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
I agree with cutting those examples. I'm not sure if "too common" is quite right though; armour does generally work at least to some extent, and some of those examples even acknowledged it. A lot of that was more that people kept developing new weapons which out-competed existing armour, and a lot of the time people didn't actually wear the best armour available, and I'm not sure if either of those are entirely valid uses of the trope anyway.
So I'd like opinions on what should be salvaged from NeverLiveItDown.Music. There are a bit over one hundred examples, and I suspect that a clean up will keep maybe ten of them.
Also, many of those will only be kept by rewriting the example to focus on the song rather than the band. To give an example of the type of rewrite I'd expect to happen, Rick Anstley has an example about Rickrolling which could be salvaged by shifting the emphasis to "Never Gonna Give You Up" use in the meme.
If this needs to be spun off into a short term repair project, let me know.
I think starting a Short-Term Projects thread would be a good idea due to how many examples there are.
Since everything on the previous crowner was closed and it was getting kind of long, I hooked a new one.
I got a rock for Halloween.My earlier post
got lost in the shuffle so I will bring it up again. Secret Test of Character, which was the subject of an Is This An Example
post, has a RL folder that shows the usual problems (general examples, shoehorned examples, nattering examples, etc).
Should we crowner or just give a thorough cleaning?
Also, there was talk
about One-Steve Limit getting the crowner, my feeling is at the very minimum we need to clear out the meta sections as actors will have the same name alot.
Edited by laserviking42 on Apr 14th 2022 at 9:06:04 AM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose meThe Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People is yet another example of a trope that's technically impossible in real life, so instead they bring examples that are slightly related to it. while were at it, trauma conga line has a similar problem as the above.
Edited by namra on Apr 15th 2022 at 1:25:09 AM
add trauma conga line as well. it's supposed to be a narrative trope, yet it has a real life section for some reason. and yeah, we should add chocolate baby as well
Edited by namra on Apr 16th 2022 at 1:50:19 AM
Added Secret Test of Character and One-Steve Limit.
I think Chocolate Baby is addable at this point, not sure though.
The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People has a serious natter problem, I went in and axed every example that started with "Not an apocalypse but...". Others can take a look and see if more should be cut.
Agree with Trauma Conga Line, that's a narrative trope and it really seems like piling on the misery.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Good clean up on The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People. Question — would the Great Depression or 1970s New York City be seen as examples of "apocalypse"? Maybe it's just me, but I'd think the threshold would be higher than this.
If there's support for it, I'll cut the last two examples.
Edited by BoltDMC on Apr 16th 2022 at 4:51:38 AM
I'm not sure if RL examples should be forbidden entirely, but Lurid Tales of Doom's Real-Life section has some problems with complaining about real newspaper brands and the people behind them.
Welcome To Ideals' World![]()
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I'm not really wedded to the idea of those staying, I was just specifically cutting examples that literally said "this isn't an example but I'm gonna natter on anyways", and a few that were "playing with" real life. If the rest of the section needs to go, I'll not shed many tears.
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I go back and forth on this, because there are some real doozies among RL, but again it has the problem of examples being too general and going off on tangents. Lets crowner it and see how it goes.
Could One-Steve Limit also fit under Narrative? The naming limit is controlled by a creator across the set of all characters in the work, which obviously real life doesn't have as parents independently pick their children's names.
Edited by Albert3105 on Apr 18th 2022 at 2:18:23 PM
Double post, but could we add Prematurely Grey-Haired next? I think it's both too gossipy and too common.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Decided to try my hand at a cleanup for the Lurid Tales of Doom RL section, as it's pretty small. I mainly focused on removing stuff that was particularly bad with complaining or violated indentation rules, and left some mild snarkiness alone. Notes from me are in bold.
- The National Enquirer is the most known example: During the war it supported Those Wacky Nazis. Then it was owned by the mafia and became a crime-obsessed rag focusing on particularly hideous crimes. Now it is more known for making up celebrity gossip.
- Weekly World News was a satirical newspaper that published this sort of story until it folded. Aside from some local stories that were weird enough to fit right in, pretty much every one was fake. Some people genuinely believed them (sometimes,) even though they often recycled stories; one standby every Presidential election year was "Space Alien Endorses [candidate for President]!" (complete with a photo of the alien and the candidate) and there were new doomsday predictions roughly every two weeks, often contradictory.
- The Daily Sport in the UK is made up of mostly pictures of topless ladies and this sort of "News", such as World War II bombers being found on the moon... and news about the bombers vanishing when an astronomer said he couldn't see them.
- While The Sun is not the most erudite of newspapers in Britain it tends not to focus much on this sort of journalism, however one stand-out incident came from a March 1986 issue with the headline "FREDDIE STAR ATE MY HAMSTER!". This "story" has followed Freddie Star around since. I've removed the subbullet about Liverpool entirely, but that's more because I couldn't figure out a way to incorporate it into the main bullet. I imagine someone would be able to create a more neutral writeup that follows indentation rules.
- American Newspapers in general were known for this during The Roaring '20s, most of them featuring huge "scare" headlines (IN FULL CAPS! AND WITH EXCLAMATION SIGNS!). But The New York Evening Graphic, which ran between 1924 and 1932, was unique among them for its emphasis on sex-related stories, and was also known for making up stories (such as the one with Valentino meeting Caruso at Heavennote ). This is probably a general example, but as the main focus here is cutting down on complaining, I've left it here for more opinions.
- One of the Graphic's most infamous practices was to have actors making a scene for the camera, their faces being replaced with those from people on the news, most notably during a notorious divorce case in 1927. From some cursory search results, I haven't been able to find much info on this specific newspaper, but the example seems valid enough. Also, I'm not sure how to get the formatting on "Graphic's" to only italize "Graphic" while not messing with the bold formatting here.
- Decades earlier (1880s-1890s), William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer engaged in a battle to see which paper was the most sensationalistic one: While they did publish some fake stories, their papers also exposed the ills of the American society of the late 19th century. And contrary to popular belief, they did not motivate William McKinley to declare war on Spain, but they did bolster its popularity.
- The week after Princess Diana was killed in a car accident, you could see on newsstands papers like this with the headline "PRINCESS DI FOUND ALIVE!" next to other papers with the headline "PRINCESS DI WAS MURDERED!" This is probably a general example, but as the main focus here is cutting down on complaining, I've left it here for more opinions.
Edited by plakythebirb on Apr 18th 2022 at 7:53:59 AM
Welcome To Ideals' World![]()
I'm fine with crownering this. While we're at it, should we consider the same for Prematurely Bald?
I found a couple of tropes that are simultaneously listed on both NRLEP and KRLE, like A-Cup Angst and Blue-and-Orange Morality. Should I do anything about that?
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

Every single real life Armor Is Useless example was general so I purged the folder. Perhaps it can be crownered for being too common?
Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Apr 14th 2022 at 3:28:15 PM
Once Upon A Time.