Complaining: Fandom Berserk Button

• The Legend of Korra: Say that the eventual romance between Korra and Asami, now famous as the very first explicitly homosexual pairing in mainstream western animation, came out of nowhere at the end, and you'll get a thorough education in how the seeds for it were subtly planted throughout the last two seasons (and if you're really unlucky, accusations of being homophobic for not picking up on them).

I'm not familiar with the show, but I've seen a couple of examples on other pages claiming that some fans found this to be Strangled by the Red String, so I'm pretty sure it fails the "objective misconception" part of the definition.

Yeah. It's an unpopular opinion, but finding a romance compelling is subjective (and this is from someone who did find it compelling).

However, I think there could be a potentially legit example of claiming the creators only had them get together as a totally last minute decision, which is inconsistent with statements by al the creators involved. Claiming that there was no deliberate foreshadowing would be false, the question of whether or not that foreshadowing was sufficient or done well is a matter of legitmate subjective disagreement. Would that be a legit example?

Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 26th 2018 at 1:13:06 PM

I think so, especially in this case. The trend around gay couples in cartoons these days is to provide very ambiguous ship teasing that could be explained either way, and to keep a less ambiguous confirmation of a gay couple to the very last episode (in Korra's case, to the very last few seconds of the series, even).

In Korra's case, the "romance" between Korra and Asami was barely there, even when you actively look for it (which I naturally did on a rewatch). Even the eventual confirmation was still ambigous enough (holding hands while staring into each other's eyes) that the writers felt the need to confirm it on Twitter, just to be safe.

And given how starved the LGBT base is for this sort of relationship, and how willing many of those fans are to celebrate even the smallest scraps of representation as revolutionary mile stones, I can totally see this as being a berserk button, yes.

Is there anything else to do here?

To be honest, I think the major stuff has been taken care of. Despite this thread never receiving the "pending final action" tag, the sort of cleanup indicated by that tag probably made up most of what was done after the definition and description were refined.

Edit: I skimmed the past couple of pages and a lot of it was one-off cleanup on works' YMMV pages. If a thread is necessary, I think a long-term project thread could be used for that kind of cleanup.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 28th 2019 at 6:10:01 AM

Perhaps a rename could be suggested to help prevent further misuse.

If a clean-up thread is necessary, it would be much easier to cut the page and be done with it.

A rename was discussed before, but for some reason it just stopped. There was a crowner last June that apparently had a good consensus to rename (18 to 1). The alternate title that had the most support was "Fan Angering Misconception", although I'd personally prefer "Annoyingly Common Misconception".

I think the issue was that there needed to be more than one option.

No, one issue is that there were too many inbounds, and the other is that a crowner asking if the page should be renamed is supposed to be made before a crowner asking what the page should be renamed to.

In that case, should a crowned asking for a rename be made?

I'm pretty sure Septimus said inbounds were preventing the name from being changed, so I'm guessing the name can't be changed even with that crowner.

So are we done here?

Looking back at the mod post, it seemed to be more a case of the previous crowner rushing into things and the inbound count was mentioned as a reason for more deliberation.

Edited by costanton11 on Jan 29th 2019 at 10:43:34 AM

So should we go ahead with a "do we rename" crowner or not?

Yes, cause Fandom Berserk Button can apply to anything that is not a misconception.

I went to make the crowner and found this one. Should I make a new one?

Make a new one. The previous one was a proposal of a specific name, not a question of whether to rename it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/SingleProposition/FandomBerserkButton2?open=all#4gt49sdh

It's hooked.

We're already at 20:1. Is it too early to call?

The crowner's timestamp says it's from May of last year, if that means anything. Unless a bug is causing it to reuse the previous crowner's timestamp, in which case never mind.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 19th 2019 at 6:44:24 AM

We can count from the February 18 date if necessary.

It looks like the mods mistakenly hooked an old crowner. Both the old one and the new are overwhelmingly in favor of a rename, however, so it hardly matters.