they or any other subset of humanity were alone responsible for the extinctions of the Ice Age animals is very much still up to debate.

It's a complex subject that would likely require a time-viewing device and decades of study to truly unravel.

Apologies, double post.

TV Tropes probably isn't an appropriate forum for contentious discussions of mass extinctions from thousands of years ago. Agree with the cut.

All the multiple factors were caused by humans. I'm not just talking about hunting.

I don't disagree with the cut BTW.

It might also be worth noting that the removed content was very messily-written with grammar and punctuation errors throughout. But in any case, I agree with the cut for the reasons others have stated above.

I'd count that as a reference to a future plotline. Considering the Last Great Time War wasn't even a foreshadowed twinkle in a writer's eye at that point, there's no reason for a mention of it yet.

Good enough for me. Just wanted a second opinion.

If anyone disagrees, feel free to dig it out of the page history.

Saying, "This will become important later," is not a spoiler. Saying exactly how it will be important later is a spoiler. It's entirely fine to list foreshadowing as long as you leave the payoff unstated.

Considering you can't "accidentally" foreshadow something, it does have to go.

^^ I can see that as a general statement, but in this case, the majority of these examples I cut were along the lines of "Davros dies at the end, but he comes back later," or "The Doctor blows up a bunch of Daleks, which causes the Time War that drives the events of the entire revived 2005 series." Those are pretty big references to future events.

I left the non-harmful references, though, such as The X of Y example stating that all the Dalek serials for the rest of Classic Who use the same title pattern, or the Nuclear Weapons Taboo example pointing out the odd fact that all earlier and later Skaro serials state that nuclear war mutated the Daleks and devastated the planet, while this serial refers to the weapons simply as "chemicals".

Neither of those are spoilers in any way, nor are they even references to future plot points—except insofar as the former reveals that there are future Dalek serials, and the latter revealing that somebody, somewhere, at some point, talks about Skaro.

But stating that Davros comes back, or that this serial leads to the driving forces behind much of the revived series, is big even by generous standards. (To clarify, Davros is pretty unambiguously slaughtered, and there's no indication that this serial is going to lead to a war that almost destroys the universe—neither is indicated or foreshadowed at all.)

I agree, don't list those.

Also seems to have a knack for creating walls of text.

EDIT: Courtesy link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/el.php?findfor=merlinxchick

They are a ban evading sockpuppet and were rebanned months ago.

As a sidenote, should the Big Brother character pages be renamed to avoid having the US series take precedence over the UK series naming-wise? In other words, Characters.Big Brother US 1, Characters.Big Brother UK 1, Characters.Big Brother Canada 1, et cetera.

I am going to suggest, somewhat radically, that the Big Brother character pages (and, indeed, characterization tropes in general) be savagely curtailed or even removed entirely, under the grounds that reality shows are, at least technically, about real people.

I think most media-savvy people know that reality shows of that nature are about "real people" to the same extent most movies that are "based on a true story" are about real people. They may be real people but they're still real people playing a character.

The character, in this case, is how they are edited and presented to the audience by the show's producers. Whether participants in reality shows are "acting" is debatable. The point is that we are troping the pretense that is given to us by the show, and that is a very flimsy basis for many of the tropes that I've seen used.

Also, the audience tends to regard that pretense as reality. If one participant, Bob, is really a good guy, but the producers present him as a villain, people will perceive that as the real Bob. So troping him with a villain trope woul be a bad thing to do...

If anything, pro wrestling proved that audiences, even after kayfabe was "official", have a hard time separating the performer from their character.

Imma oppose here. Acting is not Real Life.

But reality show participants aren't usually acting or following a script - or at least the conceit is that they aren't. They put on a persona on the show, which may not be their normal personality, and they are edited and presented in a certain way , but the point is that the way they are perceived by the audience tends to stick to their real persons, not to a fictitions character.

So troping a reality show is, I think, troping real people.

Still. A Reality Show is a work. The format and presentation matter.

Some reality shows cast real people, but have them play a specific part that may or may not be compatible with their normal personality.

...and you could always argue that when people sign up for a reality show, they agree to become public, semi-fictional characters and rescind their right to be treated as real people. I'm only partly joking here.

