Trope Description Improvement Drive

Is there a thread for tropes with title problems? I feel like a lot of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character misuse comes from the title being seen as applying to any character, when the page states "This trope is about ignored characters with good potential who never receive the spotlight (or do so just once and then get removed or forgotten). It is not about leading characters who are not used the way you would like."

The problem is that renaming a trope requires TRS. We have a cleanup thread for They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot, maybe it could be used for that trope too. I have at various times copied some entries there to What Could Have Been, when the character was planned but doesn't appear, but I wasn't confident enough to erase the original.

I made a post about this, there are some tropes with vague titles though I would need to wick check them to see if they are actually being misused. Like The Place gives no indication that the place in question is the work's title, and Big Secret doesn't make it obvious that the secret is something different than the thing they are suspected of, but causes the character to act suspiciously.

On an unrelated note, does anyone agree that The Unfair Sex and Unprovoked Pervert Payback should reference each other on their descriptions?

The description of Hostile Animatronics is a little bare-bones and doesn't explain what would make a children's animatronic scary to begin with, or common features that scary fictional animatronics have. I propose adding something like this:

The origins of this trope lie in a phenomenon called the "uncanny valley." This is when something has human-like features, but doesn't imitate them closely enough, and so a person looking at it feels unsettled or frightened. Animatronics built for children are typically bright and colorful, and behave in a friendly manner, but sometimes lean too close to the valley and make children scream in terror instead of delight. They're also huge (taller than a grown man), strong, and made of metal, making it easy to imagine them accidentally harming a child. Even more so if they start malfunctioning, st-st-st-stuttering and g-g-glitching when they speak, or have their programming hijacked to turn them into killer robots.

Damaged animatronics turn up the scary factor and invoke the robotic version of Body Horror, with missing eyes, limbs, exposed wiring, etc. Long-forgotten, decayed animatronics at an abandoned amusement park or restaurant may behave like giant, super strong versions of a Vengeful Abandoned Toy. But, surprisingly often this kind of character turns out to be a Tragic Monster when sentient. After all, it was originally built to make children happy, but something went wrong and turned it into a killer.

Edited by Snowsky on Dec 27th 2023 at 1:54:46 AM

There's this paragraph on Main.Karma Houdini:

Note to Editors

To avoid this trope from being misused, if even just one bad or horrible thing happens to a villainous character or nasty jerk and/or if it is possible to defeat or kill them in a video game (like, for example, a fighting game if they are a playable character and/or the end boss), then they do not qualify for this trope. Karma Houdinis must have absolutely nothing bad to ever happen to them (and for it to be impossible to attack and defeat them in a video game (see Hopeless Boss Fight) to qualify for this trope.

The change was made by one troper back in 2022 without any sort of linked consensus on the matter. Am I okay with removing it?

Yeah, that's an absolutely ridiculously narrow reading and a character can suffer without necessarily having proper karma for their actions.

Yeah I didn't bat an eye on this until someone cut my Karma Houdini entry on Characters.Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team for Team Meanies, citing that paragraph as the reason.

Like I said in the ATT thread, there's plenty of ways that you can fight a character and the character can still go unpunished for their crimes.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Dec 27th 2023 at 2:11:56 AM

Deleted the note,for it serves no purpose.

x5: I like that write-up a lot. A huge improvement on the current article.

Thanks! (I’ve never been to this thread before. Do we need a certain number of tropers to agree that a change is good before we can put it there?)

when something is added without prior discussion without any form of census it can safely be deleted

Got brought up in the meta thread, but does Asshole Victim need to have a header with a link to it's cleanup thread? Seems a bit unnecessary since there are tropes with cleanup threads that get much more activity that don't have that, like Narm and Overshadowed by Controversy.

Want to ask again what I should do with School Bullying Is Harmless.

I've moved some of the walls of next to analysis page,jesus christ

I agree it's rather long. About type labels, they are discouraged because they encourage lack of context (and I see one example under "Magazines").

And I agree with the expansion of Hostile Animatronics. You can go ahead and change it.

Thank you guys!

Bumping my proposal for the Broken Base description.

Should Sequel Gap also inclue Remake to "does not apply"?

Honestly... Even with the recent cuts, School Bullying Is Harmless still reads like essentially an analysis page. I feel like the entire trope is pretty much a mess and seems to be used as some catch-all page for tropers to rant about their pet peeve. At least all of the "counter argument" bullet points and the note about William Shatner (??) can immediately go in my opinion, and the rest still needs a thorough rewrite.

There isn't much this thread can do to help if you think the "entire trope" is problematic.

x2 I'd suggest running a wick check to spot all the specific issues and then bringing it to the TRS. Regardless of whether it's the trope's flawed description's fault, it seems to have accrued several issues that fall outside of this thread's scope.

Permission to remove all of the random spoiler markup in the description of Spoiler Hound? I get that it's funny and all but it's damn annoying, especially since some blue-linked words are concealed too.

Got another one for y'all... I think.

Never done this before

America Won World War II

Description is bloated, overly long, and should probably be sent over to an Analysis page. Not sure what needs to be kept.

The cynic in me says that if you cut out the bloat your're left with the below

A form of Hollywood History in which a story implies or outright states that the United States single-handedly won World War II. Sometimes, it's unintentional; the viewpoint or focus is simply too narrow for the audience to be reminded of the bigger picture. Other times, though, it's a blatant example of Hollywood History.

However, there is a grain of truth to this trope, as almost all the the Soviet Union's heavy industry was located in the area Germany invaded. The Soviets had to relocate all their factories east, which left a massive gap in their production. Without American Lend-Lease aid, the Soviets would not have been able to hold back the Germans long enough to get their own production back online.

See also America Saves the Day, of which this is a sub-trope, and Hollywood History, of which that is a sub-trope.

Note: This trope specifically deals with World War II. It does not apply to any other war, particularly modern conflicts.

The description of Poverty Food says that it's "usually portrayed as an unappetizing, bleak and gloppy substance" I think it could use a short list of other foods usually eaten by people in poverty, like this:

• Bread, the harder and drier the better.
• Plain rice, especially in Asian countries.
• Plain water with nothing else.
• Certain “poor people” vegetables like beans, cabbage, and potatoes.
• Anything fished out of the garbage that’s still kinda edible.
• For the truly desperate, semi-edible but bitter-tasting plants like acorns and dandelions, insects, and rats.

The description of Public Domain Character should be revised now that its doom-and-gloom predictions haven't come to pass. I don't feel knowledgeable enough about the subject to be the best person to do this, but I could give it a go if no-one else steps up.