Trope Launch Pad discard project

Bringing these two drafts that have been rotting in my watchlist.

• Kill it with Lightning: The idea is good, but it's a low-effort draft made by somebody who doesn't know how to use TLP. It hss enough bombs to discard this draft, while the idea itself can be yarded.
• Our Youkai Are Different: This one can probably be discarded already. It has 7 bombs, almost everybody in the comment section expressed their disapproval, and even the sponsor says he agrees.

Edited by Dghcrh on Jun 21st 2020 at 11:50:38 AM

Okay, we're finally approaching the end of these musty old mothballs. Only a handful of these and some unfinished business tropes are left to be dealt with. (I have taken a couple of drafts aside to see if I can work with them, and a couple of them have been sent to try their luck in the Adoption Drive because they were in not-terrible shape.)

Yes, some of these are a bit verbose, but they require a bit more explanation than "one line wonder" or "abandoned stub, no examples".

• The Ledger Reveals All: This is simply "Forensic Accounting, if successful."

• Informed Rarity It already has the bombs, so this is more about getting confirmation than anything else. My issue is that this really is Oddly Common Rarity applied to objects instead of character abilities. I would think that we'd be better off if we could expand OCR rather than have two tropes that are functionally identical.

• Misguided Imitation: This is the kind of draft the Yard was created for. Discard and Yard.

• Embarrassed Beauty — Okay, I've asked in multiple places and done my due dilligence. I still don't see how this isn't covered by So Beautiful, It's a Curse (beauty attracts unwanted or untoward attention), I'm Not Pretty (character doesn't see themselves as beautiful and is embarrassed to be called so), or Shrinking Violet (character is embarrassed by attention caused by her beauty due to shyness). It can be discarded straight away, but I'm going to give one last chance for a rebuttal.

• Hooker Psychologist: This is Wisdom from the Gutter. Considering a large portion of the extant examples are either aversions or misuse, that doesn't speak well to its viability as a subtrope. A Golden Girl professing to "understand men" is not the same thing as "a prostitute demonstrating an uncanny level of understanding of human psychology."

• Deus Ex Aquam: I know it's a thing in 80s action movies (if nothing else), but it should probably be Discarded and Yarded because the draft is quite bad. Also, I don't know shit about Bollywood so I can't speak to that at all.

• Ironic Flashback: The draft is an Example As Thesis,, and at least half of the examples don't fit for one reason or another (one isn't actually ironic, one's a Mythology Gag, one isn't actually a flashback, etc.). I guess it could be yarded but no other person ever even proposed an example so that may suggest how much support it would have...

• Plot Moving Song: "Song that advances the plot" is certainly a tropeable concept, so it may be a (high-maintenance) candidate for Adoption. The question is, wouldn't this eventually become a laundry list of most songs in musicals, depending on exactly how you define "advances the plot"?

• Jean-Pierre LaTrope It can't seem to decide if it's a very broad "name that sounds vaguely French but isn't" or the very specific "Le/La Word" name. There's a handful of prominent examples but most fall under Punny Name (Gaston Le Gume) or Meaningful Name (Pepe Le Pew, Fifi La Fume) before they'd fall under this. Reading the draft, it seems like most of the examples are actual names (French or otherwise) so I'm not too confident that is going to work as its own trope.

• Useless Useful Item: Okay, so this is trying to be the item equivalent of Useless Useful Spell. That idea may have some merit, but this draft is all over the place. It mostly includes items that don't work in one specific situation, along with items that backfire and other stuff. The Spell version is a gaming trope that specifically refers to spells that sound really powerful but don't actually work in any situation where they'd actually be useful. The thesis of this draft is "any item is absolutely useless because it didn't work in one specific situation".

• Unskippable Logos: This is a thing that exists. It is not a trope. Listing examples would encompass almost every video game ever made (at least, within the last 30+ years). Does anyone really want this as a trope? (Also, Unskippable Cutscene already exists as a redirect for Cutscene.)

Edited by HeavyMetalHermitCrab on Jun 24th 2020 at 11:28:52 AM

• Broadway Malady's laconic, "Anything that can go wrong, does go wrong in Broadway!", makes it sound like The Same, but More Specific to The Show Must Go Wrong. The description reads as "Broadway exists". I don't think there's a way to make a trope out of this.
• Sex Creep is a duplicate of the Tropes About Perverts index.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Jun 22nd 2020 at 9:50:29 AM

As someone who works extensively with musicals, I would agree that Plot-Moving Song is prone to becoming a list of most songs in most musicals. The idea that the majority of songs in musicals are just fluff, and songs that move the plot forward are noteworthy, is pretty outdated. I tossed in a downvote.

Here's my last batch of nonviable drafts, hot out of the oven!

• Ask A Busy Mother: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Cargo Culture: Abandoned stub lacking in examples.
• Coupon Shot: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Forced Murder: Abandoned stub with no examples, duplicate of Suicide by Cop.
• Gravity Boots: Abandoned stub with only Zero-Context Examples.
• Identical-Damage Counter: Abandoned with one example.
• Identical Rival Gangs: Covered by Similar Squad.
• Improbable Athleticism: Abandoned and lacking in examples, plus flagged by a mod as being prone to complaining.
• The Killer Left The Money: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Mock Disapproval / Oh You: Abandoned stub.
• Named for the Foreign Word: Covered by A Dog Named "Dog" and This Is My Name on Foreign.
• Offscreen Reconciliation: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Only The Bald Wear Wigs: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Walescot: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Welcoming The Baby: Abandoned draft with possibly the most chairsy concept, "people reproduce."
• You shouldn't have done that: Abandoned stub, covered by existing tropes.

Edited by MonaNaito on Jun 26th 2020 at 11:15:58 AM

Doom Signifying Iconic Item and Symbolic Flatline cover the same scope. I forgot, which draft is being assimilated into which?

Guys, I need help with something. I've noticed a strange tendency for drafts by Flowersnf to attract mystery hats well before they're ready. I'm at the point where I want to create a report and see if there's any chance they're using socks, because it's a recurring issue I've been noticing. (Obviously if the drafts I find don't follow this pattern I'll give up on making a report.)

Problem?

I can't find their older drafts! Either they were discarded or launched and I need help tracking them down. Please lend a hand; it helps that 90% of the recent discards were done as part of the project, meaning there's less discards we actually need to click and check, but yeah...yeah, I think this needs an investigation but only one draft with their name is currently in existence so I need to find more before I make a report.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 23rd 2020 at 11:30:05 AM

The only one I remember off the top of my head was Autism Theory, which I trashed a while ago. It had 11 bombs, no hats.

Yeah, I happened to find that one and only that one. I just feel like I've seen their username pop up so often with bad drafts and I remember associating their drafts with an usual amount of early hats, but it's impossible to verify either way if I can't find the actual drafts. Maybe I'm making fake memories or something, but still...

Well, there was that Spring Break thing but that was Jumbo J 99 or whatever...

I know Flowers rogue-launched at least one draft, I think it was Signature Role or whatever

Maybe it's Jumbo I'm thinking of then, but that's more hats than I'm actually talking about. I'm talking about shit like this.

You see, there's actually been instances of people using socks to hat their drafts. So any time an underdeveloped draft like this one gets multiple hats immediately, it's a major red flag. And I feel like it's happened more than once with flowersnf, but maybe it's actually Jumbo I'm thinking of.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 23rd 2020 at 12:33:47 PM

Yeah, I'm suspicious of that draft too. I mean, I know some people will hat anything just because they like the concept, but jeez, it takes more effort to scratch your butt than it does to write that draft.

I'm not saying you're wrong or misremembering about Flowersnf; you could be right. I don't personally remember seeing a draft of theirs with insta-hats before, but that doesn't always mean much as I'm not always paying attention to TLP. It's just unfortunate that there isn't a good system for tracking down old drafts, especially by original author.

That's why I made a wishlist thing about it.

Ah well. Maybe I'll just keep this draft in the bank for a while and see if it happens again after this.

• Callous cops has poor grammar, only one example, and is probably covered by Cowboy Cop or Rabid Cop.
• The Customer Is Always Wrong has no examples and is probably already covered.
• Dogs Are Mute: When there's this many zero-context examples, I have to question the tropeworthiness of the draft. It also has some overlap with Dogs Are Dumb.
• Having your wedding cake and eating it too is The Mistress with an awful name.
• High Speed Boss: The OP realized that it's covered by High-Speed Battle, but didn't discard it.
• Idle Game is a low-effort version of an existing page.
• Legitimancy is "the ability to be The Chooser of the One".
• No casual sports fans: Awful grammar, two examples.
• No Real Chicks is "Perverse Sexual Lust, but only for straight men, and only if they're not attracted to real people".
• Scenery Blanket Searching is covered by Always Check Behind the Chair and Pixel Hunt.
• Silent Protest is a low-effort draft with one example.
• Softer In Hindsight: The name alone should make you want to nuke it. All of the "X in hindsight" pages are constantly misused, and I don't think we need another one to attract even more misuse.
• Speed Striker is a zero effort draft that is just "Glass Cannon + Fragile Speedster". I don't think it's a legitimate character archetype as much as it is just "X trope + Y trope" with no connection, so I don't think it needs its own page.
• Toying With Dreams By Toying With Senses is Crashing Dreams.

Edited by Serac on Jun 30th 2020 at 10:04:51 AM

• Coupon Shot is also complaint bait that's covered by Anticlimax and such.
• Only The Bald Wear Wigs is one of those "something lacking presence is a trope" and it's really not a trope. Law of Conservation of Detail and all that.
• For a specific franchise example, "Speed Strikers" are called "sweepers" in Pokémon parlance and there's a bazillion Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon examples on the character pages already. Also, the author calls it a subversion of Lightning Bruiser when Lightning Bruiser is already a subversion of Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon, making it a double subversion that puts it back into Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon. Ugh.

Okay, here's the last batch of mothballs. There's only four, but they may merit a bit of discussion. (Also, I didn't include Heart Motifs because someone wanted it, well, here's my invitation to go get it.)

• Magical Girl Genre: After looking at it multiple times, I don't see a clear difference between this draft and the Magical Girl trope it was supposed to split off from, except maybe categorizing individual shows under subgenres (which is covered by the individual subgenre pages). This is also almost 10 years old and no one seems sure what to do with it. I say it's covered. Discard.

• Elizabethan Beauty Ideal: This is either an Appearance Trope or Not A Trope, which is already a pretty hefty issue in itself. As I said before, the only real ways I see to make this passable are to make it a Useful Notes page on Elizabethan ideals of beauty (and the ghastly things they did to achieve those characteristics), or just make a Useful Notes page on beauty ideals across time or cultures. But as a trope, it'a just another shitty ZCE and misuse magnet.

• Mythological Villain Upgrade: To me, this is Adaptational Villainy. I can kinda see how Historical Villain Upgrade is significant in its own way because that's applying the same ideas to actual events and people, but this just seems like "a character is more evil in the adaptation, only MYTHOLOGY!"

• Furnace Execution: Shares a lot in common with Murder by Cremation and the superior draft Cooked to Death, but isn't an exact copy of either. Do we need it, do we have it?

Additionally, most of these are still sitting at 3 or 4 hats and just need a finish, or an alternate course of action:

• Informed Rarity: Keep this or expand Oddly Common Rarity to include objects?

• Too Tough To Act Tough: This is either "Badass, but Downplayed" or Real Men Wear Pink depending on how you look at it.

• Plot Gravity Character: No one seems to know what the OP wanted, and frankly, unless it's referring to godlike characters or something, I don't think it's all that significant.

• Dramatic Mute Scene: Shell-Shock Silence if an action scene, Moment of Silence if other scene.

• Misguided Imitation: Not a bad idea but the draft is not workable.

• Hooker Psychologist: Looking over the examples already given, it doesn't look like there's enough to justify this as a subtrope. Half of the examples either don't or tenuously fit the description.

• Ironic Flashback: Irony as applied in flashbacks. Wouldn't be a bad idea, but the examples don't fit the description.

• Useless Useful Item:Tries to be an item equivalent ot Useless Useful Spell, but fails. Examples are all over the place, and it's trying to apply a game-specific idea to all media, which ends up making the trope look like "any item that doesn't work in one situation is automatically useless."

~IukaSylvie, I've noticed you bumping a lot of old drafts to get them discarded or to ask if they're covered. Would you mind taking them to this thread, instead? We're trying to avoid old-draft spam and keep the front page full of drafts with ongoing or recent discussion, so it's best to use this thread if you have questions about older drafts that might need to be discarded.

• Alternate Overseas Title is already covered by Completely Different Title and Market-Based Title.
• The Character's Relative seems to be covered by Family Title.
• Does Not Trust Women seems to be covered by He-Man Woman Hater. In fact, Does Not Like Men doesn't distinguish if a female character merely distrusts men or outright hates them.

Implausible Accusation, Coupon Shot, Mock Disapproval / Oh You, and Offscreen Reconciliation, all abandoned stubs I brought up earlier, are sitting at 4 bombs each. Care to give them a last push?

Edited by MonaNaito on Jun 26th 2020 at 11:15:13 AM

Nuked all of ‘em.

Thanks, everyone! It sure seems like we've been doing a lot of good work cleaning stuff out. I wonder how many active TLP drafts there are compared to when this project was started?

Anyway, here's a bunch more easy discards:

• Added for Emphasis: Covered by Emphasize EVERYTHING.
• Cue The Crying Kid: Duplicate of Crying Little Kid.
• Down To Negative One: Abandoned one-line wonder with no examples.
• Eye In The Sky: Abandoned draft about hurricanes that reads more like a Useful Notes page. Only one example.
• Gentle Words, Vicious Subtext: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Good Time Gone Bad: Abandoned with no examples.
• Hallway Hallway GHOST Hallway: Abandoned with one example. Yarded.
• Idealism Prevails: Duplicate of Earn Your Happy Ending.
• If You Like XYZ, You'll Like A: Abandoned Stock Phrase with no examples.
• Jim Carry v. Tobuscus: Covered by Zany Scheme Chicken.
• Masochist: Abandoned one-line wonder with no examples.
• New season new cast: This draft has NO description. Impressive.
• Opening Reveal: Abandoned stub with one example.
• Plotline injury: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• Proportional Possession: Abandoned with no examples.
• Roll The Rest Of The Clip: Abandoned stub with two examples.
• Theme Music Name Chanting: Abandoned stub with no examples.
• What You Don't Do Says A Lot: Abandoned stub with no examples.

Here's some others that might be Yard-worthy, although I don't feel strongly about them. How do people feel about these concepts?

• Banished To Manhattan: For maximum culture shock, people from fantasy worlds who travel to Earth always wind up in New York City.
• Best Friends Forever: Not at all distinct from Best Friend in the description, but in the comments it was specified as "cliquish school-age girls who spend all their time together and insist their juvenile friendship will last forever".
• Enemy Slashing Run: Running through a crowd of enemies and wounding (but not tossing) them all as you go by.
• Expressive Wounds: Wounds that fluctuate between healing and worsening depending on the character's emotional state.
• Eye In The Light: Camera shot of someone hiding in a closet/cabinet, where you see them peering out of the crack with a single ray of light falling across their face.
• Sleep Attack Training: Martial arts (or whatever) trainer jumps student in their sleep to gauge their reaction time.
• Stock CSI Miami Parody: Glasses Pull, Quip to Black, YEEEEAAAAHHHH!! I've had someone in TLP tell me we were cutting back on Stock Parodies in favor of the Referenced by... namespace, but I have no idea if that's an actual policy.

Edited by MonaNaito on Aug 26th 2020 at 8:51:29 AM

Hallway Hallway GHOST Hallway: We Have This... I Swear..., but I couldn't find it on Elevator Tropes. I say scrapyard it.

Edited by Miss_Desperado on Jun 26th 2020 at 10:04:14 AM

The remaining drafts in my previous batch are all sitting at three or four bombs. They're almost ready to discard.

Anyway, here's a new batch:

• Acceptable Business Targets: In addition to this page only having two such targets listed, the problems with Acceptable Targets necessitated a currently ongoing TRS thread, so I don't think we need another subpage of it to attract those problems.
• Bigamy is Funny is an abandoned draft with a bad title and a three-sentence description that's missing some punctuation. It also had no examples when it was posted, as all of the examples in the draft were suggested in the comments.
• Cool Nerd is In with the In Crowd.
• Inexplicable Ending Change Requirements is a very specific and complaint-filled version of Guide Dang It!.
• Its On The Fritz: What even is this? Is it supposed to be UsefulNotes.Apostrophes, a wiki policy page, a duplicate of Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma, or something else?
• Never pauses the game: No examples. The draft says that it's something that really annoyed the sponsor (the draft even uses "this troper"), making it seem kind of complainy, very chairsy, and definitely poorly written.
• Predictability Denial: stock phrase, Example as a Thesis, only one example, immediate abandonment... what isn't wrong with this?
• Random Encounters Tournament: The name is bad and, as written, it's very complainy.
• Sitting In The Middle Back Seat: Zero effort draft.
• Sword-ryuken: Awful name that has nothing to do with the trope, and it's just "Launcher Move + Meteor Move". I don't think it needs its own page.
• The Monster Stands Motionless is Roar Before Beating.

Edited by Serac on Jun 30th 2020 at 7:11:23 AM

• New season new cast is Revolving Door Casting. It needs one more bomb to discard.
• What You Don't Do Says A Lot: I have no idea what the sentence-long description is trying to describe. I'm pretty sure it's either chairs or What You Are in the Dark.
• Its On The Fritz: Clever title. Unnecessary page, though.

Yeah, we have a lot of drafts in the last few posts that are sitting at 4 bombs.

I'll go through them later; haven't had the time to keep up with the thread lately.