Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

If Fair for Its Day having real life examples leads to examples basically justifying the murder of gay people then it should not have real life examples

Re Arch-Enemy: I think there being an institutions and organizations folder indicates a problem. Also it's worth noting that this first came to my attention in the ROCEJ thread. It's a characterization trope between the hero and rival / villain but (1) RL does not have heroes, and (2) RL people are not grouped together in pairs in this way. Another way of phrasing (2) is "Real life lacks a narrative," which characterization tropes generally (but not always) need.

Just popping because I happened to spot that School Bullying Is Harmless is on Sandbox.Keep Real Life Examples, but doesn't actually have a real life folder. Anyone know what that's about?

e: ... And while I'm here, +1 on salting, at the very least, the religious examples on Fair for Its Day. Dunno if "real life examples are okay except this specific kind" is a level of granularity worth bothering with.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Jun 16th 2019 at 2:28:19 AM

If Fridge Horror doesn't allow Real Life examples, then does that mean the same should be for Fridge Brilliance?

Edited by FridgeGuy2016 on Jun 18th 2019 at 5:18:18 AM

Catching up on stuff, finally...

What's up with the "(CLOSED)" thing to mark crowner items that have already been decided, instead of using strikethrough? I ctrl-F'd every thread page since my last visit a year or so ago, and the only references to "closed" that show (without expanding the vote items) are in the crowner description.

Did I miss something?

Strikethrough markup doesn't work anymore. I tried it in the website cleanup thread after a page in the crowner got cut and it made the text invisible, so I had to add "(CLOSED)" to the crowner text instead.

Edit: To clarify, it still works in posts. It just doesn't work in crowners for some reason.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 19th 2019 at 6:02:41 AM

Well, now that I'm back, a bit of voting stuff to catch up on things that have been pending for a while now. Everything's been live for at least 48 hours.

Currently pending:

Most likely to be zapped:

• Galactic Conqueror: 5.33:1 (13/3)
• Tautological Templar: 3.67:1 (11/3)
• Dark World: 5:1 (10/2)
• Arch-Enemy: 2.67:1 (8/3)

Borderline:

• Fair for Its Day: 2:1 (8/4)

Not likely to be zapped:

• Amusing Injuries: 1.43:1 (10/7)
• Terminally Dependent Society: 1.29:1 (9/7)
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: 1:1.14 (7/8)
• Macho Camp: 1:1.14 (7/8)

Regarding Fair for Its Day, isn't "bound to attract controversy" one of the things that we've been steering away from over the years, listing something for what it might do? Clean up the existing problem children, yes, but I'm not personally all that keen on making it NRLEP unless post-cleanup there's more of the same kind of junk added.

And on an unrelated note, am I the only one seeing "Add fdassdNew" for the label on the new entry button at the bottom when the current options list is expanded?

Re: Fair for Its Day: The ATT thread that started it all has a strong consensus that the controversial examples don't count as real-life examples, making its listing here moot.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jun 19th 2019 at 8:47:46 AM

How did that thread start it all? It alludes to a different trope for different reasons. The only thing that connects the issues is my strong dislike to using misinformation in order to excuse slave owners.

The issue with religous examplex here is that they mostly refer to the laws and customs of the Isrealites, which is Real Life for all intents and purposes. Heck, some of them don't even bother listing any texts and just go "The Church was so progressive, man!" which is simply Real Life.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Jun 19th 2019 at 3:20:22 PM

Fair for Its Day is inherently about real life by definition, via comparing between modern-day sensibilities and those of a different real-life time and place and seeing the comparison/contrast within the values that appear in a work created in that other time and place.

i.e. I see no point in deleting a Religion/Mythology section of a trope that specifically deals with real-life context behind dissonant aspects behind a work, since the community has agreed that religious/mythological texts are tropable as works of fiction. That decision, I did not participate in that.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jun 19th 2019 at 10:50:19 AM

Yes, religous texts are tropable as works of fiction. But societies and its laws are not works of fiction. The point of Fair for Its Day is to acknowledge when a work is somehow progressive compared to its society, not to gush over how awesome society was compared to the rest of the world in its day — or, in case of those examples, how awesome a skewed perception of a society is compared to the skewed perception of the ancient world.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Jun 19th 2019 at 6:10:23 PM

A fair point is that there is Values Dissonance between Christianity (et al.) in today's world and Christianity (et al.) hundreds and thousands of years ago. You need to get over it because this seems to have gone well beyond merely trying to clean up misinformation.

Fair for Its Day is a subtrope of Values Dissonance, and the point is that [Work A] has less dissonance than it originally did. As a subtrope of Values Dissonance, "societies" are part of the trope.

The issue you are wonking on seems to require a mere clean-up, not a salting.

Yes, there is a dissonance between Christianity thousands of years ago and present-day Christianity. The question is whether Christianity — or Jewish law, for that matter — thousands of years ago was positively different from the rest of the world thousands of years ago. In some aspects, I'm sure it was — but most examples fail to show that. So sorry, I'm not going to "get over" anything.

