Duplicate Trope: Heel Face Mole

We've recently had a thread that concluded to merge Reverse Mole into The Mole. The reason is that The Mole was supposed to be restricted to good guys only, and Reverse Mole was "The Mole but only for bad guys".

Heel Face Mole has the same issue: it's supposed to be Fake Defector but limited only to bad guys. It doesn't really make sense to split tropes like these into a bad guy and good guy version; and many works don't have a clear split between good and evil in the first place.

Aside from that, the name is unclear. It sounds like either a Heel–Face Turn through becoming The Mole in the bad guys, or perhaps faking a Heel–Face Turn by becoming The Mole in the good guys. But turns out it's actually neither, it's supposed to be Fake Defector-but-evil. Understandably, this leads to misuse, as shown in the wick check. Of course, the neutrally-named Fake Defector already contains some bad guy examples, too.

39% correct; 11% regular The Mole; 32% other related tropes; 18% lack of context.

As with Reverse Mole, I think we should merge this. Heel Face Mole should probably redirect to The Mole, and the examples moved to the various correct pages.

Edited by Spark9 on Nov 19th 2020 at 4:36:52 AM

Opening.

I agree with the proposal to merge.

Merge.

Again, merge.

Merge.

Merge.

Merge.

Just be clear, we're saying "merge" with Fake Defector, not The Mole, correct?

Merge with Fake Defector.

Well it's not exactly a big deal, it just strikes me as clearest and least confusing to mave the title "Heel Face Mole" a redirect to The Mole. That's probably what people are searching for when they use those keywords.

And, less than 40% of examples match the current definition, so it's doesn't really make sense to base the redirect on that.

Maybe we should have a crowner: merge into The Mole, merge into Fake Defector, or disambiguate.

Sure, only 39% match the current def, but only 11% matches The Mole. As such, The Mole is a far less sensible choice.

I'm fine with turning this into a disambiguation page for Fake Defector and The Mole.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 21st 2020 at 2:23:43 PM

I'm not so sure if we should turn every misused trope into a disambig between whatever it was misused for; it just encourages further misuse. I'd rather redirect it (to either trope, really; it's not a big deal).

In what way does it encourage further misuse?

^ Using the Disambig page in example lists.

Why would a disambiguation page be in example lists? Wicks would be restricted to Ambiguity Index and possibly maintenance-focused sandboxes and Administrivia pages.

People who add a disambiguation page (or an index, for that matter) to example lists didn't read the page to begin with, otherwise they would have seen the text saying that links should be for the listed pages and not the disambiguation page.

Edit: The Missingno disambiguates between Pokémon Red and Blue and Glitch Entity due to misuse that was cleaned up by TRS, since people were misusing it to refer to the glitch Pokémon Missngno. and not the actual trope.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 21st 2020 at 9:26:58 AM

Yeah, you're not supposed to wick disambig pages.

Besides, why would people who don't bother to read a disambig instead read a redirect?

Ok, I suppose that's more of a discussion for the policy thread. It would help to get some statistics on how fast (and if) disambigs accumulate new wicks.

Yeah, as someone who regularly checked on Everythings Better With Princesses (disambig), Albinos Are Freaks (redirect), and Your Cheating Heart (indexified), all of which still got used post-TRS, I’d argue that redirects and disambigs are both likely to accrue misuse because the main problem is people don’t know the trope has been changed and don’t click the link to find out. However, this usage is minor. I don’t consider it a major concern as long as someone checks up on them for a bit.

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 22nd 2020 at 8:20:57 AM

I thought this thread already had a crowner... I must have been thinking of Reverse Mole.

Anyway, I made one.