I tend to agree with Gnome Titan. Reality show participants have said repeatedly, starting from way back when Survivor and The Amazing Race were still new, that what you see on the show may have little to no resemblance to the real person. I see no reason that we shouldn't trope the characters as the producers and editors create them.

You are cleared for Exterminatus.

Yeah, kill those. Troper Tales in disguise.

No.

In fact, we have an ongoing TRS project of nuking every single mention of it.

"No examples" means "no examples." I'm not sure why you think YMMV is exempt from that.

Hey, wrm5, mind toning down the snark? Pat was just confirming, because I know we've had a murky line between no examples at all and YMMV-on-a-situational-basis tropes.

What can I say? Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.

If I upset anyone, then I apologize. My goal was not to offend, only to make it clear that "no" means "no." I've found if you're gentle about it people tend to think "no" means "yes, but push harder first."

I made the OP, and the point of this trope is that Rule of Symbolism and/or Garnishing the Story means that flowers (but not real flowers usually) are on clothes a lot as a form of Costume Porn.

Now that might not be enough to make this a trope, but I just wanted to clarify what I'm going for with this ykttw.

I did not make this post so that the discussion could branch off into ATT. That is exactly the opposite of what needs to happen. This is just a "please help us out" note, not an invitation to start arguing here too.

I stated the base definition of the trope here. That's not an argument. That was just me giving further context.

Look, it's not necessary. If a mod picks this up they will go to the YKTTW. There is absolutely no need for any posting on this thread whatsoever. If you want to clarify the definition of the trope, go clarify it on the YKTTW.

Hey, you put your opinion of this in the OP of this thread. I am entitled to at least post the definition.

Fine. Edited. Now stop.

Is it okay to note that the ykttw is getting overhauled right now? It may still need a call eventually, but it's no longer in the disputed form.

True. I guess I can retract my request since the issue being debated is no longer relevant at the moment.

I.honestly still think that we can at least have a mod's say about all of this.

Wouldn't argue with that, actually. It's not a pressing need, but it would be nice.

Sounds pretty objective to me.

Agreed with Dark.

The way I see it, the trope has two aspects to it: Mascot. And Villain.

Villainy is objective.

Being a mascot is objective.

Not YMMV.

Alright, guess it's back tot he crosswicks then

It should probably be NRLEP, though, being a Villain trope and all. Might want to run it through the Real Life Cleanup thread now, before people start shoehorning in RL examples.

How would a real life example of Mascot Villain even work? Considering that real life people are not generally considered "mascots"...

Trust me, if it's not made NRLEP, someone, somewhere, someday, will shoehorn something in.

They'll probably try anyway, under an "Other" or "General" folder, but at least a NRLEP will allow for those to be nuked on sight.

And drop by the Real Life Examples Maintenance thread, that handles the maintenance and NRLEP'ing of RL sections. A dozen pages will show just how badly people can shoehorn in items, even in tropes that do permit RL examples.

I'll add the page to the NRLEP index and add that to the description.

EDIT: NRLEP index is locked, can a mod put the trope on the Index (or making a blanket statement that anything in the Villains index is NRLEP by default)?

You want the Edit Locked pages request thread.

Okay I chimed in there. Now I just have to wait for a response and check that thread or the page later.

It's doesn't even sound like Genre Savvy because there's no knowing of stories.

Well, they're aware of the medium, but they're using it very wrong. I agree it isn't very savvy, but I don't know what else to call it.

Well, it's not Wrong Genre Savvy, but it does seem to be a trope where being Genre Savvy leaves the hero at a disadvantage because the villain goes "Not doing that" and plays by his own rules.

I don't know how the character is aware of the medium but unless he's read book in that genre or seen movies in that genre he isn't savvy about that genre.

Yes, that is the best way to describe it. Although, I am not sure if there is a trope that really fits into that description outside Death by Genre Savviness, but as mentioned above there's nothing savvy about it.

lexicon, from what I know of the Genre Savvy tropes, it isn't so much about the character knowing about stuff because they read the book or watch a movie. It's an awareness of the world they live in and how the rules work. A good example would be Kim Possible where both heroes and villains are fully aware what tropes they are suppose to play and how to take advantage of them, but they don't cite knowing from movies or books, but from experience or 'this is just how things are suppose to be' mentality.

Please read Genre Savvy; it has been misused greatly for examples like Kim Possible.

