Leather Pants and Death Eaters

Is there any difference between Draco in Leather Pants and Adaptational Heroism other than the author's love for a given character? Conversely, is there a way to clearly separate Ron the Death Eater from Adaptational Villainy or Adaptational Jerkass without speculating the author's intentions?

Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater are concepts that appear uniquely in fandom and/or fanworks, whereas Adaptational Heroism/Adaptational Villainy/Adaptational Jerkass usually apply to official works^note these can apply to fanworks as well, granted that they don't reach the extremes of DILP and RTDE. Cases of DILP and RTDE should be obvious within the text itself (ie.how a character is disproportionately treated in comparison to their canon self) and don't really need author speculation (unless the author themselves state that they extremely favour/hate the character).

Edited by LazyHazy on Jan 24th 2019 at 4:23:44 AM

The important thing to understand is that Draco in Leather Pants and Ron the Death Eater are primarily motivated by feelings towards the character. An adaptation could invoke Adaptational Villainy or Adaptational Heroism for practical reasons. Maybe there are too many characters and the roles are merged.

So, if a character was made into A Tragic Villain or a Well-Intentioned Extremist, would that be a reason to assume that Ron the Death Eater is not in play?

It depends on the circumstances. What was the character's role in the original story? If they were the Big Good, who wouldn't hurt anyone, then making them a Tragic Villain could be seen as invoking Ron the Death Eater. Also, what was the motivation behind turning them into a villain? Was it out of necessity, like if there was a Tragic Villain they couldn't adapt and aspects of that character were given to this one? Or did the people doing the adaptation not like the character?

Again, the difference is that Draco and Ron apply to fanfics — unlicensed derivative works — whereas the Adaptational X tropes apply to original and licensed works.

Both Adaptational Villainy and Adaptational Heroism have sections for fanworks. And rightfully so, because for Ron the Death Eater or Draco in Leather Pants to describe all the examples in fanworks they would have to be rewritten quite heavily.

A fanwork is only an "adaptation" in the sense that me enacting a fight with my Justice League action figures is an adaptation of the DCEU. Pervasive misuse does not justify keeping misuse.

If you recorded the fight and uploaded it on youtube, it would be considered a Web Video and the adaptational tropes would apply to it. Unless you can point to any rule or trope description that says otherwise, I'm just going to ignore you.

Adaptations are official, licensed products. You can only publish an "adaptation" if you're legally allowed to use the IP in question. I don't see why this is even an issue: it's completely straightforward. This has nothing to do with perception of quality.

Would you keep ignoring me if I set the mod-mode flag?

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 4:08:53 AM

So, should I start launching tropes such as "Fan Fiction Dumbass" and "Fan Fiction Angst Upgrade" as to keep fanfictions separate from actual adaptations? Because that would be the correct thing to do in such a case.

Hmm. Good question. I'd say that we should use the more applicable trope, as with all such situations.

If a fanwork makes a heroic character evil, then Ron the Death Eater is the correct trope, not Adaptational Villainy. If a fanwork changes the motivations of a character, that's Alternative Character Interpretation, and so on.

If we don't have a fanwork-specific trope, then you can use the adaptation ones in lieu of nothing else, I suppose, although I'm not entirely comfortable with it. In fact, the "adaptation X" tropes are all badly in need of a rethink.

Technically, both adaptations and fanworks are derivative works, but we don't have Derivational Name Change, as it doesn't really flow from the tongue.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 4:35:16 AM

Also, if I'm making a workpage for a fanwork, should Ron the Death Eater and Draco in Leather Pants go into YMMV tab due to being, well, YMMV? Because then they would be describing an objective fact about the work on a page meant for subjective opinions and audience reactions.

No, they should go on the main page for the fic. Which is another problem: we don't have a way to flag tropes as "objective on fics but subjective on original works". Just tag them [invoked] to stop the warnings.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 4:40:48 AM

The likely reason DILP and RTDE existed in the first place is that they're appearing often enough in fan fics in the first place that they could warrant a page of their own.

