Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki

There's a similar example on AndTheFandomRejoiced.Nickelodeon:

• There was so much rejoice when longtime member Cyma Zarghami stepped down from Nickelodeon, allowing for more opportunities of the channel to fix its mistakes that it been suffering since she took over as President. While current president Brian Robbins, who had previously produced several shows for Nick during its golden days, has been getting mixed receptions from longtime fans, there is no doubt his management is full of surprises that will easily win back the older viewers as seen below.

Any updates on the Ship-to-Ship Combat post here? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13327578050A72722200&page=350#comment-8744

Spoiler Alert: No, he did shit the bed even worse than Cyma. But yeah. We should make a "You cant be glad someone was fired" rule.

There's no need I think. There's already a Ship-to-Ship Combat tree on the page detailing a couple of individual cases. The user who made the entry I brought up for some reason made a separate tree for their entry.

Any additional thoughts on those And The Fandom Rejoiced examples or should they be removed?

I'd say remove it both for being unnecessarily bashy and also a violation of Examples Are Not Current.

There’s another negative example on the Nickelodeon page:

• Since Memorial Day 2013, NICK STUDIO 10 IS FINALLY GONE!!! Aside from a September 2013 best-of special of the Sam & Cat segments, it's nowhere to be found, and The Other Wiki has confirmed it's cancelled. So yes, it is officially gone from the airwaves without any sign of returning.
• So, Sam & Cat is...

Yeah, that can go.

Speaking of Sam & Cat, I just took a look at its pages and there's plenty of complaining there about the show just existing. YMMV.Sam And Cat has an entire section that seems mostly negative from before the show even aired, which feels un-kosher. Should that part of the page be moved or purged?

Edited by Zarina on Mar 9th 2022 at 12:22:28 PM

I mean, if the reactions were legit prerelease reactions, I don't see a point in removing them.

I feel like we should talk more about a formal anti-complaining rule on ATFR.

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 9th 2022 at 1:31:27 PM

Fair enough, I don't know enough to say one way or the other how legit they are. I was just surprised to see a whole section dedicated to it.

Edited by Zarina on Mar 9th 2022 at 12:31:58 PM

I seem to remember a time when it was common to have a pre-release section of the YMMV page. I assumed we stopped doing that to prevent pre-release complaining.

I thought we stopped doing that to prevent Speculative Troping?

Yes to both, it's for various reasons: to stop premature complaining, to stop simply troping rumours and leaks, and to stop the page from simply turning into speculation.

Plus, there are plenty of things that simply cannot be gauged until the work is out. Some things, like Tainted by the Preview or Memetic Mutation can definitely be pre-release, but not things like the Hindsight tropes or most audience reactions.

Sam & Cat was a spin off of two other shows, so I can see there being a lot of pre-release opinions about it. Personally I'm cautious about adding YMMV examples to kids' shows because online opinions tend to overrepresent older viewers, making it hard to know what's an opinion held by the audience and what's one held by a Vocal Minority.

Here’s a section from And the Fandom Rejoiced that had complaining natter added to it:

• Oh geez, The Ren & Stimpy Show is back? Let me guess, it's- WAIT JOHN K IS FINALLY RETURNING AND ALLOWED TO WORK ON HIS SHOW AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 13 YEARS?! AND IT'S ACTUALLY A GROWN UP VERSION OF THE SHOW FOR ALL OF THE ORIGINAL FANS TO COMPLETE WITH EDGY CONTENT LIKE SOUTH PARK AND FAMILY GUY? YES YES YES!
  • Oh, wait. Never mind, everyone hates it and John K. turned out to be a scumbag.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Mar 9th 2022 at 9:29:33 AM

We can zap the complaining from it.

Just zap it entirely. We don't need eye-bleeding CAPS LOCK examples, especially not ones gushing about a universally panned show and a sexual abuser, even before anyone knew about it.

What the hell is complaining doing in a page meant for gushing?

It was added a few months ago by ~Puppet Fido.

Complaining sometimes gets added after an upcoming thing that was being gushed about didn’t live up to expectations. This happened with Teen Titans Go! and The Powerpuff Girls (2016), but the complaining was removed.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Mar 9th 2022 at 11:16:38 AM

I think I brought up Translation Style Choices here once already but it never caught on enough to be corrected into something less whiny.

