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

Now's a good time; we finally have an opening!

Make sure you save your OP in a text file in case someone gets there before you.

We may soon have another—I just went through all of the Genre-Killer wicks, and neither I nor anyone else have any idea what to do with the trope.

Yeah, I think some threads are on their last rope here. We may have several spots soon, so I'm not in a rush to steal this one. But if someone doesn't take it in the next few hours...

I'm not taking the spot BTW. I want to wait a bit until I am ready for a potential TRS for Unintentional Period Piece.

I opened up the TRS, saw a spot was available, and took it. Might as well, already had the opening post pre-written and seems like a quick issue.

Question is, will the thread open in a month like it used to before the new limit was imposed, or within days like with Image Pickin'? We'll find out in due time.

Edited by FernandoLemon on May 31st 2021 at 9:40:18 AM

I will probably be starting a Famous Last Words TRS thread soon, but I can wait for now.

I've been wondering for a while if it would make sense to copy the contents of the Welcome to TRS thread into Trope Repair Shop, for the following reasons:

• The thread takes up one TRS slot.
• There is no need to have two stickies.
• Documenting and keeping such information up-to-date is easier on a wiki page.
• I can put a link to Trope Repair Shop in the first post of this one, so that people know where to go for information.

I'd say that'd be fine. One more slot will come in handy, plus there are those other arguments.

Works for me.

And it's enacted - thread unpinned and morguified, the content is at Trope Repair Shop and the slot has been handed to a thread about Wimpification which was already on Tropes Needing TRS.

Is it possible to create a single thread for several related tropes that suffer the same issue? I had wanted to propose renaming the tropes Two Lines, No Waiting, Four Lines, All Waiting, and Third Line, Some Waiting, as, for all three of these (though to a lesser extent with the third), tropers use them to mean "This work has X many subplots", when they are actually about how the work's A-plot, B-plot, etc, interact with one-another (The first is when they eventually merge into a singular plot, the second is when they are completely separate from each other, and the third is a subtrope of either of the first two in which one of the plotlines doesn't become apparent until later in the story), so a singular thread would be more efficient than proposing a thread for each trope.

It's been done before, though sometimes threads like that can get confusing.

Generally only if the tropes are really closely related, say like the Wiki Tropes thread where we are repairing all the tropes on it in the same thread.

I don't know if this is where I should take this concern, but should Critic-Proof really be a YMMV trope?

I found that out when I added the trope to a page. It sounds like it'd fit much better under Trivia, as the way to qualify for the trope is rather objective: the work was disliked by a majority of professional critics, but was a success financially.

The "success financially" is the YMMV aspect; audiences ignored the critics.

I don't know how a financial success is subjective. If a film made much more at the box office than its original budget, then it was objectively successful.

Edited by WackyPancake on Jun 3rd 2021 at 4:55:28 PM

Acclaimed Flop, its converse (critics liked something that audiences didn’t want to see) is Trivia. They should be in the same place, whether that’s YMMV or Trivia.

I think both Critic-Proof and Acclaimed Flop should be YMMV, because the former has the audience paying a decent amount for the work despite negative critical reception, while the latter involves a critically acclaimed work being unable to find a significant audience despite positive critical reception. In both cases, I think the audience's role in the work's success (or lack thereof) is the Audience Reaction part.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 3rd 2021 at 10:16:02 AM

Perhaps I've been misinterpreting it all along, but I've always been under the impression that what "YMMV" meant as "audience reactions" was simply a widely, but not unanymously shared subjective opinion about a work. Hence it's placed on a separate page because it's not objective and a minority would probably disagree. Many people might think a certain character is The Scrappy, but one out five people will probably like or not mind that character.

This, meanwhile, is not really subjective or an opinion. If you go to Rotten Tomatoes and find a big red tomato in the movie's page, yet the box office numbers indicate that it flopped, it's Acclaimed Flop. If the exact opposite occurs, it's Critic-Proof.

Edited by WackyPancake on Jun 3rd 2021 at 5:21:27 PM

Audience Reactions involve different ways audiences react to the work, even if it's not necessarily opinion-based; I'm pretty sure that's why the Audience Reaction banner merely says to add examples to the YMMV page instead of saying they're opinion-based. (Things indexed under YMMV.Home Page are the ones that display the "This is based on opinion" banner, and for some reason, that's what's displayed on Main.Audience Reactions instead of the one that's actually displayed for items indexed on that page.)

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jun 3rd 2021 at 10:27:50 AM

For what it's worth, there's about a dozen Critic-Proof wicks on Trivia pages... and even more Acclaimed Flop wicks on YMMV pages.

Perhaps I should take this up on the Trope-Relationships thread, but wouldn't Critic-Proof be an extreme subtrope to Critical Dissonance, which is YMMV?

I always took Critical Dissonance to be critics vs. audience, whereas Critic-Proof is closer to critics vs. profit. Although I am now questioning why there are separate tropes for "bashed but profitable" and "acclaimed but failed", when Critical Dissonance covers both "bashed but beloved" and "acclaimed but hated".