Wick Cleanup: Killed Off For Real

You know, when I proposed Character Death as a universal supertrope, I wasn't intending that it be potholed wherever KOFR had been misapplied. I suppose there's no harm in it, though.

I strongly disagree with the idea that any character death at all - or any example that is "X dies" without more context - is an example of Character Death. That's a very irritating pattern of misuse that haunts tropes which, like Character Death, are "X, except with storytelling purpose".

Character Death, like The Hero, is a Universal Trope and is not intended to be potholed or linked everywhere. That said, characters dying is always a significant part of a story; it is almost never narratively unimportant.

edited 11th Jul '13 6:49:35 AM by Fighteer

Like I said, I'm only using it as a trope of last resort. At least 75% of the time there's another one I can use.

…How exactly are we going to go around cleaning this trope? Majority of the examples and wicks (besides Zero Context Examples and blatantly wrong ones) require familiarity with the work in question(although I’m pretty sure over half or more of the wicks are not legit, due to this trope status as a Pothole Magnet for any character who died). I think that’s the reason why this thread is stalling so much. Would it be a better idea to move this thread to the Short Term Projects forum instead?

edited 13th Aug '13 10:30:40 PM by MacronNotes

That's the reason I was (mostly jokingly) suggesting using the mass search and replace tool to just nuke 'em all.

That is more plainly the reason why I am not participating here.

Bumped the request on Tech Wishlist to flag Killed Off for Real with a dot and tip message.

I think all editors should get a message. Similar to that one when there was a rename from It Got Worse to From Bad to Worse. First, to get more people for the clean-up. Second, more people would realize what that issue is.

I mentioned this in Incredibly Lame Pun before. This is the post I made.

If this becomes a clean-up thread the first thing to be dealt with would obviously be the subpages. Going over the Film page there's still massive misuse.

To name but two, from The Dark Knight Saga, only Rha's Al Ghul makes the cut due to the body doubles. The rest are simply "died in a non-magical world". The Disney examples are rather interesting in that there's the issue of Disney Death being the expectation for good guys. Not quite sure how that would be best handled, but I think the villainous aversions ("this character does not die", basically) are not worth listing, and of the actual villain examples only King Candy seems to meet the trope's definition since there's at least a precedent of coming back from the dead.

And I just deleted two that were added within the past 10 hours.

This is gonna be a challenge.

edited 30th Sep '13 2:33:28 AM by Leaper

I think I had to delete Killed Off for Real at least three times from Dexter and the same with Downton Abbey (plus several wicks in the character sheets). People don't read edit reasons in history. Finally I left a commented-out note for editors, so I hope it helps but it seems hopeless. I also started sending P Ms to people who added the trope incorrectly.

Houston, we've had a problem. I've just deleted Killed Off for Real from Truth in Television. Were there any confirmed resurrections recently?

Also, it occurred to me that many Death Tropes use Killed Off for Real in the trope description, but it can be misleading.

I'd say the problem is the name, but only if there weren't so many wicks and inbounds!

Maybe we need a banner like there is on Crazy Awesome and Early-Bird Cameo. I suggested coding a banner on problematic pages that would mark pages that appears only to known users, like the TRS and IP banners.

Joining this discussion several pages in, but count me in for helping with the cleanup jobs. I'm already going into a handful of noticeable repeat offenders (ie the ever-present Downton Abbey problems) and will gladly lend a hand as needed!

I don't personally have a preference for what we do, but we need tech help from Eddie in some shape or form to get the word out to the wiki that KOFR != any permadeath ever.

I'd like to modify it as well, particularly when it comes to just

Now, I'm aware that there are some examples I'd like to get rid of, if it wasn't for the fact that there were some characters in that series that did cheat death, like Mobile Suit Gundam 00, but not everybody was lucky. What do we do about those? Plus, even if a character is "killed off for real", that doesn't mean they are gone forever, because you can probably see dead spirits.

Finally managed to get Characters Dropping Like Flies launched to siphon off the Anyone Can Die misuse.

Okay, I'm about at the Despair Event Horizon with our cleanup efforts at this point. I just killed a brand-new misuse of Killed Off for Real on Characters.Intelligence 2014.

How's this for a new proposal:

• Redirect Killed Off for Real to Death Tropes.
• Make a new YKTTW with a clearer name to cover its definition.

Because absent any tech help from Eddie, people just aren't getting that the trope doesn't mean what they think it means.

edited 13th Feb '14 5:01:38 PM by StarSword

Any other input, or can I fire off a crowner on this?

At this point, I'm with either your proposal, or just scrapping this entirely. It's just become more trouble than it's worth

edited 16th Feb '14 8:54:28 AM by tryrar

I agree! Cut!

Behold, the crowner equivalent of saying, "The hell with this."