Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

Grand Finale is a plot trope, so it can’t exist in Real Life.

I'm wondering, if Death by Despair was put on Gossip and Stereotypes, would that mean that Secretly Dying, Dying Moment of Awesome and Face Death with Dignity fall under the same boat?

I'm also thinking of where Determinator would fall under. Too Common?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 26th 2020 at 6:49:21 AM

It should go in too common, since it is, not to mention it attracts gushing.

Good pount. I'll add Grand Finale, which is the most obvious of the batch, and Determinator and Dying Moment of Awesome, which seem to have the most discussion so far.

What about State Sec? Comparing modern armed forces, police and intelligence to the Nazis is an invocation of Godwin's Law AFAIAC.

At the very least, I think there should be a waiting period.

• Turkey during the political instability of the 1970s did not have an actual State Sec (Secret Police is another question though). However, almost every political party that vied for supremacy had a paramilitary wing to conduct their morally dubious operations. More often than not, when the Government, the Army or the National Intelligence Agency needed its dirty work done, it would use one of these organisations. The most notorious and only surviving example is the nationalist Grey Wolves who have been involved with some of the blackest of government and army operations. These days, they're on the news regarding their part in a suspected military coup.
  • Armed political parties are a recurring theme in the Middle East. The kindling for Lebanon's Civil War was that every political force had a paramilitary organization, making it easy for the Arab–Israeli Conflict to light the fire; Hamas and Fatah's armed forces allowed them to fight a rather embarrassing civil war in 2006-7, and Hamas uses its armed wing as a secret police in Gaza; and any political party worth its salt had a militia under the Egyptian monarchy (before the July Revolution of 1952).
• Egypt's police forces under the Mubarak regime provide a fairly classical model: under the control of the Egyptian National Police (which included—and continues to include—all police in the country) came both the State Security Investigations Service (SSIS, usually known as 'Amn ad-Dawlah, or "State Security" in Arabic), who (despite frequent protestations to the contrary) were Secret Police with mass surveillance matched in history only by the Stasi and a fondness for Electric Torture, as well as the Central Security Forces (CSF), paramilitaries whose jobs included patrolling the Sinai (where the Egyptian military was forbidden to enter under Camp David, but nobody said anything about the police) who also served as riot police. Much like joining the SS, someone who was a career police officer (a lot of police, and particularly CSF members, were conscripts) moved into a totally different social circle, with special clubs, dedicated hospitals, and even entire residential compounds and vacation resorts dedicated to them. After the Revolution of 2011, the SSIS was disbanded...only to reappear under the name of "Homeland Security" and back to its old tricks within only a few years. The Central Security Forces never went away at all.
• The Shabiha militias in Syria. Not only does their name (roughly) translate to "thugs", but they've also been accused of perpetrating a number of massacres throughout the recent uprising.
  • For an example of one controlled by the military, you've got the 4th Armored Division and the Republican Guard, both commanded by President Assad's brother Maher.
• During the Saddam Hussein regime, there was a powerful security apparatus set up, but not quite formally unified as other examples. One part was the Iraqi Special Security Organization, which included the Special Republican Guard. Its other branches included presidential bodyguards, "security" that monitored Republican Guard loyalty, communications, internal affairs, surveillance, administration, and even a "science" division - which only tested Saddam's food. The Republican Guard was another part of this informal State Sec, serving as a Presidential Guard and didn't fall under the Ministry of Defense. In addition, Saddam also had a separate irregular paramilitary branch loyal to him.
• A strange case would be the various incarnations of the secret police under the Austrian Habsburgs, at least in their later days. Tracing their origins to Prince Metternich, the State Sec provided an unnervingly amiable (and deceptively incompetent) face, preferring to pull strings or subtly ease potential malcontents out of relevance rather than making them "disappear". Of course, this doesn't include an intricate spy network that not only stretched across the Empire but even beyond, or the fact that it helped Austria-Hungary to a degree shape its society as it saw fit. Even as their actual competence decayed, the fact that elements of that system survived into the 1920s (after the end of World War I destroyed the monarchy) says a lot.
• The United States Coast Guard is a military organization, but in peacetime it operates independently of the normal military. Today it's run by the Department of Homeland Security, but in years past it has been in the Department of Transportation and the Department of the Treasury (who also used to control the Secret Service). Unlike most Real Life examples though, this one isn't evil, just unusual.
  • Even more unusual, both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (part of the Department of Commerce) and Public Health Service (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) have some commissioned officers. They use Navy/Coast Guard ranks and wear the same uniforms, but with different insignia. They are non-combatants who can be attached to military units as needed. Among the many things these two parts of government do: the NOAA runs the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service while the PHS runs the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
• Fascist Italy had the 'Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale' (Voluntary Militia for National Security), better known as 'Blackshirts', whose job was to keep the regular armed forces and the people in line. The Blackshirts are notable not only for being the direct model of the SS, but also for being more loyal to the state than the regime, best shown when Mussolini was deposed in 1943 and their only reaction was to replace the fasces buttons on their uniforms with star buttons like the regular armed forces as ordered by the new prime minister. Not to be confused with the trope, though many Blackshirts might have indeed been black shirts, and the trope was named after them.
  • The Milizia worked closely with the OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo, 'Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism'), a proper and frightenly efficient political police absorbed in the proper state police after the war. Or not: there is no actual evidence than the OVRA actually existed as anything more than a way to scare opponents into submission and bait attention away from the real police (that would do all the work) with a backronym that Mussolini (a former journalist) would have chosen purely because it sounded similar to 'piovra', the Italian name for 'octopus'.
  • And if you think they disappeared with the fall of fascism, you're wrong: OVRA (or whoever actually did their job) and the MVSN were simply absorbed in the normal police, that still does their job. And the Carabinieri military police often act as this, and were doing it before Mussolini's rise to power.
• Even peaceful and democratic Norway had shades of this. A unit called Statspoliti (there is something familiar about that name) operated in The Roaring '20s and early into The Great Depression. They became historically known for repressing strikes and generally working for the government (and possibly the factory owners) against the labor unions. As such, they became increasingly unpopular, and may have contributed to making the Labor Party even more popular than they intended.
  • Then, the Labor Party itself invented a new security agency, surveilling communists for years after the war...