• Bleach is particularly egregious. Only three recurring terms in the dub were translated: shinigami (to Soul Reaper, likely to distance itself from the western conception of the idea); the Gotei 13 (to the 13 Court Guard Squads); and "reiatsu" (to "spiritual energy" or "spiritual pressure"). Everything else — shikai and bankai, zanpakuto, spell names and incantations, even wordplay gags about the proper usage of one's first name and philosophical metaphors regarding old parables — was left pretty much completely intact. In a rare inversion of how this tends to go, the fansubs often adapted more terms than the official version.
  • "Soul Reaper" is creator Tite Kubo's preferred translation of shinigami. It even appears on some Japanese Bleach merchandise.
  • In more recent episodes you can move that down to two: reiatsu is it at least part of the time left untranslated now.
  • To be fair, the Bleach dub also changes the naming conventions, and has half-Japanese half-Mexican Yasutora "Chad" Sado going by his westernized name (he's called "Chado", a portmanteau of his Western and family names, in the Japanese). It is still one of the most literal of translations.
• .hack//, even to the point of characters being unsure of how a character's written name is "read". Not spelled, read.
• Death Note's dub drifts into this direction. The public's name for Light ("Kira", an Engrish rendering of the English word "killer") is left intact, as is shinigami. The Translation Convention also appears to be in full effect, with no attempt at a whitewash. This is sort of necessary: consider how often tiny details that involve language (especially how names are written) can be extremely important. However, the literal translations can make things confusing sometimes; at one point Misa notes that Light's name also means "moon". Unless someone knows Japanese (and as a result knows that the symbol used for Light's name can, with a different pronunciation, mean "moon") this line is likely to confuse them.
  • The sub does this at times too — notably, a saying that we would consider equivalent to "an eye for an eye" is literally translated to "one time is one time", leaving some members of the audience scratching their heads.
    • The Viz manga does that too, as "once is once!" Members of the audience on this very wiki were still confused.
  • The original work goes out of its way to point out Kira is derived from the word killer, so it's extremely likely that having them keep the name Kira was in respect for that.
    • The Viz translation even spells "Kira" as "Killa" in chapter 21, in the notes written by prisoners - though the original uses the standard katakana spelling, and when we first see the note in volume 1, it's still spelt as Kira. Maybe L fiddled the note to throw Light off.
• The ADV sub of the Elfen Lied anime tries to translate everything as literally as possible. A lot of the dialogue sounds stilted as a result, and sometimes the translation is so literal that it mangles the line's original meaning. The fansubbed version and the English dub actually have a more natural-sounding translation.
  • One problem is that the subtitles always try to replicate the original sentence structure, even when it doesn't flow well. For instance, Tomoo gleefully says, "I heard about it!" before specifying what he heard about.
    • Also, Tomoo's line "You're not human, you're more like a demon's child!" is completely misunderstood as him asking Lucy whether her parents were human.
  • Then there's Lucy's line to her puppy, which was rendered as, "If it wasn't for you, I might have been discouraged long ago."
• The English dub of Lucky Star is this in spades, including retention of all honorifics and zero adaptation of references to shows or products that just do not exist in North America. As for the other aspects of its Western release, see further down.
• Older Than Print: Most early translations of Latin poetry into the vernacular.
• Although a less extreme example of this type, Star Ocean: The Second Story for the PSX was widely derided for its bland, overly literal translation, resulting in conversations that barely made sense and stripped out most of the entertainment value in favor of literalism.
• Persona 3 kept food and place names intact, along with Japanese honorifics like -chan and -san. Did not cause undue confusion, as most fans of the game would understand what those mean anyway.
  • The sequel Persona 4 did the same thing. Atlus went as far as including a glossary including all the non-translated terms.
  • Persona 5 is forced to continue keeping the Japanese food and place names, as this time around the game takes place in the real world city of Tokyo, rather than a fictional Japanese town.
• Fate/stay night hovers along the sliding scale here; the anime drifted more toward Woolseyism, while the otherwise appreciated fan translation by Mirror Moon erred on the side of a "Blind Idiot" Translation.
  • For one example, Mirror Moon often literally translates the expression, "the time the date changes", which Western viewers would understand clearer as simply "midnight".

Not just complaining, there's also natter and misindentation. I'm not sure what to suggest other than a rewrite from scratch.