Fixing a long list of PSOC articles

& You're right. I'm sorry. Just let me know which trope at a time you think needs to have its description fixed up and I'll try my best to fix it, okay?

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

~Cave Cat — We're not complaining about your lack of effort. Your work ethic has produced dozens of pages, far more than most tropers. Improve your communications: check for ideas and gain consensus. For the first trope... try Agitated Item Stomping. A good description will help tropers to write good examples. Important parts of the trope are "Why are they upset?" and "What are they attacking?", and possibly "What's the relation?".

~Darksilverhawk —

• RE: Fox Hunting, you could be right. I associate it as an action English Gentlemen would do, but I wouldn't oppose a cut in the current form.
• RE: Bubblegum Popping, your fix looks good. I wonder if there's a way to tie the two aspects of the bublegum balloon together better, or split them into more discrete segments.
• RE: Ate It All, much better. It's short, but doesn't seem to be missing anything.

For the next "should we cut?" TRS threads, it looks like:

• Feud Episode — 3 votes to cut
• Busy Beaver — 2 votes to cut
• Bug Splat — 2 votes on cutting, ~Kyle Jacobs and ~Another Duck were were discussing ways to rescue it.

For other TRS threads, I see Absurdly Bright Light — not a lot of consensus on what to do, needs a "Unclear Description" tag.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I'm basically in favor of cutting Bug Splat. There might be something salvagable in there, but given the examples on there right now it'd be easier to start over from scratch.

Let's stick with threads for the easy cuts now. The ones you listed, plus Who Are You Calling Names. Might as well launch Absurdly Bright Light now as well; that one might take a while.

Fox Hunting could potentially be reworked into something like Gentleman Hunter, with pheasant hunting also thrown into the mix and written as a signifier of a Blue Blood. There might be enough examples of a hunt viewed from the fox's perspective, or of a hunt being interrupted to save the fox, to split off a trope for that as well.

edited 7th Jan '15 10:52:49 PM by KyleJacobs

Bug Splat is as it is cuttable. What I was talking about where it's an actual trope would be if it's actually used as a stock joke, rather than something that just happens. The Garfield example is a clear trope. However, as most examples are written, they don't say anything other than "this happens", in borderline ZCEs. Would probably need a re-YKTTW to work out. I don't really see a problem with cutting it and then allowing someone to make a real trope out of it if they want to.

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RE: Bubblegum Popping I was definitely thinking about that was I was writing, as there doesn't seem to be anything tying them together besides the presence of the gum. It almost feels like they don't belong on the same page, though I don't see much justification for a split atm either. I'll think about it for a bit and if I come up with a good connection I'll throw it in.

Re: Fox Hunting I can see some sort of Gentleman Hunter or Hunt For Sport trope in there. Do we have a general Sympathize With The Hunted trope already? Because I don't think it's specifically a fox hunting thing where we're made to sympathize with a hunted creature.

Rocks fall, everyone miraculously survives.

~Crazysamaritan — I fixed the description for Agitated Item Stomping, by adding a line about the character stomping on the item as a way of blowing off steam from his anger.

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

The description is still Example as a Thesis, and what you added had Weasel Words. Is that the reason or not? Is Rocket really mad at the grass? Instead of repairing, you made the definition more murky. It doesn't help tropers write good examples, it encourages them to write natter and Zero Context Example. The description defines the trope, it shouldn't wander around guessing.

Bug Splat TRS thread here. Who Are You Calling Names, Busy Beaver, and Feud Episode ready to go.

Who wants to lead Absurdly Bright Light?

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Fox Hunting — the split sounds good, but that will likely end with the current page getting cut anyway. I'm pretty sure we don't have any Sympathetic Prey / Prey Upon Our Sympathies trope pages. How Did We Miss This One, indeed. (First example to mind, Bambi) As for the other half, I like Hunt For Sport as a redirect. If it were the main name, I think it would get misused for American hunting seasons. Nobles Hunt For Sport might work, but would we would get Gentleman Adventurer examples of Big Game Hunting with that name?

---

Bubblegum Popping —

• If we take away the gum aspect of the first part, we're talking about a large bubble that explodes, which can also happen to balloons and cartoon tires. Maybe there's a wider trope there that we weren't considering because we focused on the fact that Gum Is Sticky?
• If we take away the gum aspect from the second one, we're left with "character shows they aren't paying attention". No opinions currently.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Now I took away Example as a Thesis and fixed the description. Happy now?

edited 8th Jan '15 1:42:46 PM by CaveCat

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

Big game hunting generally falls more under Egomaniac Hunter or Great White Hunter. This would be for the small game hunting like fox, pheasant, quail, etc. that's the traditional province of nobility.

edited 8th Jan '15 1:52:44 PM by KyleJacobs

I see no need to rename and redefine Fox Hunting. It's as much a trope as Bug Catching or Knife-Throwing Act. Not every trope has to establish a particular characterization or have a deep Story Arc significance.

Actually, those two could probably use some cleanup as well. The thing is that actually, tropes do need to have some significance beyond simply "this is a thing that happens." Look at the caption for People Sit On Chairs for this concept in action.