Read. What the trope specially says, 'A Genre Savvy character doesn't necessarily know they're in a story, but they do know of stories like their own and what worked in them and what didn't.'

It doesn't specially say they have to know what will happen because they read or watch stories like their situation, but they heard or experience what usually happens. Taking Kim Possible again, Kim knows all the cliche of her genre because the villains themselves keep using them for various reasons and the villains know their genre because they know the heroes act a particular way. This does sounds like a type of medium awareness.

For the question, the character know the cliches of their genre because their parents experience them and they heard the stories. So, they expect certain things to happen, while the villain isn't doing what every villain up to that point did.

The first part of the trope definition reads like the character must have their knowledge from stories. But then, it says that there are two kinds of genre savvy, and continues:

"The other kind comes from being a character in some sort of serial fiction, and having a good memory. For example, many modern comic book superhero characters exhibit a lot of savviness, simply because they can remember all the weird things that've happened to them, and thus are not surprised when yet another evil twin shows up. "

This sounds like it could apply to Kim Possible having learned from previous episodes of her own story.

To comment on my own post above (I'm not just editing it because of the risk of turning it into a wall of text):

I would have guessed that "genre savvy" meant that the character is aware of a certain genre of stories, and draws the conclusion that since their own life is like such a story, the genre conventions should apply.

The "other kind" talked about in the trope definition is something different - it doesn't involve any genre-awareness, but is just learning from past experiences.

Of course, the effect is more or less the same, and Tropes Are Flexible and so on...

I do see where you're coming from. It may seem like medium awareness to the audience, but it could be just common sense to them, given the rules of their universe.

I do wonder if there is any trope that fit what I written above.

Genre Savvy is different from Functional Genre Savvy. "The other kind comes from being..." shouldn't be on the description. If the character being savvy doesn't come from being familiar with fiction it's misuse. The page quote is good since it was decided on in discussion.

From what I read on the Genre Savvy page, 'familiar with fiction' is not a requirement. Just an awareness of the medium and know stories like their own and what worked in them and what didn't, which I assume can be gain from their own experience in their world. Not just because they read a book or watch movie

Looking how big this got, we may need a mob's opinion, since what is and what isn't Genre Savvy seems to be the main issue here.

Familiar with "stories like their own" implies that the characters are aware of fiction; otherwise you'd have to postulate that zombie apocalypses and closed-circle slasher murder sprees are everyday occurrences in their world.

I do agree that is true with horror type genres, but what about something within the super hero genre in which the heroes are familiar with the cliches of their medium, but it comes from experience or they heard stories from others. Does that count as a type of Genre Savvy?

^ In keeping with that, I actually have a specific question, which I think can also apply to what Ramona is asking.

I got this from Characters.The A Team, in reference to the Team's nemesis Colonel Decker:

• Genre Savvy: Very much so, to the extent that "Never underestimate the A-Team." almost borders on being a Catchphrase for him, and his awareness of how they operate allowed him to very nearly capture them numerous times. Still, no matter how genre savvy you are, no one beats Hannibal's plans.

Essentially, he knows how his own story works. It's not that he's aware of the medium, or even that he's a fan of "do-gooder fugitive on the run" shows. Rather. he's "aware of stories like his own" in that he's aware of the A-Team's public record and has studied them thoroughly. Essentially, he knows how his show works, just as much so as if he had watched all the episodes personally.

Does that count, or does it actually HAVE to be medium-awareness?

I don't think that really counts. It is just a case of "Know Thy Enemy" - his knowledge is specific to how the A-Team works, not how stories like their typically play out.

Anyone can know his own story. In Real Life we can be savvy about our experiences. That doesn't make us "aware of genre conventions like the one they are participating in" since we're not in a genre.

Medium Awareness is more extreme than genre savvyness.

Fair enough.

But lexicon, how do you know you're not in a genre :P

So does "the other kind" modification of the trope that I described above really belong, or is this a late addition to justify shoehorning? To recap, after several paragraphs that imply genre savviness is a character applying tropes from fiction to their own life, it suddenly says that genre savviness can come from, basically, learning from experience.

Should this go to the TRS? Or is it just a case of Tropes Are Flexible?

I think it is a late addition to justify shoehorning. TRS or the Trope Description Improvement thread.

I would like to just delete it on the grounds that it is inconsistent with everything else but we can take it to the improvement drive.

