Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

I'm the one who brought up It Amused Me. Yes, the description says that the characters aren't necessarily evil, so I'm not sure who decided on the "related to Evil Is Petty" bit, but it does point out that the distinction between For the Evulz and an It Amused Me character who happens to enjoy hurting people is rather arbitrary.

I don't agree with it being related to Evil Is Petty, but it's still ascribing (a)moral motivations to real people.

I mean, maybe, but given that the trope outright says this is not a trope about good and evil can we really call it a morality trope?

Miss Conduct I believe does the crowner stuff so the Evil Is Petty stuff is their doing (most likely anyway).

This is precisely why I asked to be able to discuss every possible crowner trope, not just the controversial ones...

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 4:15:03 AM

The description for Look Ma, No Plane! also mentions flight via "some nifty invention". Between that, the page image, and the numerous examples (Rocketeer, Iron Man, The Mandalorian, etc), it's definitely safe to say that examples involving jet packs are valid. I think this one should be removed from NRLEP "impossible in real life" on account of not actually being impossible in real life.

Is Days of Future Past a future prediction trope?

Claiming a real person operates under Blue-and-Orange Morality or is entirely amoral is still ascribing moral motivation even if you're not calling them "good" or "evil" explicitly. Plus It Amused Me is basically a Jerkass trope, and calling real people assholes also falls under the morality banner per its page.

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 14th 2023 at 4:22:39 AM

Where does it claim amorality or Blue-and-Orange Morality? It's solely about people doing things because they find them funny; I just read the description and I'm not seeing anything that outright says these characters are amoral, and especially no reference to BAOM.

I'm not going to work on crowners anymore.

Is there an issue with just waiting for consensus on all of the options...? That's what we do at TRS...

The first sentence in its description states that it refers to amoral characters. Saying that someone just does what they want without regard for others is still a statement of moral motivation or the absence thereof, and is a kind of mean thing to accuse a real person of.

"It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin: the motivation of an amoral character seeking... well, amusement. It's not that they enjoy being good or evil — they may not know or care about the difference — but they do whatever they feel like without regard for others."

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 14th 2023 at 5:48:08 AM

Alright, fair enough I guess, though the rest of the description contradicts that by talking about how such a character may still have morals and may still care about the people around them. If the trope really does require "amorality" then that's not very clear based on everything else that's been mentioned.

Looking through the examples, most of them are ZCE or misuse. The ones that actively talk about amusement and stuff though don't seem to be implying the person is bad or amoral though, just that they do things for the sake of fun.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 5:54:37 AM

Yeah, "people do things they enjoy" is chairs. I was under the impression, as is most of the description, that It Amused Me isn't just "folks do things that are fun"; it's "this character's only or primary motivation, beyond good or evil, is their amusement". Might be a TRS candidate if misuse for "people enjoy things" is running around and even the description can't decide what it's trying to say morally.

I mean, I may have misspoke but yeah, it may ultimately be a TRS issue since the title is a stock phrase and so it seems like it's being used for both "primary motivation" and "the motive behind a specific action", with the latter being much less morality-defining but also much less meaningful.

TBH I think we can run through, clear out the ZCE and misuse, and then discuss further based on what's left. Sound good?

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 6:00:12 AM

Here's my assessment of the examples on It Amused Me. To be honest, I'm not sure if there'd be anything left if the misuse was purged; none of the present examples really feel like the trope. Otto the octopus (and even then, that's ascribing motivations to animals which is pure speculation) and Mario Balotelli (is this really a consistent pattern of behavior in his overall life or just publicity stunts?) seem to be the only examples remotely close to the trope definition.

Yeah, sounds good. Based on the description and the fact that "people do things they enjoy" is completely meaningless, I'm 90% sure that it's supposed to be a trope about amusement being someone's primary / only motivation, making most of the RL examples, about specific incidents, misuse.

