Discussion JustForFun / TheUniversalGenreSavvyGuide

Sounds like a good idea.

Coming in 3 years later. The Furry folder's dominated by yiff and fetish rules again. Given the subject matter, would it be better to just leave those off?

This page needs to be organized.

I did a check and it certainly looks like this is pushing our generally-accepted character count limits (the HTML clocks in at around the 470k range and the "too-long page repair" thread starts thinking of intervening at 400k, with 500k considered to be reasonably urgent). Problem is that I would prefer to split off individual folders into full-fledged guides in their own right like How to Survive a War Movie, but the two largest folders are the Villain or Antagonist and Heroes and Good Guys folders, which cover large categories of characters of each faction and are mixed up with pre-existing lists, not all of which have been tropified, so I'm not sure how much of each folder to split off or how. Simply splitting off the advice I deem to be specific to major protagonists from the Hero folder would save around 21k, but that's a largely arbitrary judgment call, or I could split off the third-largest folder, the Video Games folder, and save 28k. In the meantime, some of the advice under the Villain folder can be moved to TV Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vows.

I did a check and it certainly looks like this is pushing our generally-accepted character count limits (the HTML clocks in at around the 470k range and the "too-long page repair" thread starts thinking of intervening at 400k, with 500k considered to be reasonably urgent). Problem is that I would prefer to split off individual folders into full-fledged guides in their own right like How to Survive a War Movie, but the two largest folders are the Villain or Antagonist and Heroes and Good Guys folders, which cover large categories of characters of each faction and are mixed up with pre-existing lists, not all of which have been tropified, so I'm not sure how much of each folder to split off or how. Simply splitting off the advice I deem to be specific to major protagonists from the Hero folder would save around 21k, but that's a largely arbitrary judgment call, or I could split off the third-largest folder, the Video Games folder, and save 28k. In the meantime, some of the advice under the Villain folder can be moved to TV Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vows.

Speaking of TV Tropes Additional Evil Overlord Vows, we know have someone proposing this list of TV Tropes Additional Hero Vows (an extension of Things I Will Do If I Am Ever the Hero).

Splitting off some of the folders into separate guides does sound like a good idea.

For reference: the 2016-2017 TRS thread for the UGSG.

Thanks. This page really needed to be sliced in half.

I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this solution, but I guess it's as good as any.

I do object to your characterization that this has "gone beyond genres into other areas covered by the How-To Guides"; if anything, it's the other way around, with the How-To Guides horning in on the UGSG's turf. This page dates to 2008 in its oldest form, and its main purpose was to link to various off- and on-site Evil Overlord-type lists, with troper-supplied addenda; the "Characters" section, as such, was the largest for pretty much its entire existence. The How-To Guides are older, but originally took the form of what might be called tongue-in-cheek pseudo-indexes, consisting of short, snappy descriptions of various tropes that serve as means to achieve each end laid out in each title (some of them actually being addressed to the writer as much as a character, making it a sibling to the So You Want To pages). More to the point, each How-To Guide consisted of various ways each end is actually achieved in fiction (though not intentionally on the part of a non-Genre Savvy character, which is where the overlap first comes in), whereas the Evil Overlord-type lists consist of things people in fiction should do once they find themselves in a particular role. How to Survive a War Movie arguably first blurred the lines between the two, especially since, unlike the other How-To Guides, it was written in the first person from the perspective of a character, much like an Evil Overlord-type list; by 2010 the Evil Overlord List and The Universal Genre Savvy Guide itself had been added to the list, as well as If I Am Ever Head of an Alien-Monitoring Agency, which, notably, was potholed with a name fitting the How-To template.

