Trope Description Improvement Drive

Pretty much. In high fantasy elsewhere, they're more like to be depicted in a more shamanic way (European shamanism, that is). In modern settings, they'll be depicted as more neo-pagan. Sometimes they're given a hermetic spin.

This paragraph in Where Everybody Knows Your Flame is wildly inaccurate to what an actual gay bar looks like. I can say this as someone who goes to gay bars a lot. I feel like it was written by a straight person who wanted to go "see, these filthy homosexuals aren't so filthy after all, they're just like us!"

OK,so if you feel its inaccurate you can

1)Rewrite it

or

remove the line entirely,how much would be lost by removing it?

I wouldn't assume bad faith here. It's probably either someone recounting an experience from visiting a gay bar once that did function like this (and assuming that it applies across the board), or someone who hasn't that's just trying to guess based on their limited knowledge. Nothing in that paragraph implies any sort of bigotry.

Regardless, if the paragraph is inaccurate, it should be either corrected (by someone with appropriate knowledge) or removed.

Okay, I was probably assuming bad faith where there was none, I apologise. I've had a rough couple of days so I've been a bit irritable. I'll have a look at the page tomorrow when I've hopefully had a good night's sleep, and see how I can fix it.

I have a counterargument for the heading of Adapted Out deciding to say that it overlaps with The Ghost, which apparently came about from users confusing the tropes.

My understanding is that Adapted Out refers to a character not appearing in the adaptation at all and not even having the slightest indication of existing.

Since The Ghost is about characters who are mentioned but never physically seen, I argue that it cannot overlap with Adapted Out, as a character being mentioned in a work still counts as the character existing even if they are never seen physically.

The rectification I propose is to revise the heading for Adapted Out to instead include The Ghost among the other tropes compared to Adapted Out, like Chuck Cunningham Syndrome and Demoted to Extra, with the clarification that The Ghost is when a character is mentioned but never seen, and that a character from the source material not even being acknowledged in the adaptation is when the more likely trope being used is Adapted Out.

As we've had a few issues with docudramas and non-fiction documentaries, I posted to the Nightmare Fuel cleanup thread suggesting that we add something like this to the "Notes to editors" folder in the trope page decription:

• Nightmare fuel is No Real Life Examples, Please! and examples for real events reported in documentaries or other non-fiction works aren't normally permitted. Examples for docudramas and historical fiction are allowed, but must focus on things as they are presented within the work, not the real events they adapt.

Looks good to me.

Looks great!

Your Mind Makes It Real has a bunch of off topic digressions about how devices that create the trope's effect "dont make sense" and are unrealistic, all of which is, I think, beyond the scope of describing what the trope itself is about. These two paragraphs seem unnecessary.

"Why would such a device even exist is rarely touched. Needless to say, the very first precedent of a machine-brain connection killing or maiming the user should result in public backlash and double or triple failsafes (plus lawsuits). Some stories work around this by stating that it's that very first time, or that it's a legally enforced rule, like, against hackers. In the latter case, seemingly the lawmakers were not aware that the most dangerous hackers could and would design or reverse-engineer safe variants of the device, making the whole idea pointless. The aspect of automatic capital punishment for something as trivial as stealing money from a credit card is also not touched.

Let us be very clear: there is no obvious or immediately compelling reason that dying in a dream or hallucination would actually kill you, unless you are really gullible and you live in a world where the Nocebo Effect is much more powerful than it is in real life. Maybe if the pain transferred is so real and intense that it causes you to die from the shock, but then again, it has to be designed that way deliberately. Obviously, magic spells can do as they like, but the only reason that you would be actually harmed by dying in a VR simulation would be if the VR simulator was intentionally and specifically designed to murder the operator. This makes sense if it's part of a Death Trap (insofar as a death trap ever makes sense), but usually this is some commercial, publicly-available system, often with no stated purpose beyond simply playing games "

Definitely remove the first one at least.

The second paragraph also seems pretty unnecessary.

Maybe keep the part about magic? As is, i think the description not only has a lot of natter and "but this would NEVER work in the real world", but it leans a bit too hard into trying to define the trope as purely technological in scope. And that's not really what the trope is all about.

Is there any reason for Rooftop Confrontation to have this restriction?

Don't think so.

Me neither.

The description of But We Used a Condom! seems to complain more about the trope's inaccuracies (down to calling it a Broken Aesop with Unfortunate Implications right in paragraph 2) than actually describing the trope.

Following on from the Nightmare Fuel post further up the page, and as part of the same wider non-fiction Moments cleanup, any concerns if we add this similar statement to the end of the Tear Jerker description?

Can the following be added to "Forgotten Trope" article?

Some tropes can become Forgotten Tropes before becoming Discredited or Dead Horse Tropes first. Sometimes the usage of a trope just fade away quietly. Some trends were overlooked at the time of their popularity and are only recognized as a trope only in retrospect, thus avoiding the backlash.

Any comments on this? As mentioned, the Moments thread seemed supportive, but I'll give it another day or so before taking any action.

I support your edit

The third paragraph of Friendship on the Set suggests comparing and contrasting this Trivia trope with some NRLEP tropes. Should we remove them from that paragraph, or does this often happen on Trivia tropes' pages?

Scorpion People says:

But it's not a centaur? Remove? Replace with Mix-and-Match Critters? Replace totally with calling it a Vertebrate with Extra Limbs subtrope instead?

Centaur is already a subtrope of Vertebrate with Extra Limbs and the Our Centaurs Are Different intro includes this:

...so I'm not convinced scorpion folk are out of scope for that trope, as written.

The problem here is that scorpion-men shouldn't be out-of-scope for Our Centaurs Are Different. However, scorpions are invertebrates while people are vertebrates, and OCAD is listed a sub-trope of Vertebrate with Extra Limbs. So, would invertebrate options like scorpions count on the grounds that the "man part" is vertebrate-based? What if we're talking about some kind of alien creature that "scorpion" based but even the "humanoid part" classifies in the setting as "invertebrate"?

Spider People does seem to suggest a split in its trope description where certain kinds of Spider People wouldn't overlap with Our Centaurs Are Different, but any that are basically going to be "centaur-like", as in a "human-type" part + a spider-type part, would count as Our Centaurs Are Different, too. However, it's really not clear on what it imagines wouldn't count as "centaur-like" given its overall description. I therefore think both Spider People and Scorpion People have a similar problem in needing to decide exactly whether they're sub-tropes of Our Centaurs Are Different, or whether they can have examples that are different enough in make-up that they wouldn't count as "centaur-like" despite the trope descriptions.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 25th 2023 at 5:58:16 PM