These pages are also settings tropes, about how this time period is portrayed in historical fiction. These pages tend to also include digressions about how current events at the time influenced media/tropable works.
Most important trends of this era in my opinion:
- Unprecedented levels of globalization brought about by technology and imperialism. This influenced things like Art Nouveau.
- Political tension and threats to the world order lurking under the surface, with rising militarism, a lot of old empires being on the verge of collapse, and the dark side of imperialism
- Huge amounts of optimism about technology that have maybe never been seen since. This led to a big surge in Speculative Fiction and seems to have inspired Steampunk.
- Fitness and leisure became a focus for the first time. Most modern sports and sporting events came to be in this era.
I would probably structure the article in two sections: the first talking about the optimism about progress in various forms (which tends to get emphasized more in portrayals of the era) and the second about the lurking tensions there. I don't think the last paragraph is salvageable.
If this is mostly an "improve the description thing", I'm not sure if this really needs a repair shop thread.
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"^This. Those would be used for the main highlights without going into overdetail. I suppose that the other details woukd be put into a separate Useful Notes pages. Most of the decades pages have a Main page for the setting and a Useful Notes pages for the details.
Update: I went on to TRS as this was the last place to ask for this as there had been no replies on the Discussion page and on the ATT.
Edited by alnair20aug93 on Nov 10th 2018 at 2:03:09 AM
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔Side note: I see other settings tropes like The '90s which do have a Useful Notes page but the main page is double the size of The Edwardian Era.
Then again, The Edwardian Era is listed as a Settings trope while The '90s isn't.
Edited by eroock on Nov 10th 2018 at 2:29:43 PM
^ I'm curious on why The '90s is not a Setting page while The Edwardian Era is? Is it because most of us were born in that decade and we had a lot to talk about that while The Edwardian Era had been a bygone era that our now-passed great-grandparents can only wholly remember?
Edited by alnair20aug93 on Nov 12th 2018 at 1:55:53 AM
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔This was the previous edit of the last paragraph before it was expanded. Should this be reverted to this or do we need a better description?
If something has to be done right, I gotta do it myself. Done tweaking the last paragraph by splitting them and tweaking the other parts.
Asking on what is the page size for The Edwardian Era.
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔Bumping this a little to ask about some further trimming down. I noticed today that the third paragraph is outdated and refers to a page image that's not there anymore, and while I suppose that's a simple fix, before I change that I couldn't help but notice that the paragraph it's attached to is a statement that it's a popular period for musical dramas sandwiched in between a summary and a gigantic parenthetical digression on women's fashion.
Which got me reading the rest of the page and realizing that although it's not really wrong about anything, it's an unorganized mess that continually makes gigantic topic jumps and can't keep a consistent tone (and I feel like it still manages to miss talking about what makes the period really attractive as a setting.)
I think this page has the capacity to be really good, but it needs a lot of work right now. Frankly, I think most of it ought to be thrown out and be replaced with a more focused article that summarizes cultural and political trends of early 20th century Europe in an organized format, instead of a messy ramble that jumps from English fashion to worldwide societal upheaval to an aimless list of early 20th century inventions. A lot of the stuff on the page rarely, if ever, gets referenced in period fiction, while a considerable amount of important and relevant stuff (the Boer War, anyone?) is completely missing.
I'd gladly rewrite it myself but I figured I ought to bring it up here (and better here than on the practically dead discussion page) before I do anything drastic.
Thank you for that. The page definitely needs the CCW treatment right now.
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔No problem! I'm happy to help—this period interests me a lot as a historian and I've enjoyed trying to clean the page up some.
So after some thinking and comparing it with similar decade/period trope pages (my main inspiration was probably the to-the-point—if overly anecdotal and "tropey"—The Cavalier Years page), I've drawn up a new version of the page that's trimmed down significantly. I cut a lot of the fat by basically rewriting a lot of the article from scratch but usually incorporating or expanding on material that was already on the page (so, for example, the dark side of the period as exemplified by conflict in Eastern Europe is there, just put down a bit more cleanly and in a more logical location.) I also reworked the "See also" section at the end to direct toward useful notes pages that cover the period in places I didn't talk about much in more detail (e.g. No More Emperors and The Mexican Revolution.)
The page I've drafted is now much more comfortably sized, a little shorter than The Great Depression is right now. I'd just put it up now, but I think that first I'd like to sit on my draft for maybe a day more and think about how to expand the period-relevant tropes list a little bit before I put it up—I cut the Zero Context Examples and expanded on & fixed the wording of the shorter and more questionable tropes, but it feels like it could use some more tropes on it.
Speaking of other pages, I noticed early on in the thread you mentioned trimming down the rest of the decades pages. I agree most of them are too big, but I feel obligated to point out the two standouts, The Roaring '20s and The '90s. The Roaring '20s is kind of like The Edwardian Era's bigger brother—I wouldn't brand it as really straight-up wrong or bad, it's just way too long, even by The Edwardian Era standards.
And, uh, The '90s is a Gordian knot of... stuff. Like, even by current-The Edwardian Era-page-standards it has no idea where it's going—if The Roaring '20s is a well-meaning Signal-to-Noise Train Wreck, The '90s is a Signal-to-Noise Train Pile-up. There is a section about *90's car design* wedged between a digression on the dot com boom and a paragraph on 90s electronics.
I feel like the decade tropes pages in general are worthy of a short term project thread. Like, I cited these two, but honestly all of the post-Roaring Twenties pages don't know if they're about politics or pop culture and settle on a kinda surreal mixture of both.
Ack, I forgot about this! Sorry—I hope it's not too late?
Anyway, I've added my draft to the sandbox page; it's mostly untouched from a month ago but I have updated the works section of the draft to the current version.
Edited by Tawa on Mar 4th 2019 at 5:13:40 AM
Nice. The other details should be put on a separate Useful Notes page. Especially with the fashion section as the fashions of the 1900s is different from the 1910s.
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔I think this thread should be closed now, as it's been solved. I thank Tawa for the description. Without him, the page would have been an unreadable mess.
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔

This issue has been lingering me for a while now for the past year or two, but the last paragraph of The Edwardian Era and probably the rest of the decades of The 20th Century had a Wall of Text on it, and I find it overwhelming to trim it down to a more readable paragraph, and I can only do much on trimming down the rest of the description to not make it into a borderline Useful Note because of the Wall of Text. After seeing the change in the page image, I asked a mod about trimming down the description, and he told me that I should start a TRS thread on this issue.
There's also this cleanup thread
related to The New '10s cleanup thread regarding tropes from the other decade-related pages.
TL;DR, the Wall of Text on the last paragraph is driving me nuts!
Please and thank you.
Edited by alnair20aug93 on Nov 8th 2018 at 6:00:02 PM
ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔|I DO COMMISSIONS|ᜇᜎᜈ᜔ᜇᜈ᜔