Do you have trouble remembering the difference between Deathbringer the Adorable and Fluffy the Terrible?
Do you have trouble recognizing when you've written a Zero-Context Example?
Not sure if you really have a Badass Bookworm or just a guy who likes to read?
Well, this is the thread for you. We're here to help you will all the finer points of example writing. If you have any questions, we can answer them. Don't be afraid. We don't bite. We all just want to make the wiki a better place for everyone.
Useful Tips:
- Make sure that the example makes sense to both people who don't know the work AND don't know the trope.
- Wrong: The Mentor: Kevin is this to Bob in the first episode.
- Right: The Mentor: Kevin takes Bob under his wing in the first episode and teaches him the ropes of being a were-chinchilla.
- Never just put the trope title and leave it at that.
- Wrong: Badass Adorable
- Right: Badass Adorable: Xavier, the group's cute little mascot, defeats three raging elephants with both hands tied behind his back using only an uncooked spaghetti noodle.
- When is normally far less important than How.
- A character name is not an explanation.
- Wrong: Full Moon Silhouette: Diana
- Right: Full Moon Silhouette: At the end of her transformation sequence into Moon Princess Misty, Diana is shown flying across the full moon riding a rutabaga.
Other Resources:
For best results, please include why you think an example is iffy in your first post.
Also, many oft-misused tropes/topics have their own threads, such as Surprisingly Realistic Outcome (here
) and Fan-Preferred Couple (here). Tropers are better able to give feedback on examples you bring up to specific threads.
For cleaning up examples of Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard, you must use their dedicated threads: Complete Monster Cleanup, Magnificent Bastard Cleanup.
Edited by Synchronicity on Sep 18th 2023 at 11:42:55 AM
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Yeah that's one reason why I'm not 100% confident of my example. Moxxie (he's male btw) isn't treated as "unsympathetic" in the episode, but the episode mocks him for supposedely forgetting he had a gun on him all along, notably by Millie, despite the fact that she stumbled on him getting strangled by behind and she should normally have no way to know whether or not Moxxie had the occasion to use his gun. I guess Informed Wrongness fits more but I forgot that Informed Wrongness was YMMV rather than a trope. Now I'm asking, do you guys think this is a valid Informed Wrongness example? I'd like to have more than a single confirmation.
Edited by jOSEFdelaville on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:03:43 PM
Moon Queen and Wanderer
Yeah, that's a shoehorn
Professional Wick Checker
Mrph1, The first point feels more like Write What You Know, since a Chinese-American author writing about his culture and people from the same nationality as him is just natural and not an Author Avatar. The second point can kinda stay as it mentions his fondness of The Golden Age of Comic Books and how he incorporates it into his comics. The "New Super-Man in particular has..." sentence can be cut, however.
I mainly fix indentation issues
Any new thoughts on my post? I want to be sure before I make any change to it.
Can Complete Monster exist in Black Comedy?
So I've noticed that some stock animal tropes are sometimes expanded to similar creatures (for example, Bears Are Bad News having koala and panda examples). By this, would a rascally red panda qualify under Rascally Raccoon?
"Squid has to go to market. He's had to go to market for as long as he's sucked water."
Don't see why they would be incompatible. Complete Monster is an audience opinion anyway.
Discarded and Feeling Blue
Er, questions like that are part of what this thread is for.
She / Her
(x3) Rascally Raccoon seems to be explicitly about raccoons, so an example like that is misuse.
As a sidenote, for those Bears Are Bad News examples involving koalas, I believe those are misuse since koalas aren't bears. That said, the examples with pandas shouldn't be misuse since pandas are a type of bear. (I did a websearch to double-check both, EDIT: for the record.)
Edited by RandomTroper123 on Dec 28th 2022 at 7:18:40 AM
Is Shipping supposed to allow for examples on individual YMMV pages? The banner on the trope seems to point to that but I've heard otherwise and also wonder how tropable that is since every work in existence has people shipping an infinite combination of different things.
"Let’s see who’s stronger: someone that has something to protect, or someone that has nothing to lose."
She / Her
I didn't see the main page state you couldn't list examples on YMMV pages, so I feel it's fine. EDIT: That said, we're not allowed to list examples on the page itself.
Edited by RandomTroper123 on Dec 28th 2022 at 7:17:41 AM
I mainly fix indentation issues
It doesn't even have examples on its own page. I have never seen it being used in the wild (as far as I can remember).
Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 28th 2022 at 8:29:17 AM
Valdo
x8 Without checking, I think Complete Monsters can technically exist in a Black Comedy, but they themselves cannot have their actions Played for Laughs. Or undermined by Negative Continuity.
Who’d you have in mind?
Edited by CSS1 on Dec 28th 2022 at 6:29:27 AM
Complete Monster (along with Magnificent Bastard) has it's own thread (currently on hiatus) for new examples FYI.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
I mainly fix indentation issues
When talking about Overshadowed by Controversy, one of the best examples must be How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. A best-selling novel that was quickly discovered to be plagiarized from many other novels causing a huge scandal that culminated in the cancellation of the book. In fact, this novel is so overshadowed that some of the tropes on its page are affected by it.
