Note: If a newly launched trope was already given a No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only designation while it was being drafted on the Trope Launch Pad, additions to the proper index do not need to go through this thread. Instead, simply ask the staff to add the trope via this thread
.
This is the thread to report tropes with problematic Real Life sections.
Common problems include:
- Conversation on the Main Page
- Flame Bait
- Squicky content
- Impossible in Real Life
Real Life sections on the wiki are kept as long as they don't become a problem. If you find an article with such problems, report it here. Please note that the purpose of this thread is to clean up and maintain real life sections, not raze them. Cutting should be treated as a last resort, so please only suggest cutting RL sections or a subset thereof you think the examples in question are completely unsalvageable.
If historical RL examples are not causing any problems, consider whether it would be better to propose a No Recent Examples, Please! (via this forum thread
) for RL instead of NRLEP. If RL examples are causing problems only for certain subjects, consider whether a Limited Real Life Examples Only restriction would be preferable to NRLEP.
If you think a trope should be No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only, then this thread is the place to discuss it. However, please check Keep Real Life Examples first to see if it has already been brought up in the past. If not, state the reasons and add it to the crowner.
Before adding to the crowner:
- The trope should be proposed in the thread, along with reasons for why a crowner is necessary instead of a cleanup.
- There must be support from others in thread.
- Any objections should be addressed.
- Allow a minimum of 24 hours for discussion.
When adding to the crowner:
- Be sure to add the trope name, a link to where the discussion started, the reasons for crownering, whether the restriction being proposed is NRLEP or LRLEO (and in the latter case, which subject(s) the restriction would be for), and the date added.
- Announce in thread that you are adding the item.
- An ATT advert should be made as well (batch items together if more than one trope goes up in a day).
In order for a crowner to pass:
- Must have been up for a minimum of a week
- There must be a 2:1 ratio
- If the vote is exactly 2:1 or +/- 1 vote from that, give it a couple extra days to see if any more votes come in
- Once passed, tropes must be indexed on the appropriate NRLEP or LRLEO index
- Should the vote fail, the trope should be indexed on KRLE page
Sex Tropes, Rape and Sexual Harassment Tropes, and Morality Tropes are banned from having RL sections so tropes under those indexes don't need a crowner vote.
As per Real Life Troping, we never trope unscripted real life sports — so sports tropes where RL examples would only apply to those scenarios don't need a crowner vote.
Crowner entries that have already been called will have "(CLOSED)" appended to them — and are no longer open for discussion.
After bringing up a trope for discussion, please wait at least a day for feedback before adding it to the crowner.
NRLEP tag:
%%https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13350380440A15238800
LRLEO tag:
%%The following restrictions apply: [list restriction(s) here]
%%https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13350380440A15238800
Notes:
- This thread is not for general discussion regarding policies for Real Life sections or crowners. Please take those conversations to this Wiki Talk thread
.
- Do not try to overturn previous No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only decisions without a convincing argument.
- As mentioned here
, the consensus is that NRLEP warnings in trope page descriptions can use bold text so that they stand out.
- The [[noreallife]] tag no longer works. This is a deprecated tag that was introduced many years ago — originally, it would have displayed a NRLEP warning banner when you edited the page. Per word of admin
as of 2025, any replacement for this system will not use markup, so these tags can be removed.
- If a newly launched trope was already given a No Real Life Examples, Please! or Limited Real Life Examples Only designation while it was being drafted on the Trope Launch Pad, additions to the proper index do not need to go through this thread. Instead, simply ask the staff to add the trope via this thread
.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 3rd 2025 at 6:31:00 AM
What do you guys think of Closet Key? There's two real life examples and they seem pretty gossipy.
- From Not Always Romantic: through a phone conversation with the narrator, a woman comes to realize that she reciprocates the feelings that her female friend has confessed to her.
- From Gay Star News: an ostensibly straight guy has a Green-Eyed Epiphany about his gay roommate, and ends up getting together with him,
after a long process of experiencing confusing feelings which he mistook for latent homophobia, posting on Reddit about them and receiving feedback, and finally showing the Reddit post to his sister who caught on immediately and called him an "oblivious walnut".
Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 31st 2020 at 4:31:12 PM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!We don't classify "Not Always Right" and it's ilk as Real Life because the stories are often made up or exaggerated. That example can just be moved somewhere else.
Reddit posts can also be fake.
Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 31st 2020 at 7:45:56 AM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallJust because they "can be fake" doesn't mean they are. There's a very fine line between making apocryphal and/or embellished stories about Real Life and gossip. The former are marginally suitable for troping as long as what's being troped is the embellishment, not the original facts. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.
Reddit and other microblogging / discussion sites are generally not suitable for troping because there is no way to establish the above distinction. Of course, if there are subreddits or boards specifically for creative writing or whatever, that would be fine, but frankly I'm not terribly excited about using them for examples. We've long held that websites cannot be Creators as we define them, so to whom are the examples attributed? Is a forum post a "discrete work"?
This is very similar to the reason why "Let's Play Call of Duty Infinite Warfare with YTBoi69420xx" is not suitable for a work article.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2020 at 9:38:52 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Jane is a girl. She is pretty and smart. She is the hero. Joe is mean. Joe bullies Jane. Jane hits Joe, and Joe stops bullying. They are happy. The end.
Look at my brilliant original fiction. I can easily find three tropes. Let's write up an article and get me a Creator page. TV Tropes gets distribution credit.
I'm not mocking (well, at least that's not the main point), but illustrating something. Where do we draw the line about what gets troped?
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2020 at 10:42:04 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Such a story is theoretically eligible for a page; we have pages for shorter works. But considering who you are, I'm sure you're well aware why these sorts of pages don't get made in practice!
As for your other example above, LetsPlay/YTBoi69420xx would be "the work". LetsPlay/ is a work namespace, not a creator namespace, though the line is quite blurred.
Returning to the topic of Not Always Right et al, didn't we have a specific ruling on that at some point?
2025: the year it all ends?If you made an entire site of stories Fighteer, then it would be tropeworthy. I'm apathetic about Reddit but I do think Not Always Right is tropeworthy for the same reason as reality TV and documentaries- they're never just objective stories about reality and are exaggerated, edited, etc to be interesting or serve a goal.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallSo, what do we do with Closet Key?
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!- Mr. Fanservice: Anthony got the most amount of shirtless scenes, wearing skimpy outfits and even crossdressing. After his departure from Smosh, Shayne has been the person with the most shirtless scenes, being shirtless in the first video he featured in and with his recently introduced Shayne the Stripper persona.
I feel like this is kind of a blurry line between persona and real life person. I'm also not sure if those shots were even intentional either.
Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 31st 2020 at 8:37:56 AM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!Wholesome Crossdresser has a Real Life section... and it's pretty big. I don't think we need a section that gushes about crossdressers in real life.
If Creepy Crossdresser got put on NRLEP for being a morality trope, Wholesome Crossdresser should be too.
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!From what I remember from Smosh, their crossdressing and skimpy outfits were comedic Fan Disservice if anything. It's the same "I know it's not meant to be sexy, but it gets my rocks off so I'm gonna write about it as if it's fanservice" crud that plagues the Doug Walker pages.
I don't think Wholesome Crossdresser needs to be NRLEP on the basis that Creepy Crossdresser is, because WC can refer to neutral crossdressing and thus isn't inherently gushy or based in morality. If there's any argument for it being NRLEP, then "too common" might fit better. Clean up general/ZCE examples and gushing and see what's left.
Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 31st 2020 at 8:44:14 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Honestly, having Wholesome Crossdresser refer to neutral crossdressing too kind of pushes the trope into PSOC territory for me. Also, since when did it refer to neutral crossdressing? I don't think it was there the last time I checked. Did you just go off by the laconic? But I digress, I think this should be a discussion for someplace else. Preferably Trope Talk.
