Trope names with outdated and/or offensive language

So I think it's safe to say Magical Negro is staying where it is.

No, you were correct. I just didn't want to give the impression that "A black guy said it one time and then we took that as permission to use the word in our trope page". Usage outside the wiki is a good reason to keep the name.

Anyway, I thought I'd summarize the discussed pages so far at Sandbox.Outdated Or Offensive Trope Names, so we can see what (if any) tropes we should focus our efforts on. (My listed reasons are lacking; feel free to expand on them.)

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 20th 2021 at 6:24:53 AM

Saw it earlier in the thread but clearly it didn't happen: updating Handicapped Badass to Disabled Badass would be appreciated, to reflect community preference and avoid using an insulting, euphemistic term.

Well, these things don't just happen magically over night. We need TRS threads and community consensus and hard work.

Yep. Handicapped Badass is one of the age-old tropes, so it especially needs a wick check and TRS discussions and all that if anyone even wants to consider doing anything with it.

Also, in such cases it would also be useful to have evidence that the term itself is, in fact, discredited. One common pitfall I see in such discussions is that folks are just assuming a term is offensive/outdated but we need evidence.

~Ardently Queer: We need more than your say so that the term "handicapped" is widely considered offensive.

I dunno about offensive per se, but definitely outdated.

I wouldn't even say that "handicapped" is outdated, considering that it is the term in use by the people it applies to.

I see handicapped parking spaces at every lot. My mother in-law has a handicap tag that she uses to park at those spaces.

Compare with other words that are acknowledged to be offensive... I don't see children with mental handicaps going into the "retarded" program at school any more and it's been quite a long time since there were "n-word" bathrooms.

TV Tropes is not a place to launch a crusade to change language usage. If it can be proven that a term is in widespread disfavor, we'll follow along, but we don't create the trends. We invent trope names and that's our main contribution to human language.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 26th 2021 at 9:28:08 AM

I don't think handicapped (in reference to people who are physically handicapped) is particularly offensive as I had said, although I don't know how I feel about the use of "mentally handicapped", which is sometimes used to refer to people with mental illness, a group that includes myself. But I don't think we are talking about the latter so the former could probably stay IMO.

Disabled Badass is a redirect, so if someone has some personal discomfort or "disabled" fits the context of the work better, they can just wick to that instead when appropriate.

"Insulting" and "euphemistic" are antonyms, it can't be both.

Edited by Reymma on Feb 26th 2021 at 7:04:03 PM

I dunno about that, condescension is generally considered a type of insult.

I don't know how to say this, given Sim Sim Salabim caught my attention, but bumping this.

Sim Sim Salabim might not sound offensive, but it's still outdated, confusing, and misleading even if Bollywood still release films set in the Mughal empire.

And fighteer even proposed the Exaggerated Ethnic Stereotype.

Though I would propose for the Anachronistic Ethnic Stereotype, given that, with the aformentioned "India is still the Mughal empire", popular media would still think of China being stuck in the Qing Dynasty, Japan in the feudal period, Russia in the Soviet era, Britain in the Victorian era, and Greece and Egypt in ancient times (though there's already a trope for Egypt).

Edited by alnair20aug93 on May 11th 2021 at 6:04:06 PM

Sim Sim Salabim is on Tropes Needing TRS either way, since the title makes it seem like it’s about stereotypes of Arabia, not India.

Yeah we’ve previously discussed it on this thread; it’s in the sandbox upstream.

Edited by Synchronicity on May 11th 2021 at 7:39:17 AM

I know. I feel like it needs a bump after three months of inactivity.

... and the Yukon being stuck in the Klondike Gold Rush

Edited by Nen_desharu on May 11th 2021 at 11:10:40 AM

Cult Colony seems to be about a group of followers of a religion (no matter the morality or mainstream status) founding a colony or other independent settlement together.

It has the obvious issue of using the unnecessarily negatively loaded term "cult" in the trope name, which IMO should be changed.

Edited by Albert3105 on Jul 13th 2021 at 10:50:00 AM

Reviving this thread because I discovered that there is a trope called Date Crêpe. I'm sorry, but whatever discussion has been had about this trope in the past, it's really uncomfortable IMO to have a trope name that is a rape pun (and a juvenile and unfunny one at that.)

It appears the name is a relic of another time on the wiki, when trope names like that were OK, hence one of the comments on the initial TLP:

Man, this site in 2010 was terrible.

There's gotta be another potential name, right? Something less juvenile and sick?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 2nd 2021 at 3:12:47 PM

It is not a rape pun. But, the pronunciation problem has been discussed before.

Your link's broken... and I think it's a rape pun regardless. There's no way it isn't just a coincidence.

IDK. I get the offense but it works at face value. If I saw it in any other context I wouldn't have immediately sounded it out.

Fair enough and as I read the old TRS thread I realize it's an accent thing. Not everyone pronounces it like "crape".