Values Dissonance is a NRLEP trope. Which makes sense, since it concerns exclusively works, not physical aspects of the world in the past. Why should Fair for Its Day be any different?

I have, originally, requested a clean-up, but I fear that allowing Real Life examples — as in, the physical aspects of the world in the past — will just keep attracting non-examples and examples based on misinformation. If someone will offer to clean it up and watch for this kind of entries, fine, but I don't see anyone willing and I bet that if I did that, I'd be accused of being biased — which I must admit I am, at least in regards to sexual slavery and its apologists.

And there is also an issue of the trope description mentioning "work" multiple times, which makes the inclusion of RL examples highly questionable. I don't really mind the trope being used to describe real laws and customs as a matter of principle, but the way it is written right now seems inappropriate for that purpose.

I'm not sure why Amusing Injuries probably won't be made NRLEP. the trope's nature is by no means possible in reality.

If "The Reason You Suck" Speech doesn't have its RLE zapped, how will we clean its examples, especially on the Real Life and New Media pages? A lot of them are single Tumblr posts, YouTube videos, and other stuff and can get pretty political or petty.

By discerning which examples are flamebait and which are not

To bring change, it is best to cut down the "citations". There are far too many large blocks of citations, even when citing is only about summarizing the information and giving some ideas, not copying large chunks of text.

No Real Life Examples, Please! means all examples on a page must be fictional right? If so, why are Trivia pages such as What Could Have Been listed as NRLEP?

EDIT: I used the Wayback Machine to go back to the July 2013 version of the NRELP page and saw the reason for WHCB as "Real Life doesn't have a writer so this doesn't apply." At first that didn't make sense to me, as the item doesn't only apply to shows but can apply to RL events that had factors affecting whether they would have occurred or not. Then I went back to when this item was made NRLEP, and by the looks of it, the actual reason seems to be misuse. Still, with "No Real Life Examples, Please" meaning "All examples on this page must only be about what happens in a work, not the work's cast or crew", it seems a little weird.

Edited by FridgeGuy2016 on Jun 24th 2019 at 1:53:18 AM

What Could Have Been's RL page was full of natter, and all the examples were just "imagine how different the world would be if [historical event] didn't happen or [historical figure] didn't get killed".

A Birthday, Not a Break has a lot of examples of people dying on their birthday. Isn't that troping real people?

On this ATT thread regarding EnsembleDarkhorse.Real Life examples, it was brought up that Ensemble Dark Horse can't apply to real life since real life doesn't have characters and it falls under troping real people.

Edited by ADrago on Jun 26th 2019 at 6:07:29 AM

No, not really, as it's not a characterization trope.

I was talking about A Birthday, Not a Break, not Ensemble Dark Horse.

Edited by rjd1922 on Jun 26th 2019 at 9:09:24 AM

But it is about very popular minor characters. Real Life does not have "minor characters".

Edited by FridgeGuy2016 on Jun 27th 2019 at 2:57:57 AM

Also, regarding Terminally Dependent Society, its Real Life section has many walls of text, most of which are natter. And it looks more like a WMG on certain necessities of the world.

Forgot to follow up on the votes, sorry.

Calling to make NRLEP:

• Galactic Conqueror: 24th May '19 at 09:51:55 AM, 4.67:1 (17)
• Tautological Templar: 24th May '19 at 09:51:12 AM, 3.67:1 (14)
• Dark World: 24th May '19 at 09:52:32 AM, 5.5:1 (13)
• Arch-Enemy: 14th Jun '19 at 10:08:33 AM, 2.5:1 (14)

Calling to keep RL examples:

• Terminally Dependent Society: 11th Apr '19 at 04:03:30 AM, 1.43:1 (17)
• Amusing Injuries: 9th May '19 at 03:33:15 PM, 1.38:1 (19)
• Fair for Its Day: 15th Jun '19 at 04:52:18 AM, 1:1 (16)
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: 30th Apr '19 at 08:28:39 AM, 1:1.25 (18)
• Macho Camp: 24th May '19 at 09:31:23 AM, 1:1.29 (16)

Terminally Dependent Society and "The Reason You Suck" Speech may not be being made NRLEP, but they do need cleaning, which I won't have time for today.

That clears out all the current entries, and with 14 entries this is as good a time as any to start a new crowner, even if we don't currently have any candidates for NRLEP consideration (though I'm leaning towards listing A Birthday, Not a Break as a narrative trope, not just "bad stuff happening coincidentally on a b-day" which is what pretty much all the RL entries strike me as, at first glance). That much I can get to, at least, and will do so after closing out the decided crowner entries.

[edit] Also, tweaked the crowner description. Just "(CLOSED)" was indistinguishable from the rest of the text, so I added bolding to it after checking to see that the bold formatting still works in crowners.

Edited by Nohbody on Jul 1st 2019 at 9:02:25 AM