What about old tropes with new names?
How can you find the best but least linked tropes out there?
Worry no more: Trope Report is here.
Hiya Tropers! Bet you all thought we were gone for good, huh? Well, good news we have returned from the dead to bring back the latest in TV Tropes society! Let us not sweat the small stuff like why we were gone for over a month a year, or that this message is copied from an earlier report! Let us instead get straight to the matter. What did you come here for? News. That is what Trope Report is here to deliver! Excuse us while we get back on our feet after so long a slumber, today's report is on the short side—but here it is!
Forumwatch:
New stuff!
Forum Heralds:
During the holidays, Fast Eddie added a new staff position: Forum Heralds. They are identified by the badges that appear by their name in their assigned sub-forums. (Thanks to Lock for designing them!)
Their role is to guide newbies in their assigned sub-forum and answer questions. When a Troper posts in a particular sub-forum for the first time (or after a long time), the Welcomebot attached to each handle sends a welcome PM written by the herald. Don't be surprise. Feel free to ignore it, or ask a few questions. Just don't flip any of them off. That's a surefire way of being whapped with the banhammer.
Unlike all the other positions, being a Forum Herald is an recruiting job. You can apply here
for open positions. The list of Heralds can be also found here.
New Moderators!:
Due to On-topic Conversations getting a bit...flamey, a few changes had been made:
- Three new moderators had been installed. Best Of and Katrika have been made full moderators, although their focus is OTC. Shimaspawn had also been promoted from Engineer for Trope Repair Shop.
- New topics made in OTC have to be approved by a mod before any posts beyond the first one can be added.
- The "Straw Dog" thump tag had been added. Basically, a "straw dog" is when an outrageous argument is proposed for the purpose of everyone else ripping it apart and replacing it with a better argument. Since it had been observed that this can be mistaken as trolling and cause...flamey talk, straw dogging is no longer around.
Remember, welcome our new moderators, and don't be afraid on using the holler button. In order to keep the forums civil, we have to respect both the staff and the community.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes:
Our short report is filled with a surprisingly short list of changes this week. Mostly renames in this case. News is news though, so let's see what we got.
- Still The Eighties is Still The Eighties no more! It has been renamed to Two Decades Behind with its negative slant cleaned up.
- In the cases of Final Fantasy XV and the History section of Ho Yay; People, wait until info is actually out and don't go looking for real life examples of an audience reaction trope. That's just silly.
- The True Art pages have had a nice big clean up and hopefully they will stay cleaned up. Keep the exanples to in-universe only!
- Blackout Blink has been renamed to Light-Flicker Teleportation.
- The Blade series has had all its individual media portrayals spit into their own namespaces. The main page will guide you to each of these.
- The Telltale Drapes has been cut and sent back to YKTTW. Again. Lets hope third time's the charm.
- Golden Saucer has been renamed to Minigame Zone on account of supposed to be named Gold Saucer and because, as someone else noted, Final Fantasy VII isn't getting any more recent as a reference.
- Not So Pretty Now is not Not So Pretty Now now (that totally sounded more clever in my head). It has been renamed to Past Victim Showcase.
- NOHAMOTYO + Seven-Year Rule = Fleeting Demographic Rule. The first two were merged into the latter since they were more or less the same concept but one had a long acronym of a title and the other was needlessly concise.
- Mining Accident On Troy is another of those tropes with a really odd name. In this case, a Battlestar Galactica reference. It has become Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story.
- Hulk's Cooldown Hug Corollary has dropped the Hulk part and is now Interrupted Cooldown Hug.
- Since Gotterdammerung's description did not match what the title suggested, the trope has been rewritten and clarified with bad examples moved to End of an Age.
- The rather vague trope name of Likes Older Women has been renamed to the rather less interesting but more clear Likes Older Women.
- Dolphins, Dolphins Everywhere has given birth to Heroic Dolphin, Sapient Cetaceans and Playful Dolphin
Spotlight Stealing Trope:
Left blank for this issue. If you want to contribute a Spotlight Stealing Trope article, please contact the Trope Report Chief Editor!
Needs More Wiki Love:
Left blank for this issue. If you want to contribute a Needs More Wiki Love article, please contact the Trope Report Chief Editor!
Edits From the Editor:
Today we have a special message from Moderator Bobby G concerning where this wiki and forum have been, where we are, and where we're going.
I was delighted to learn of the revival of this newsletter, but surprised to learn how long it has been since the last issue, which feels like it came out only a few months ago. October 2010? Really?
On this site, we have always placed a lot of emphasis on continuity, not just within specific works of fiction, but within all of human creative works, and how tropes that are still recognisable today, like Star-Crossed Lovers, Dream Sequence and Genre Savvy can be found even in ancient texts. But change, too, is an equally important aspect of tropes. Sometimes a trope becomes an unpopular cliché, is discredited by scientific advancements, simply leaves the popular consciousness, or evolves into a new, different trope. Meanwhile, new ideas, technologies and trends are inspiring new tropes all the time.
Like the tropes we catalogue, TV Tropes must constantly change and evolve, all the while never losing that sight of what came before. Some tropers may welcome change, while others may resist it, and on the forums lately, there has been a lot of discussion of changes – recent changes, past changes and future changes, desired or otherwise. Inevitably, as in any project of this magnitude, these changes can generate a fair amount of turbulence and friction. To this, I say that no, not all changes are good, but that change itself is not something to be feared. And one thing that has not changed is that this site is the product of a vast and diverse community. Alone, no one troper could hope to describe tropes from across every medium and every genre, but together, we have built something ambitious, vast, exciting and fun.
I want to thank you, my fellow tropers, for making this Wiki something we can all enjoy. But more than that, I also think this is a time to move forward. We've scratched the surface, but there's a whole lot of fiction out there that hasn't been troped yet, and I'm looking forward to the new articles and ideas that 2012 will bring. I hope you are, too.
Happy troping.
- Bobby G
Add More Here:
We'll let you readers mull over that while we wrap up this issue. Thanks for reading and check in next Saturday for our next issue or Trope Report!
