Big "Big Bad" clean-up project

Big Bad needs a massive clean-up effort project.

It came up in the zero-context example project thread. The trope itself is fine. Well-defined and everything...

But most examples on the sub-pages are ZCE. Those that are not ZCE are likely misuse — it's troped incorrectly as the main antagonist or recurring villain of the season, but it ignores the key requirements, namely:

• Note that the Big Bad of a story is not always the most powerful or oldest existing evil force.
• He is the ultimate villain of the story, who's causing the problem the heroes must solve.
• Note that Big Bad is not a catch-all trope for the biggest and ugliest villain of any given story.
• The Big Bad is the one who turns out to be behind several other seemingly independent threats.

It was one of the first Overdosed Tropes. Now it has nearly 47,000 wicks.

I randomly checked 20, all were ZCE or had insufficient context, some were plain misuse.

What needs to be done:

• finish clean-up of the media subpages. They violate ZCE and example indentation rules (most of it is being taken care of as it was reported in the zero-context thread), but the pages are long and second (third etc.) pair of eyes is always welcome.
• check the wicks and remove all ZCE and misuse

Edited by XFllo on Feb 14th 2019 at 7:58:15 PM

Looking good! Let's get this ball rollin'.

I've made Sandbox.Big Bad Animated Films for the purposes of more easily cleaning up this particular subpage without either spending five hours working on it in one go or spamming the page with edits. Once the page is ready to go we can just copy+paste the Sandbox text onto the actual subpage. I think doing this with most subpages will be a good way to collaborate and clean things up in our own time. However, to avoid people editing the subpages in the meantime we might want to add invisible notes about these sandboxes to each page.

Sandbox is a great idea. Those serial-lurker-like edits are probably not good for the servers.

Edited by XFllo on Feb 14th 2019 at 7:59:58 PM

Yeah, exactly...

I also want to bring some attention to BigBad.Pinball. It speaks for itself. What to be done about this one?

I wanted to laugh and say cut, but I see it's a redirect to the main page.

It was done probably because of high number of external links.

I merged it and I'm fine with cutting the redirect.

So.... Is this about cleaning the ZC Es and tell us why the particular example counts in the main page? I'm cool with it.

^ Precisely. The job is massive, so we need a lot of help.

Can we cut BigBad.Pinball? The page was too short to live on its own, so I moved everything to the main Big Bad page and then commented it out. BigBad.Pinball doesn't have a lot of inbounds, so can we cut it?

Edit: Same goes for BigBad.Roleplay.

Edited by Mickoonsley19 on Feb 14th 2019 at 6:06:03 AM

^ I'd love to, but I can't find the page, the Roleplay page is another redirect link

Hmmmm let me see with what can I do with ZC Es despite my poor grammar. Well, Big Bad on its own is rather hard to define on what they had done because they act probably mostly consisted of "behind all the bad things that happened" and its pretty hard what kind of the bad things that they had done so yeah...

If you can't add context, then you can always help us find examples to comment out.

What do you mean you can't find the pinball and roleplay pages?

The links are just redirects. The links on the Pinball and Roleplay pages themselves are redirects. The link in your history is a redirect.

You can view and edit them from here.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=BigBad.Pinball

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=BigBad.Roleplay

I'm trying to get to the actual pages though. Being able to edit them and see their history isn't helping me. I want to put these on the cutlist, but I don't know how if the link will only go back to Big Bad.

I've cut redirects before, cutting redirects will not cut the real pages.

That's not what I'm worried about. I want to cut the Pinball and Roleplay pages but I can't if the only links to them are redirect links.

Alrighty, let me see what I can do but at a later time.

Anyway, the Roleplay and Pinball pages are frying my brain so if someone else has an idea of how to go about cutting them, please do so. I'm going to focus on my sandbox.

Edit: Okay, so I now realize they were turned into redirects after the fact. My bad. I had no idea that was how it worked.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 14th 2019 at 10:05:32 AM

The Big Bad is the one who turns out to be behind several other seemingly independent threats.

I don't think this is required for a character to be a Big Bad. In the original Star Wars trilogy, the Emperor isn't behind several other seemingly-independent threats. He's the leader of the Empire, the force of evil that the heroes must overthrow to resolve the plot. In The Lord of the Rings, you don't find out after the fact that the seemingly-unrelated Ringwraiths, orcs, and trolls were servants of Sauron; they're all introduced that way from the start.

Actually, given how bad the ZCE problem is, it might not be a bad idea for us to settle on a couple of unambiguous examples of Big Bad and work up example writeups for each, as a model for what proper context looks like. The Emperor from the original Star Wars trilogy, Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series of books seem like good places to start.

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 15th 2019 at 11:59:06 AM

Isn't the Big Bad the villain driving the main plot forward, not just the person behind the biggest threats?

Usually those are the same person, but yes, in cases where it's not, the Big Bad is the one driving the plot forward.

For example, in The Lord of the Rings, the biggest threat in the universe is Morgoth, the God of Evil who was cast out of the world in the Silmarillion but will one day return for an apocalyptic final battle.

The plot of LOTR isn't about stopping Morgoth's return; it's about stopping Sauron from taking over Middle-Earth. So Sauron is the Big Bad, and Morgoth is a Greater-Scope Villain. Morgoth is indirectly responsible for the plot of LOTR (he was the one who corrupted Sauron to evil in the backstory, and in general he's the source of all evil in the setting), but Sauron is directly responsible for the plot (he's the one who sends the Ringwraiths to capture the One Ring and sends armies to conquer the Free Peoples).

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 15th 2019 at 12:04:09 PM

Right, exactly.

So, this is something to keep in mind when working on this cleanup. Some examples might have context, but the example might not fit to begin with.

So for example, a proper example writeup for Sauron (which currently doesn't have very good context on the BigBad.Literature page) might look something like:

• The Lord of the Rings: The Dark Lord Sauron is the primary driver of the plot. As the trilogy begins, he is poised to conquer all of Middle-Earth, and his victory will become assured if he captures the One Ring. He kick-starts the plot by sending the Ring-Wraiths to take the Ring from Frodo, he corrupts Saruman into attacking Rohan and kidnapping two of the heroes in the second book, and he musters a massive force to attack Gondor (and is mentioned in dialogue to be attacking all other good-aligned nations) in the third book. The plot isn't resolved until the Ring is destroyed, killing Sauron and leaving his forces leaderless and easily routed.

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 15th 2019 at 7:32:25 AM