Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki

FandomSpecificPlot.Harry Potter gets kinda bashy, to the point where almost every example has a snarky aside or pothole.

On Creator.Gwyneth Paltrow, the word "entrepreneur" is potholed to Snake Oil Salesman, which I'm pretty sure counts as bashing.

Yeah, even if I do consider the comparison appropriate, it is bashing

Edited by fishysaur on Nov 7th 2021 at 6:04:46 PM

I hope no one minds me bringing up some examples from TastesLikeDiabetes.Animated Films:

• The Lorax has shades of this. Examples include some of the woodland critters that the Once-ler meets (especially Pipsqueak) and some of the musical numbers like "Let It Grow," which can really come across as sappy and unnecessary. However, the biggest offender has to be that little three year-old girl that gets an entire verse to herself in "Let It Grow," and is basically just there for people in and outside of the movie to adore. UGH, if that doesn't qualify for this trope, nothing does.

• DreamWorks Animation thought in the early 2010s that doing sentimental films á la Disney (totally inverting the studio's previous formula) would be a good idea. Due to some negative receptions from audiences, they snapped out of it and brought comedy back on the front (although far less gag-based than before).

That last one doesn't even explain how the films are Tastes Like Diabetes...

Honestly, I think the page has more complaining, but I'm not sure...

Edited by fragglelover on Nov 7th 2021 at 8:26:56 AM

Both can be cut. The Lorax is too totally snarky to be Tastes Like Diabetes on the whole and the scene with the little girl only lasts mere seconds.

So having idly clicked on it after having seen it linked today... why the fuck does Opinion Myopia even have examples? Virtually everything on the page is general, and 95 percent of it is strawmanning both sides of an argument involving Vocal Minorities. I guess the latter part might be an attempt to be even-handed, but in practice it just comes across as a page purely dedicated to complaining about any and all fans you don't like. It would make far more sense as simply a definitional page.

Edited by nrjxll on Nov 7th 2021 at 12:33:50 PM

Opinion Myopia has examples??

I remember someone tried to nuke that page a while back. It was restored, but it seems like nothing about it has changed since. Surprised it took this long to be brought up again.

It'll probably need to go to TRS, but it'll be a quick fix that I doubt anyone would be against.

What Measure Is a Non-Human? suffers from a lot of complaining as far as I'm aware. Here's just one example:

• Possibly the most WTF example of this is the episode "Donatello's Duplicate", where Donatello creates a clone of himself specifically to have it do his chores for him, and treats the duplicate as his slave. When the clone turns against him and becomes evil, it gets wiped out of existence. And it's apparently perfectly okay by all the others. You know, the good guys.

Fixable by scratching out the first and last parts of the entry.

Yeah... a project for whoever wants to wade through all that, but glancing at various subpages, there are numerous good examples, like the large majority.

Edited by Tabs on Nov 8th 2021 at 9:52:54 AM

That's right. I think a general look at the trope's subpages is still in order, though...

I agree that most entries do constitute, but I was only talking about the tone they're written.

Edited by BigJimbo on Nov 8th 2021 at 11:38:20 AM

The Incredible Melting Man has a good part of the description complain about the bad parts of the movie.

This paragraph from The Incredible Melting Man is just shoehorning all the complaints one could have about the movie into the description. I think that maybe the part about the director initially wanting to make the film a parody could be kept, but I am inclined to cut the rest.

"Okay, now for the bad stuff: The movie is also poorly written, dimly lit, loaded with uninteresting characters, and contains an extremely bad and unsatisfying ending in which nearly everyone with a speaking part dies and the Incredible Melting Man melts. Incredibly. And is thrown away by a janitor. The director wanted to do the movie as a parody, which could have indeed worked—several things left in the final film even hint at this original plan—but sadly, the studio forced him to turn it into a straight horror flick, resulting in the ludicrous mess moviegoers wound up seeing."

Edit: I was on the previous page by mistake and didn't see that this had just been brought up, whoops.

Edited by Zarina on Nov 9th 2021 at 11:49:06 AM

Funny how we both ended up finding it around the same time, though.

Perhaps it's a sign, haha.

Here's an attempt at rewriting the paragraph to excise all the complaining. I consulted Wikipedia and its sources to get some more information on the purported Executive Meddling and its results without getting bashy.

"The director, William Sachs, initially intended for the film to be a parody of other sci-fi horror films, but it became more of a straight horror movie during production. Several scenes were re-shot or altered without Sachs's input; some moments from the more comedic original script remain intact, however, resulting in the surreal tone of the film."

Looks good.