And honestly, the reason I bring the gushing up is because something like this tends to attract progressives, who want to flaunt their favorite celebrities "defying gender norms"
But anyways, barring ZC Es, here's some problematic examples IMO.
- David Bowie, who even in normal clothes evokes Stupid Sexy David and Even the Guys Want Him reactions, looks simply marvelous in a dress.
- Director Ed Wood. A heterosexual transvestite (and apparently a bit of a womanizer in his younger days), he's probably one of the more famous real-life examples of this trope.
- Lady Gaga. No, not just wearing pants, she actually goes full Drag King with her alter ego Jo
◊
- Artist Grayson Perry personifies this trope. It's remarkable for him to be at a public appearance not dressed like a little girl.
- This is actually a Double Standard, given that Crossdressing women seems to be looked down upon far less than a cross-dressing male. A cross-dressing woman might get comments of Butch Lesbian thrown at her, but a cross-dressing man is likely to be seen as a Creepy Crossdresser.
- Danny Bonaduce was seduced by a cross-dresser and found out only too late— just as the cross-dresser likewise found out too late that Danny was a psychotic ex-child star and martial-arts/steroid freak. Bonaduce spent time in jail, and the cross-dresser spent time in the hospital.
Edited by PlasmaPower on Oct 31st 2020 at 9:58:58 AM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!The Real Life section of Wholesome Crossdresser is a whole lot smaller now. I removed a bunch of non-examples and natter, and commented out everything that was simply "Person X crossdresses".
Human Hummingbird appears to be an animation/graphical trope, but lists both zero-context live action examples and a single Real Life example about strobe lights that's too general. I suggest filing it under Impossible.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.One trope. Big Brother Bully. It is a morality trope, and this wiki has no opinion on any person, just as mentioned on the Morality Tropes page of No Real Life Examples, Please!.
Alpha Bitch and Jerk Jock are on the Morality Tropes page, so it makes sense to add it.
Working on Sandbox.The Amazing Race TV Tropes Edition.
It doesn't have a Real Life section yet, just a Truth in Television mention in the description, so this is just a preemptive measure, I suppose.
I was just wondering if it would be OK to classify it as No Real Life, not to change anything that is real life examples. (there is none)
It's because it is too subjective to be used in real life context, aside for certain cases. I wanted to classify it as such, but I needed to get permission for such, and this is the closest there is to it.
Edited by callmeamuffin on Nov 2nd 2020 at 6:40:41 AM
Working on Sandbox.The Amazing Race TV Tropes Edition.Why does Surprise Incest have RL examples? It's clearly a sexuality trope and yet it hasn't already has them banned?
Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 1st 2020 at 4:08:17 AM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!![]()
![]()
Never mind, I found a discussion page for it. Thank you!
Edited by callmeamuffin on Nov 1st 2020 at 6:50:08 PM
Working on Sandbox.The Amazing Race TV Tropes Edition.![]()
Few to none of the RL examples seem to be about sexual incest, but things like marriage and kissing. Not sure if that even fits the trope, though. There's some general/speculative examples though.
This
explains that since Not Always Right is a collection of supposedly true stories, NRLEP applies.
Reposting from the last page: I believe this example should be cut from Maury since Attention Whore is NRLEP, and it isn't something that happened/was discussed on-camera. FYI, the first sentence used to be "All the guests, if you think about it."
- Attention Whore: Many of the guests. Why else would they go on national television to share their problems?
Shameful Strip and the recently launched Defiant Strip both have real life examples. Honestly, I think its a bit creepy to describe women stripping themselves in detail.
Also, I don't see "Just Joking" Justification so much as morality as it is really controversial. Can I move it to that page?
Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 1st 2020 at 6:34:55 AM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!Hollering to swap out the crowner. New crowner here
.
Agreed. I've moves "Just Joking" Justification, and you can add Shameful Strip, Defiant Strip and Closet Key to the new crowner.
I get the impression that all "World of X" tropes, such as World of Ham, are impossible because not everyone is a Large Ham. Three of the others (World of Badass, World of Jerkass, and World of Snark) are already NRLEP. What do you think?
