Removing complaining, bashing and other negativity from the wiki

Lip Lock is utterly filled with complaining. Want some examples?

• This is presumably the reason why the Tower of God anime's English dub has more wordy lines of dialogue than the English subtitles have while often adding nothing informative and sometimes straying further from the source material.
• Hungarian voice actress Melinda Major, who had voiced a character in Nana, cited this as her reason for quitting anime dubs. Trying to emote to anime mouth movements (or in her words, "triangles that sometimes move") was simply way too frustrating for her. She loves dubbing western animation, though.
• 4Kids's Sonic X dub had a little problem with the term "Chaos Control" — in Japanese, its pronunciation is slightly longer (Kaosu Kontorōru), so they always needed to add something to it. When characters used it, it became "Chaos Control, now!" — a little awkward, but works fine. When it was mentioned in conversation, however, things could get a little weirder (check Sonic X's Dub Induced Plothole entry for more information).
• The infamous Mega Man's death scene from Mega Man NT Warrior. As dying, Rockman originally had, as final words, "Ne...tto...kun...". As far as adapting goes, this was a tricky line for the dubbers. First, because Netto's English name is the monosyllabic "Lan", and second, because the lips were carefully animated in said scene. The dub opted for the "De...le...ted...", which just seems random and loses most of the emotion.
• Digimon Adventure usually uses only one or two voice actors to say something in crowd shots; the rest of the scene is completely silent. In the Saban dub, on the other hand, they usually got a handful of voice actors for those scenes, which resulted in the crowd scenes sounding more natural, although harder to hear the "important" facts.
• The English dub of Revolutionary Girl Utena was a hallmark offender. Not only did the characters often have long, awkward pauses between most of their lines, occasionally rushed and abnormal dialogue, and flat-out not having the words sync up properly, but there are numerous instances (most notably, whenever the Student Council rides the elevator to the top of the school) where entire lines of dialogue are just cut-and-pasted from episode to episode (though given the Stock Footage nature of the series, this actually somewhat played into the theme). They did manage to improve somewhat for the movie.

Why do we even have it? This is not a trope, this is a byproduct of dubbing but its not intended. It's like Off-Model.

I apologize for this wall of text. I actually want to start the process to get rid of the trope entirely this is too much.

I think the entire tropes section for Ken Penders needs to be removed, as it is all complaining, except for the Homage bit. Even the video link is simply footage of a fan swearing at Penders.

And this is from someone whom doesn't even care for the writer.

Edited by Monsund on Feb 3rd 2024 at 3:28:03 AM

I don't think the concept of the trope is too complainy (it's just something that happens like other translation tropes), but people definitely use it for complaining most of the time. Idk, maybe retool into a more general "dubs make dialogue changes based on sentence structure / syllable count"?

I also find it ironic how the first example complains about the dub not being concise, yet has a lot of word cruft.

I love this post. I hope we can get rid of all that whining.

I'm detecting massive negativity on some of the subpages for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, namely YMMV, Tear Jerker and even main pages. For instance, this is what it says for They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The narrative almost completely brushes past Batman's activities after Knight, even though what came in between — Bruce meeting Superman, being convinced to accept new allies, emerging from hiding to join the Justice League, rebuilding his image as a public-facing hero — would've been a monumental, life-changing decision on par with the Knightfall Protocol, with enough story possibilities to fill its own game. A not uncommon sentiment among Arkham fans was that they'd rather have played that game than the one they got. Brainiac's brainwashing of the Justice League is absolute; barring Wonder Woman using the Lasso of Truth to get the Flash to answer how to undo the brainwashing (they can't), there are no moments of resistance, and the Leaguers don't even get a Dying as Yourself moment. As this is the first appearance of these characters besides brief mentions in the other games, we never get to see how these characters usually act in the flesh. The story immediately putting the kibosh on any attempt to save the Justice League robs us of potential conflict between Waller/Task Force X and Wonder Woman, who is actively trying to save her friends and teammates.

Vanity Publishing has a huge issue with snark and complaining (and note the praising of a review as "brilliantly hilarious" in one example, which is borderline Reviews Are the Gospel). Here's just a few examples.

