The content of the tropes is still valid.
The problem is the tropes themselves.
Do we have alternatives?
I agree that all three of those, plus So What Do We Do Now? and Story Breadcrumbs, should be removed and not retroped as they are about the creator and his life. Story Breadcrumbs are a narrative story choice.
Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.@GoodGamer14: I think the tropes themselves are not the problem, the problem is that they are applied to a real human being, rather than a fictional or at least a constructed character. Unfortunately, we don't have any other options than to remove everything that pertains to Noah as a person and focus on the tropes he either discusses in other media (e.g. Right for the Wrong Reasons) or invokes in his own style (e.g. Armor-Piercing Question).
@ImmiThrax: Off-topic, but I see you've marked Old Guard Versus New Blood as ZCE, and I don't quite understand why? What exactly is missing from the example, in your opinion?
I marked ZCE because, despite all the words, it doesn't really explain itself and relies upon a link to another page. What is he labeling as the "old guard" and the "new blood", specifically? (just saying 90s versus 00s doesn't explain how they're different in his view). What does being a D&D player have to do with that? Is he falling on the old guard or new blood side of things, or just pointing out what they are?
Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.^ Fair point. I will try fixing that in the next couple of days.
Regardless, is there a consensus regarding the removal of Real Life-troping entries?
Edited by KoverasWe could move the less serious and personal examples to the Funny tab, most notably the Despair Event Horizon example.
^ Again, it's not an issue where it is placed — the issue is that that entry tropes a real-life person as if he was a fictional character, which is verboten by the rules and the mods.
As Koveras said. Creators are not characters and their lives are not narratives.
From our Creator Page Guidelines, what should not go on creator pages: "Tropes applied to the creator as if they are a fictional character. Please resist the urge to apply character tropes to Real Life people. We've had a lot of Square Peg, Round Trope issues in the past with this, so as a general guideline, it's best to apply No Real Life Examples, Please! to creators. If it seems harmless it might be overlooked Just For Fun, and there is an exception for Conversational Troping as mentioned above, but on the whole this is something best avoided. The only time such tropes can be added is if the trope in question relates to their works."
If the content that's on Despair Event Horizon is indeed displayed in a video, with him humorously reacting to a game, it would need a big rewrite to describe what he said or did before putting it on Funny. So that one has a kernel that is not about the real person.
Edited by ImmiThrax Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.^ If I recall the video correctly, Noah did not mean that particular segment humorously: instead, he was earnestly disgusted by Narco Road and eventually gave up on finishing it due to a combination of bad design and bad writing.
Hrmm... Trying to guess at tropes without having seen it, would the presentation of that segment fall into: Mood Whiplash compared to the rest of the video or channel? Did he invoke Know When to Fold 'Em / avoid Sunk Cost Fallacy? Because just troping "Noah felt this way about this game" does not work.
Covered in Star Wars Cleanup, Deadpool, and Web Video sand. I'm not coarse and rough, but I get everywhere.@Good Gamer 14: The Despair Event Horizon entry is now a Zero-Context Example, since it does explain how exactly Noah has that trope Played for Laughs and makes the point about bad writing and design.
- Old Guard Versus New Blood: [[Invoked]] A major theme of his Western RPGs retrospectives and reviews is the comparison between how RPGs were made and expected to be played in the 90s and from 2000s onward. He reviews them from the perspective of a player/fan of both the Dungeons And Dragons tabletop game and of its video games.
This is indeed a recurring theme of his RPGs so why remove it?
Edited by GoodGamer14^ As Immi Thrax pointed out earlier, it was a ZCE because it didn't specify in-example what said difference is, and after mulling it over, I came the conclusion that explaining it would blow the example out of proportion to the rest of the article, and it is easier to just remove it. Besides, it's been too long since I watched Noah's old videos and searching for quotes all over again would take more effort than I am willing to invest.
I have a growing concern that the main page veers too close to troping Noah's life, instead of his work. That would be OK for a public persona, like a president or a pop-star, since those personas are always at least somewhat artificial, but I don't think it would do for a video game critic like Noah. Specifically, I think following entries, as they currently are, have to go:
So What Do We Do Now? and Story Breadcrumbs almost made the above list, too, for different reasons: the former is about Noah's own feelings after the 2017 trip, but he does explicitly discuss and focus attention on it; the latter is about his work, but I am not sure whether it was an intentional stylistic choice.
Thoughts on any of the above?
Edited by Koveras Hide / Show Replies