Okay, which tropes do you want me to work on next?

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

About Agitated Item Stomping: Exactly how is it different from Percussive Therapy? I must say that it The Same But More Specific. Though a good argumet could convince me it's a Sub-Trope.

If we agree that it's its subtrope, Punch a Wall could be its Sister Trope.

edited 11th Jan '15 5:05:38 AM by XFllo

I suppose that Agitated Item Stomping is a Sub-Trope of Percussive Therapy, since Percussive Therapy doesn't say anything about stomping on items.

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

A tentative proposal of rewritten Fly in the Soup description (ykktw link). If it's adopted, there would also be need to cut down on referring to it as the joke in the example section.

I'm not confident in it, so I leave it here and not in the actual article. (quote formatting is mangled by the forums)

---

->'''Customer:''' Waiter, what is this fly doing in my soup?

->'''Waiter:''' The backstroke.

-->-- A joke.

A Dead Horse Trope, short plot which involves a restaurant customer eating, then finding something unhygienic and disgusting in the dish. Restaurant staff then goes to great lengths to allay the impact, by offering free service, best delicacies, extra expensive wine, as well as not charging for the meal.

A fly here is an insect, common enough for cooking environments to normally have non-specific measures against. Flies are regarded as possible disease carriers, able to contaminate the dishes.

Playing it straight would imply that indeed a highly unlikely event happens, yet with compensation in mind, it can't be properly ascribed to perhaps customer's bad luck. And with civilised commerce practice leaving no room for breaches of sanitary norms, this plot would be hard to weave into a proper story.

In theory, the customer can bring a dead fly with him, dump it into the plate when no one's looking in order to create the situation where he gets away with a free dinner. Basically, to scam the restaurant. But then there are the questions of preparations required and actual gain, of morality of such customer, of his acting skills under scrutiny, of the risk and consequences of being noticed, of the fact there's no guarantee of staff generosity, etc. Not an obstacle for Comedy genre, a bait rather.

edited 12th Jan '15 2:33:22 AM by NemuruMaeNi

Added the new description for Fly in the Soup.

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

Reverted. It's not a stock plot. There's no stock plot like that. It's a Stock Joke like the Lightbulb Joke or the Chicken Joke.

edited 13th Jan '15 3:49:40 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

While I do wonder if Cave Cat has any process of telling good things from bad at all, insisting that examples of Fly in the Soup are those of a stock joke is just, well,.. baseless. Chicken, knock-knock, lightbulb — all have a formula with clear point of splitting into separate jokes. Fly in the Soup does not. If there's anything to argue otherwise with, I won't hope for anyone to share it. Ykttw had nothing. If I were convinced it's a type of stock joke, I'd vote for it to be trivia; it fills space, its specifics do not serve a narrative function at all. Look, even the original poster here (and on Ask the Tropers before that) assessed it as People Sit On Chairs — think why, for a second.

edited 13th Jan '15 11:03:10 PM by NemuruMaeNi

Fly in the Soup is a stock joke, regardless of what some examples may claim, or whether some people say it's PSOC.

A few links. It's not something we made up or that's baseless.

Check out my fanfiction!

I can tell the good things from the bad. Why do you think most of the tropes I created got launched when they all got five hats?

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

If these were well written in the first place this discussion wouldn't be happening. Beverage Spill YKTTW has one hat and ends without addressing the problem.

General consensus disagrees, but that fault may partly be due to our hat system, so we're fixing things this way. I took a visit to Agitated Item Stomping and removed the natter from the definition. I also took a visit to Percussive Therapy and Punch a Wall.

Fly — I'm inclined to consider it a Stock Joke, and the earlier definition posted by NMN starts well, but goes Analysis in the third paragraph, ruining the effect.

More input later.

edited 14th Jan '15 4:19:20 PM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Fly- I also vote for stock joke, not stock... situation? NMN's write-up regards it as far more serious than it tends to be and there's too much analysis about a theoretical example. First and second paragraphs are good, third and fourth go on way too long.

Rocks fall, everyone miraculously survives.

I really am convinced that I can try again with creating tropes.

Sometimes, you just can't win them all.

Stock Joke is an index page; a link to index page used for crucial part of definition means there's no definition. Nothing is self-explanatory, no one has to guess the missing parts to what is the trope, so "Stock Joke" isn't a viable term.

The "Stock Joke" pages seem to just be catalogues of moments of characters making or mentioning the respective formulaic joke (there indeed is a formula to what I've just been offered to view the Fly in the Soup as), then... the People Sit On Chairs stands, with authority. It's just a joke. Why is it this type of joke used in a piece of fiction? What common function do the joke specifics serve for the purpose of storytelling in different works? No reason, no common function either. Sure, it is something that is easy to recognize and make instances lists of. That doesn't make it a trope.

Anyway, I think there are "It's a Stock Joke, so it's fine" arguments here. Could you point me to some rule or policy giving weight to that reasoning? Stock Joke status doesn't look like a reason to exempt it from common requirements. Stock jokes look like out-of-TV-Tropes-scope material, not deserving pages here. See Not A Trope, for example.

edited 14th Jan '15 11:03:01 PM by NemuruMaeNi