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
I'd definitely say that Sore Loser has enough consensus to crowner next time though.
I've been trying to get discussion on Sad Clown for literal months now. With So Beautiful, It's a Curse now NRLEP, Sad Clown is definitely the trope with RL examples that feel the most... nosey, I think is the word I want to use. The current RL examples are just a long list of celebrities that have mental illnesses or past traumas, and they feel very uncomfortable to read. I'll argue the trope of Sad Clown itself is a Characterization trope, based on its description, and it's also Gossip about mental illnesses/trauma, based on the current examples, and "funny celebrities have mental illnesses", which is basically what the current examples are, is Too Common.
The real life example for My Own Grandpa really seems like a stretch, as it's not even talking about people (or time travel).
Yeah, that's not an example. It's actually an ontological paradox (a subset of Stable Time Loop), but even then it would belong under Star Trek and not real life. Go ahead and cut.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
She / Her
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I agree that's misuse because My Own Grampa seems to just involve sentient characters and it lacks the Time Travel aspect. I feel it's safe to remove it.
- A common quote misattributed to Vladimir Putin: "Whoever doesn't miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain." In the original context, he was actually criticizing that joke for having such a romanticized view of politics. Aversion of a trope that's not omnipresent
- The book Revolution 1989 describes Mikhail Gorbachev as a man who did "the right thing for the wrong reasons". Gorbachev did not relax the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe because he wanted to see the Soviet bloc go capitalist. He did it because the Eastern Bloc countries had become a serious economic drain on the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was, in fact, a committed Communist, and his program was quite similar to Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia a generation before. He thought that political repression was not necessary to maintain communism, genuinely believing that his own country and the USSR's satellites would choose communism of their own free will. To his credit, about 80 percent of Soviet citizens wanted to keep the Socialist state together; it's just that many members of the Communist Party thought there was no good way to turn back what had already been damaged, and decided to just end the state all together. Kinda long, but I think okay?
- Many people in the former Yugoslavia will, understandably, be nostalgic for the rule of Josip Broz Tito after the bloody religious wars and economic stagnation of the 90s. General
- Former citizens of East Germany have begun a trend of Ostalgie, a neologism combining Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia). The rather sad economic state of what was once East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall has led to many romanticizing the previous Soviet establishment. In Berlin, many people make a living by selling relics of the Soviet past such as Social Realist art, Soviet war medals, hats, and there is even a restaurant that specializes in selling East German food. General
- When the USSR secured their hold on all the land previously owned by the Russian Empire, they decided to divide the country along ethnic lines, giving each major people group their own "Soviet Socialist Republic". Due to the fact that the areas inhabited by traditional Arch Enemies the Azeris and Armenians overlapped somewhat, this resulted in an exclave of the Azerbaijan SSR being placed on the other side of the Armenian SSR, and the majority Armenian "Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast" being placed in the middle of Azeri territory. As long as everyone could move between the four areas and the Red Army and KGB were around to keep an eye on everyone, the ethnic tensions were kept quiet. When the central government collapsed, suddenly all those internal administrative boundaries became international borders, and war broke out over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, as Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence, Azerbaijan tried to assert control and Armenia tried to annex it. The conflict is still going on in some form to this day. General
- Many citizens of old Soviet bloc countries miss Communism, because it's what they knew, because they were important back then, or, indeed — surprisingly enough for a Western reader — because they think they were more prosperous than they are now. note General
- R. James Woosley, who was about to become Director of Central Intelligence, testified to Congress in 1993 about the downside of the end of Soviet Russia, at least so far as intelligence gathering was concerned (with a subtext of "so please don't cut our budget"): Valid
Woosley: We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.