We should get some consensus before deleting it, and we should probably also delete examples that fit that paragraph - if we delete it, they won't be examples anymore. If there are many shoehorned examples we might want to take it to TRS since it's not just a matter of improving the trope description.

We have consensus that Genre Savvy is about being familiar with fiction. It does have a pretty big shoehorning problem so much that it might help to start a clean-up thread for it.

In that case, I'd like to do a proper wick check to see just how common the shoehorning is, and if it is common take it to TRS as a "misuse" case (or can we go directly to a cleanup project?) I'm not sure I'll have time to do that the next few days, though, so if somebody else feels like taking action before that I won't say anything.

My personal feeling is that Genre Savvy is one of those tropes that require you actually to read the trope definition and think a little before applying it. The problem is that people are just generalizing from examples of genre savvy characters to generally savvy characters, which leads to shoehorning.

The "offending" paragraph in question is this:

---

There are two finely-distinguished varieties of genre savvy. The first comes from being familiar with fiction. A good example of this is the Scream series, where the genre savvy characters are savvy because they've watched horror movies. The other kind comes from being a character in some sort of serial fiction, and having a good memory. For example, many modern comic book superhero characters exhibit a lot of savviness, simply because they can remember all the weird things that've happened to them, and thus are not surprised when yet another evil twin shows up.

---

I see nothing wrong with the "current consensus"'s interpretation of this trope and this seemingly conflicting paragraph - the "Genre Savvy by experience" variety as described here implies that the Genre Savvy person in question has a good enough memory to simply remember how things usually go within their lives and thus, are able to predict exactly what would happen just like "being familiar with fiction" guys are able to be Genre Savvy simply because they know how things go by reading books and that.

The first paragraph said "stories", not "works of fiction". Therefore, the "offending" paragraph isn't tacked in to justify shoehorning because it offers two different interpretation on what said "stories" could be (either fictional stories or stories within their own life). Stories don't have to be made up, you know, and they don't have to refer to stories of someone other than your own.

That said, even under both interpretations I've presented, stuff like that The A-Team example are still misuse simply because it doesn't seem to fall under either of these two interpretations of these tropes. Just because that villain knows how the titular A Team operates doesn't automatically make them Genre Savvy under both interpretations I've presented. Therefore, I can honestly say there's still some misuse here.

The problem with your interpretation of the trope is that it reduces "genre savvy" to just "being able to learn from experience". There's nothing wrong with that interpretation per se, except that it makes the trope superfluous - there's nothing about "genre" in it (there is to the audience, of course, but not to the character unless they recognize their situation from fiction).

But anyway, since we have at least one dissenting voice we can't be sure that we have consensus to remove the "offending paragraph". I propose to take this discussion to TRS, and if necessary have a crowner to decide.

Tropes Are Flexible - they aren't meant to be limited to just one interpretation of the trope.

The mere fact that it makes the trope name "superfluous" means nothing due to tropes that are kept here under names that wouldn't fly today if they're named today simply due to the Grandfather Clause that's in effect for them (tropes like Underground Monkey, Springtime for Hitler, etc.). Said Grandfather Clause states that it's impossible to get rid of the trope name entirely if it has enough wicks, and Genre Savvy is one of the biggest tropes here. (The best that can be done is to make the old, problematic name a redirect, but even then, the old trope name can't be outright removed and this would only be done if the name itself is causing the misuse).

I do agree about bringing this to the Trope Repair Shop. In fact, my previous post here had me proposing we'd also bring this to the repair shop at one point when I was typing it.

I can start a TRS thread tonight (European time).

OK, I just posted to TRS. I gave my view of the matter, but tried to point out the differing opinion. Any discussion will have to wait until a mod opens the thread.

Edited: Madrugada has opened the thread now.

I'll come over and help.

As I am unfamiliar with Adventures as a whole, I unfortunately can't help. It's not a find-and-replace job because the main point of the cleanup is the Green/Blue name switch thing.

This might be better suited on the forums (mainly Writer's Block).

Okay, thanks :)

Not familiar with the site, but I suggest you change your password RIGHT NOW just to be safe. And not just here, either: anywhere you use that password and login combo, change it!

Oh god, that place again. This can't be legal. Why would anyone want to rip us off?

Because anything popular has high traffic. Anything with high traffic is worth ripping off.

