All-Purpose Policy and Meta discussion: Administrivia.Trope Repair Shop

Well, we're making decent progress at least. If we keep up this pace, it won't be that long. Tomorrow when I'm less... sleep deprived, I might compile a list of threads that don't need much more work to clear them out of here.

It's been a breakneck pace as far as I'm concerned.

Which is why I voiced my opposition to closing the Talking Typography thread.

After I finish some other stuff, I am debating taking Fallen Creator to TRS. Tropes Needing TRS says that some examples have had their validity questioned, and having looked at the page in the past I feel like something should be done here.

Three problems. First off, the backlog (which should eventually be cleared out.) Second, I don't know of any solution that would fix the problem. And third, I want to list it under Complaining, but that requires a wick check, and Fallen Creator has only 30 wicks due to not being allowed on trope pages, with the existing wicks being mostly potholes.

What would I do?

Use on-page examples, but I think it might be difficult to draw a distinction between "complaining" and "not complaining" examples that is useful.

Yeah, the struggle with tropes that are used for complaining is twofold:

• The complaining may still be proper usage
• Stopping tropes from being complaint magnets is a lot harder than anything else, since it's about wiki culture and there's nothing definite

Why not make a projects thread instead to go through and clean up bashing?

Because unfortunately Fallen Creator is locked, and we can't do any cleanup without the mods.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 25th 2021 at 7:30:49 AM

That's not the end of the world. I've been able to clean locked pages by copying the source into a sandbox and then asking the mods to do a swap.

Sooo...start a Short-Term thread?

The moderation team has felt that the entry for Five-Man Band in Tropes Needing TRS is ignoring a more glaring issue while focusing on a matter that has been argued ad nauseum.

So, instead of looking at how it's attracting shoehorns, subbulleted tropes, and ZCE's, we're more worried about political correctness?

There are other issues, but I don't think the concern about The Chick is just "political correctness" (which implies we're trying to force a gender issue rather than recognizing one that naturally emerged) but the fact that more recent works do move away from The Chick and more towards The Heart. So it's still a valid concern, just not the only one.

That entry probably needs to be expanded to shoehorns, indentation problems, tropeworthiness. I wouldn't call the issue political correctness exactly, more like the trope was documented at a time where female characters outside the Girl-Show Ghetto had the Smurfette Principle applied to character teams, so people are now questioning why limit the number of female members to a team.

I don't think that shoehorns are a sufficient cause for TRS when there is an ongoing cleanup effort. I think the bigger issue is that we don't have sufficient reason to put the gender-switched examples under Five-Man Band rather than The Team.

The reason for that entry is that the Five-Man Band cleanup has nearly ground to a halt because we're not sure what is and isn't allowed. When the cleanup was more active we found plenty of examples that seem to fit the spirit of the trope that had say, 3 girls to the team, and relatively few where The Chick was the Token Girl. Arguments about how strictly to apply the gender ratio caused major derailment and the cleanup eventually died.

I agree that Five-Man Band has major problems with shoehorning that can only be solved through cleanup. But it's hard to proceed with this when people have different ideas about what the trope is.

Yeah, right now the only thing currently being discussed on the cleanup thread is what indentation to use, because the cleanup got stalled trying to deal with the gender issue.

I just don't see any evidence that the current gender restriction creates less shoehorns. If anything, all it does is restrict examples that would be valid if one of the characters didn't have tits. It's not about political correctness. The media landscape is changing. The trope is evolving, and you guys keep claiming that changing this restriction will lead to more problems, but I haven't seen any proof that. I'm one of the tropers who painstakingly slogged through each subpage for the cleanup effort, and all of the shoehorns I saw pertained to things like too many team members, blatantly shoehorned roles and arguable cases. Most of the "too many girls" ones got cut not because they were actually misuse but because of the arbitrary gender lines.

Yes, the trope has a lot of problems, but they're problems that have nothing to do with whether or not the trope allows more than two girls. That restriction feels entirely artificial and like an artifact, that would've been lifted about a decade ago if Eddie didn't whine about it (as the earlier pages of the cleanup thread would prove, since even back then people thought the restriction was stupid).

At the very least if we're allowed to have a TRS thread on it we can discuss it in depth. Shutting down the discussion isn't fair since nobody's allowed to actually debate about it, and we can't do it at the cleanup thread since this is a discussion that needs to be done in TRS. If it doesn't work it doesn't work, but at least let us make the case and have a deeper discussion over it.

At that point, this is all I ask.

Edited by WarJay77 on May 27th 2021 at 3:06:58 PM

Why is "just leave the issue lie" never an option?

For me it's not, because I genuinely do believe there's plenty of examples that should and would be valid if the gender restriction was loosened or non-existent. I'm not a big fan of letting things lie if I think the solution would make the trope better in the long run. Letting it stay the way it is to me is the equivalent of if we'd let any other trope continue to suffer because we didn't feel like actually talking about the solutions- if there's a chance that something can be improved, why not improve it? Not to mention this would let the cleanup thread come out of stagnation, and a full cleanup of the trope can proceed.

And again, I at least think this is something that deserves a full discussion, even if no changes come of it. What's the harm in that?

Edited by WarJay77 on May 27th 2021 at 3:23:15 PM

Split out Outnumbered Gender Group as its own trope, and leaving role sets in a group, as another trope?

Outnumbered Gender Group would be a lot broader, and as of now would be a supertrope to FMB as well as things like The Smurfette Principle and The Squadette. I'm not necessarily opposed to it but it'd need to have a bit more meaning than just "this team has all boys and one girl".

Edited by WarJay77 on May 27th 2021 at 3:36:47 PM

I'm a little confused about what the mod team is actually saying here re: Five-Man Band. Are you saying that a TRS thread would only get opened if it focused on shoehorning or whatever and didn't mention the gender restriction issue at all?

- Well, I'd add a requirement that the group who has unbalanced genders, is not connected familially, because that would just be A Boy, a Girl, and a Baby Family or Outnumbered Sibling, basically?

Edited by Malady on May 27th 2021 at 12:41:02 PM

Well, eh. This should probably be moved to the Sounding Board.

Maybe? Admittedly, I have no idea what a TRS thread about the shoehorning would even accomplish since it's an issue with wiki culture and not the trope itself. The only thing a TRS could potentially resolve is the gender issue.

The recent TRS threads related to shoehorning tend to be way harder to figure out than threads related to more specific issues, like a bad name or a specific description issue, since we can't always place why the trope is such a problem.

If the gender issue is a legitimate issue that confuses enough people to stall cleanup because people don't know what exactly the trope entails, why can't we address that? A wick check will probably unearth more problems to be tackled in the thread anyway, and it's possible to address more than one problem in a thread.

Yoooo, I just noticed we're at 58 threads. Damn, we've been making progress. The limit was the best thing that could've happened here.

Sequelphobic is a YMMV item that's only wicked in 6 YMMV pages. Should I make a TRS thread for it when the backlog clears up?