• Meet Otto the octopus, who will do anything for attention—or, perhaps, out of sheer boredom—from dousing the lights to juggling the hermit crabs in his tank to throwing stones against the tank wall. When you spend your entire life in an aquarium, you have to make up your own amusement. The staff is considering a purchase of octopus toys to keep him busy. — anthropomorphism speculation alert. octopi are damn smart, but we don't know if they think of "amusement" the same way we do and without being able to ask him, we can't tell.
• Thomas Griffiths Wainewright's reasoning for poisoning his third (known) victim, sister-in-law Helen Abercrombie. — I don't understand how this is related. It just sounds like a petty reason; not that the guy enjoyed it. Misuse.
  "She had very thick ankles."
• Mary Bale's explanation for why she decided to drop a cat in a garbage bin. — Zero context.
• Italian professional football/soccer player Mario Balotelli, formerly of Manchester City and Liverpool, lives his life this way. From racking up tens of thousands of pounds in parking tickets to going to a kids' school to stop bullying, paying off random student loans, wandering around a women's prison because he wanted a look around, and driving around with obscene amounts of cash on his front seat. Why? To quote the man himself when the police asked him that exact question, "Because I can". It is because of this that the footballing world generally regards him as a viable source of entertainment. — Is this actually how he lives his life or just that he's rich, attention-seeking, and because he's rich, immune to meaningful consequences? I highly doubt that "because I can" is his motivation for the majority of things he does.
• During all the drama that surrounded Lebron James going to play for Miami, Chris Bosh's explanation for not doing the same with any more tact? "It's entertaining to see people react to your real emotions, because if it wasn't fun I wouldn't do it." — This is an isolated incident, not their overall motivation. Misuse.
• The entire schtick of the Jackass boys. — Zero context; also in regards to their on-series personae, not real life.
  Ryan Dunn: [explaining to Bam Magera's mom why he stabbed Bam in the ass with a hot iron brand in the shape of a dick] Because it was funny.
• Hunter S. Thompson's entire life. — Zero context.
  "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
• Warren Ellis invoked this word for word in regards to G.I. Joe: Resolute's Gender Flip of Dial Tone, as he'd given a random technician so many lines that Hasbro insisted that she be a named Joe, they gave Ellis a list of names, and that's the one he picked. — A single action; not someone's overall behavior. Misuse.
• Chile pepper breeder Ed Currie, the creator of the Carolina Reaper, claims he bred the world's hottest pepper just to see if he could. And also because decades of substance abuse had deadened his sense of taste to such a degree that he needed something insanely hot to get a buzz. And he claims he's still not done breeding even hotter peppers. — This isn't an action that has an impact on other people, which the trope focuses on. It feels like misuse?
• Scambaiters get a kick out of posing as prospective victims when responding to 419 Scam emails, with intent to set scammers off and waste as much of their time as possible, robbing them of opportunities to pursue and swindle real victims. If the scambaiter is also a sufficiently skilled IT technician, they can and will bring down entire scam networks just because it is funny to Pay Evil unto Evil. — General.
• Brenda Spencer, the culprit of the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego in 1979, was called by a reporter at her home after the shooting, who asked her why she did it. Her answer: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats, who was doing an interview at an Atlanta radio station when the news came in, was so disturbed by the senselessness of the shooting that he wrote the song "I Don't Like Mondays" about it. — A single action, not overall motivation, and also probably an ROCEJ violation.
• "Smurfing" is a practice on ranked online games where an experienced player makes a new account. While this might be done for a few different reasons, it isn't uncommon for said player to use this new account to bully inexperienced newcomers just for the fun of it. — General.
• During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, armed American bomber aircraft would be sent into the air to clear the flight decks ahead of Japanese air attacks to prevent a situation similar to what happened to the Japanese carriers at Midway. Several squadron commanders would, of their own initiative, lead bombing raids on the Japanese airfields of Guam. Upon hearing of this, their superiors would direct the rest of the orbiting aircraft to launch follow-up raids. — Folks at war doing warlike actions, even if they weren't directed to do them, is not something they're doing "just for fun". Misuse.

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 14th 2023 at 6:06:34 AM

Hmmm... If it's all misuse then it can all be axed regardless of a crowner vote, tbh. Really I'm just unsure it's a "morality" trope given the trope's vague definition and whether or not it's "amoral" characters only or not.

It's one of those cases we keep having lately where things aren't fitting neatly into categories. The true crime stuff got brought to the wiki talk policy thread, and it's all reminding me of my previous concern that the categories are too limiting and important to the point where we must be able to fit these tropes into one of them at all times. More on that at the thread though.

Granted, this one is more of a subjective thing, and I can understand why you see it as a morality trope.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 6:08:07 AM

Yeah, what we've run into with this one, Operator Incompatibility, and tbh, Black Widow / The Bluebeard is issues with the trope definitions themselves. It Amused Me feels like it's supposed to be about overall motivation, but is getting misused for singular actions and can't decide if it's related to morality or not, Operator Incompatibility has no reason to be specifically speculative fiction, but its description's specfic-centric and that's how it's being used, and Black Widow / The Bluebeard don't clearly distinguish between "woman who repeatedly kills her husbands" as a stock character and "this person killed their spouse".