At least in a social sense, we're more popular than banks. :p

Though why would they want are information?

Though only explanation I can come up with is The Illuminati. They want our information for some reason.

Actually, Satoshi, there's a very good (well, very evil) reason.

That is, most people use the same login ID and password everywhere, to make it easier to remember. That includes banks, online games, cell phone services, et cetera.

Essentially, someone links glassbooks to that chaozhide website and tricks him into entering his login info, then they take that info and go try it out on various websites. Maybe they try it out in World of Warcraft, and if it works they steal all of his items and sell them for real world money. They go try it out at a few bank websites, and if it works they drain his accounts.

So on and so forth.

So see, it's not his TV Tropes account they're after. It's the keys to his very LIFE!!!

...okay, but seriously. What I said is true, and considering glassbooks hasn't been back on here since the original posting I'm a little worried...

^ How do we nuke the site out of existence?

That's the same question people have been asking about The Pirate Bay.

The very least we can do is not give them free advertising. Sheesh.

I think it helps to be aware that it's out there and be careful that you're logging in to the right site.

^^ To be fair, I doubt that saying their name here is going to make people be like "oh, I wanna go give them my info!"

There's a reason I use different passwords all over the place, even if it means I often have to reset those I don't use that often.

I think that this counts as anti-advertising: The site is a potential phishing/scam site, and this is warning people about it.

I also P Med glassbooks to make sure they're okay.

Just thought I'd update: I got a PM from glassbooks saying that everything is fine.

Ah, but were you talking to glassbooks...or the hacker who secretly replaced them? :P

For anyone who has run across these phished copies of TV Tropes pages, I did a little investigation into the dupes and have sent off what information I developed to the TV Tropes moderation staff.

Further, I wrote a blog post here about this phishing scam (it has masqueraded as other sites like Reddit), how to spot it, and how to make sure you don't get suckered by any fake copies of TV Tropes pages, as the scam in question is a pretty good one aside from one giveaway casual users might not notice (besides the UR Ls):

http://gethn7.blogspot.com/2015/02/tv-tropes-got-phished-and-how-to-defend.html

If you have any more information on this scam, those behind it, or any further additional information that may help TV Tropes defend against it, please do not share it here, PM/Email the TV Tropes moderation ASAP.

Either in that forum or in the headscratchers page for the work in question. A reply is never guaranteed, though.

Well, we don't even have a page for the book, and I'm not about to make one; it's been several years since I read it and I no longer own a copy. I'm just trying to track down someone who remembers/knows/has the book and can remind me of something that happened in the plot. It's not a headscratcher, it's just a plot point that I can't remember.

Wow, record time for a new sock.

A page lock may be a good idea for now.

I dunno. It's just one thing, so it's an easy enough revert, and I hate seeing pages get locked because of one loony.

The idea is to have it locked for a while so they give up. It's just a deterrent. It has worked in the past, mind you, but it depends how fast a Mod shows up to ban/bounce, anyway(they have lives too, after all).

I wonder how you can hate a fictional character so much that you have to create multiple sockpuppets just to keep adding Complete Monster to their page...

This is the sock that never ends,

it just goes on and on my friends.

The mods, they started banning, knowing who she was,

and they'll go on banning, forever just because...

Don't we have a way to track them down?

Not sure if we do, Satoshi Bakura. Besides IP Address checks.

That said, we should keep the commentary to a minimum and let the Mods handle it themselves. Just supply what we can of relevant information and all.

The mods can ban their IP, but dynamic I Ps and proxies can bypass it. There's also the fun when it's a group IP, such as a library or college, so banning the IP would punish a lot of innocent people along with the perp.

LOVE the pic, Septimus. :)

I would say it's a step backward. Shout-Out is a supertrope and there is no point to list examples which fit the subtropes better there.

No Celebrities Were Harmed and Bland-Name Product don't seem to be subtropes of Shout-Out, so my opinion would change if they were relabled to be subtropes.

What they did right:

• Identifying examples of Shout-Out that were also No Celebrities Were Harmed and Bland-Name Product.
• Moving the large number of Shout-Out examples onto the subpage.

What they did wrong:

• Removing examples of No Celebrities Were Harmed and Bland-Name Product.
• Asking readers to go to a different page.
• Hiding work names in potholes.
• Making a header with the title "In general" (that encourages tropers to make "general" examples, which is against policy)

Hiding work names in potholes is strictly a don't-do-that. That alone is worth a PM, or a shoulder tap.