Edited by SkyCat32 on Nov 30th 2020 at 9:03:22 AM

Oh, yes. One entry claims, "Unlike most Real Life examples though, this one isn't evil, just unusual." Naturally, most examples are about totalitarian regimes, including recent ones like Saddam Hussein.

Time for some calling. Only one eligible at the moment :

Frat Bro (5-7) - KEEP

Pending:

Dying Moment of Awesome

Grand Finale

Determinator

Do we need Real Life examples for Sore Loser? It's mostly the same as calling people a jerk for their reaction and it just attracts complaining

I've considered that, too. Not complaining per se; rather, all the examples, by the very nature of this trope, are about people bashing certain targets. And some examples are political as well.

Bald Women has an entire folder for cases of Dyeing for Your Art. However, this doesn't fit with the trope's definition, as for the meaning to the trope is that a woman going bald contrasts with societal norms of feminity, and can symbolize her power.

That trope title is downright non-illustrative of what the trope is.

I'll cut everything in the other Real Life folder that doesn't specifically tie into cultural values, such as the one about alopecia.

EDIT: So much of the folder is just "X woman is bald;" I commented all those examples out. Not sure what to do about examples describing cultural values where it's encouraged for women to be bald, or where the women's shaved heads have negative connotations like self-punishment. Also unsure about the general example that describes how baldness is becoming more accepted and even feminine women do it now - can that be moved to the description?

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 1st 2020 at 4:39:11 AM

Yeah, that trope seems to not fit its name.

Add Bald Women to the Tropes Needing TRS list?

Already did.

Ah, wasn't sure whether to group it in with the appearance tropes or not. IT can be moved there.

Edited by mightymewtron on Dec 1st 2020 at 9:34:47 AM

So, can we discuss State Sec's issues a little more?

If anybody has any counterpoints to the concerns I raised, please voice them now.

Actually, it belongs at the Appearance Tropes Cleanup.

Edited by LaundryPizza03 on Dec 1st 2020 at 8:39:49 AM

RE: State Sec - some of those definitely need to go. I am on the fence regarding purging the whole thing.

Do you have any more comments about Sore Loser?

Moral Guardians should have the real life section cut completely. Not just that, but Moral Guardians is indexed under Villains and it's never a good idea to have any tropes indexed under Villains to have real life examples for obvious reasons. I am requesting consensus before a mod can remove it, as that page's locked.

Examples of real life moral guardians already exist in Media Watchdog, The New Rock & Roll, New Media Are Evil, and Everyone Is Satan in Hell.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Dec 1st 2020 at 10:02:47 AM

As I said earlier:

Now, you may be able to persuade me that the section only needs a deep clean, seeing as Nazi Germany is seen as a Trope Codifier for State Sec, and RL examples will inevitably draw comparisons to Nazi Germany.

Which examples do you think are valid, aside from Nazi Germany, ~Zyffyr?

ETA: I removed the CIA, FBI, and US Police examples because they seemed to violate the rule of cautious editing judgement as they were written.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Dec 1st 2020 at 10:45:08 AM

I did repweatedly mention a few tropes a while back without comment, but at this point I forgot all of them except Humans Are Psychic in the Future. You don't need to see the examples to understand the problem here.^note It's impossible in real life.

Stasi definitely, and the KGB section could be trimmed down to just the parts about NKVD.

Quite a few are really just Secret Police though as they lack the paramilitary portion (at least as written), which is a different trope. Got a few that lack context to judge proper placement.

Even if we vote to keep it, most of would need to go away from either misuse or insufficient context.

Yeah, genuinely impossible in real life doesn't take much to show it is invalid.

Edited by Zyffyr on Dec 1st 2020 at 11:01:22 AM

Okay, Humans Are Psychic in the Future has been added.

Why is Moral Guardians indexed under villains? It doesn't seem like a villain trope to me, especially since it is often used for real life situations.

I think it would be much more suitable for a more general index, if we have one, for tropes like critics and reviewers. Putting it under villain tropes seems more like meta-commentary than proper indexing.