Trope Description Improvement Drive

I actually have addressed this at this Trope Talk thread on whether we bring this here or there or make a TRS.

The description for Board to Death is very confusing. It says in the third paragraph: "It must be noted that the villain doesn't necessarily need to kill every meeting-attendant. If he is the more pragmatic sort, he will spare some select members, usually the ones he still needs for his plan. Or he might even kill just one person, usually the one who is having second thoughts and/or is most outspoken against his plan/leadership. Either way, such cases serves not only as exposition, but also as a way for the villain to display a clear message to his partners/subordinates: "Do as I say, and You Will Be Spared. Cross me and you're next on the chopping block."

But then in the final paragraph it says "Especially note confusion with Thrown from the Zeppelin, of which some examples on this very page are. This is only for when ALL of the audience dies. Thrown from the Zeppelin is when traitors are killed" which seems like a contradiction. Which one of these two is the correct definition?

The last part was added in 2015, though history shows people removing examples for this same reason as early as 2013.

Aborted Declaration of Love has a Example As Thesis that makes it seem like the character in question never having another chance is a integral part of the trope. The former trope image (Haley and Elan) has a character abort their Dying Declaration of Love once Haley is healed, therefore not dying, as with the Seinfeld scene OOTS was likely parodying.

re: #5123 I like that summary.

Should Luck-Based Mission talk about how Role-Playing Game battles go from Luck-Based Mission to Curbstomp Battle over the course of the game when Character Levels are in play? A.k.a levelling up to high levels to beat weak enemies consistently?

Edited by Malady on Sep 5th 2023 at 8:05:05 AM

Symbol Swearing has just had a general example put in the Anime & Manga folder. This sort of thing should be in the main description, but I'm not sure if noting two characters used for this purpose warrants a place.

~Rubber_Lotus added it.

Edited by Reymma on Sep 5th 2023 at 11:52:39 AM

If Examples Are Not General has been added there, it should be removed.

Verdict on the Four-Temperament Ensemble description cleanup?

The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday mentions that said shops might look like they come out of Charles Dickens which...doesn't really make sense.

Dickens is known for his painfully accurate depictions of working class Victorian life and skewering general Victorian society as a whole. He wasn't much for fantasy or the kind of strangeness that is part and parcel of that trope. There's a Lovecraft comparison which makes a bit more sense, but the Dickens one comes first and it sticks out strangely.

Could it possibly just be cut and leave the Lovecraft reference in? I could even see swapping in a Stephen King reference, as he has a novel all about such a shop.

Edited by ArthurEld on Sep 6th 2023 at 10:42:56 AM

I think it's trying to say that the shop looks Victorian and a century out of date. So maybe we need a different way to say that?

Anachronistic? Belonging to an earlier era?

"They may look out of place, both in time and space. Like they travelled in from somewhere else."

Anyone have any other opinion on the improvement of Devastating Remark's description here or am I good to swap the description in?

Someone brought it up for other reasons, but Barbaric Bully has this paragraph which looks very odd to me.

"This is on its way to becoming a Discredited Trope with the recent rash of cyberbullying and bullying-related suicides making news, but it only makes the few works that cling to this misconception stick out like a sore thumb. With tighter security in schools in the post-Columbine era, fistfights in crowded high school hallways in full view of crowds are also far less believable that they once were. For this reason, it also tends to be far more common in works that are at least a decade old. However, due to Values Dissonance, it is still Truth in Television in the United Kingdom, especially as there have been well-publicised reports of teachers being unable to control their students there — so it is still an Omnipresent Trope in British educational programmes (e.g. Waterloo Road) and a Cyclic Trope elsewhere in British society, despite cyberbullying being common."

First of all, tropes aren't recent. Secondly, there is no factual evidence bullying is going down at all (in the last decade or so the only thing that actually brought bullying down was COVID) and the rest of these just seems like supposition.

The idea that students are less likely to hit each other post-Columbine is ridicolous. And the idea that there is more bullying in the UK because there's a difference of values is also way off.

I'd be in favor of cutting the whole paragraph or at least drastically rewriting it.

Barbaric Bully is specifically about a bully who uses physical violence, not bullying in general. Stereotypically at least that is something that schools have been much less tolerant of in the post-Columbine era, and anecdotally at least I do know this always felt like a very disconnected-from-reality trope when I was in school myself.

