Redmess
I agree on that part, just making an appearance on television should not count, it should be an actual appearance in a work.
Optimism is a duty.
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
By the way, here are the tropes on Boris Johnson's page:
- Author Avatar: In the mid-noughties he wrote an infamously terrible novel called Seventy-Two Virgins, which "stars a tousled, bicycling Tory MP who believes everything is up for grabs".
Sound familiar?
- Bestiality Is Depraved: He once won a Spectator competition for a limerick in which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sex with a goat. ("There once was a fellow from Ankara, who was an enormous wankerer…")
- Colbert Bump: Johnson's appearance on an April 1998 episode of Have I Got News for You is credited as being what brought him to a far wider audience; emphasising a bumbling upper-class persona, he was viewed as entertaining and invited back on to later episodes, including as a guest presenter. After these, he came to be recognised on the street by the public, and was invited to appear on other television shows, such as Top Gear, Parkinson, Breakfast with Frost, and Question Time.
- First-Name Basis/Middle Name Basis: Often referred to in the media simply as "Boris", making him the only British political figure excepting royalty known by (a) given name alone.note
- Obfuscating Stupidity: He's pretty upfront about it, as the page quote shows. He is extremely well-read and educated, and it is generally accepted that he is much more ruthlessly Machiavellian than he seems, with his on-screen persona being just that — a persona. However, people seem willing to go with it anyway (though approximately half the population came to hate him following the Brexit referendum, so there's that).
- On the other hand, the COVID-19 outbreak (which started less than six months after he became Prime Minister, and less than a month after he was re-elected) has been noted to severely test his supposed abilities; quite a few commentators, including a number from within his own party, have started to sound the alarm that even if he was a competent operator before (which is something not universally agreed-upon), he's started to flag after having contracted the virus and been laid up in hospital. His response to the virus outbreak has also, shall we say, not been universally lauded.
- Politician Guest-Star: To the point where there is a special part of the HIGNFY DVD collection called "The Full Boris".
- Sophisticated as Hell: Combines Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness with a set of "oh, gosh", "um, ah" placeholder noise Verbal Tics to odd effect, leading Russell Howard on Mock the Week to speculate that when really excited, "he'd sound like a thesaurus going through a blender".
- Too Funny to Be Evil: According to The Daily Telegraph:
A not inconsiderable number of people either a) don’t believe bad things about him because they think he’s funny, charming and boyishly harmless; or b) do believe bad things about him but let him off because they think he’s funny, charming and boyishly harmless.
- Verbal Tic: He has a habit of stammering and stuttering, as well as punctuating his speech with strange noises. Dead Ringers lampoons this by having his dialogue being made up more of nonsensical blither and blather than actual speech.
What should be cut? What, if anything, should be kept?
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall
Redmess
Sophisticated as Hell and Verbal Tic should probably be cut. The rest seem to be notable media examples, and the Obfuscating Stupidity one has been attested in the media, so that seems to be true if nothing else.
Optimism is a duty.
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Thanks, I've removed the two offending examples.
Creator.HP Lovecraft is incredibly densely written (paragraphs average at about 200 words without line breaks; on non-wide load desktop windows that's 10-12 lines per paragraph and I don't want to imagine the nightmare it is on mobile) and meanders quite a bit, changing topics back and forth fairly frequently. Tried my hand at whittling it down a few months ago but only really made a dent in it.
The most egregious thing is several obsessively analytical paragraphs dedicated entirely to the subject of his extreme-even-for-his-day racism, what it entailed, and how it affected his work, which could honestly probably be cut down to one reasonably sized paragraph.
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Mar 17th 2021 at 6:10:05 AM
the Obfuscating Stupidity one does need to be rewritten to remove natter and have proper indentation.
Angry babby
John Kricfalusi has a very long description. He has had a very wild and very personal career, yes, and we should definitely mention the controversies that affected (or even defined) his career, but surely it can be trimmed down.
Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 16th 2021 at 2:22:36 PM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Musician/Composer
I have no objections to trimming it down.
Not sure if this is the right thread, but Podcast.Frenemies seems to trope the hosts.
Avatar by Butterscotch Arts. Used under license.
Angry babby
We should go through the wicks on Doug Walker, especially for sex-related tropes. I brought it up on the P5 cleanup, but he attracts... weird stuff.
Redmess
Yeah, he has really creepy fangirls, it seems. We should really go through all the former Channel Awesome contributors for this sort of thing.
Optimism is a duty.
Angry babby
Doug gets it the most, as does The Spoony Experiment, especially since he had videos about Black Comedy Rape.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Should we have this paragraph on Joss Whedon? It doesn't really add anything to the page as of now other than "Whedon bad"
- In 2020, Whedon was accused of abusive behavior on the set of Justice League by actor Ray Fisher. He has since been accused of the same by a number of other collaborators including Charisma Carpenter, Michelle Trachtenberg, Amber Benson, Jason Momoa, and Jose Molina, in addition to 2017 accusations of mistreatment by his ex-wife Kai Cole. These accusations came not long after he was accused of sexually pressuring younger women who worked on his shows into affairs with him.