- In some sections of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, the use of intense speech patterns and a theatric eloquence at parties, among friends, or even during family squabbles is the norm.
- "Young MAN, if I EVER see BEFORE ME this kind of MANIFESTATION of INSOLENCE from my own FLESH AND BLOOD again, you will regret the HONOR your parents GAVE YOU in ALLOWING YOU To! Be! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN!"
- Most amateur improv shows turn into this very quickly.
- Maracaibo and to a lesser extend San Cristobal of Venezuela count as this.
- Nazi Germany: for an example, just watch Triumph of the Will. Hitler himself deliberately ate tons of Wagnerian ham (and some Nietzsche) for his propaganda techniques. In democratic countries you politely say hello; in the Reich you shout "HEIL HITLER!!! HEIL MEIN FÜHRER! SIEG HEIL! DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES! FÜR DAS VATERLAND!" as loud as possible. All speeches are as much as ostentatious theatrical rants of the FÜHRER praising the DESTINY OF THE ÜBERMENSCH. All architecture is decorated in Sigil Spam of swastikas, Imperial Eagles and generally Neoclassical aesthetics on steroid overdose, while everyday the earth itself is shaken by marches of a million Badass Longcoats goose-stepping and stomping the ground with their hardened jackboots, followed by supersized castles-on-tracks. Weapons design is based on Bigger Is Better (see also: Panzer tanks, the Schwerer Gustav artillery etc) and everyone is expected to express in the most ostentatious manner their sorm of LOYALTY to the FÜHRER and the GLORY of the ÜBERMENSCH to CONQUER first EUROPA, tomorrow THE WORLD!!!
- This was responsible for the stereotype that in Germany, everything sounds like Hitler Rants.
- Italy, especially southern Italy, and with the habit to mock everything, themselves included, combine this with World of Snark.
- Argentina.
- Now imagine Iron Maiden live in Argentina: "[(relatively) somber] Fear of the Dark [ham] ARGENTINA!! Muhahahaha! [somber again] I have a constant fear that something's always near."
- Also Brazil and Italy. Italians are so hammy they tend to not realize when not-Italians are being hammy.
- VIVA MÉXICO, GÜEY!!!!
- It's fair to say that pretty much every southern European country (or country colonized/influenced by a southern European country) is a World of Ham. This is especially prevalent in football matches.
- Sarmatism, a cultural movement in the 17th and 18th centuries among the szlachta, the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In theory, it was meant to emulate the customs of ancient Sarmatians (from whom the Polish and Lithuanian nobility claimed descent), but in practice, it was a nationwide exercise in creating a World of Ham. Heavy cavalry? Have them wear leopard skins and giant metal wings. A speech? Infuse it with so much Gratuitous Latin there's hardly any Polish left, and don't forget to cry. Political protest? Fall to the ground, block the door with your body, rip your shirt and shout you'll let no one pass. Funeral? Doesn't count if there's no fully-armed Hussar riding into the church in full gallop and breaking his lance against the coffin stand, and ritual demolition of the dead man's insignia of office.
- Older Than Feudalism: The fashion in Roman courts for opening and closing speeches in the 1st century BCE was the "Asiatic style", a long, thrilling Large Ham performance lasting several days, complete with florid hand gestures and Manly Tears. Every lawyer was supposed to do this at trial, meaning that the Roman courts were veritable festivals of ham for several decades. Then Cicero showed up in the trial of Verres with a different plan...
- Ancient Rome itself is often considered by contemporary media to be a World of Ham, what with Altum Videtur, grandiose architectural projects, and a "Master Morality" ethics which puts emphasis on Ambition, Conquest and the acquisition of Glory. Conquerors such as Julius Caesar are celebrated in bombastic Triumphs.
- Incidentally, the Italians, mentioned above, live in the ancient Roman heartland and claim to be the heirs of Rome. As far as hamminess go, they're right.
- The Philippines. Dear god, in that country, everyone is emotional and everything is Serious Business.