- Write What You Know: The author stated that she drew inspiration from her own experience as an academically-oriented Indian-American teenager trying to get into Harvard. ► Considering the extent of the plagiarism, I'm not sure this counts.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The novel had already generated quite a bit of publicity at the time of its 2006 release, due to the author being 19 and having written it during her freshman year at Harvard. However, things completely blew up four weeks later when the Harvard Crimson reported that over 40 passages in the book had been plagiarized from two other novels by Megan McCafferty (which was only the tip of the iceberg). Sales of the book skyrocketed, but the whole thing ended just a few days later when Viswanathan's publisher recalled the book from stores. After that happened, people were selling it on eBay for $80! (the controversy couldn't have hurt McCafferty, either, as she had just released a third book at almost the same time the first two were suddenly back in the spotlight). Over a decade later, some people who heard of the book via the plagiarism scandal will still try to get their hands on it to see what all the fuss was about. ► None of these sales actually benefit neither the novel nor the author in any way (she does not receive any money from this).
- They Copied It, So It Sucks!: This book is an extreme example. It initially sold well until readers started to notice many similarities between the plot and prose to previously published books, including Megan McCafferty's Jessica Darling series, Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret? and even a Salman Rushdie book (Haroun and the Sea Of Stories). The author admitted she had read some of these books as a teen and may have been subconsciously influenced by them. However, upon analysis it was found that whole sentences or even entire passages were identical or near-identical to other authors' works, which to many people - including Opal Mehta publisher Little, Brown and Co. - looked too suspicious to be a mere coincidence. Readers and critics rapidly turned on the book, resulting it being recalled by the publisher and all remaining shelf copies destroyed. Although not mentioned much during the initial controversy, several readers have also noted Opal Mehta bears a lot of similarities to Mean Girls and She's All That (with one Goodreads review even describing it as "a less good Mean Girls"). ► Hahaha, very funny, guys.
Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:38:13 AM
Valdo
I fix my examples all the time
Found this in Characters.Attack On Titan Reiner Braun.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: His Titan Shifting powers, which allow him to survive horrific injuries and generate a 15-meter Titan.
Edited by ElRise on Dec 28th 2022 at 11:55:22 PM
Graffiti Wall
I mainly fix indentation issues
Attack on Titan is listed on the Lovecraftian Superpower page, so it should count.
Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 28th 2022 at 10:18:41 AM
Valdo
I'm helping!
:thunking: Is Original Character a fanfic-specific trope? It seems like one to us; if a licensed work adds new characters to a later installment, that's just a character, surely.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
If it's an adaptation then that's a Canon Foreigner
She / Her
(x5) Besides most of those examples being Walls of Text, I'm not entirely sure about No Such Thing as Bad Publicity and I feel Write What You Know is just misuse (it seems to involve Real Life professions or activities).
(x4) I'd hide it personally because I oft just do that when an example lacks context like that.
Original Character says it can also involve a work that does not originate from a copyright work, so it's not fanfic-exclusive. That said, sounds more like what you're looking for.
Edited by RandomTroper123 on Dec 28th 2022 at 8:27:14 AM
I mainly fix indentation issues
Thanks for you feedback. What should i do with the They Copied It, So It Sucks!? This one go beyond just borrow ideas.
Edited by SoyValdo7 on Dec 28th 2022 at 10:32:35 AM
Valdo
I noticed a lot of examples on Inspiration for the Work have the creator mentioning the older works that influenced their project, but I'm pretty sure the trope is for how the creator first came up with the idea for it.
lmao
I was about to add this to Hero of Another Story but then realised that it's for when we don't get to see the side/minor characters' heroic ventures. This example features minor allies getting their own adventure in an online comic (while the main media is an animated TV series). Would this be sufficient for A Day in the Limelight instead (I'm unsure if it counts as an episode)?
- BoBoiBoy Galaxy: Cattus and Bellbot are minor characters, but they become the main stars in an exclusively online comic in 2019 when they get accidentally sent to Planet Londari, where Admiral Tarung's battle suit was sent to be cleaned. Cattus and Bellbot help save a village from giant hostile monkeys and are considered heroes among the locals. Unfortunately, when the two return to the TAPOPS station, it had already been destroyed by Retak'ka as per the events of BoBoiBoy Movie 2, which explains how the powerful Admiral Tarung lost so easily to Retak'ka in the film; because he didn't have his suit.
Edited by BlackFaithStar on Dec 29th 2022 at 3:56:07 AM
Pantheon Wick Cleaning
She / Her
(x3) No problem. As for the They Changed It, Now It Sucks! entry, I'm uncertain again, sorry.
While it might help if I had particular example(s) to go off of, I guess those are correctly used; Inspiration for the Work involves the creator(s) revealing how they came up with the idea for their project.
Actually, the main page suggests we can see the character's adventures occasionally, courtesy of A Day in the Limelight. As for the entry, it sounds like A Day in the Limelight to me in part because it seems like one comic. Also, I think the trope can involve other equivalents of episodes like chapters.
Should this misc. entry in Trivia.Encanto be cut for being a shoehorned example of Role Association?
- In the Italian version, Luisa is dubbed by the same voice actress that voices Homura Akemi. Surface Pressure could definitely work for her if you swap "sister" with "friend" and "family" with "Madoka".
"I just want what everyone else has, that's all."