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 mods 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 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 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 doesn't currently work. 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. However, there's been some staff conversation (Feb 2024) about what a new technical solution might look like, so we'd advise against deleting these from pages, at least until we have a decision as to whether it'll be fixed or replaced.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 8th 2024 at 10:49:13 AM
(she/her)
Oh no, I called that page for KRLE. It had a ratio of 1:10 which is far below consensus for NRLEP. I accidentally cut the page so I restored it just now.
Macron's notes
Apologies then, I misread your post ... long day.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Chew.
Would you say Large Ham, Genius Cripple, and Daydream Believer have enough consensus to be crownered?
Koichi really steals? No dignity.
In order to cut the Daydream Believer RL section, you would effectively be making it In-Universe only. It's actually a Trivia trope, but it pre-dates 2010, before such distinctions were made. I do not believe this thread can change all of it (we'd be cutting the vast majority of examples). So no, no consensus on that one.
There seems to be little to no discussion occurring here anymore, people show up, toss out a few tropes, then disappear (until it's time to toss out more tropes). Meanwhile several proposed cleanups (that I'll be dealing with shortly) just sit there while most tropers have reverted to using this thread to just cut cut cut. It's ludicrous to think one or two people commenting on a trope is somehow consensus now, but I guess that's where we're at. I'll look at the rest later on tonight.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Regarding this cleanup of The "Fun" in "Funeral":
- Andrew Jackson example is fine to keep, can remove the "reportedly" as several sources seem to confirm it.
Everything else seems fine.
Will repost my earlier cleanup with one change:
- People with embarassing or Punny Names, or with the same name as a celebrity, are Blessed with Suck regarding this here.general, cut
- For that matter, the celebrities themselves probably too.general, cut
- Various celebrities have been discussing examples of this on Late Night Talk Shows, having been called by X other celebrity to be in a film and thinking that it's one of their friends pranking them.still general, maybe if we had an example of a specific celebrity talking about a specific call, but still cut
- Can of course also happen to you if the place you are calling from has a name with one of the above mentioned properties.general, cut
- One example was told in a news story regarding a town/neighborhood somewhere that was named South Park. It was considering changing its name after at least one genuine emergency call to 911 was ignored by the operator who thought that the call was a prank.cannot find a single source that confirms this ever happened, cut
- If you're doing research on the seventh planet from the sun, it's probably better not done via phone calls, as they'll almost assuredly be mistaken for these.ugg, general, cut
- Some of the seat-mounted phones in commercial airlines have a short lag between when the user speaks and when the call recipient hears the words. It's possible to hang up on a "prank caller" during that lag time (and annoy the person calling tremendously, those phone calls are expensive).natter, not really this trope, cut
- Happened in the case of the Travis the chimp attack - the 911 operator initially, for the first few moments, thought the call was a prank.prob okay
- Also a known problem with trained service animals calling 911 - nowadays, many databases have an alert that pops up saying there's a trained service animal at the location, but it can still happen. Ditto with the 'accidental 911 call, animal really in trouble' scenarios that pop up every now and then.general, cut
- Has also happened in cases where a child has called 911. Operators know that children often do play on the phone, and will sometimes mistake a real call for one of those.general, cut
- Arnel Pineda, the current lead singer of Journey, initially believed he was being pranked when Neil Schon emailed him and invited him to audition after seeing his videos on Youtube.keep
- Eddie Van Halen admitted that he had initially thought that the request from Michael Jackson to contribute a guitar solo on one of his songs (Beat It) was a prank call.keep
- This is apparently a frequent phenomenon among Nobel Prize winners when they first receive their calls from Stockholm. So much so that the committee now tries to to deliberately avert it by having colleagues who know the winner personally take part in the call.general, cut
- Not knowing he had the same name as an eminent scientist, California carpet cleaner Donald Cram was awakened by a phone call informing him of his Nobel Prize in chemistry. He initially believed it to be a prank.prob okay, move to first level bullet
- As carpet cleaner Cram had a chemistry degree, this was not the first time he had been mistaken for the more eminent Cram.pure natter, cut
- Not knowing he had the same name as an eminent scientist, California carpet cleaner Donald Cram was awakened by a phone call informing him of his Nobel Prize in chemistry. He initially believed it to be a prank.prob okay, move to first level bullet
- A woman in Australia called a koala rescue organization and said that her family had just found a live koala in their Christmas tree. The operator initially thought it was a prank call. It wasn't.maybe?
While doing wick cleaning, I noticed that Slobs Versus Snobs's real life section seems to be mostly general examples. Additionally, The Peter Principle's is attracting a lot of complaining about various creators.
Edited by Orbiting on Dec 13th 2022 at 6:48:58 AM
Okay, the Slobs Versus Snobs just needs a bit of cleanup, I'll comb through it after dinner and make some cuts.
