Real Life section maintenance

The problem isn't that LOHK is restricted to people; the problem is that it restricts how the person in question becomes the LOHK by focusing on calamity.

It does ... because that's the trope. You don't get to be the last of your kind without something bad happening to reduce that population. It adds to the almost Byronic brooding and tragic element of the character.

Any more thoughts on my earlier post? I don't want to do a mass purge without at least a few more voices on it.

I don't think any of the examples actually for the trope so I'm fine with them getting cut.

It’s been a week for Required Secondary Powers and Simple, yet Awesome. They can probably be called anytime.

Called both but not sure where to put Simple, yet Awesome. Too Common?

Too common makes sense to me.

Urgh. And double urgh. In line with the discussion we had above about the problems with Magnum Opus and Magnum Opus Dissonance, we just had a new trope launched titled Signature Album, which may well have similar issues. It doesn't even seem to be limited to In-Universe examples like Magnum Opus.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but that seems like a problem just waiting to happen. I stay away from the TLP, or I would have brought up these concerns there.

I cut the Hell Is That Noise music folder examples.

I'm not a TLP regular, but I don't see enough daylight between a Signature Album and Magnum Opus. That should be a trivia trope since it's naught to do with the content of the album and everything to do with how it is received.

I contributed to that draft. In hindsight I regret doing so, especially since I did raise concerns in it.

EDIT: And they didn’t even add one of my examples. Should I bring this up in TLP Crash Rescue?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 4th 2022 at 12:34:51 PM

If they failed to launch it properly, then yes.

Yup, looks like that was Stealth Launched if the TLP Crash Rescue thread is accurate. It's not active as a trope as of now.

I saw it back in TLP ... I added my 2 cents and a bomb because it's basically Magnum Opus redux.

Calling Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers for NRLEP.

So, Raptor Attack is a trope that's specifically about the portrayal of dromaeosaurid dinosaurs as featherless, unnaturally intelligent, pack-hunters. No dinosaur with this description exists in reality, yet the page has a surprisingly large "real life" section which covers everything from cassowaries to a species of spider to a basketball team. None of these, it seems, fall under the actual definition of the trope, and I would argue that nothing in real life does.

Should Raptor Attack become a NRLEP trope?

Edited by ElSquibbonator on May 6th 2022 at 11:18:40 AM

That's a prime example of Impossible in Real Life, I agree.

Agreed. Crownering it is fine by me.

Can someone take a look at DisasterDominoes.Real Life? There was an ATT query recently where someone was spewing right wing rhetoric, I went to take a look.

The page is massive, apparently tropers have decided it should be Wikipedia-lite as they rush to chronicle every disaster mankind has faced since recorded history (not being hyperbolic, the Bronze Age Collapse is listed there).

Many of them aren't examples of Disaster Dominoes, it's just a bulleted list of things that happened before a disaster. DD means that one disaster directly leads to the next. Instead they'll list things like an economic slowdown that got exacerbated by climate change ... that's a bad combination, but one did not lead to the other.

In short, it's rife with misuse, prone to ROCEJ issues and just bloated as all hell.

The portion of my ATT comment I deleted was actually asking exactly that. I deleted it because I accidentally came off too angry unintentionally, but that was basically what I was saying. These political analyses have little to do with fiction IMO and can probably go.

Yeah, that page is huge and loaded with walls of text and misuse. I'm fine with a crowner for this.

Yeah the page is too ROCEJ-y and may have inaccurate info too. As just one example, this entry (and this could be my bias talking admittedly) about a train crash in Valhalla, NY in 2015:

• The events that led up to the February 3, 2015, collision of a Metro North Railroad commuter train on the Harlem Line with a stopped SUV in Valhalla, New York, that killed the driver of the SUV and five passengers on the train:
  • The crossing that the accident happened on was on a section of the Harlem Line running parallel to the Taconic State Parkway. One hour before the incident, a pretty serious car accident closed both lanes on the parkway going southbound, and one lane going northbound, causing many drivers to seek alternate routes.
  • The driver of the SUV took this detour and somehow ended up stopped on the tracks at a grade crossing while waiting to rejoin the parkway.
  • The gates came down and got stuck on the driver's car.
  • Instead of trying to back up and possibly avoid being hit by the oncoming train, or even just abandoning the car to at least save his own life, the driver tried to pull forward (and this is after getting out of the car and trying to free it from the crossing gate by hand), and thus was in the center of the tracks when the train hit it.

I live near the area where the crash took place and I remember the crash well. The entry seems to be written in a way that implies that the driver alone was at fault for the crash. This isn't entirely accurate—while the driver did make questionable decisions, I know for a fact that the area where the crash happened is quite a dangerous and treacherous turn, and the Metro-North train line were also at fault here for decisions they made. Per the linked article:

This makes me wonder about the factual inaccuracies and bias of the other entries too. Is it really worth having this page? Might be a possible minefield.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 7th 2022 at 3:15:27 PM

That's one my major issues with RL sections, the accuracy therein. Places like Wikipedia have policies and other tools in place to evaluate claims and their sources, while we ... don't even require a source to get an entry in. Plus there is the fact that our mission is the tropes in fiction, and this is a detour at best.

From that same page, look at the (entirety of) the "Celebrity" folder:

• The sexual assault allegations against and career implosion of Bill Cosby all started because of a joke rising comedian Hannibal Burress made about him during a stand-up show.
  • Even more impactful than Cosby was the case of once-powerful studio executive Harvey Weinstein, whose decades-long spree of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape ultimately not only started a movement, but it also led to other people in other corners of the entertainment business (Weinstein's brother Bob, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Les Moonves, just to name a tiny few) having similar allegations against them brought to light, resulting in their careers being subsequently torpedoed.
• Chris Brown's infamous incident involving Rihanna started the domino effect of the many other incidents he would have in the future.

Disaster Dominoes is about one disaster directly causing another and another and so on. Here the progression is: Hannibal Burress tells a joke -> Bill Cosby's career gets ruined. Buress's joke is not a disaster, and the "disaster" of Cosby's career didn't lead to other "disasters". In short, natter and misuse.

Likewise the sub-bullet ... the NYT article on Weinstein was what caused his downfall, and the same article unleashed the MeToo movement on many others. However I fail to see the "disaster that led to another disaster" chain the trope requires.

And the fuck does the entry on Chris Brown even mean? This is the page bloat problem, where tropers see marginal examples in real life, so they in turn add even more marginal examples until we have an entire page full of .... this.

I'm in favor of nuking Disaster Dominoes' real life subpage.

Adding Raptor Attack as impossible in real life. Disaster Dominoes should be added tomorrow unless significant dissent is made before then.