- In the Robert D. Kaplan book Eastward to Tartary, he discusses what the fall of Communism meant to the former Eastern Bloc countries and he found that, not exactly surprisingly, the further West the country was, the easier they took the transition (this book dates to the late 1990s - ca. 2000, so things might be different today). In places such as Romania and Georgia, there's a huge struggle to cope with life in the post-Communist era; older Romanians are considered unemployable by Western firms, who find their secrecy and lack of teamwork antithetical to the capitalist way, and Georgians are regularly intimidated by ex-Olympic wrestlers who are employed by former members of the Soviet KGB to form corrupt corporations that exist as little more than gangs with offices. Georgia is also the home of Stalin's birthplace, a heart-breakingly poor town that lives off the Stalin legacy and with a high concentration of residents whom Kaplan found were exceptionally nostalgic for Communism and had nothing but good things to say about their native son. On the inverse, most of the ex-Soviet nations that border present-day Russia have come off rather well in the post-Soviet era. Idk, leaning general
- Academia in general suffered from this. There has now been a move away from the arts, humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences—and towards engineering, business, and medical school—coinciding with the fall of the USSR. One of the most telling bits of information is that, for a while, 9 different engineering professions were in the top 10 for the most demand in the 2000s and are still up there in the 2010s. Ironically, arts, humanities and social sciences were discredited in the USSR because of their associations with intellectualism. Furthermore, the CIA actually used art as a weapon against the USSR. While Soviet artists stuck to "safe" realist art, the CIA promoted more abstract art as kind of a "this is why freedom is better" sort of tactic in the "Cultural Cold War". A senior CIA member, Thomas Braden, has gone on record saying, "The Boston Symphony Orchestra won more acclaim for the US in Paris than John Foster Dulles or Dwight D. Eisenhower could have brought with a hundred speeches". Indeed many Soviet artists started to sneak in more abstract themes in their art. Others outright defected to the West for greener pastures. General
- Many engineers from the Soviet Union have faced difficulties adapting to the post-Soviet economy. Due to the organizational structure of Soviet engineering, with its concentration of most R&D in huge centralized Research Institutes, a lot of fresh engineers had found a cushy position where they could do essentially the same thing for all of their career, gradually losing any semblance of flexibility. Adapting to the more general nature of engineering outside of the Soviet Union was difficult. General
- During the Cold War, competition between the United States-led West and the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc at the Olympic Games was incredibly intense, with heated patriotism on both sides of the Iron Curtain generating a great deal of the excitement. The Olympics literally became an ideological battlefield and a direct extension of the conflict. As a result, performances such as the Miracle On Ice at the 1980 Winter Games and the controversial finish in the Men’s Basketball Final at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich have a lasting impact on popular culture today. However, while in the immediate post-collapse era the lingering influence of the Soviets still intensified many of the competitions (such as the "Magnificent Seven" US women's gymnastics team winning Gold at the 1996 Games), the Olympics today have lost much of their relevance without the Cold War driving the rivalries. General
- Many Americans miss the days when they had a clear enemy, versus the more nebulous, decentralized threat of modern terrorism. Some people honestly believe that a nation like the Soviet Union is necessary to fight terrorism because they would be willing to go to extremes that democracies wouldn't. However, it must be said the Soviet Union had extreme trouble in Afghanistan, and indeed sponsored left-wing terrorism from The '70s to The '80s, backing Carlos the Jackal, RZ and other groups as they conducted attacks and hijackings in the West. General
- This article best explains it; part of the reason the Republican and Democratic parties have become so polarized in the 21st century is because the collapse of the Soviet Union left the government without a common enemy to fight, so the two parties began to turn on each other. General
- This article
- Even though the USSR/Eastern Europe and post-1990 China have stopped supporting pro-Communist rebel groups throughout the world, some of them still exist due to other factors such as government corruption or poor living standards. General
- Despite the fact that even when the Union was around every rebel seemed to have an AKM rifle, it was nothing compared to today. The bunkers and storage facilities owned by Russia but outside of its territory that had to be abandoned with the collapse (and apparently no one bothering to lock the door on the way out) caused an explosive proliferation of small arms in the Third World. General
