Not Tropeworthy: Some Anvils Needto Be Dropped

That's what I figured it was. The previous thread had separate crowner options for defining Anvilicious and Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped to fit misuse and moving them to Darth and Sugar, respectively, but none of those gained consensus; only launching Anvil of the Story had consensus, and for a while it kept the thread open with nothing else to do (but it was closed after I asked if it could be closed, since, as I said in that post, further discussion could take place on TLP).

As stated earlier, though, the description at Anvilicious is actually less complainy that the one in Anvil of the Story. The former merely states that it applies when a moral is heavy-handed (which is not necessarily a bad thing), while the latter strangely goes on tangents about the moral being "clumsy".

If we do a merge, I'd suggest using the Anvil of the Story title, but primarily use the description in Anvilicious as a basis.

Edited by WackyPancake on Jun 3rd 2021 at 4:46:25 PM

Moving the Anvilicious page's contents to Anvil of the Story, replacing the latter's current contents, was actually what I intended to propose. I probably should have been more clear about that.

Going to put in a hard vote against moving SANTBD into Sugar. It's definitely better than nothing, 'cause at least that'd get all the soapboxing off the work pages, but I think it's a really, really, really bad idea to invite gushing about political morals even on the more self-contained Sugar Wiki, it's basically building a battlefield for edit wars. Remember the only good edit war is an edit war that doesn't happen. I'm also concerned that it'd attract radicals from all extremes, trolls, and lots of Misaimed Fandom.

I understand that it'd be a lot of work to remove it completely, but I really think that's what has to be done.

We should clarify whether we want to remove SANTBD completely or just merge it with Anvilicious and/or AOTS.

I feel the best course of action would be to remove SANTBD. I know someone said it's out of the question because of the number of inbounds, but if you ask me, that shouldn't even be a factor if it's being misused to this degree. And I agree with the above that moving it to Sugar Wiki as a gushing trope would just invite toxic behavior. Once the Anvilicious/Anvil of the Story merge is done (which seems to have been agreed upon at this point), a Tropes Are Not Bad clause could be added to it, as with other tropes and reactions that tend to be seen with negative connotations.

Edited by Infitroper on Jun 4th 2021 at 8:35:09 AM

Again, that sounds like merging SANTBD with Anvilicious, which would help the inbounds problem.

Honestly I really think all three Anvils should have been tackled at once as all their definitions rely on figuring out what the other two mean, but eh.

At this point, I think if all three of these tropes describe (mostly) the same thing, then it might be best to just merge them all together.

Yeah, I'm down to merge and if we're not concerned about the edit-war issue, we can make an "Aesop Gush" sugar wiki page.

Agreed.

I'm gonna say a hard no to the "Aesop Gush" one. As others have said, whether an aesop is good or not is such a subjective thing that it's bound to be Flame Bait.

I think we should be concerned about the "aesop edit war" issue when it's happened at least once before because someone disagreed with a politically-charged aesop (which wasn't even really political in the context of the game).

On that note, another problem I notice with SANTBD is that people seem to project their own aesops onto the work when it's not really explicit... which violates the point of SANTBD as being for very blatant aesops.

I wouldn't want an "Aesop Gush" page without some sort of restriction, whether it be limited to Anvilicious aesops, or if we employ a Ban on Politics. I like that last idea best. We should also make it about actual intentional aesops to avoid a dupe of Sweeten That Aesop.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 4th 2021 at 9:48:52 AM

Eh, I'm okay with not doing an Aesop Gush page, I just wanted to point out that we could still do it even if we merge SANTBD.

I think we're close to an agreement about merging the three anvil tropes into Anvil of the Story. As for examples, I kinda wanna just wipe the slate clean, get rid of everything from both of the other pages. Hopefully, that'll set the tone that it's a new day for the anvil tropes, no more complaining, no more gushing. Tabula rasa.

As for the Sugar "Aesop Gush", as previously mentioned I don't like it but I could maybe see making it, giving it like a month or so, and if it proves toxic we can nuke it.

I strongly agree that any aesop page in the Sugar Wiki must prohibit political aesops, such as "This is why [controversial political issue X] should be condoned/condemned."

Edited by Nen_desharu on Jun 4th 2021 at 12:04:17 PM

Overall, the more unnecessary politics we cut from the wiki, the better. Shitty ROCEJ magnets.

The concern is it's hard to draw the line between "political" and "not political". There's a handful of things that are obviously political ("This work openly supports Blah Blah Blah candidate for president, which is an SANTBD because Blah Blah Blah candidate is the best"), but it's a bit tougher to tell when something isn't political (for instance, let's take a Green Aesop - sometimes environmental messages aren't particularly politically charged, like "let's all recycle and carpool more!", but a pro ecoterrorist story would also technically have a "Green Aesop" - if we put a blanket statement that "Green Aesops are fine", then theoretically we'd open ourselves to gushing about aesops like "We need to murder all the greedy pigs who don't recycle enough and plant bombs in their factories!"). And I hate to use a cliche, but it's 2021, everything is political.

Anything calling for murder would obviously be cut, but I think we can allow green aesops and stuff while banning aesops relating to political parties.

Thing is you can still get pretty political without directly mentioning political parties or politicians. Let's say that (for example) a pro-life person watches a work with a pro-life moral and adds it to the gush page. Then another, pro-choice person comes in and removes it because it's a bad and wrong aesop. Then the first person comes back and adds it again because it's good and right. Ad nauseaum.

No one technically mentioned Republicans, Democrats, or whatever. But anyone who is vaguely interested in politics knows where certain parties and certain people stand on a number of hot button issues.

At that point we'd just be vetting every single example to decide which issue is or isn't too political. It just isn't worth it.

Edited by WackyPancake on Jun 5th 2021 at 4:54:39 PM

That is why I think we shouldn't allow this stuff to be removed.

Just caught up, and by cutting out the examples, do you mean just starting the example section over from scratch, or making the merged Anvil page a fan-speak definition-only page?

If moving SANTBD or a replacement trope to Sugar Wiki is this much debate, I'm fine with just redirecting to Anvilicious or Anvil of the Story for now. We can always come up with a replacement trope separately later.

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Jun 6th 2021 at 12:51:55 PM

Yeah, I still think merging the three into Anvil of the Story and tabula rasa on the old examples is the best way to go. Everyone else agree?

If there's enough of a demand we can add a gushing Sugar page, but I kinda think that right now there isn't a ton of demand for it from our non ROCEJ tropers.

Edited by MissConduct on Jun 9th 2021 at 10:25:24 AM

Do we have enough consesus or should this be crownered?