Can we trope what happens in deleted content?

Tropes like Deleted Scene and Cut Song are trivia, and so listing what said deletions are would go better on the trivia page:

• Cut Song: Alice and Bob's big love duet initially had a Dark Reprise in the second act that was cut for time.

However, what about stuff that happens in said deleted material? Like occurrences that only happen in advertising/promotional materials, this content is usually widely available and thus tropable. For example, from Characters.Hamilton:

• Her Cut Song "Congratulations" is a full-on "The Reason You Suck" Speech, two minutes and fifteen seconds of her calling him a complete moron not just for outing the affair himself, but for hurting Eliza so terribly and that he'd better make sure any future "sacrifice" he makes is on her behalf.

Is there a way to do it without putting Trivia/ on main pages, or is that all right?

Marketing content is not "deleted", unless you mean content that occurs in marketing but never appears in the finished product. That is explicitly defined as Trivia and goes there.

Yes, Missing Trailer Scene and its ilk are trivia and rightly so.

But I'm asking if entries like "The Reason You Suck" Speech (troping what happens in only deleted content) in the OP are valid.

Yes, we've put those in Trivia subpages before.

I'd perhaps consider creating a supertrope like Deleted Content to cover material (including tropes) that occur in deleted stuff. So you could have an example like:

• Deleted Content: A Moral Event Horizon crossing [deed] was deleted because the Moral Guardians disapproved.

There is something of a grey area, an item via Word of God or news reports would be trivia under something like What Could Have Been or Executive Meddling, a tangible deleted scene that we can observe and assess as its own thing is not much different than troping the information in a Re-Cut and could go on the main page so long as you specify the origin.

• Nice Hat: In a Re-Cut / Deleted Scene a character puts on a classy fedora for a party.

The information with a Word of God is often very vague and requires some troper speculation just to put into words, so you probably shouldn't give a trope for such deleted content its own bullet point on the main page because it ultimately didn't happen.

• What Could Have Been: The director thought of giving the character a Nice Hat as part of their look.

Seconding to put this as bullet points under What Could Have Been.

That's fine. In the example I cite in the OP said song is publicly available, so I'm asking if the first of those is kosher, as that would involve putting Trivia tropes on Main.

Edited by Synchronicity on Oct 14th 2020 at 8:54:14 AM

Doesn't matter if it's publicly available; if it is content not in the released work it goes in Trivia.

Bumping from this ATT. I think it's detrimental to shove all the content under Deleted Scene because it means fewer wicks for the tropes used in those deleted scenes, unless you wanna bloat the entry with every tropeworthy thing that happens in those scenes.

I would at least want to keep scenes that are completely filmed and were cut close to the end of production. Unlike bloopers or Hilarious Outtakes, this is deliberate scripted content, and unlike What Could Have Been, it's a final product and not just an idea inviting speculation.

Plus, sometimes the deleted scenes are added back in later releases. What becomes "the release" is then subjective. Is it the original cut? Or the extended one?

I guess for those we could specify the cut in the example?

To show it's not in every version.

Like "In the directors cut,"

I was more trying to respond to Fighteer's old argument about it not being "in the release".

I would like to address this at least: there is no competition for how many wicks a trope has. All that matters is when and where the trope is used in media. We are not playing this like a game with a scoreboard, where you get "trope points" for adding examples.

This is a misconception that a lot of tropers share and that I think is behind a lot of the issues we have with people being overly eager to launch drafts out of TLP, rushing to fill out trope lists for recent works, and so on.

Wick counts, example counts, inbounds, and other measures are not goals unto themselves. Our first and foremost goal is accuracy. If I could have this stamped on every new troper's retinas so they see it every time they open the site, I would.

As for Deleted Scenes, if a trope example is not in the released work, then it is not in the released work. We define all such extras, including Word of God, behind-the-scenes happenings, documentary information, and so on, as Trivia. There is no ambiguity here. The only source of confusion comes from people trying to shoehorn examples in because it bweaks their widdle hearts not to.

If there is an alternative version of a work released at some future date, such as a Director's Cut, and the example is in that, then it is now part of a published work and can be listed as normal. Again, zero ambiguity. Just make sure to clarify the version in which the example appears. "In the Snyder Cut, Martha Kent is a frog person."

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 2nd 2022 at 1:28:51 PM

Copy-pasting my points from the ATT thread:

Tropes will be cut or refused to be cut on the basis of wicks. That's what I hear from other mods and that's why I used it in my argument.

Generally I don't see why lumping so much under Deleted Scene is helpful when it'll just clutter those pages more.

If it was released for public viewing as a DVD feature with some indication of where it would be in the final product, I don't see why that's much different than it being released as part of a director's cut. They have almost the same context.

So I agree with Twiddler, though I will add that troping deleted scenes feels more legit than troping trailers, because deleted scenes feel more directly connected to the final product — they were almost there. Trailers are kind of works of their own.

No, because deleted scenes are explicitly not part of the completed work. That's why they are deleted. Just because they're on the DVD doesn't mean anything.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 2nd 2022 at 12:03:23 PM

Why wouldn't it mean anything? A DVD is a publication medium. If they're on DVD, then they're published works, regardless of whether they're part of the movie itself.

Edited by Twiddler on Apr 2nd 2022 at 10:13:04 AM

Deleted scenes are deleted for a reason (whatever that may be). There is an infinite distance between "almost in the finished product" and "in the finished product". If a trope occurs only in a deleted scene that was made for, but never included in a movie, then the trope does not occur in that movie.

And what of TV releases that incorporate the cut scenes?

I think there's a distinction between deleted scenes, deleted scenes re-added as clips on a DVD, and re-releases that show the "extended" version of the work in the entirety. A lot of these scenes are just cut for time, and I can think of at least one case (House of Anubis) where a season was eventually re-played but with the "new" scenes incorporated, and from there those scenes were always just sort of considered a proper part of the work (I can't even remember any more what half of those deleted scenes were since they aren't out of place at all). There is, however, another scene that was only ever shown in the Anubis Unlocked aftershow that never got re-added, and it's not as polished as the others because the audio quality is weird, so that's a scene I can understand not just troping as canon.

A deleted scene that is never released as part of the full work? Yeah, those might just be trivia, but there are times when deletions don't stay "deletions" for long.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 3rd 2022 at 9:51:05 AM

I get why we wouldn't include deleted content on a work page, but what about including on a trope page? Would it be fine to mention that a trope occurred in a deleted scene on a trope page?

Just noting that The Batman (2022) had recently released a somewhat extended Deleted scene on The Joker, and since this scene is a lot longer than his actual appearance in the movie, most of the tropes listed on the character's folder come from this deleted scene. So what should be done with those?

This leads to a wider question of how we trope alternative versions of a single work. As long as the scenes in question appear in some version of the work, they are eligible for trope examples, but the examples need to clearly specify those version(s).

That strikes me as misuse and should be removed.

It reminds me, I was actually considering making recap pages for the unfinished episodes of Red Dwarf for a while. They were never completed, but they were released in storyboard format on DVD (with added narration by one of the actors), so there is something to trope there. The trouble is is it able to have an entry here? I don't know, which is why I stalled.

Hmm. Since it was given an official release of sorts, it counts as published, although that goes back to another debate over whether scripts and storyboards count as works independently from the finished product they contribute to.