ZettaiRyouiki getting ZCE'd seems like a problem, so what's the solution?

Several places I've seen Zettai Ryouiki entries with "Type [x]" and a pair of percentage signs justified with Zero Content Example. This is a problem because now Commented Out lines leave a conspicuous gap between the preceding and succeeding lines, but also because I'm not sure how they should be otherwise described. Not all tropes are created equal; characters with a Character Alignment entry such as Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil require at least one sentence justifying its presence, maybe a whole paragraph, but do people really need the same amount of information explaining Lex Luthor's Bald of Evil qualities?

I dunno, I'm not really an expert on wiki exploration conventions, but if "Type [x]" isn't sufficient for mod purposes, then what is?

Edited by MinisterOfSinister on Sep 4th 2018 at 5:31:52 PM

Type Labels Are Not Examples

If examples of this trope cannot provide any useful information besides a type label (or, more generally, "this happens"), then it's Not a Trope and needs to be trashed.

Speaking more directly to the trope, it's a fetish thing. It has no actual trope value besides that.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 4th 2018 at 1:05:28 PM

It's an appearance trope, so the obvious answer is to murder it in an alley and hide the body in a dumpster.

I feel like this trope page could be replaced with a page that explains the term without needing any examples. I mean, do we really need an exhaustive list of works containing characters that wear thigh-high socks?

There doesn’t seem to be any indication on the page that the appearance of Zettai Ryouiki actually tell us anything about a character or their place in the narrative. Has anyone ever seen it used in a way that does?

This isn't the first time this entry has been brought forward for problems either. Like some others here I am struggling to see how this is a trope. This looks like describing a fashion paired with an unhealthy obsession by giving it a detailed classification system.

If it isn't ascribing some trait to a character, cueing viewers into some character trait or character type, or really any other narrative purpose than to be some weird fetish measure why do we have it?

All I am seeing is this falls almost entirely on describing a fetish and serves no other purpose.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Oct 12th 2018 at 10:59:51 AM

Seriously, if just lists off some woman's fashion choices and there's an note that says "please post examples without lusting after them," it's an fetish like Absolute Cleavage. Don't believe me? There's an example for Bible Black (If you don't know what that is, then you're too young to be on the internet).

Edited by RabidTanker on Oct 14th 2018 at 6:45:15 AM

For the record, Bible Black is considered Hentai.

...Example section-ectomy?

I think so. Do we still do fanspeak warnings at the top of a page, or is that deprecated?

Outright deletion is better. We already do that for any appearance trope with at least 50% ZCEs.

This is a job for the Trope Repair Shop. I'd like to see a wick check to back up those claims about the prevalence of ZC Es before anyone gets serious about making drastic changes.

An argument in favor of its tropeworthiness: This is a stylistic choice with a specific reason (fanservice) that is far more prevalent in Anime and Manga than in real life. Higher grades of Zettai Ryuouki are very impractical, as socks higher than above-the-knee tend to fall down, and shorts that short fail at their nominal purpose of not creating constant Panty Shots. So it's definitely a case of Awesome, but Impractical. That said, if this trope is horribly misused, that could be a reason to cut, but I don't think this is Chairs.

It's definitely not Chairs; nobody is arguing that. What we are saying is that it contains no value as a trope, instead serving as a catalog of how fetishistic a particular character's stockings are. We cut Fetish Fuel a long time ago precisely for this reason.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 17th 2018 at 2:20:58 PM

Fair enough, but no one here has presented any evidence (like a wick check) that this is being used for creepy edits any more than other fanservice tropes like Absolute Cleavage, Vapor Wear, Cleavage Window etc. I would guess that the real problem is that this is almost an Omnipresent Trope in Anime and Manga costume designs (its abundance may cause the ZCE problem, but is also an argument against cutting it).

If someone does demonstrate misuse, I would favor an example sectionectomy as has been done with Panty Shot.

Worth noting that Zettai Ryouiki was in TRS many times in the past and that both the ZCE and creepy issues were discussed at length back then.

I’ll dig around in there when I’m back at my computer (on phone ATM), but while it’s fresh in my mind…

The issue I take is not that Zettai Ryouiki is being misused, it’s that there does not exist a way to use it properly. Does it tell us anything about the character or their place in the story?

Having looked trawled through as many archived discussions as I could handle, I have found that tropers generally seem to believe that Zettai Ryouiki is a symbol of some vaguely defined "innocent sexuality."

Yes, I feel extremely creepy typing that.

There seemed to be more discussion over what "grade" of Zettai Ryouiki qualify than what it actually means, and no-one saw fit to include that on the trope page itself.

I don't think that it's being misused, I think it's an bad trope.

Sure, it's an fashion trend, but it doesn't really add anything to the conversation. Aside from making it look like someone has an obsession with socks.

Even a look outside of tropes I can't actually find an example as is it exists outside of tropes describing anything solidly beyond a fetishization of a clothing style. I saw a couple articles noting it was associated with Moe style characters, still creepily fetishized with the grading system, but nothing giving any clarification if it is just a visual indicator of that type of character or if it actually has some sort of meaning beyond that.

As it is this is frankly like Tanker noted, a bad trope. It is badly written and it keeps landing up in discussions and repair shop for one issue or another.

I was conducting a wick check. I got a few examples in when I realized that it was a waste of time. Even when examples have context, they tell us nothing. This is not a trope. This is a costuming choice that offers no information about the character. The first two non ZCE'd Zettai Ryouiki-wearing characters in the random sample (here and here) have no tropes in common listed.

This is not a trope. If anyone still really wants a wick check to see exactly what percentage of wicks are ZCE's, I'll do it. But I don't think it's going to tell us anything useful.

Edited by shrikelet on Oct 20th 2018 at 11:31:26 PM

Even the title is non-indicative anyway. It all feels like a relic of the old days of TV Tropes, back when the rules for making trope pages were much more lax.

It does look that way. Some of our problem entries are from back before we started attempting to apply standards to entry creation for tropes. In fact, entries like this are the reason it was started to begin with. Honestly, this thing either should have been gutted or drastically re-worked to give it something we can actually use long before now. Obviously just cleaning up the mess and forgetting about it isn't going to work. That is a circular path every time.

I am not sure what we can do with this whole thing. For those that want to keep it, right now it is nothing but a description of a form of fashion with a creepy rating system. It doesn't tell us anything about the characters, the story, or the world. We would have to find a regularly recurring pattern that achieves at least one of those three things.

I always thought it should just be strictly a fanspeak page with no examples. All it is is otaku slang and documenting every time there's a gap between socks and skirts isnt something we should be doing. It has no narrative purpose at all and only serves as a fetish point.

Edited by MacronNotes on Oct 27th 2018 at 11:11:06 AM

I'd forgotten how many examples that page has. Do any of them actually discuss/parody/lampshade/etc. the trope, or is it just a list of characters?

It just seems to be a list.