Here's a college graduate thesis on Metroid's Dork Age:

• After being revived to universal acclaim through the Metroid Prime Trilogy by Retro Studios, the Metroid franchise stumbled into one hard with Team Ninja's Metroid: Other M, which was widely maligned by the fanbase for its more streamlined and linear gameplay, unconventional control scheme, and notorious storyline that many felt did a disservice to the character of series protagonist Samus Aran, as well as committing a second major sin in hinting that the Prime Trilogy might be Canon Discontinuity. The game was met with middling reviews and by and large alienated the Western fanbase, becoming an outright sales flop on the Western market, and didn't do any better to the Japanese market it was meant to appeal to. This resulted in Nintendo letting the Metroid series lie low, with co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto (who was heavily involved in Other M, to the point of being directly responsible for the more controversial design decisions) temporarily abandoning the series.
  Things went From Bad to Worse when Nintendo followed up Other M six years later with Metroid Prime: Federation Force, a Lighter and Softer spin-off game that took significant steps away from the series (focusing on the Federation instead of Samus, who is otherwise hardly in the game outside of a few cameos; utilizing a more simplified and deformed artstyle, and being a team co-op shooter, as opposed to being a Metroidvania game, among other things). Fan reaction was predominantly negative, with the fanbase at large accusing Nintendo to being absolutely deaf to what they wanted from a new Metroid game, with some fans even going as far to call for the game's cancellation; the backlash culminated in Federation Force, on top of receiving weak reviews from critics, bombing even harder in sales than Other M did. Not helping matters was the DMCA takedown of the positively received Fan Remake, Another Metroid 2 Remake, which happened right around Federation Force's release.
  Thankfully, one year later, interest in the series was revived when not one, but two Metroid games that had Samus as the lead as well as two Metroid series amiibo were announced at E3 2017, with the first one — Samus Returns — being released later that September to widespread critical praise, and managing to restore a lot of faith in the franchise with fans. The second game was none other than Metroid Prime 4, though that game would end up not releasing for a while due to it hitting some development difficulties that resulted in Nintendo completely restarting its production in 2019. However, the reveal and release of Metroid Dread^note Significant for 3 reasons: it had languished in Development Hell since the days of the Nintendo DS, it finally follows up on Metroid Fusion after nearly 2 decades and concludes the story arc started with the original game, and it's the first completely original, non-spin-off Metroid game since Metroid: Other M in 2021 to strong reception and sales, which will hopefully put the Dork Age to an end for the forseeable future.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 10th 2021 at 1:28:25 PM

Yeah, I'm not reading all of that. It can be trimmed down immensely (does it even count as a Dork Age if a franchise that's been good up to that point has one awful game and then goes into a long hiatus?)

Perhaps it's because I'm not familiar with the trope, but this example of Sensory Abuse seems a bit bashy:

• Pibby: The trailer prominently uses the ear-grating sound of static for horror, punctuating the monster's presence by blasting out your audio device. Best shown in the scene right after Fred Flinstone is assimilated, where the audio suddenly cranks up and shreds away at your eardrums as several corrupted characters emerge from the glitchy mass and stare at the camera.

One bad game, then a hiatus, and then an even worse game; and the C&D on a fangame was also a factor (as not only was the reception of the latest games negative, but Nintendo didn't even let fans make their own games due to their protective stance).

I agree with a trim, but not a full removal.

I don't know, that doesn't sound very bashy.

I agree to a cut down rather than a cut.

Allen Gregory is loaded with complaining. Edit: I went ahead and cleaned it up.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Nov 10th 2021 at 7:21:05 AM

It's hard to say Metroid was in a Dork Age post-Other M when the franchise was basically dead for 6 years. It'd cut the entire thing.

Does this entry on YMMV.Big City Greens seem bashy, or is it just me?

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • There's a number of background characters that would've gotten any chance of being more notable without being used once before disappearing in the mists of time. In most cases, as a newly-introduced character, who is a voiced by guest star usually appears once, while the same happened to those not voiced by a guest star.
  • Poor Gloria. She may be part of the main cast, but hardly ever gets used in any merchandise, and has yet to appear in a single short or have her own musical number. Even after moving in with the Greens, she rarely gets involved in any outdoor activities with them. Not after following the coffee shop that she worked was sold.
  • Poor Nancy. She may be the toughest of the Greens, but remains the only member to this day who is unaware of Chip Whistler's plot to force them out of town. Even though he's at least aware of her existence, she has not once seen him face-to-face, even in the unexpectedly dark Society-on-Edge Episode of Season 2. She does get a much bigger role in the next episode, however.
  • And where the heck was Chip's dad during the events of "Chipocalypse Now"? Did he even see Chip try to murder Cricket and his family on live TV??
  • Even after her Relationship Upgrade with Cricket, Gabriella has rarely been used, as to the point to as why she even there when writers rarely made her anything but interesting.