- Bergen, second greatest city in Norway, may be considered this, courtesy of the big percentage of Large Ham actors and some reporters coming from the area. On the actor side, Bergen houses the oldest theatre in Norway, and the city has served ham on the menu at least since 1849. It is not always wise to put more than two of them in the same production, because of their Ham-to-Ham Combat tendencies, and when an entire crime show covering five episodes was set in Bergen... hoo boy.
- As for the reporters - well, some of them managed to break the sound barrier all by themselves.
- When Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) produced a four-episode historical drama telling the story of the Norwegian Constituent Assembly in 1814, one particular scene presented no less than FOUR bergensian actors hamming it up in a priceless Ham-to-Ham Combat. It is fair to say that one scene was the most noisy one in the entire episode, and the one person in the room who was not bergensian (a Large Ham in his own right), almost faded out of the picture. That said, Northern Norway is a good runner-up for being an example in its own right.
- Theoretically, you could have things like this. They just would have to be on the larger end of this scale (or be very deep) and have constant support (artificial atmosphere, seeding life, etc). There's no real idea how this would work in practice, but there's decent ideas that it could work.
- One way that probably wouldn't work would be compacting a large planet to a smaller size. The escape velocity of an object depends on how compact it is; that is, the ratio of its mass to radius. So the more you compact a planet, the higher the surface gravity would be - the Earth itself compacted to 3 miles across wouldn't be a black hole, but we certainly wouldn't suggest walking around on it.
- Baby Planets might be able to be constructed once Magrathean construction technology is attained, by creating a world around a superdense core. Considerably less mass than the Earth would be required given the distance from the surface to the gravitational center would be significantly less, so long as the gravitational pull of the core was not enough to decompose the shell of nuclear matter around it, and as long as the diameter is large enough that tidal forces (difference in gravity between feet and head) don't cause serious trouble. Except neutronium is unstable in piles less than 1/10 of a solar mass due to the fact that neutrons are more massive than protons. Anything lighter than 1/10 of a solar mass and made of nuclear matter will decay, then explode as the electrical repulsion overcomes gravity.
- A black hole inside a hollow shell could work (this is used in The World is Round, a novel by physicist Tony Rothmann, though in this case, the planet in question is much larger than Earth, and the scheme is used to keep the surface gravity down). Black holes less than about the mass of the Moon are theoretically thermodynamically unstable, though this is much less of a problem than with neutronium (they would eventually evaporate, but it turns out the lifetime for a black hole of mass 10^11 kg... roughly the mass of a hill of dry sand 250 m high... is in the billions of years, with larger holes having even longer lifetimes).
- Icy moons, such as Europa and Enceladus, are theorized to be capable of housing aquatic life and ecosystems. Europa is a bit smaller than earths moon, and Enceladus is about the size of the British Isles. However, as small on the scale of celestial bodies they are, they are still much larger than a true Baby Planet.
- Polar panorama photos
look very much like tiny planets and can be made from any panorama photo, such as a cityscape.
EDIT: Here's a writeup for a neutron star entry:
- Neutron stars are stellar remnants that pack 1-2 solar masses into a nearly-perfect sphere around 10 kilometers across. Their gravitational pull, about 200 billion times stronger at their surface than on Earth, is stronger than anything except a black hole.
Edited by LaundryPizza03 on Nov 3rd 2020 at 11:07:40 AM
I'm back!
Crown Description:
Vote UP to cut real life examples; vote DOWN to keep. Anything marked DONE has been resolved. In order for a crowner to pass:- Must have been up for a minimum of a week
- There must be a 2:1 ratio
- If the vote is exactly 2:1 or +/- 1 vote from that, give it a couple extra days to see if any more votes come in
- Once passed, tropes must be indexed on the appropriate NRLEP or LRLEO index
- Should the vote fail, the trope should be indexed on KRLE page

Ready to call Fallen States of America, Mile-High Club, and Vapor Wear.
Rock'n'roll never dies!