- And the most telling result of the fall of Communism, for the West, has been a dramatic shift towards liberal capitalism and a narrowing of the political landscape; "socialist" and "labor" parties now stand for centrist free-market policy, and governments that think to institute policies of wealth redistribution or fund social welfare are branded as "radical". Such a lack of pluralism can be considered to have weakened post-cold war democracy. General
- In an interesting variation, many Eastern Europeans are glad that communist rule ended but wish it haden't fallen like it did. These people would have understandably preferred if the USSR and its satellites had liberalized and eventually allowed for multi-party democracy rather than the whole system imploding. This would have avoided the economic troubles of the nineties and given communism a meaningful legacy as well a voice in modern Eastern Europe. General
- In the years between the end of the cold war and The War on Terror, the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence operations were as muddled as America's foreign policy. Where in previous years the FBI concentrated on rooting out Soviet spies and brutalizing Black Nationalists, The '90s saw FBI agents focusing on ecoterrorists, Animal Wrongs Groups, and Right Wing Militia Fanatics. (The agency is also rumoured to have been behind the bombing that severely injured Judi Bari.) 9/11 gave the FBI a clear focus, though the fixation on Islamic extremism has allegedly let right-wing white domestic terrorists (despite then making up the vast majority of home-grown terrorism) slip through the cracks and continue to fixate on Black community organizers and activists, along with environmentalists. General
- Nicaragua (a country many only dimly recall as the "Contra" half in "Iran Contra") had a leftist, Cuban/Soviet aligned government from 1979 (when it overthrew the Somoza dynasty) to 1990 when - as part of a peace settlement brokered by Costa Rica - free elections resulted in the loss of the Sandinista party under Daniel Ortega to a center-right led "anything but Ortega" coalition. Whatever the next sixteen years brought, apparently enough Nicaraguans were bummed enough by it that in 2006 they elected Ortega to the Presidency once more, when the center/right split the vote (Ortega won with just 34% of the vote, ironically his lowest percentage to date). Ortega's propaganda milks both the nostalgia and their - perceived or real - successes since 2006 for all they're worth and the old man (born 1946) shows no sign of letting go of power as of 2018. General
- With the rise of far-right elements and domestic issues in Eastern Europe, in countries like Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania and the Baltics many people have started to look back fondly on what the socialist state brought them even if they had issues with the way the socialist states ran things - they miss the sense of solidarity, comradeship and a feeling of safeness that existed back then and loathe the political unrest that has unfolded in today’s Europe. General
- While Communism ended in Russia, most would hardly call what they got a free market. The Soviet Union organized its industries in bureaus, with each usually focused on an industry for its particular region if not the whole countrynote These were usually headed by extremely talented and loyal individuals (Kalashnikov), favored politicians (Mikoyan of Mig), high level bureaucrats or some combination there of. When the Soviet Union broke up, the new government decided to make these into corporations and put the same sorts of people in charge. Suddenly the country was controlled by mega corps owned by politicians. Instant plutocracy. The worst part is that, as a lot of these companies own/are Soviet brands (yes, the Soviets had brands), a lot of modern Russian Communists don't actually want these companies to be broken up or regulated because they have major nostalgia factor. Everyone else though certainly has the right to be more than a little bummed about the whole thing. General
- Ironically, though, this is one time where the Soviet Union's fixation on Russia was a good thing for all of the other constituent republics. Since most of these were headquartered in Russia, the other former Soviet states had the opportunity to divide their economies more sensibly. General
- Interestingly, the state of much of the former Eastern Bloc resembles what Adam Smith derisively called "landlord capitalism," the term "landlord" here referring to former feudal lords. Much of Smith's writings were an attempt to prevent this situation, where the elites of a former economic system have a huge advantage in the new economy because they now have private ownership of things that were awarded to them to manage for societies' collective benefit. Just as the former nobles once used their estates to enrich themselves while no longer providing protection, food, or shelter to their peasants, the former members of the Communist Party and their family have used their industries to exploit the working class. Ironically, the failure to fully resolve such a situation, even if the nobility was keen on some of Smith's other ideas, also led to the writings of Marx. General
- Several states in Northern Italy - most prominently Emilia-Romagna note - were governed by the Communists during most of the Cold War era - and very successfully so. This article from 1972 notes the Regions' status as a keynote for Eurocommunist parties. Since the Italian Communist Party dissolved in the nineties, however, corruption has increased again and the shift to the centre of its successor, the Democratic Party, has made many Italians disillusioned with left-wing politics. General