I'd say restore the No Celebrities Were Harmed And Bland-Name Product examples (where I'll leave to those familiar to the work), and cleaning up the other issues.

Regarding hiding work titles in potholes: While in some cases the removal of potholes may make it slightly less succinct, which I think is workable (although I have to say it made the lines involved sounded overly clinical and less human), I have issue with the few examples that related to Rocky Chuck the Mountain Rat. It is the Animated Adaptation of some of the Burgess Bedtime Stories, but the adaptation does not have a work article on its own. I'm not sure whether "Rocky Chuck the Mountain Rat, the 1973 World Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Burgess Bedtime Stories" is an approipriate language, since it sounds really long-winded.

I would also want to check whether toe potholing policy extends to creators.

Well, you could Wiki Word the Rocky Chuck title (with the proper namespace of course), and then make a redirect page sending it the Burgess page.

Has an attempt been made to discuss the matter?

I didn't send him/her a message about his/her edit, if that's what you mean.

I am not in a position to judge the objective truth of the situation, so I'm requesting corroboration.

An official list of Scream Factory releases: https://www.shoutfactory.com/tentpoles/scream-factory

Done, but unless you want an Edit War you should communicate with that troper.

:/ ...

Note that What an Idiot is not a trope. It's a YMMV item. As such, if you wanted to keep the entry as What an Idiot, it should have been moved to ymmv subpage. If the other party guessed you wished to keep this example still a character page material, branding an example back as a trope was doing you a favor.

The context provided for the example is not enough for my non-fan self to suggest what is the right thing for the described event. However, it's quite strange to see trope misuse sentiments in close proximity to simple slapping of another name in the front and leaving example that way. If that's supposed to be a What an Idiot example, my advice is to read What an Idiot more carefully, and to explicitly forbid oneself to get by on trope names alone in the future.

Except it's not doing a favor because, as he just said, it's not an example of Too Dumb to Live.

Too Dumb to Live is a Death Trope, specifically for when a character dies (or something equally horrible) as a result of their own stupidity. From the page itself:

If the character didn't die, become a zombie, etc. because of his stupidity then it does not count.

However, since you are right that What an Idiot is a YMMV item and therefore not applicable to character pages, I suggest using Idiot Ball instead.

I also suggest that in the future you refrain from such condescending remarks, especially since you're actually in the wrong here.

Whoops, didn't realize Idiot was YMMV, was just going by its mention in TDTL. My mistake.

Anyway, I'm not certain about Idiot Ball, either, as he was intentionally sabotaging the engine, it wasn't "never thought that would happen" from a person previously shown to be intelligent. That the bus crashed so dramatically is something I'd think no one would really expect.

^^^ Nitpicking, but YMMV items are, in fact, tropes. They are YMMV tropes, not objective tropes.

^^ That's exactly what Idiot Ball means: he did something really stupid. The fact that he did it on purpose is irrelevant, and being a genius prior to the incident isn't a requirement.

I'm not familiar with the work, but to be clear, Idiot Ball is not just "Character does something stupid". It's "Character does something uncharacteristically stupid in service to the plot."

If he's just a stupid character in general, he cannot, by definition, hold the Idiot Ball unless he's being spectacularly, exceptionally stupid, even by his own stupid standards, and the reason for it is that the plot requires it.

So the question is, how stupid is the character normally?

Aaaaaaand that is a question for Nohbody and whoever else is editing that page to answer. :p

The character in question has a lot of book smarts, but as made evident by this page, he's made some dumb choices. How about Ditzy Genius, since he is really smart, but he sometimes just has zero common sense?

And yeah, I changed it back to TDTL because I figured that what was listed under YMMV trope "What an Idiot" was an important part of his character, and it did nearly get him and his friends killed. But Ditzy Genius sounds a thousand times better, thanks for educating us on what TDTL really is.

I'm also pretty much completely unaware of Edit Wars and the like, so sorry for any inconveniences, folks!

^ Then Genius Ditz it is.

"Nitpicking, but YMMV items are, in fact, tropes."

No, tropes are objective.

Tell that to YMMV Tropes.

The definition of a trope is objective.

