Trope Description Improvement Drive

The only important part of Leonine Contract's description is "Alice and Bob are making a bargain. Odds are good that Bob will regret it, even though Alice hasn't threatened to do anything." The rest feel like specific circumstances and motives about what could have caused it. I don't get the sense the description explains it's "absurdly one-sided unfair long-term contract".

Edited by Amonimus on Sep 13th 2023 at 10:29:48 PM

Also, is there a way to tighten up that page quote? It's nearly a wall of text all on its own.

Like this?

Discreet Drink Disposal

This is very much Truth in Television particularly at very formal events such as weddings, funerals and star-studded fundraisers which usually involve a different drink for every course and a lot of toasting. Toasting with a glass that isn't full is generally considered very impolite, but actually drinking all of those drinks would generally be dangerous to one's health.

Is this really all the common. I know drinking occurs at weddings, but is it that expected that people pretend to do so.

Gonna post again since it got lost in the ensuing discussion...

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

I feel like it's too specific yet too common to really be worth elaborating on.

Hm. I like your draft 2's first two paragraphs and Shadeblade's draft 3's last two paragraphs. But no objections with going with your full writeup, either.

There's a paragraph in Improbable Taxonomy Skills I would like to amend:

The problem is that referring to binomial names as "Latin names" is misleading for the reason given there. So I would suggest:

I like your version better.

Refusal of the Second Call links talking about the hero coming from humble beginnings to the trope Humble Beginnings, which is actually NOT that but about a low budget work with a higher budget sequel/spin-off. Could I change it to a link to From Zero to Hero which is actually the trope they are going for?

Looks like the right call, but really Humble Beginnings needs a rename. I went through some wicks and half were misused.

Mind if I swap "examples" and "related" lists at Big Bad? They are rather unusually placed.

Girlfriend in Canada: The whole paragraph about it being "a very American trope" seems misguided. The trope is about claiming to have a significant other with a Hand Wave for why other characters haven't met her yet; it doesn't require that she's literally in Canada. The whole waffle about languages is nonsense because being bilingual is not uncommon. I don't see anything worth saving and would just delete this paragraph.

Thoughts?

There's a wider problem, the whole description is written assuming USA-invoking-Canada is the only form it can take. It should be rewritten to be more general, noting that the most common form is another country that is not too far and has no language barrier (Britain/Ireland could be offered as one form).

and : agree, that whole long paragraph adds very little. Maybe we could keep a couple of sentences to explain why Canada is commonly the country used in US American media (adjacent; speaks the same language).

Maybe something like:

"The most common example, at least in English media, is of someone in the United States claiming the partner lives in Canada, as the two countries are adjacent, with lots of travel links, and speak the same language. In Britain, Ireland is the obvious choice, and in France it would be Belgium or maybe Switzerland. In countries with no neighbours that share a language, this is less likely to work, as it would bring up questions about how they make the relationship work through travel and language barriers, and the whole point of this ruse is to deflect questions away."

I like it, but does the trope occur this way in other countries? I only see it in American / Canadian works.

That's a good point. I admittedly don't consume a huge amount of media, but same here (and I'm not American).

That can also be because the wiki has a bias towards English-language media.

I mean, that's not impossible, but there's usually at least a robust anime section but we only have one anime example on the page and only three anime wicks; the rest are from American works primarily (I only said Canada because I know Total Drama did it once).

Sometimes tropes just are regional.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 20th 2023 at 2:52:31 PM

For Down to the Last Play, it's handy to list out various ways a sport or other competition can be won at the last minute, do you really have to imply that every game ends that way.

Irony has always had a Take That! against Alanis Morissette in the page description. This might be seen as gratuitous, especially since not even the Analysis page elaborates on it; there's just a link to a trope named after her song, and of course it isn't an example of that either.

Edited by Prfnoff on Sep 27th 2023 at 4:41:31 AM

its because of her song literally called 'Ironic' but I think thats over explaining the gag

Edited by Ultimatum on Sep 27th 2023 at 12:42:00 PM

The problem isnt why, the problem is that its needlessly bashy.

It's a dumb joke about a song from 1996. I don't think we'd lose anything of value by cutting it.