- Many women's artistic gymnastics fans long for the days when, as they see it, artistry and grace dominated the sport. The Soviets won an unheard-of nine back-to-back team Olympic gold medals,note and on any list of the greatest gymnasts of all time, a minimum of seventy percent are guaranteed to be Soviet.note The Soviets, with their national training center, massive government funding, thousands of aspiring athletes, and in-house choreographer, emphasized line, artistry, dance, and grace in their gymnastics, and no one will dispute that their routines, and floor exercises in particular, are of a standard that may never be reached again. There is a reason why the Golden Age of Women's Gymnastics is said to have ended with the 1992 Olympics. But because the government demanded success at any price, the system's Training from Hell means that dark brutality lurked in the shadows behind the blazing lights of the Soviet greats, and many of the stories hidden in that darkness would give any parent nightmares. General
- The Soviet dominance of pairs figure skating and ice dancing. Although that actually lasted long after the fall of Communism, it's no longer a guarantee that a Russian pair will be standing on top of the podium. Meanwhile, their newfound dominance in singles skating has come under threat for the same reason of their brutal training regimen being exposed. General
- The fall of old-style Communism has been hard for people on the seriously far, Stalinist, Left. In the old days, the sort of people who pined for an all-powerful Leader who would guide and steer Revolution in formerly decadent capitalist nations, those looking for an idol and whose only complaint about Joseph Stalin was that he could be too soft and forgiving, they had a lot of choices for a Leader to worship. Stalin himself, Mao Ze-dong, Enver Hoxha of Albania, Jaruzelski of Poland, Ceaucescu of Romania... as totalitarian Communism has ebbed and died and the Leaders have fallen, the choice of Great Leader has shrunk to one: Kim-Yong-Il. Leftists have largely moved on to more moderate social democratic and green politics, which place more emphasis on individual freedom and don't look to strongman leaders. General
- Some right-wing commenters have lamented that younger generations, especially in America, are becoming more drawn towards left-wing politics because the collapse of the Soviet Union has caused the specter of the Red Scare to fade away, and to not resonate with people who grew up or were born in the post-Cold War era. General
- For the former Marxist-Leninist nations in Africa and in the Middle East like Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia and South Yemen, many of their citizens have also looked back on their former Socialist pasts with appreciation and because they feel life meant something back in those days and decry the current day governments and politicians for selling out and becoming rich while most of their population are living in squalor like Angola and Mozambique and Benin - and that’s not even getting into the wartorn nations like Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. General
- More than one American small town built itself up around military bases during the Cold War. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of these bases either scaled back or shut down entirely, and the soldiers left, taking the local economy with it and leading to depopulation and high rates of unemployment and poverty. General
Lots of general stuff, lots of walls of text.
(she/her)
Calling Trademark Favorite Food and Offing the Offspring for NRLEP
Macron's notes
Indexed the pages on NRLEP, both were sub-pages which are now on the Cut List.
I could see a case for Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell to be Too Controversial and thus an NRLEP candidate. Although certainly there are people in the world who miss the way things were during the Cold War and miss the communist or socialist regimes of the mid-late twentieth century, there's certainly a lot who don't, and debates on this topic can get very heated so I'd say that the concept is controversial enough to warrant NRLEP. I can also see a logic behind calling it a stereotype as well - it's certainly a stereotype that shows up in media that "all Russians, either secretly or openly, miss the Soviet Union", which isn't at all true in real life. Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell is also related to tropes like Make the Bear Angry Again, Post-Soviet Reunion, and the more general Capitalism Is Bad, all of which are NRLEP on controversiality. I'd put it on the next crowner, honestly.
The Woosely quote, one of your very few valid examples, could easily just go on the quotes page anyway.
Edited by MissConduct on Dec 30th 2022 at 4:15:11 AM
Or we could just clean up as indicated instead of automatically jumping to crowner every single time you see a trope on this thread.
I agree with the cuts as suggested.
How sweet it is
Place Worse Than Death might be in "too common/gossip" territory. Seeing the folder sizes for the RL sections is worrying.
Edited by Berrenta on Dec 30th 2022 at 9:26:31 AM
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Is War Is Glorious truly a narrative trope, or can it be put under Too Controversial?
