Television Is Trying To Kill Us

...Needs some cleanup.

It's been discussed on ATT. It's been discussed at the Locked Pages. It's time to finally bring the discussion to it's own thread.

The issue? Some tropes are there that probably shouldn't be there. Let's discuss which ones they are, and what we can do to fix the page.

I decided to put this here instead of Projects:Short Term because we also need to spend a lot of time talking this over before we clean things up.

Say, how exactly are we gonna do a clean up on this scale with a locked page? That has to be a bit of work for the admins.

Typically what I do is transfer the page stuff into a sandbox, cleanup the sandbox, and then ask the admins to swap the contents of the sandbox into the page itself.

Sure, let’s go with that.

Anyway, I‘ll start with the one that rustles my jimmies the most.

• False Rape Accusation: Far more rapes go unreported than falsely-reported. Furthermore, a "false report" doesn't necessarily mean that whoever reported it was lying. It could be a case of mistaken identity, and victims of sexual trauma don't always react in the stereotypical Broken Bird manner. And trauma has a way of scrambling or partially blocking out memories, especially in cases where there's a long time between when the event actually happened, and when it was reported. The result of this is that many victims aren't believed, and only a small percentage of rapists will even go to jail, let alone Prison.

This all just feels fallacious and agenda-y... like sure there’s a lot of unreported rapes and so little accused/rapists (I’m not sure if they’ve been found guilty or not) being jailed, but that dosen’t mean that false rape accusations aren’t important, since they there’s always going to be those people and that these impact victims as much as the accused. Speaking of them, there’s not even a mention of how this even impacts the accused... Especially, since the accused will still have their reputation tarnished even if the victim dosen’t have a good memory of the incident and the accused is innocent.

Anyways, should this be deleted since it’s more “TV exaggerates thing” rather than “TV says it’s an okay thing to do”?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 1st 2020 at 7:19:43 AM

Yeah, the sandbox approach seems to work well. Maybe get an agreement here on what types of things are misuses that need to be cut, what kinds of things stay, and from there shift to a short-term project to discuss changes to match?

That absolutely needs to go. False Rape Accusations do happen, which is why we always need to go by Innocent Until Proven Guilty if anyone is a accused of rape. Saying that this trope somehow harms actual rape victims is insane, especially since it just goes on about how the person was probably still raped- irrelevant to the trope itself, which is just "someone knowingly falsely accuses someone of raping them".

There's a difference between the claim that a certain person didn't actually rape anyone, and that the person was never raped to begin with; but that's the tangent the example chooses to go down, as if ever being somewhat skeptical that one specific person is a rapist is the same as saying the person made up the entire story.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 1st 2020 at 6:21:25 AM

That's just describing the reality of how rarely victims are believed, how rare false accusations are, how few rapes get prosecuted and how even fewer lead to convictions, etc. Not the trope. People aren't going around making false accusations based on media depictions.

Wait was I really misconceptulizing about actual victims having a harder time being believed because of people with malicious intent? I wasn’t sure what you were getting at there, since I assumed it was an endless cycle going on with victims, alongside the accused being ostracized.

I know, a lot of examples on the page are describing implications of shown tropes like that, but this just rubbed me off personally because of how one-sided of a stance it took on the subject, even if it included statistics.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 1st 2020 at 7:51:00 AM

I believe the goal of the entry is to illustrate that false reports are used disproportionately in media. Due to the image of false reports being a malicious lie, it contributes to victim-blaming and disbelief. "Innocent until Proven Guilty" is supposed to work both ways, and by showing a disproportionate number of false allegations in media, a rape accusation can cause more trouble for the accuser than the accused, especially when there is an imbalance of power between the two.

No, I was saying the example as written talks more about how the victims suffer, not about how False Rape Accusations actually...exist...and how they work in reality. I wasn't talking about you at all, just the example.

While that may be true, the example...doesn't says that. It just says "False Rape Accusation is a bad trope because in real life most rapists don't go to jail, and the victim may have still been raped even if they accused the wrong person, so please believe them anyway." Which I mean, while what it's saying isn't false, it also isn't relevant.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 1st 2020 at 7:12:12 AM

But is False Rape Accusation an example Television Is Trying to Kill Us, and is how the example written demonstrating how it fits that trope? Because I could ramble at the drop of a hat about how the criminal justice system works, how trauma affects people and specifically sexual assault, how media depicts sexual assault, misconceptions, etc. but is "the media exaggerates the frequency and motivations behind false vs. genuine rape accusations and contributes to people disbelieving victims" this trope?

Ah I get ya. In that case I agree.

I get what you're saying, I think it could've been handled better by at least acknowledging the accused and not downplay the concequences of either victim or accused. The imbalance of power you're talking about can also go the other way around too, with everyone doubling down on the accused because of a misguided attempt at supporting victims.

Anyway, I think this is better left for another thread. Should we list more problematic entries?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 1st 2020 at 8:21:03 AM

I'm not even sure what you're talking about anymore. I was literally just pointing out that the example as written isn't even talking about the actual trope, just other stuff about rape stats and victims- this literally isn't anything to debate over, because what I'm just saying something objective here. The example has nothing to do with False Rape Accusation besides that it's discussing rape. That's all I'm trying to say.

Anyway, we seem to agree that example should be removed, at least in its current state.

Edit: Dang 'ing and arrow changing and what not. Let's move on.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 1st 2020 at 7:23:46 AM

It sounds like we generally agree that this example is not this trope whatever our perspectives on False Rape Accusations and how that example was written.

I'm not keeping a cut/delete list for this because my hands are full with Star Wars Cleanup but is someone else up for that until we get a sandbox going?

I could do it. Does it have to be a sandbox or can I just note of it on my phone?

Ye, lol. You guys post faster than I'm thinking of what to say. Doesn't help I'm doing this through my phone.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Mar 1st 2020 at 8:27:27 AM

I think a sandbox would be most useful, especially if we work with the source code of the page itself and just delete/change examples as we go.

Alright then, how exactly do I make a sandbox then? I never did one before.

^ You just use the Sandbox namespace. It's like making any other non-main page.

Just copy the source code from the page and paste it into Sandbox.Television Is Trying Ti Kill Us.

But use Sandbox.Television Is Trying To Kill Us instead; dang typo :P

Okay, how am I supposed to copy the entire page when the page is locked?

Click the Page Source button at the top.

Thanks, the sandbox is open for business now.

LOL, I can't get the arrows right easier when things are flying fast! Just a pile of arrows.

Fine by me to do it as we go instead of making a to-do list for big edits at once.

Probably going to use the same edit summary repeatedly instead of writing a new one each time, like... "Deleted misuse per https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15831033980A30113400&page=1"

Edited by immichan on Mar 1st 2020 at 7:52:12 AM