The Peter Principle is by it's very nature, a negative trope. It describes how people will get promoted until they reach a level where they fail to do well then just remain there, or promoted until they're incompetent.
The examples aren't necessarily wrong (though as always in the case of politicians, it is a matter of interpretation), but they do cast real people in a negative light. It's not gossip, because most of this is factual. It's not narrative trope, because this is something widely discussed in business and management. I guess this maybe Too Common? I'd like to hear what others think.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
The real life section for Informed Poverty seems a little iffy, like it's all "oh these people aren't REALLY poor because they have a mobile phone!", it seems to echo very nasty rhetoric about the poor being entitled and not really suffering.
Informed Poverty has two examples, both of which are general and will be cut as soon as I can click the buttons.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
The Real Life section of Going to See the Elephant seems to be just examples of people using the phrase "going to see the elephant" even if in context it doesn't fit the trope, rather than actual uses of the trope.
The third and fourth examples are misuse.
Industrious Incisors
Cosmic Keystone lists the sun and moon. In this case, just cutting should be sufficient, right?
SoundCloud
Those are both (badly indented) misuse, they can be cut.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
I propose removing all real life examples from Heat Wave. This is because The Other Wiki's list of heat waves already includes hundreds of entries, and it will only get longer as time goes by, and so it is completely impractical to list real-life examples for this trope.
Chew.
Heat Wave is too common to be worth recounting real life examples.
The Peter Principle is also too common in theory, but I'll also argue that the trope The Peter Principle is somewhat Characterization - in the real world, there's often many reasons that people don't thrive after promotion, while a lot of examples of the trope, particularly in comedies, characters go from exaggeratedly hypercompetent at one job to ridiculously flopping at the next, which is not really how things go IRL. I'm also going to disagree with you and say that there's some Gossip involved in the trope - while often there are objective measures like financial success and lack thereof for this trope in action, the examples have a lot of subjective guessing or straight-up complaining as to why they are examples of the trope. I'd crowner regardless.
Did some cleanup on More Popular Spin-Off. A lot of examples weren't spinoffs or weren't dramatically more popular. I'd say it's fine now but it's a page to keep an eye on in case misuse starts growing back.
Edited by MissConduct on Dec 16th 2022 at 1:59:42 PM
Koichi really steals? No dignity.
(she/her)
Calling Practically Different Generations for NRLEP.
Macron's notes
I Minored in Tropology has a short Real Life folder, but is it useful if it's just noting people's educational history? With the only three entries that aren't, being:
- Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, claims to have a degree in violence.
- Indiana University offers a "Build Your Own Major" major. It's the same way New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz got his degree in Enigmatology.
- Thanks to Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski, students may now receive an actual degree in evil—ponerology, in his terms. It's the study of societal causes of sociopathy and social injustice, although nonetheless his students can legitimately claim to have least taken a few courses in evil.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Indexed and RL supbage cutlisted.
Edited by laserviking42 on Dec 16th 2022 at 12:20:01 PM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
the Retromancer
Pinging ~Novella053 to here because PracticallyDifferentGenerations.Real Life hasn't disappeared due to a bug, it was manually cut and should stay this way.
Chew.
Daylight Horror is most certainly Too Common to warrant RL tropes - many examples are general, and "bad things happening during the daytime" is Chairs.
Koichi really steals? No dignity.
Absurdly Youthful Mother is on Sex, Sexuality, and Rape Tropes. It doesn't specify the reason. Is it the implication of teenage pregancy?
I think all the examples for The Chain of Harm are general except for the L. Ron Hubbard one. Trim away?
Probably because listing a bunch of children who were impregnated (i.e. sexually assaulted) is just a bad idea on so many levels.
Agreed, trim away.
Example on Morton's Fork Real Life This example...
- The documentary "The Problem With Apu" created a situation for the creators of The Simpsons. If they modified Apu to appeal to political correctness or remove him outright, then it'll offend nostalgic fans for "pandering to SJW's" or make them afraid of what can happen to other beloved characters in the series. If they didn't change Apu, then they'll be blamed for ignoring complaints or accused of promoting their accusations through inactivity. They decided to go with a mix of both options: Apu remains in the series, but is now voiced by an actor of Indian descent.
Crown Description:
Vote up to either forbid all real life examples (No Real Life Examples Please) or forbid real life examples for specific subjects (Limited Real Life Examples Only); vote down to Keep Real Life Examples. To add a trope to a No Real Life Examples Please index or the Limited Real Life Examples Only index, its crowner option must meet the following criteria:- Stable 2:1 ratio needed for NRLEP or LRLEO
- Must have been up for a minimum of a week
- If the vote is exactly 2:1 or +/- 1 vote from that, give it a couple of extra days to see if more votes come in.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]")
I'm just going to cut those now since RL cannot be played with, averted, inverted, subverted, etc. If it becomes problematic again we can discuss crownering.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me