That trope is weird AF, it has a soft split for various places specific to the US (I don't even know why New York City is there considering we have The Big Rotten Apple), each with a RL section (each one starting with "Truth in Television").
The RL sections are big and nattery, and quite frankly, almost any place on earth could be considered Place Worse Than Death at some point in history (myself I'm living on a few native burial grounds). So yeah, we have a few more days til the crowner clears, but I'd say this one should count as Gossip & Stereotype.
War Is Glorious is for when an entire work frames war as a glorious thing, not a character (we have tropes like General Ripper for that). Without a work that makes it a theme, the trope simply cannot exist, hence a Narrative trope.
Alright.
Could War Is Hell also be a narrative trope?
LaserViking, I feel like you're personally attacking me. I do not automatically want to crowner every trope that gets brought up here, for example I saw that Smitten Teenage Girl had one terrible example, I cut it and I didn't bring it up for crowner. If you have arguments against the ones I made against the ones I made about potentially crownering Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell being Controversial and Stereotyping, make them. The way you phrased your post makes it seem like you're dismissing my arguments because they're coming from me. I think we should have more discussion on this trope instead of throwing out my argument on bad faith.
(Oh, and I'll second crownering Place Worse Than Death. Totally narrative.)
Edited by MissConduct on Dec 31st 2022 at 8:06:42 AM
Amateur Veteran
So, Our Dragons Are Different, which was formerly NRLE under the reasoning that dragons ain't a thing, has had a real-life section restored in the past few days. I do not know if it was voted on by crowner — the page did not mention it if it was, it had a "No Real Life Examples" warning but did not state how that status came about — but all the same it seemed like the kind of thing that should be brought up here.
(Regarding personal thoughts on the page's status, I do think that there's no need or benefit to listing things that are tangentially similar to some dragon portrayals like pterosaurs or crocodiles or whatever, but I do wonder about the persistent trend of naming reptiles after dragons — Komodo's dragons, bearded dragons, flying dragons, dragon millipedes, Dracorex, Dracoraptor, Dilong, Mei long, etcetera, which is the one thing I think has merit of being mentioned somewhere.)
I've never heard of or seen an incident where a trope was un-NRLEP'd. But I have seen people who are unaware of the NRLEP (it's not always clear from the page unless you look at the indices at the bottom) adding stuff in. I'll clear this one out and leave a commented out tag.
EDIT: Nevermind, the history shows the troper saw the no real life tags and just deleted them, I'll send a notifier too.
Edited by laserviking42 on Jan 3rd 2023 at 5:18:11 AM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
The Enforcer
Never Sleep Again has the following examples, most of which are general and of which the only one that's not is zero context. Permission to cut the section?
- Fatal familial insomnia is an illness that leaves the victim physically incapable of sleeping. The lack of sleep results in increasingly severe psychological symptoms, rapid weight loss, dementia, and eventually, death. There is no cure. — general
- Undine's Curse, a disease that makes the victim forget to breathe when they sleep. This can be fatal. — general
- Similarly, Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome. — general, zero context
- SIDS: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, can occur while a baby is sleeping. — general
- An old wives' tale says that a person who has had a concussion shouldn't be allowed to fall asleep or they could fall into a coma or die. This an oversimplification of the truth. People who've had a concussion shouldn't be left alone, sleeping or awake, because if their brain starts to swell from the injury, they'll pass out and will need someone to rush them into emergency care before their respiration shuts down. Waking them up if they doze off is necessary to determine if they can be aroused from their unconscious state; it's not because sleep is dangerous in itself. In fact, keeping them from sleeping at all can make matters worse as it slows down healing and can even do further damage; the accepted rule of thumb is that you only want to keep a concussion victim awake until they get medical attention, at which point you should listen to the experts as to how often you should try to rouse them. — general, misuse
- Typically domestic gas poisoning causes drowsiness. When dealing with it, try as hard as you can to not fall asleep, as you will inevitably die. Same thing with freezing, carbon monoxide poisoning, high-altitude hypoxia, and really a lot of life-or-death situations dealing with hazardous environment. Though it's not the sleep that kills you, it's the environment finishes you off once you stop resisting it and searching for a way to safety. — general
- Serial Killer Gerald Parker, who earned the nickname "the Bedroom Basher" due to this habit. — zero context, could be salvaged with more information
- Falling asleep while suffering from hypothermia can accelerate heat loss due to lack of physical activity, and drowsiness is one of the side effects of a drop in body temperature. — general
- Goddamn bedbugs! Not fatal, but creepy and uncomfortable. — general, misuse
- Occasionally a story will circulate about someone who supposedly doesn't sleep living somewhere in the world. The veracity of these is always suspect, though. It's far more likely that these people have a condition that prevents them from recognizing their sleeping state as such. — general, misuse
Re: Our Dragons Are Different, I feel like mentions of reptiles named after dragons would go in a different place. Do we have, and would it be reasonable to create, a Trivia entry for real animals or scientific concepts named after fictional entities?