Whether or not a YMMV trope applies is subjective. It is still a trope. We can all agree that the definition of Narm is when something intended to be dramatic comes across as comedic because of poor execution. But what makes it YMMV is that not everyone will agree on what is funny, or on what is intended without Word of God.

There are two concepts here that we lump together somewhat clumsily: tropes that everyone may not necessarily agree are present, but are found in the work, its presentation, etc.; and Audience Reactions, which are not tropes at all.

No. The trope is a very specific ensemble dynamic. Each member may get a focus episode where they are in charge temporarily, but there is always a defined Leader who takes over again when the status quo resumes.

While Fighteer is right about Five-Man Band having specific requirements, what he left out is that, strictly speaking, Five-Man Band does not require that The Leader also be The Hero, only that The Leader be... well, The Leader.

To explain... The Leader needs to display the qualities inherent to a leadership role, but they need not necessarily follow all the tropes of The Hero. They don't need to have Incorruptible Pure Pureness, or even be a nice guy. They don't even need to be the main character (see: Yuna from Final Fantasy 10). They only need to be the leader.

For the second part of your question... a leader can display some attributes of some of the other members. A lot of leaders are really smart, like The Smart Guy... but they're NOT The Smart Guy. Otherwise the dynamic doesn't work. (As has been said, the Five-Man Band is about A VERY SPECIFIC dynamic, not just "any group with five members.")

As for The Chick... one of the primary components of The Chick is holding a PASSIVE role in the group. It is therefore physically impossible for The Chick to even come close to being The Leader.

The Chick does have to be female. The only female in the group.

"Yes, we understand that a male can fill this role, but this trope is a component of a Five-Man Band, which is specifically four guys and a girl. Examples of male characters acting in this way can be found in The Heart."

"The Chick — (vocal effects, tambourine) A peacekeeping role to balance out the other members' aggression, bringing them to a nice or at least manageable medium. The Chick is often considered the heart of the group. This role is played by a woman or girl. Someone female. Otherwise, it is not a Five-Man Band."

Also, if you want to add a Five-Man Band example, I strongly advise taking it through the clean-up thread. The trope page is locked, preventing cross-wicking, and if taken to the Edit Locked pages request thread, it will get rejected if it doesn't fit.

Also, just as an aside... how the Hell did THIS make it on the list?

BlazBlue

The Leader	Ragna the Bloodedge
The Lancer	Jin Kisaragi
The Big Guy	Hakumen
The Smart Guy	Rachel Alucard
The Chick	Noel Vermillion

First, by your definition Rachel can't be on the list as anything but The Chick because she's female and according to you Five-Man Band MUST be four-guys-one-girl.

Second, none of those people even WORK together! Rachel occasionally talks to Ragna but never anything more than that. Noel barely knows any of them but Jin. Jin and Hakumen are sworn to kill Ragna on sight...

How is this a Five-Man Band?

^^^ I believe 2 females are allowed, but yes The Chick is gender-locked as female.

The Chick might temporarily be leader if no one else could do it at the time. That example was probably added before the cleanup started. You don't have a Five-Man Band where The Lancer and The Big Guy are sworn to kill The Leader on sight.

RE: The Chick as the only female:

The description for Five-Man Band says...

The five-man rock band phenomenon, four guys and a girl singer, is no longer as current as it once was. It was very hard to escape in the 60's and 70's. However, the group structure, as you will see in the examples, turns up in a lot of storytelling. Like a whole lot of storytelling.

...but aside from that, I see nothing to suggest that non-The Chick members must be male, and honestly I don't see that line as presenting any sort of hard-and-fast rule. It's more of "this is how the music variant of this trope used to work."

The narrative roles are clearly defined to encompass four guys and a girl. Very rarely is The Smart Guy a girl. That's about the only room the trope has to play with. See the cleanup thread.

According to the cleanup thread Eddie has said that two females is acceptable. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13401353520A80460100&page=8#182

@wrm5: If they don't work together, they don't count as a Band. You might want to take that to the Five-Man Band cleanup thread I link.

Don't forget that there's The Team for teams that don't quite fit Five-Man Band.

Just so we are clear: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13401353520A80460100 is the thread that deals with all issues pertaining to Five-Man Band. We don't need to duplicate it here.

Yes, it was natter. Given that people despite several warnings couldn't stop nattering, it's now locked.

Responded.

Thanks.