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Author: Bobchillingworth

May 9th 2013 at 9:50:11 AM

I don't want to get into a big debate about world history with you, but your oddly aggravated reply only continues to reinforce my belief that your YKTTW purports to be about a clear-cut decision between good or evil while including multiple entirely irrelevant examples.

I will try to make this simple.  Going back yet again to the bounty hunter example, the fact is that it does not fit the trope going by ''your own definition''.  The trope posits that an entity faces a decision between "good" or "evil", and that furthermore the more morally positive option will inevitably provide greater dividends.  There '''must''' be a choice, or the word "better" in the three-word title does not make sense.  How then does a real-life bounty hunter fit the trope?  Even if we accept your inaccurate assertion that fugitives cannot earn more than bounty hunters, the trope '''still does not apply''', unless you mean to claim that ''the bounty hunters themselves'' must decide whether to be in their current profession or be fugitives.  The claim that bounty hunters earn more than cops (which is itself again incorrect unless you're discarding many higher-level police positions) is even ''less'' relevant, since now you're just comparing salaries between two different non-criminal jobs.  Looking at it logically, right now the trope states that actor A must decide between options 1 or 2, and option 1 pays better.  The bounty hunter example is instead actor A inherently picks option 1 while actor B intrinsically includes option 2.  It simply does not fit.

There is of course also the unaddressed issue that TvTropes does not assign black-and-white "good" or "bad" labels to large groups of actual people. If bounty hunters are only good because they are not felons and a school claims they are a "force for justice", then you could include literally thousands of professions in the RL section.  How about physicians, surgeons, professors, lawyers, military officers and congressmen?  All generally well-paying positions which include codes of conduct.  Except again none of them would fit, because there is no requisite decision a person faces between being a "good" pediatrician vs. an "evil" whatever.  The fact is that you cannot simply declare that all bounty hunters are good, and even if they ''were'' universally recognized to be paragons of morality, there is no clear evil alternative which they out-earn.

Moving on to your nation-state wall of text & ignoring your unnecessarily condescending tone, it does not matter how much the average North Korean peasant makes or how backward the nation is.  I only mentioned schools etc. because '''you''' list various forms of infrastructure as being signs of a "good" nation in the trope description.  If you now feel they are in fact irrelevant, you should fix it.  I cannot read your mind through the internet to garner what you actually intend this trope to represent, I can only go by the text you have written.  In fact, going again by what you yourself have provided as the trope's description, it continues to not make sense to focus 3/4 of your introduction on comparative international development.  It does not matter how many statistics on North Korea you rattle off here- nations are not living entities, and the people ''in charge'' of North Korea are much more wealthy than most of the people leading democratic nations.  This is because dictators are not bound by constitutionally-limited salaries or mandated ethics.  There are plenty of ways for a world leader to make billions regardless of the wretched condition of most of their subjects.  A country's GDP is completely different from its ruler's personal fortune.  Your Nazi / Vlad the Impaler (??) paragraph is irrelevant for the same reasons.  And of course this all yet again incorrectly assumes that nations (or at least the people in charge) face binary choices between arbitrarily-assigned "good" or "bad" policies.

It is clear that YKTTW needs a significant rewrite before it is ready to launch.  Something which should be mostly about how taking a paragon prompt gives more exp or whatever than a renegade one in the same situation has instead developed a tumor of dog-chewed, half-forgotten Poly Sci 101 notes.  I'm happy to edit this page if you'd like; it is not very large and shouldn't take long.  It might help to have someone who can step back and take an unprejudiced look at this entry before fixing it.