they/them pronouns. Look at my Neocities.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
An Analysis page could be created for real-life dragons such as the Komodo dragon.
The Enforcer
Catapult Nightmare is another case where the whole section is general medical natter. Permission to cut for the same reason as Never Sleep Again?
- Certain people will react this way, most notably to dreams that feel real (dreams where you are in your bed for instance).
- Will often wake up kicking, punching, or screaming.
- Waking from a dream that there is a snake in your bed is a pretty strong justification for leaping from the bed and hitting the light switch.
- Some people actually feel pain from perceived injuries sustained during dreams, so a nightmare where one is experiencing some form of injury, the pain will jolt them awake, sort of like the polar opposite of a sexual dream.
- As mentioned, night terrors, also known as sleep terrors, also known as pavor nocturnus, are often a specific example of this. While bolting upright doesn't always happen, it's a common occurrence and is usually accompanied by hysterical screaming, uncontrollable crying and an inability to be comforted until the episode passes. Since it is often accompanied by sleepwalking - itself a similar condition to night terrors, a related parasomnia - some suffers may even bolt upright, clamber out of bed and begin attempting to 'escape', walking or even running around without direction, screaming in terror all the while. Things may get even worse if someone tries to touch the sufferer, who may respond violently, punching, kicking or thrashing about at the sympathetic person, all while still asleep - most advice posits that the best thing to do when witnessing someone having a night terror is to try to prevent the sufferer from experiencing injury, and be prepared to reassure them when they finally wake. That said, night terrors themselves are a very rare occurrence. They're most common at a young age with an estimated 1% - 6% of children suffering from them, though most grow out of it; less than 1% of adults continue to suffer from night terrors.note
- Chronic sleepwalkers occasionally sit up suddenly in bed, as if startled. If anything, this inverts this trope, as they're still very much asleep, and generally don't start dreaming until after they've sat up or stood and walked for a bit, then gotten back into bed without waking.
- As for the screaming part of the screaming and bolting upright, the aforementioned sleep paralysis may dampen your ability to scream or speak at all, so while you are, in fact, screaming murder within the dream, you may be struggling very hard with it and more or less mumbling nonsense with all your might in reality. It is possible to wake yourself in this way, be it recursively hearing the noise of your mumbling or the exertion you're having to put behind it waking you. While some people scream during the previously mentioned night terrors, many children who suffer from an episode have been recorded mumbling, groaning, or weeping uncontrollably instead.
Reading over Never Sleep Again, it is for plots where the characters do whatever they can to not fall asleep (because that's when the monsters get them). It is not for situations where people are incapable of sleeping, which is what most of the RL section seems to be about. It seems to be all misuse, so go ahead and cut the examples I say.
The Enforcer
@badtothebaritone
I guess Life Imitates Art would be the closest, but I was also thinking about cases like these beetles named after the legendary bird trio and ''Dracorex hogwartsia''. Do you think there are enough examples of real animals/scientific concepts being named after fictional entities to justify it as a trivia entry separate from Life Imitates Art?
That's even more general, I say cut that too.
Edited by laserviking42 on Jan 3rd 2023 at 9:06:28 AM
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
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.
Anyways, the crowner is full, so any new candidates will have to wait til current votes are all in.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me