• The Adventures of Archie Reynolds is a supposed children's book that suffers from horrible dialogue, Beige Prose, very repetitive writing (several times a character thinks about doing something, says what they're going to do, and then does it), nonsensical plot elements (like a Gang of Bullies who talk like pirates), and weird Contemplate Our Navels moments. The author attempted to promote his book by using multiple accounts on Amazon and elsewhere to write nearly identical glowing reviews.
• The Great American Parade is an attempted political satire by retired English professor Robert Burrows, who had it vanity-published in 2002. It's about a plucky band of college students who set out to stop a huge parade by George W. Bush to thank all the evil corporate robber barons who got him elected; in the process, they also end the war in Iraq and undo the Bush tax cuts. It features such brilliant dialog as this gem (spoken by a character immediately after witnessing the events of 9/11): "What an unimaginable tragedy! It will take a great deal of unity and hard work to recover from this crippling blow!" A Washington Post review called it "the worst novel ever published in the English language".
• Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs is a hilarious piece of vanity-published gold. It's the only children's book in which a non-anthropomorphic horse overdoses on marijuana, with an illustration of his family (of horses) crying over him. The surreal illustrations and repetitive, Anvilicious writing seal the deal. While marijuana is toxic to horses, this is probably not what the author was going for.
• Night Travels of the Elven Vampire by LaVern Ross is one of the most notorious examples, such that it was originally thought to have been a parody of vanity publishing (à la Atlanta Nights). Once it was discovered to have been a serious attempt at writing, it became the subject of multiple scathing reviews, some of them brilliantly hilarious. Notorious for its over-the-top lead, laughably bad language, and bizarre graphic sex scenes, it generated at least two Internet memes. Amazon eventually dropped the book, only for Ross to vanity-publish a nearly identical "re-imagined" version, Eternity of Blood, under the pen name Valena Graham.

Quite honestly, I don't think anything on there needs a description; we can just go with a straightforward list.

I think the YMMV page should probably be locked until August. Hopefully the flames will die down by that point

Edited by Loekman3 on Feb 3rd 2024 at 11:06:23 PM

So should we lock the YMMV page for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League?

I agree.

An alternative suggestion could be to make Vanity Publishing In-Universe Examples Only. I think the definition is useful to have, and it does show up in fiction, but I don't think we need a list of vanity-published works.

Alternatively, we can make Vanity Published Works part of So Bad, It's Horrible with very strict guidelines, and keep the rest of the page in-universe only.

I don't see the point of that. If the works conform to our requirements, they'd go in Horrible.Literature, same as any other books.

That's not how SBIH works, Dongwa.

This isn't so extreme a problem as to demand extreme responses.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 4th 2024 at 12:29:28 PM

And vanity published books can still be good. Assuming all real life examples would be SBIH is honestly more complainy.

IDK if it needs to be a pure titles-only index but the only context any of these truly need is just how they were published professionally.

Edited by mightymewtron on Feb 4th 2024 at 12:34:50 PM

Holy Terror:

• Divorced Installment: The story was originally meant to be a Batman story set in the "Millerverse" called Holy Terror, Batman!, a nod to Robin's "Holy (whatever!)" Mad Libs Catch Phrase from the '60s Batman series. (Miller was probably not aware of an Elseworlds tale already called Batman: Holy Terror.) Supposedly, Frank Miller decided to take the book to Legendary because he realized it was "not a Batman story" and the hero was "much closer to Dirty Harry than Batman". Though given that the story still takes place in what is very obviously a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Batman mythos, it's commonly speculated that in actuality DC objected to the book's content and didn't want Batman depicted as an Islamophobic sociopath.

This reads as speculation and I don't like implying that a creator is lying (at least without more proof).

Yeah, the bolded part can go if there's no source that actually backs such speculation up.

Well if we cant make Lip Lock not a trope or do clean up, would it be right of me to at least add positive examples? I think that would be a nice balance at least.

• Episode 21 of the Futari wa Pretty Cure dub had Kiriya telling Honoka (Hannah in the dub) about being part of the Dark Zone. The line "You wont... See Me... Around School... Anymore" was particularly stilted but the fact that the actor was good enough and that Kiriya was filled with regret and hesitation saved the scene.

That might fit better under Narm Charm. I don't think we should add praise to these entries, it is a mistake of production, but we should avoid snark and "offender". And that Digimon Adventure entry is just not an example.

Then I suggest we just get rid of all the examples. If its "Not a trope" and we cant even have positive examples to balance out the bad apples I dont see any worth in this trope keeping examples.

Also, I knew people would consider it gushing but the gushing is keep to a bare minimum and also balanced by a bit of criticism.

EDIT: Lastly, this is not a production mistake. Its more like a byproduct that is unavoidable when dubbing something. Not an actual mistake.

Edited by AegisP on Feb 6th 2024 at 4:39:16 AM

I'd be happy with an example sectionectomy.

That way, we'd retain the definition, which is a demonstrable thing that happens in dubbing.

How can I make an example sectionectomy happen? This trope is filled with whining.

Wick check, then TRS thread.

Is there a tutorial for wick checks?

How to Do a Wick Check

When that's done and you've proven the main issue of the article, follow the instructions in the description of TRS Queue and add the writeup you intend to write as the opening post of your would-be thread at the end of the folder list below.

Edited by MyFinalEdits on Feb 6th 2024 at 10:55:54 AM

Quotes.Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 has a quote about the game from a critic, which talks about how bad the game is. I assume this isn't allowed?