Removing Fan Myopia from Descriptions

YMMV.Afterlife 1996 contains fan myopia for Hilarious in Hindsight and Retroactive Recognition.

Not just that, but there's this from the description of The Cat Came Back:

How should I go about in fixing these?

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jun 7th 2021 at 12:00:57 PM

The description of Canada Eh is filled with potholed fan myopia.

Moved to Trope Description Improvement Drive.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jun 19th 2021 at 11:00:02 AM

Any appetite to revive this thread for a look at Fan Myopia in work introductions and character pages as well as the trope/work page examples themselves?

How come anime-specific tropes that aren't really specific to anime are bad, but fanfic-specific tropes that aren't really specific to fanfics are fine? I.e Patchwork Fic is just Adaptation Amalgamation but for fanfics, Peggy Sue is just Set Right What Once Went Wrong for fanfics...

Edited by molokai198 on Sep 17th 2023 at 10:23:15 AM

Well technically Patchwork Fic predates Adaptation Amalgamation by a while, so that one may just be a case of how it's much easier to launch a new trope than to expand an old one.

And Peggy Sue, TBH, has always been a mystery.

Peggy Sue startled me when it turned out to be a fanfic specific trope, given that the trope namer is a movie and all that. This was discussed somewhere else and I'm still confused by it.

That said, the difference between anime-specific tropes and fanfic-specific tropes are simple; fanfic is a unique medium and thus has specific unique trends that can't apply anywhere else. Anime tropes tend to be just slightly different versions of tropes that can apply to other mediums.

...However, I do think that you have a point with Patchwork Fic.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 17th 2023 at 10:30:38 AM

Well, the trope namer also arguably isn't an example; it seems to me that the point of a Peggy Sue is to go back over the canon and "fix" things that happened along the way. It's a specific form of Set Right What Once Went Wrong that seems different enough to be worthy of subtrope status, and while it can happen in an original/professional work, it's highly unlikely since it would involve rehashing previously published work. (Unless you consider the definitive aspects to be the mechanism and duration rather than the fact that the events lived through have already been published.)

Edited by MorganWick on Sep 18th 2023 at 2:10:33 AM

I would be fine with merging Patchwork Fic into Adaptation Amalgamation. I suspect that before today's rush of superhero films (by far the biggest section) it was easy to see this in fanfiction, but very little of it elsewhere.

Peggy Sue is more difficult. It's Set Right What Once Went Wrong but in different canons; the derivative work relies on the audience knowing the original to appreciate the twists in the new version.

Indeed, if there's something that justifies fanfics having their own tropes, it's that their audience is expected to know what they are based on. This is something most adaptations avoid, for good reason. "Can't stand on its own" is valid criticism of any adaptation/spin-off but not fanfiction.

The ones that I would really like to see merged are Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater with Adaptational Heroism and Adaptational Villainy.

There is simply no reason to have Draco in Leather Pants when Adaptational Heroism exists (and the like for the other pair). As a result, DILP comes off as "Adaptational Heroism but for fanfiction AND BAD."

Nah, Draco I'm sure means the fans refuse to take a villain seriously. It would be very unfair to merge it with adaptational heroism since you can have something like Wesker and Dio Brando who are almost always portrayed as evil and still get Draco'd because they were funny to fans. Same with Ron the Death Eater which is basically villainous characters for no reason aside of "I don't like it".

Edited by Mr-ex777 on Sep 19th 2023 at 2:36:50 AM

That's not it, either.

DILP and RTDE were retooled by TRS to focus on general fan behavior, not on individual examples. Said individual examples do indeed belong under Adaptational Heroism and Adaptational Villainy. The cleanup is just slow.

Additionally, the reasons can vary greatly. RTDE does not require the fans to actively dislike the character, and DILP isn't about "not taking the villain seriously".

Anyway, guys, this has nothing to do with Fan Myopia and is better for this thread.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 18th 2023 at 2:39:18 PM