It Amused Me's definitely characterization, since it's ascribing motivations to someone's overall, well, character, but since nobody can agree what "characterization" means and It Amused Me doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to be either...

I know this isn't going to happen, but I'm starting to wonder if we should put crowners on this thread on hold until we fully clarify the criteria, since I totally agree with you that the categories are overly limiting as they presently are.

Anyway, I'd like at least one more person to sound off on It Amused Me; if we agree that the current RL examples are misuse, I'll cut them and it can be taken off the crowner until and unless it comes back up (and should probably be put in the cue for TRS).

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 14th 2023 at 6:11:22 AM

TBH if the misuse is axed and it gets voted as NRLEP on morality grounds I won't be that bothered. I mostly just felt like we needed a lot more discussion since the current crowner reason is misleading and there wasn't enough discussion on the subject beforehand. Now that we had this talk though I'm still personally unconvinced but I'm also not sure if there are clear enough grounds to say it absolutely isn't morality-based.

So... eh. What happens happens.

I made a Trope Talk thread to try to get more clarity on the "overall motivation vs. individual actions" aspect of It Amused Me. It's definitely a trope about ascribing motivations to people, which is speculation at the best of times (even interviews with public figures don't necessarily illustrate their full reasons for doing something, let alone their overall personality), so I think it probably should be NRLEP on at least one grounds, but if it doesn't have any valid RL examples I guess that's not an issue.

So uh where should I go to get a time limit on Propaganda Machine. I dont mind real life historical examples per say from like WW 2 and such. Tokyo Rose for example.

But uh talking about how in 2023 Joe Biden's US government had become an "Orwellian Ministry of Truth" is uh.....

Things like that can be cut on ROCEJ grounds, definitely. For a time limit, I think you go here.

Socially Scored Society defines itself as a SF trope about settings where citizens are given a numerical status.

It's acquired a RL section with a single example - references to China, plus acknowledging conspiracy theories about how "they" want to do that to all of us.

Given the positioning of the trope, does this sound like a NRLEP candidate?

This was discussed in the TLP phase and I think at the time it was determined that it's not inherently contentious to mention some real-life context (or maybe that's not what we agreed, I don't remember fully). Anyway at this point we may be able to slash that for ROCEJ grounds and see what happens later.

Dropping back in very briefly, as I normally do not feel comfortable posting in this forum thread.

Some time ago, I brought up the following Green Gators example here, making the case that the example be removed because it contained problems with Examples Are Not General and natter.

I received no pushback on the issue and subsequently removed it. The post on this thread appeared on this page:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13350380440A15238800&page=460

Troper Mormonic Pazazu later readded what amounts to an elaborated version of it (the second example) complete with Weasel Words, as well as another that's a shoehorn (the first example):

Note that the trope description is very clear as to its scope. Emphasis mine:

"Crocodilians in fiction, especially cartoons, however, are typically depicted as bright, vibrant green, similar to some lizards and amphibians, without any kind of markings or patterns (though some may have a paler green or yellow underbelly)."

And regarding the first of their added examples, note that it's already covered in the trope description here:

"While this trope is often associated with cartoons, it is actually surprisingly old— even Ancient Egyptian artwork of crocodiles often depicted them as green. [note] This is because the Nile crocodile's gray-and-olive skin does look vaguely greenish."

I'm requesting two things:

-permission to remove the Real Life folder as per the case presented above.

-considering adding this trope to the crowner, given that it is attracting shoehorned and general examples.

I tried the removal option first, but given what subsequently happened, am thinking it needs to be made NRLEP.

Thank you.

I mean, those are misuse though IDK what category they'd go in if we made them NRLEP. We're having a discussion here that touches on whether or not to ditch the category system entirely, but for now we do need to have a category to justify this one. Technically it's not impossible, though obviously real gators are never as cartoonishly green.

Yeah, you can remove that example or possibly send in an Ask The Tropers query about the user if they re-add it. It's misuse since the trope's for cartoonishly bright green gators and it being an artistic convention. Animals being the color animals are is completely meaningless.

If you wanted to NRLEP it, there could actually be a case for Impossible. That's where Cartoonish Companions and Puni Plush, similar cartoon art style tropes are. After all, real life doesn't have an art style which allows for extreme colors or body shapes like that. "Gators being green" isn't impossible but "all gators are a cartoonishly bright green" is.

Before I axe the section from It Amused Me, I'd like one more person to sign off on all the examples listed here being misuse, ZCE, or otherwise problematic.

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 17th 2023 at 8:28:24 AM

Hey, important news. It looks like we're getting rid of the category format after all.