On the subject of pre-release work pages

Your participation in this thread has consisted largely of willfully ignoring every point that I, Fighteer, and nombretomato have brought up (e.g. the trailer is not the work, troping a pre-released work based on promotional material is Speculative Troping and disallowed, etc.). I am therefore unsurprised by your unwillingness to engage with this latest analysis. I will, however, thank you to discontinue your calls for me to "give a reason why this is a problem" or "prove that unreleased pages are worse than released work pages". I, crazysamaritan, and others are doing exactly that. Your willful refusal to engage in that work in good faith is not my problem.

I am happy to help clean in preparation for a page lock to ensure that the cleaning job sticks until the work's release. I am less enthused about cleaning in preparation for another mess. I'll hold off until the mods have reached a consensus on what is to be locked / nuked / whatever, thanks.

That... is not a persuasive argument in favor of continuing to let such tropers run rampant on pages (or at least, example sections) that shouldn't even exist yet, because they're for works that aren't available to the public yet. I'm not advocating "asking" people to refrain from Speculative Troping. I'm advocating preventing them from doing so with a page lock. Whether it appears arbitrary "to them" is not my concern. There is nothing "arbitrary" about troping only works that are actually available to the general public.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 7:51:40 AM

~Discar, your first post had this summary:

Sandbox.Case Study Frozen is evidence that your assessment is wrong; rampant speculation and behind-the-scenes spoilers are de rigor on unpublished work pages. As a result, we get violations of ZCE, violations of Handling Spoilers, and edit wars. The more popular the work is, the more it looks like we approve of those violations.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I'm not arguing against locking pages (I'm fine with it in fact). I'm merely stating that people here are generally hasty. It's even been proven here with the whole Advertising page mess and automatically cutlisting pages on a whim.

THAT is what I mean. All I want is for people not to be hasty. We have a compromise in a cleanup thread. Maybe it won't work. But it is a step forward, one way or another.

That, and efforts at cleaning these problems while still leaving the pages open have been labor-intensive and ineffective. I don't see any reason to believe that the cleanup thread (the latest iteration of this strategy) will be any different.

The cleanup thread is proceeding on the faulty premise that tropes present or implied in trailers and other pre-release advertising is indicative of tropes present in the final work. It is dedicated to creating cleaner, better-organized pages of Speculative Troping. That is not something I'm interested in participating in.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 8:09:40 AM

Then you'll be proven right. But ignoring the thread guarantees it won't work.

This isn't an emergency that needs to be fixed in the next few days (hell, even the next few months) to keep the site from exploding. It's been the way it is for years with minimal trouble. Maybe the site will be improved with changes, but that's different. We have time to take it slow, feel things out, and find the best solution. The whole Advertising/ controversy is an example of a rushed solution that could have been avoided if we had taken more time. Obviously that problem was fixed, and that's fine. But it's still better to take this step by step.

Chining in to support preemptive lock of pre-release ymmv pages.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

Its premise guarantees it won't work. As I said, it's dedicated to creating cleaner, better-organized Speculative Troping. Whether it succeeds at that or not, it still fails at the goal of eliminating Speculative Troping, which is the goal I'm interested in.

Now if you want me to jump in and eliminate all the Speculative Troping on these pages, sure, I can help with that. It will result in a lot of pages with no examples section, some with one or two entries (like Numbered Sequels for Frozen II), and a lot of subpages on the cutlist. I'm more than willing to do that.

But I think that would probably fall under your definition of "hasty."

And again we're back to the part where you insist that a trailer is, by definition, never a part of a work. Which is simply not how people write pages.

I know it's not how people write pages. That's the problem. People like to do Speculative Troping, which is against the rules.

It's not "my" insistence that a trailer is not part of the work. It's not, by definition. That's like saying that an automobile ad is part of the car. Can you drive the advertisement to the grocery store?

The trailer has things in common with the work, sure. But it's impossible to know which things until the work is publicly available.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 8:47:15 AM

We are arguing in circles.

We are. Do you still want me to jump into the cleanup thread so we can continue this there, with specific examples on specific pages?

Or shall we refrain from being "hasty" and wait for the mods to make a policy decision?

If you do, I think it should be noted that the cleanup thread is probably operating on the assumption that the trailer is a legitimate, tropable part of the work, barring unfounded speculation which it exists to clean up.

And how are we defining "good examples"?

I would define them as "examples that are definitively present in the work itself, not assumed to be present due to their presence or implied presence in a trailer or other promotional materials." That is consistent with statements made by yourself and Fighteer in this thread, but I don't know if that's consistent with current thinking among the mods as a whole.

In the case of unreleased works, that would be limited to a very few tropes, such as Title Tropes for works that are very unlikely to be promoted under a Working Title.

Trivia tropes like Word of God, which are external to the work proper by definition, could be valid as well, although only as trivia. E.g.,

• Word of God says that the Ending Theme will be a Chiptune song

...is a valid example of Word of God, but not Ending Theme or Chiptune until the work comes out and we can confirm that the creator was telling the truth and nothing changed since they made that statement.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 10:20:55 AM

Eh, I still think a lock is the best idea yet. People clearly aren't interested in trying to trope advertisements and just want to focus on troping the work itself. There's been clear evidence that, for at least very popular unreleased works, the pages garner a lot of misuse and hype-examples, which leads to a lot of cleanup and debate in ATT and this very thread. Now maybe not every page is like this. Maybe a lot of them are good. But locking pages for bigger unreleased works would ensure that we can prevent the possibility of bad examples slipping through the cracks— heck, maybe people can bring potential examples to the cleanup first so we can all decide on whether or not it's speculation or fact.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Did anyone already mention here that Yesterday (2019) already has a Fridge page, written by someone who's/people who've seen the trailer, but not the still-imminent movie?

Edited by dsneybuf on Mar 2nd 2019 at 1:02:44 PM

That one's gotta go.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Yeah, I still say unreleased works shouldn’t have main pages, or at the very least their pages should be locked until actual release. I don’t think trailers are sufficient to trope the actual work for all the reasons High Crate has gone over.

Turns out Fridge.Toy Story 4 was declined on the Cut Lost. Huh.

Contains 20% less fat than the leading value brand!

It was declined in a swath of declinations for cut requests made while this thread was still under active debate.

Edited by nombretomado on Mar 2nd 2019 at 1:25:58 AM

Marketing creates tropes, such as Covers Always Lie and Billed Above the Title. They're not part of the story told by the work, but unless we're planning on using the Advertising/ namespace or creating a new subpage just for the marketing campaigns used to sell the product, I think it is fine to trope these on the main work page.

---

However, the examples need to say they're from the marketing, much like when a work and the adaptation/sequel shares a page. From Sandbox.Case Study Frozen, we see that people aren't doing that. VideoGame.Fire Emblem Three Houses has people troping "Actually Four Mooks: When zoomed out, only each squadron's leader is visible.", when the only evidence are marketing videos, which could be splicing together different modes or be purely promotional.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Technically those tropes should probably be Trivia, since they're not part of the work proper. That's something that can be brought up in the proper thread, though. Regardless, I agree that they can often be troped pre-release. Billed Above the Title is something that often happens in movie posters, so that can be troped as soon as the poster is viewable. Covers Always Lie can't really be troped pre-release, though, since we don't know if the cover is lying until we have the work to compare it with.

As to the second paragraph, if we're allowing trailers to be troped on the work page that will eventually be used for the work itself, then I agree that it needs to be made clear that it's the trailer that contains the trope, not necessarily the work.

Edited by HighCrate on Mar 2nd 2019 at 2:33:08 AM