This troper: Nightmare Fuel

I haven't checked the other subpages of Accidental Nightmare Fuel, but This Troper is all over the place.

76 counts on that page. May I take a chainsaw to the guilty examples? (That is to say, just start nuking them rather than trying to make something coherent out of them after the removal to This Troper.)

edited 7th Sep '11 5:03:36 PM by Balmung

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I think the only thing that can be done for both types of Nightmare Fuel is to raze the examples to the ground and start over.

Well said, though I would include removing mentions of either on other pages as well.

I would have exactly zero objections to doing that.

...that would be... rather extreme. Especially since it's such a pervasive set of tropes...

I wouldn't mind a Special Efforts thread for it, though...

I'm saying I think it's the only way to solve the misuse. I'm not saying that means it's going to be done.

This Troper shows up on the following ANF pages in addition to the 76 on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Advertising:

• 14 times on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Anime
  • 11 times on NightmareFuel.Yu-Gi-Oh
  • Once more on NightmareFuel.Hayao Miyazaki
• Twice on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Art
• 8 times on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Comic Books
  • Three times on NightmareFuel.Sam And Max Freelance Police
  • Once on NightmareFuel.Transformers
• 19 times on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Disney
  • 8 more on NightmareFuel.Fantasia
  • Twice more on NightmareFuel.The Great Mouse Detective
  • Once on NightmareFuel.The Princess And The Frog
• 6 on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Film
  • Two more on E.T. The Extraterrestrial
  • Two more still on NightmareFuel.Harry Potter

I could go on, but ANF/NF seems to attract This Troper like bees to honey. Also, I think that if I started editing it out now, I'd just nuke every entry that uses This Troper, regardless of what other value the entry might have, but I think I'm only really supposed to rewrite entries to not use This Troper.

edited 7th Sep '11 8:27:21 PM by Balmung

If they used wording they're not supposed to use, isn't that telling that the editor didn't know what they were doing?

If we nuked all the examples of either kind of Nightmare Fuel, it wouldn't have much reason left to exist. If we didn't have pages with a ton of examples and history behind them, given where the wiki is now and what those pages mean now, would we create them?

Other natter magnets have had their example sections cut and been left as, basically, targets for links. I wouldn't mind in the least if we decided to do the same with High Octane Nightmare Fuel.

Accidental Nightmare Fuel is another matter. Since the definition is stricter (examples don't just have to be scary, they have to be scary to a child, and must not have been intended to be scary), Trope Decay is probably less likely to happen, meaning that people can't legitimately list every single scene in every single work ever as an example. That makes maintenance easier. Still, we might have to throw out all the current examples and start the Accidental Nightmare Fuel example section over again. Many examples are probably from the time when the Nightmare Fuel trope was first launched.

edited 9th Sep '11 9:48:50 AM by Antheia

So, this has popped up again eh?

ANF and HONF are bottomless wells of This Troper, Thread Mode, and Natter. Its like the whole thing is a Troper Tales playground. Probably because the tropes are highly subjective by nature, so any examples are pretty much going to be based on personal experience, which leads to everyong just filling the pages with personal anecdotes.

Kill It With Fire For Great Justice. I nuke examples all the time. This Troper entries are always based on personal anecdotes.

^ Also, ANF has worse Trope Decay than HONF, since practically anything that you think of could be twisted to say 'my kid jumped at this, therefore it is ANF'.

edited 9th Sep '11 10:02:15 AM by OmegaKross

Accidental Nightmare Fuel isn't about just scaring children any more. That was the old definition.

Actually, yeah, it's just about 'things which weren't meant to be scary, but some guy jumped at this once, so I guess it is' now.

Well, I took a chainsaw to every last use of This Troper on AccidentalNightmareFuel.Advertising. It might not be the cleanest edit job ever, but I got them all.

Thanks for that.

I had a look on the Literature subpages and there are some uses of "This Troper" there too, so I suspect this problem has spread into the other subpages.

I'll get the other subpages later, but ANF is a massive This Troper magnet. The way I see it, if you used This Troper when writing your example, it's subject to arbitrary deletion and anything salvaged is naught but getting lucky (though using This Troper late in the example rather than at the beginning greatly decreases the odds that the whole example will be nuked).

I think part of the reason there's so much is if there's This Troper on the page it encourages the idea that it's okay. Hopefully, once this is all cut, the problem will decrease.

Like I said, the problem is that ANF, HONF, and all their subpages are practically pseudo Troper Tales pages where people add personal and highly subjective anecdotes of what they think fits the trope. This will forever be one of the main problems with these pages. All we can do is keep killing the This Troper when we see it. Maybe then people will get the hint.

The other part of the problem is that if you dont visit the forums often (or at all) you wont know that This Troper, Natter, and Thread Mode are not encouraged. I think all of us wrote examples with This Troper when we first started editing, simply because it's so widespread that we just thought that was how people talked on the wiki. Like I've said a few times in other threads, this needs to be made obvious. Like, 'On the homepage in huge bold letters' obvious.

Don't ask. If you see This Troper in the examples kill it. Kill kill kill. If you see "I" "I think" or a link to a tropers page kill those too.

About the closest thing to that being acceptable is Judge Troper and even then only on Neglectful Precursors. If it's not Judge Troper on that page delete it. The wiki is only for examples, not individual thoughts and opinions. If someone is sneaky about inserting such then so be it but any overt examples should be removed.

They are definitely a clutter. I say Axe 'em. Subjective views on what people think are scary can apply to pretty much anything.

Judge Troper? Does he ride a ludicrous Motorcycle, have a handgun that can set people on fire, and is his chin as big as the rest of his face? Does he enforce the Wiki as Judge, Jury and Executioner?

Judge Troper: "Using This Troper in the examples section: 5 years. Engaging in Thread Mode Natter in the main article: TWENTY YEARS! And Vandalising the Homepage with links to Furry Hentai sites...

Generic Troper:: Lemme guess: Edit Ban? AAARG-

BANG

Judge Troper: Death.

As far as Nightmare Fuel of high-octane and accidental varieties alike go, I think we should start over entirely; scrap the examples, and redlink Accidental Nightmare Fuel and High Octane Nightmare Fuel so that everything crosswicked with those examples is redlinked. Then we can discuss what to do with examples of scary things in general in the future. (Keeping it to subtropes, having just one nightmare fuel trope, etc...)

edited 12th Sep '11 4:47:11 PM by HiddenFacedMatt

I'm just going go ahead and reiterate what I think should be done to the examples.

Not to mention that even though it's now Accidental nightmare fuel, a good half of the examples are still citing stuff that was very fucking calculated to scare the audience.

ETA: I actually thought that the home page did have something about how articles should be written in objective third person, no 'This Troper' or 'I'. Guess I'm wrong. Huh.

edited 12th Sep '11 5:16:55 PM by raisingirl83