Edited by nrjxll on Sep 8th 2023 at 12:17:33 PM

Schools are less tolerant of it, sure, but that doesn't mean it happens any less.

What I tend to see from fictional bullies is less that they no longer use physical violence, but that they're humanized to not just be bullies. Sometimes they're even sympathetic or redeemable.

Speaking from the UK -

There is a real problem with the way British schools report and tackle bullying. It was in the news before the pandemic lockdowns, and it's back in the news now.

That said, the reporting makes it clear that while physical bullying is still a major issue (and in an environment where guns are rarer and school shootings are almost unknown, the security approach within schools is very different), cyberbullying is just as much an issue in the UK as in the USA, Canada and elsewhere.

Not sure the Values Dissonance has anything to do with it, though. It seems to be more a case of underfunded and overstretched schools, not anyone suggesting it's acceptable.

Edited by Mrph1 on Sep 9th 2023 at 10:34:53 AM

Yeah that's what was so weird. And speaking from experience, theres still plenty of physical bullying in American schools.

I just dont think it counts as a discredited trope, at all.

If you go onto certain pages on Reddit you can still find plenty of videos of crazy school fights in front of crowds of people. Are school fights in full view of crowds really less believable than they once were?

nrjxll but then on the bully brutality page it states that that's truth in television. The qualifier is that they use it 'sometimes'. So a bully using bully brutality is sometimes truth in television is guess?

I'm in favor of just cutting that last paragraph. It doesn't help to describe the trope at all, it just goes on a weird, and thoroughly incorrect, tangent about physical bulying somehow having gone down when there's very little evidence of that happening in the real world, or in how the trope itself is used.

Yeah. Physical bullying is definitely not the most common type of bullying. But it probably happens enough to portray it occasionally. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2751860/

Edited by radicalmight on Sep 9th 2023 at 8:37:13 AM

Besides, Discredited Trope doesn't mean that it's no longer relevant in real life. It means that the trope is no longer used seriously in fiction. There can be several reasons a trope can become discredited, for example being overused. It can also happen that a trope that is no longer Truth in Television still remains being used. In the case of Barbaric Bully specifically, that paragraph is neither true nor necessarily lead to the trope becoming discredited, so I agree that it should be removed.

I just noticed something with Honesty Is the Best Policy. It's currently written as a villain trope, where the villain has no problem being honest about the Evil Plan because they know the recipient can't do anything about it, and the "best" examples of the trope have the villain be honest to turn the listener into an Unwitting Pawn whose response to the truth ends up inadvertantly helping the plan.

However, looking at the oldest version of the trope I can find (February 2009), the trope was originally supposed to be just someone telling the truth about what their plan is because they realise that honesety won't hurt the plan and may even help it; there's no apparent limitation to evil in the trope description (although there is a reference to Xanatos Gambit, the trope maker is George Washington... who I assume isn't being regarded as evil at the age of six years old, even if he did something wrong).

The older trope made it clear what the distinction was between it and Just Between You and Me, but the current trope doesn't and makes a previously clear line between the two tropes far more blurred than it used to be. On that note, George Washington isn't an example of the current trope (and may never have been), given that the story is that he was just testing out a birthday present hatchet he'd been given and damaged the tree in the process, but his father didn't punish him because he valued honesty more than the tree (which is certainly what we use the phrase "honesty is the best policy" for in real life, but the trope's use of the phrase is not based on the typical real life use). Ironically, his biographer might have been the better example of the original trope, given that the claim is that he explained to his publisher that he was inventing this story (and several others) to enhance Washington's virtues in the minds of the public, partially for profit and partially to create a role-model for people to follow.

Edited to add: the trope description being changed to specify that it's an evil plan (rather than the original "or" a Xanatos Gambit) specifically occurred very early on — somewhere between August 2009 and July 2010.

So, I'm a little confused about the scope of this trope. Is it villainous only, or has it become restricted from its original wider intention because the original used the at-that-time villainous Xanatos Gambit as an example reference (note, according to the wayback machine, Xanatos Gambit was much more villain-oriented back then than it is now).

Edited by Wyldchyld on Sep 10th 2023 at 12:19:23 PM