As I said, I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong for taking this approach, as for all I know the "UGSG is for genres, How-To is for character types" distinction had already been established as a matter of official policy, and in any case the original distinction has already proven somewhat unenforcable - certainly both types of lists had become thoroughly intermixed on the How-To Guides page even before this change - and something of this magnitude may have been necessary to chop down the page size appreciably enough to make an impact, as I laid out below. So I'm not going to take this to the forums or anything (though I'm sorely tempted to); I'm mostly just establishing what this history is that has been mostly left by the wayside, but I do worry about someone coming along, being ignorant of this history (or perhaps, knowing about the past of both pages but not the present), and finding the distinction mostly arbitrary and taking the "genre" part of "Genre Savvy" way too literally. But then, there's also a lot of overlap between Evil Overlord-type lists and the lists of cliches that appear on Books on Trope...which might be as much of an argument for my view considering that that page seems to list the EOL and pawn off any references to any other similar lists, except the Jack Butler version of the EOL, to this page.

(I did move a good chunk of the superhero stuff back here and treated superhero stories as a "genre" as most of it seemed directed at civilians, not superheroes.)

Edit: I changed my mind and created a thread with more historical information. Apologies if the title is too accusatory.

I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this solution, but I guess it's as good as any.

I do object to your characterization that this has "gone beyond genres into other areas covered by the How-To Guides"; if anything, it's the other way around, with the How-To Guides horning in on the UGSG's turf. This page dates to 2008 in its oldest form, and its main purpose was to link to various off- and on-site Evil Overlord-type lists, with troper-supplied addenda; the "Characters" section, as such, was the largest for pretty much its entire existence. The How-To Guides are older, but originally took the form of what might be called tongue-in-cheek pseudo-indexes, consisting of short, snappy descriptions of various tropes that serve as means to achieve each end laid out in each title (some of them actually being addressed to the writer as much as a character, making it a sibling to the So You Want To pages). More to the point, each How-To Guide consisted of various ways each end is actually achieved in fiction (though not intentionally on the part of a non-Genre Savvy character, which is where the overlap first comes in), whereas the Evil Overlord-type lists consist of things people in fiction should do once they find themselves in a particular role. How to Survive a War Movie arguably first blurred the lines between the two, especially since, unlike the other How-To Guides, it was written in the first person from the perspective of a character, much like an Evil Overlord-type list; by 2010 the Evil Overlord List and The Universal Genre Savvy Guide itself had been added to the list, as well as If I Am Ever Head of an Alien-Monitoring Agency, which, notably, was potholed with a name fitting the How-To template.

As I said, I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong for taking this approach, as for all I know the "UGSG is for genres, How-To is for character types" distinction had already been established as a matter of official policy, and in any case the original distinction has already proven somewhat unenforcable - certainly both types of lists had become thoroughly intermixed on the How-To Guides page even before this change - and something of this magnitude may have been necessary to chop down the page size appreciably enough to make an impact, as I laid out below. So I'm not going to take this to the forums or anything (though I'm sorely tempted to); I'm mostly just establishing what this history is that has been mostly left by the wayside, but I do worry about someone coming along, being ignorant of this history (or perhaps, knowing about the past of both pages but not the present), and finding the distinction mostly arbitrary and taking the "genre" part of "Genre Savvy" way too literally. But then, there's also a lot of overlap between Evil Overlord-type lists and the lists of cliches that appear on Books on Trope...which might be as much of an argument for my view considering that that page seems to list the EOL and pawn off any references to any other similar lists, except the Jack Butler version of the EOL, to this page.

(I did move a good chunk of the superhero stuff back here and treated superhero stories as a "genre" as most of it seemed directed at civilians, not superheroes.)

Edit: I changed my mind and created a thread with more historical information. Apologies if the title is too accusatory.

So, some of the links in the guide aren't taking you to the intended places anymore. I clicked on the link to the Genre Savvy guide for heroes under the Heroes folder, and it took me to a place that said, " Not available - 50megs. " So the Heroes list is useless now, apparently. I just wanted to get the message out there in the hopes that someone will fix that. I know there's still some info in the guide itself, but still.

Fixed via archive.org.