Making up for lost LGBTQ+ tropes

That prevents restoration, not comments.

Wouldn't it be better to unlock the 5T Incident thread to talk about further issues with commenters on that draft?

For what it's worth, I made a wishlist query for an ability to mod-lock TLP comments.

Edited by mightymewtron on Sep 30th 2020 at 11:23:48 AM

To make one more comment about the "Token Gay Option" thing you were discussing recently, the best example I can think of is Fire Emblem Fates, where each gender has over thirty straight romance options to choose from... and one gay option.

We will figure out the TLP thing at a technical level. Why anyone wants to discuss it is beyond me. You can't fix stupid.

See, at least the first round of posts were explained by things like over-tiredness, mob-mentality, and a false understanding of the rules. This is just inexcusable.

I admit I'm kinda annoyed. I liked the lgbt trope pages for finding about the latest gay characters and their doings. I like reading about them, and they were also useful for finding new shows to watch or things to read. Also this is past the point of mattering or any relevance now but some of the examples on the Suddenly Sexuality did still fit what would've been the new definition if a new page was made. It's just that some of them would've had to have been rewritten to explain how. Wing and Wong for example.

Edited by Rakuraku on Oct 18th 2020 at 11:32:03 AM

That's the issue. With Zero-Context Examples, we're completely out of luck if none of us know the work at hand. We can't assume proper usage when it comes to wick cleaning.

I am still in favour of using a Significant Sexuality or Significant Sexual Orientation trope to cover some of these cases, but I believe ~nrjxll had objections.

Wouldn’t that also cover heterosexuality?

Yeah, that's kind of it right there. I'm straight, so this all should be taken with a large amount of salt, but the impression I get is that a lot of the reason why LGBT people resent tropes like Bi The Way being cut is because they were defined as "bi people exist (and that's it)" or the like, without needing to emphasize some aspect of their existence in a potentially othering way the way most LGBT tropes do. A "Significant Sexuality" trope would be the exact opposite, because unless it was in fact extended to cover all sexualities (in which case it'd be PSOC) it'd be a list of gay people being unusual and remarkable just for their orientation.

I don't really have an opinion on it as far as general tropeworthiness and the like, but as far as the specific concerns brought up in this thread go, Significant Sexuality sounds actively counterproductive.

While I can certainly appreciate the craving for representation, TV Tropes can't compromise its standards in this way. We have a definition of what constitutes a trope and "character is LGBTQ+" doesn't fit.

So? The trope proposal I have in mind ain't "character is LGBT".

There's tropes posts for countless insignificant things, I don't see why lgbt characters need to be ground-breaking for it to count as a trope. The impression I get from a lot of posts is just that nobody is really impressed by "X happened with a gay character." tropes. I mean geez, we have a trope page for people who are just...happy and fat. But gay isn't good enough?

Edited by Rakuraku on Oct 19th 2020 at 8:24:10 AM

And we're trying to clean up all of those, not add more of them. Juxtaposing <personality> with <character trait> to make a trope creates an awful lot of ZCEs and chairs.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2020 at 11:25:43 AM

I bet if we took a poll that had the magical ability to force people to vote on whether or not they think character personality tropes should be removed, most would say no, it shouldn't. It doesn't benefit anybody to have less to read.

Disingenuous. Personality tropes and "Trait + personality" are different things.

Barely? Plus there were no "This character is just gay. Nothing else, that's the entire trope." trope pages in the first place, so it's not relevant anyway.

We've been over this, "character is gay, end of statement" is textbook People Sit on Chairs.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Oct 19th 2020 at 9:41:08 AM

There was Bi The Way, which had to be reworked because it was just "character happens to be Bi".

In addition to Bi The Way, Badass Gay was cut because "badass" is such a nebulous term on this wiki that it boiled down to "character is gay and cool." As you can see, Badass Gay was disambiguated into gay tropes that are significant due to being about specific personality contrasts.

Also, for the record, I've seen at least two other bi people who were upset about Bi The Way being cut, though I don't know about Badass Gay's reception from the LGBT community itself, but it's just not accurate to say the LGBT community unanimously agrees that Bi The Way was pointless. As a bi person, I get why it was cut, but it's damn frustrating that almost all of the current Bisexuality Tropes have something to do with violence of fetishization. I know that's because media is like that, but it's frustrating.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 19th 2020 at 1:07:22 PM

I'd also like to point out this isn't limited to LGBT tropes. For instance, there was a trope proposal that was just female characters who wield axes. That draft didn't make it past the TLP phase. This isn't a standard we made up to stop LGBT tropes from existing.

Y'mean Big Fun? I honestly wouldn't mind looking into that trope at some point, especially since I recently saw it be misused for characters that are just stocky, not fat.

Right. We need to remember that just because other tropes exist doesn't mean those tropes should be used as justification. A lot of older tropes, especially character based ones, are in bad shape.

It's important to separate our interest in diverse media from our efforts to clean the wiki. The tropes cited weren't cut for being LGBT related. They were cut for being chairs. The issue is that character sexuality isn't inherently tropeworthy. There's no patterns inherent to a character being Gay or Bi or Trans, much like there's no inherent pattern to characters being female, Asian, or blond.

It's sad but it's the way it works.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 19th 2020 at 2:00:59 PM

It can sure feel targeted when there's stuff like 6 different trope pages for fat and large girls. There's SO MANY "This is a character type." trope pages that are never going to get touched.

Edited by Rakuraku on Oct 19th 2020 at 12:17:51 PM

Have you considered bringing them to TRS yourself? Things only get done if someone does them.