If we go to talk Fanon here too, there are a lot more of those pairs - like Memetic Badass vs Adaptational Badass or Memetic Troll vs Adaptational Jerkass. I said so because DILP and RTDE are also often used to talk about Fanon of those characters in general.

"I said so because DILP and RTDE are also often used to talk about Fanon of those characters in general."

And that is also a practice we'd like to stamp out. Much like Shipping, the fact that it occurs in a general sense is a direct violation of our example writing rules, which require specifics. Specific examples would derive from fics, and it follows logically that they should go on the articles for those fics, rather than for the original work.

After all, the trope isn't found in the original work.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 4:45:21 AM

So... can we rewrite the Ron the Death Eater and Draco in Leather Pants for them to contain all the examples of Adaptational Villainy and Adaptational Heroism equivalents? DILP is described as a form of Misaimed Fandom, so we would have to either throw the example goes out of the window when the writer acknowledges the character's canon vileness or assume that every case of Adaptational Villainy in fanworks is a result of writer being stupid.

I don't think we can pithily dismiss it as "the author being stupid", but RTDE and DILP should be used for all cases where a fanwork changes a heroic (or neutral) character into a villain, or vice versa, regardless of the author's motivation. If that means modifying the descriptions to make them sound less like bad writing, that would be fine by me.

The reason that the tone of the tropes concerns me is that there's a built-in implication that (for example) pantsing a character is an "immature fangirl" reaction from someone who wants to write shipping fics, whereas Adaptational Heroism is a more "mature" attempt to write an alternative version of a character for meritorious reasons. As much as I personally am not invested in treating fanworks as equal to original works, I don't think this distinction is worthwhile.

Frankly, the tropes have more problems the more I think about them, such as the titles being work-specific, which is a violation of trope naming policy.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 5:09:29 AM

I guess I'll stop troping these kind of things until I care enough to modify the DILP and RTDE pages to make them more inclusive, or someone goes on a crusade to change all the "Adaptational" tropes to "Derivatory" tropes. One of the two.

Never mind, I actually did just that. The former, that is, though a crusade remains an option. Draco in Leather Pants actually required very little rewriting, though it still seems negatively accentuated.

Sorry for the double-post, but I figured I'll better announce this in case somebody doesn't like the edits.

I would think people generally seeing a canon character as a Drako or a Ron would be Alternate Character Interpretation, right? The specific tropes would be for the fanfics in which they actually appear.

The fact that people have alternate interpretations of canon characters is so common and so obvious that any kind of statement to that effect without citing specific cases is going to violate our rule on general examples.

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Many fans see Alice as being manipulative.

Okay, great. I'm sure many fans see her as being kawaii, and many fans want to bone her, and many fans hate her hairstyle, and so forth. You haven't said anything useful, nothing that would help someone looking for specific cases of this find them, and so on. The audience reaction is so broadly defined as to be completely useless. "A lot of people think X." A lot of people probably find me annoying, but that fact wouldn't belong on a trope article about me.

Alternative Character Interpretation, like Ron the Death Eater, Fix Fic, and similar fandom tropes, should, in most cases, be placed on the articles for the fanworks in which they are expressed, rather than on the YMMV subpages of the works that inspire them. It's also a supertrope, encompassing RTDI, DILP, and other more specific tropes, which should be used if they apply rather than the more general trope.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 25th 2019 at 12:02:28 PM

Fair enough.

Does Ron the Death Eater versus Adaptational Villainy come down to author intent? For example, a fanfic depicts a benevolent character as an evil baby-eater, but the author doesn't dislike the character. They're just making an alternate universe interpretation where the character is awful. Would that still go under Ron the Death Eater?

On Ron the Death Eater on work's YMMV pages, is it okay to list them if you list examples? Such as "[x] character is depicted in [x] manner in a lot of fan-works, such as in [example]". I see it posted like that a lot. Should those examples be moved to the main Ron the Death Eater page?

For your first question: yes, that would still go under Ron the Death Eater.

For your second question: no, do not put them on YMMV pages of the original works. Do not move them to the trope page. Don't list them at all. Rather, the tropes should be attached to the specific fanwork(s) that use them.