Edited by PlasmaPower on May 21st 2021 at 4:18:02 PM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!
Angry babby
I think it's really affected his public reputation (which was heavily tied to writing stories with feminist themes) so it's worth keeping. Its current incarnation isn't that complainy, just describing facts, and its much shorter than, say, that stuff that was on John Barrowman.
It still seems like it was written in bad faith though.
Edited by PlasmaPower on May 21st 2021 at 9:03:11 AM
Thomas fans needed! Come join me in the the show's cleanup thread!
Angry babby
I can kind of see the potential unnecessary factor with listing everybody who called him out, and maybe the "this came not long after" phrasing, but I don't see anything glaring other than that.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.
Now a lurker. Thanks for everything. | he/him
Don't know if this is the right place to bring this but Down the Rabbit Hole is bloated with real life people troping. I'm not even sure how much of the page is salvageable without it.
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall
I know Boris Johnson has been through this thread once before, but I found some more real life troping on his page. I've cleaned that, and fixed some atrocious sentence structure (although the page still needs a proper grammar parse).
I also cleaned up poor formatting and speculative troping from the page as well. Most of the trope list that came through here before remains intact, I've just cleaned up the wording and made them proper media entries rather than entries that look like they're trying to loophole "no real person troping" by jamming a reference to the media into the entry (in short, I've made the media portrayal the focus of the entry instead of a glossed-over reference or afterthought).
Most of the issues were inappropriate real life person potholing in the main text (such as referring to Dominic Cummings as using Insane Troll Logic); the trope list itself was mainly a formatting mess (such as quotes being used for examples and things like "First-Name Basis/Middle Name Basis").
I did remove the Blue Blood entry. It was just an entry stating his descent from George II. That's troping a real life person, so it should have been removed rather than commented out.
- Blue Blood: Descended from George II (his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather).
Edited by Wyldchyld on Jul 21st 2021 at 11:45:22 AM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
Speaking of which, here's an example from the Real Life folder of Voluntary Vassal:
- If you subscribe to the belief that the European Union is a Hegemonic Empire (which would then raise the question who the hegemon is, but let's not get sidetracked), each member would be a Voluntary Vassal, because they joined entirely voluntarily and as the referendum now known as "Brexit" has shown, there is an open door if anyone wants to leave.note Playing the trope even straighter are a handful of non-members of the EU (Iceland, Switzerland and Norway, mostly) who of their own free choosing adopt a lot of EU legislation in which they have no say in exchange for free trade and open borders as well as some considerations on the fields of fishery (Norway and Iceland) and/or foreign policy (Switzerland).
Please read the note. I have bolded the problematic part in the note.
Edited by Nen_desharu on Jul 17th 2021 at 11:59:23 AM
Kirby is awesome.
Yes, the bold is an issue; it enters Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement territory. What I would say, however, is the entire entry is a problem for reasons that are probably outside the scope of this thread. For example, the reasons why the EEA countries adopt many of the same rules as the EU isn't because they volunteered to do it. The purpose of the EEA to seek a unified economic strategy across Europe. That's the Single Market, which requires EU alignment.
The first sentence also makes it clear it's a shoehorned example from the outset. It's effectively saying "If you think about it from one specific angle, you can come up with Voluntary Vassal entry; even then, it still doesn't really fit until you come up with a specific definition of "hegemon" that allows us to fit the entry into this trope".
The entry also ignores the fact that the law it refers to (Article 50) didn't even exist until December 2009. All countries that had joined prior to 2009 and done so with the understanding that no law existed to permit a country to ever leave the EU once it had joined. The reason it came into existence also isn't quite what that entry thinks it is (it wasn't actually intended for the use the Leave campaigns ended up putting it to; not quite, anyway).
So, the entry is inaccurate, ill-informed and shoehorned on top of the "troping real life" issue.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Jul 21st 2021 at 12:19:19 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
Should that entry be axed from Voluntary Vassal?
Not quite real life people, but an inscription that seemingly deals with them: Laguna Copperplate Inscription.
The page has several tropes which are attempts to ascribe narrative-based moral judgments to real life people, independently of context. Not sure how kosher that is.
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
Axed
The entire Evgenia Medvedeva page is troping her as if she's a character. She's a figure skating; a sports person. Does anything she creates (figure skating programs, I guess) even have tropes, or should this page get sent to the cutlist?
Edit: Identical issue with Alina Zagitova, and...all of the other figure skaters linked in those pages.
Edited by Eiryu on Aug 2nd 2021 at 12:40:20 PM
The more general problem with these Useful Notes pages is that there are a LOT of subjects that are occasionally mentioned by media. Consequently, if "some mentions in fiction" becomes your cutoff you end up with an ungodly long list of pages, all of which are at risk of being a problem.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman