Not Thriving: Wacky Guy

In the ZCE cleanup thread, troper Spark 9 did a ZCE cleanup pass through Wacky Guy, cleaning up only the most egregious ZCEs, and wound up with only six entries still visible on the page. Looking through them, I'm of the opinion that only the Super Troopers entry has anything close to proper context; the rest are along the lines of "[character] is this combined with [other trope]."

That level of ZCE is usually a sign of a problem trope, and in this case the trope description does ramble a lot, although there does seem like there may be a tropable idea in there somewhere, something adjacent to the Plucky Comic Relief and Drop-In Character.

The trope's been around since 2013 and has 176 wicks.

Mini-Wick Check:

• Friendship Is Magic: Discord: ZCE
• The Calvinverse: ZCE
• LeftTheBackgroundMusicOn.Live Action TV: Pot Hole
• Couch Potatoes: Pot Hole
• TV Tropes Superhero Team: JFF goof on the trope name, has nothing to do with the actual trope.
• Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure: Offhand reference
• My Hero: Pot Hole
• Body Parts: TBH I'm not entirely sure what the point of Pantheons is supposed to be or what this wick is doing here.
• Drunkard's Walk: ZCE
• Step by Step: Actually has something approaching context, although still rather vague, just says "is highly eccentric and lives in a van."
• Gilmore Girls: Says the character is "the local weirdo in a town full of weirdos." Not precisely a ZCE, but still rather vague and context-light.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Passing above-the-line mention.
• Danganronpa: Ultimate Despair Ship: ZCE
• Family Matters: Two different ZCEs
• The Last Stand: ZCE
• Mimosa Crossroads: ZCE. Side note: I hate literally every Roleplay page I have the misfortune of clicking on. They are so far below the general standard of quality for this wiki it's not even funny.
• Charles in Charge: ZCE
• ThatCameOutWrong.Live Action TV: Trope title used as an adjective with no further context
• Webcomic/CTHS: ZCE
• Girl Meets World: Passing mention.

ZCEs: 9 (45%) Potholes or passing mentions: 8 (40%) Something approaching an actually decent example: 2 (10%) Other: 1 (5%)

I had to stop there for the evening; I can complete the wick check on request once this gets opened, but without a firmer grasp of what I'm looking for, it's hard to say that it would do much good.

What is apparent, though, is that the wicks have as serious a ZCE problem as the on-page examples. There probably is a tropable concept being grasped at here, but there's so little worth saving that I'd recommend just sending it back to TLP.

Opened, since matters were discussed elsewhere. The wick check helps.

Anyways, I second sending it to TLP.

That's fine with me.

Yes. The grammar seems a bit messy as well as the other issues pointed out. I'm for sending it back to get that fixed too.

Send it back.

We seem fairly unanimous, but for form's sake if nothing else, I've made a crowner to make it official. Hollering for a hook.

How would sending it back to the TLP help with the zce issue any more than just a wick cleanup?

The trope seems pretty clear to me- it’s the character in a comedy ensemble who is more eccentric than everyone else, and constantly driving the plot via Zany Schemes. Think Kramer in Seinfeld, Todd in Bojack Horseman, etc. I would guess that a lot of misuses of cloudcuckoolander are actually this trope- I often see it used for anyone who’s sort of weird, when in fact the trope is about characters who are totally out of touch with reality.

I’m increasingly thinking that all tropes suffer from serious zce and misuse problems that aren’t directly derived from the trope itself but simply the nature of the wiki.

Not all tropes suffer this badly, which is what the wick check is there to demonstrate. Most have more than literally one valid entry on their own trope page.

Yeah, that's the thing. Oridnary ZCE problems pop up all the time- but this is something different. It's the absolute worst ZCE issue I, personally, have ever seen for a trope. If we go around just cleaning wicks, we could very well just scrub all evidence of the trope's existence away. We need to get good examples that can be crosswicked, and the TLP is a good place to do that.

TLP is really good at collecting enough examples that can be put on the trope page.

The current page is... very brief. 6 on-page examples with so-so context is very low for a trope that has been up for some time.

That said, I haven't checked wicks on Related/ page. If there's enough that can be cross-wicked back to the trope page, we might skip the "send-back-to-TLP" phase.

Edited by XFllo on Jan 23rd 2020 at 9:20:16 PM

It's still unclear to me what this character type is about. Something to do with Drop-In Character?

Where did that crowner come from? This thread hasn't been open for a full day. OP didn't actually copy and paste any of the wicks from the wick check as per How to Do a Wick Check, or check 50 wicks...

That said, the on-page examples are pretty bad, and if no one else but me knows what the trope is about there is a problem.

Edited by naturalironist on Jan 23rd 2020 at 8:16:21 AM

^ You say this character is out of touch with reality. How is this not similar to Cloudcuckoolander?

You want a full wick check?

-Cracks Knuckles-

I'll give you a wick check. Give me an hour.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 23rd 2020 at 10:44:53 AM

Wacky Guy Wick Check

Of 50 random wicks, 35 are ZCEs or unhelpful potholes; and even the ones that do have context may not actually be using the trope correctly. That's about 70% misuse without even accounting for misused-but-contextual examples, or the ones that can't really be counted.

That means that we can expect about 122 of the 175 wicks to be lacking any sort of context, or to put it another way, only 33 wicks with context of any sort- and that's already false, if we account for the "N/A" folder, which has 6 of the checked wicks.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 23rd 2020 at 10:38:28 AM

Ambiguous phrasing. Out of touch with reality = Cloudcuckoolander NOT The Wacky Guy

Thanks! Based on the pervasiveness of zces, I suppose sending back to the tlp. Most of the non-zces seem like legit examples though.

Though I'm still personally a bit unclear about what the trope is, and the wick check didn't help.

What is the specific procedure for sending it back to TLP? Normally that's done through the TLP Crash Rescue thread and I always got the sense that it needed to be done by a mod.

Usually we don't literally unlaunch it- we just copy+paste the source into a TLP draft.

Ah, gotcha. Done.

Edited by HighCrate on Feb 4th 2020 at 2:43:40 AM

Since the page was cut and the TLP draft is up, is there anything left to do for this thread?

That should do it. Thus, time to close.