Playing With Wiki: General Cleanup and Writing Help

Are these correct uses of Defied and Played for Drama?

Friday Night Funkin': Corruption:

• Interface Spoiler: Defied; certain elements, like Boyfriend's gameover sprites, were left purposefully unchanged in the Week 2 demo as to not spoiler then-unrevealed plot points.
• Summon Backup Dancers: Played for Drama; due to the much more serious tone, the Mom's backup dancers normally present during Week 4 are absent for the first two songs. They suddenly appear during the final song, corrupted and motionless save for the occasional twitch. Unlike other corrupted characters, their eyes are a bright, glowing white; as Pico's eyes are also glowing when they weren't before, it's implied he somehow called them over, as if to mock the Mom.

Defied Trope is something a character does, never the author. So that's incorrect.

Not at all sure about the other one.

I'd say the second one is fine.

Looking at the definition of "Summon Backup Dancers", having the dancers as motionless zombies seems like an ok way to play with the trope.

Cool!

Also I forgot this one, from the same page:

• Wingding Eyes: Averted. Unlike in the original game, the character icons on the health bar keep the character's eyes as they are and simply show the corruption spreading when their icon nears the edge. The exception is the first fight against the Mom, whose lose icon still depicts her snarling with X's for eyes.

I'm not sure WE is something that can really be averted, since it's effectively just drawing eyes normally.

I notice that the Conversed section in many playing with pages seems rather complain-y, as it merely tells what a cliche the trope is. Should these sort of entry be cut?

- Really making the case for making Imported Trope or something for when tropes are reused due to having a source work or something.

That's supposed to be the section for Conversational Troping. Feel free to rewrite any or all of those to give them a more positive tone.

PlayingWith.What Do You Mean Its Not For Kids...exists. YMMV is not supposed to be played with, so...

Yeah, just cut it.

Bumpity bump. Found this on PlayingWith.Easy Sex Change, under "Parodied":

• A terf complains about how it's legal for "kids to cut off their genitals whenever they want", and Alice wonders why didn't she think of that sooner... then pulls out a hacksaw. (It works.)

This seems like both a ROCEJ violation and not an example of the trope actually being parodied. Should I cut, or leave it?

Cut. If anyone knows how to make a replacement, do it, but the current one MUST go.

Edited by Delibirda on Jun 21st 2021 at 1:41:57 PM

It's gone. Luckily, there was another bullet point, so we didn't lose much.

From PlayingWith.Which Restroom Dilemma, under "Downplayed":

Alice, while she cannot tell what bathroom is the ladies' room, is only doing so in order to avoid an nasty incident.

First of all, it's grammatically incorrect— it should be "a nasty incident". Secondly, is it really a downplay? Most people go to the bathroom to avoid a Potty Failure, and if the "nasty incident" is a different sort of incident (like being murdered or a diplomatic incident) then the entry doesn't really convey that. And if Alice genuinely can't tell which is the women's bathroom, how is it a downplay anyway?

Found PlayingWith.We Will Use Manual Labor In The Future. It's not really formatted like normal.

What kind of Play is this, that I've seen someone remove before...

A Great Offscreen War is happening in the first chapters, then the main character is thrust onto the front lines?

Is that Subversion or Aversion? I'd say Subversion, because it still counted for those first chapters?

And is that any different when applied to a gendered trope?

Like, if Water Is Womanly due only seeing Mermaids, for the first few chapters, then we see a small number of mermen, then after that, we get indications that it's not gender divided...

Played straight, then Subversion then aversion...

Enough plays to be Zigzagged?

Is it different as over multiple chapters than all happening in one chapter?

The entries in PlayingWith.A Dog Named Dog are written in dialogue form. I suppose it's not violating any rules, but it kind of reads oddly, especially in the Lampshaded section. May I rewrite it?

This is on PlayingWith.Cat Scare:

• Zig Zagged:
  • The cat is the psychopath, and tries to kill the character. But wait, no it's not, it was just very startled- it's harmless after all. Wait a minute, the cat couldn't have made all that noise, there must be something worse there! Wait, no there isn't... Then we see the psycho jump out... or rather, his body falls out of a nearby closet, as he's already been killed by... the cat, who proceeds to give a sinister meow and then - WAIT! What was that noise? The psychopath jumps out from ''behind'' the closet, and charges at the cat! We are treated to an amusing chase scene in which the psychopath chases the cat through various hallways. Eventually, you follow the crazy scene to the end. The cat and the psychopath immediately stop their fighting, and point nervously behind you. You're not going to fall for that, so you keep your eyes on the tw-OW! What was that?! It turns out that the dead psycho from before has come back as a ZOMBIE! No wait, it's a vampire...wait, no, it IS a zombie. You then realize that you've been bitten, and you take the psycho's knife from him by force to commit suicide, and to prevent a transformation. But alas, your corpse reawakens anyway - as a vampire! Wait, you swore you were bitten by a zombie, not a vampire. You look back, and no - it was a WEREWOLF! The werewolf then kills everyone.

Aside from being a Wall of Text, it also feels a little rambly.

PlayingWith.Nature Lover lists, basically, "Some characters are Nature Lovers and some aren't" as Zigzagged. Is this kosher?

No. That's basically, "some characters are examples of this trope and some are not", which is meaningless because you can't expect a trope to apply to every single character in a work to begin with. And that's definitely not what a Zigzagged trope is.

Edited by Adept on Sep 7th 2021 at 2:32:01 AM

PlayingWith.Psychic Dreams For Everyone is a little inconsistent over whether Alice is the one who has the dream and Bob is her coworker, or the other way around.

Edited by Unicorndance on Oct 13th 2021 at 11:45:25 PM

Can Suspiciously Similar Song be played with if it's YMMV?

I see that everywhere. Also "character a is a subversion but character b plays is straight" is not a double subversion

Just to note that not every single played with element can be applied to all tropes (it is, for instance, impossible to invert Ensemble Tropes).

Yeah, I've also frequently seen badly written Subverted entries where it's just rewriting the Straight, and ending it with "but it's not" without actually elaborating how the set-up and subversion happens.

PlayingWith.Character Development lists Status Quo Is God as an inversion. This doesn't seem right, because if Status Quo Is God applies to characters, they are static and don't change, so I think Status Quo Is God is more like an aversion.