Can you trope content that is accessible in advance if you pay?

Allowing spoiler-tagged examples for early-access episodes would still be bad for reasons I mentioned previously. It makes it hard for the people who actually care about the show to keep the page clean, since it's likely that most of them will not be paying subscribers. I already gave NightmareFuel.RWBY as an example of what might happen if we allow such episodes to be troped.

A movie is a different thing, because the whole thing is released at once, so you won't have people constantly adding bad examples for months on end while most tropers can't do anything to stop it without getting spoiled.

A similar issue affects anime and manga. Often, they get released in Japanese early, but most tropers rely on the English translation. If people add tropes based on the Japanese version, that'll spoil it for those who don't know Japanese.

Edited by Zuxtron on Jan 16th 2022 at 10:30:53 AM

Oi, I read manga in Japanese sometimes and add examples based on the Japanese chapters. In many cases, any legal translation is either years and years away, or will never happen at all.

Should we wait for scanlations? Because those are illegal and we're not supposed to link to them anyway. And their quality and accuracy is sketchy at best (and, anyway, people like me reading the Japanese often don't know when the English scans happen).

Or do we just have exclusively trope officially-in-English content only and forever? That's a hell of cleanup project.

Troping work without any official English release has always been allowed.

That feels like a different case to the RWBY thing, where this would just be people posting spoilers a week before everyone else could touch the page and thus getting away with a lot of issues. When it comes to foreign language works, I feel like people expect that they'd need to read/watch the original language version if they don't want to be spoiled.

I am in agreement that the language translation delay is an entirely different matter (although obviously a blatantly biased one). It's publicly available, in one language. The question seems to be, does paywalled content count as "publicly available".

I lean toward yes, with a note to readers and editors that spoilers are contained. One week or so...really isn't that long a time, and yes, there are a few high-profile shows like RWBY where it might cause issues, but the vast majority of pages I suspect would not have such a problem.

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 16th 2022 at 10:59:17 AM

I remember at least the Naruto subpages went by "spoiler everything not available on Crunchyroll Free yet".

Ah, Crunchyroll has a similar paywall aspect, actually: if you have a paid account, you get access to simultaneous anime releases a week earlier than they become accessible to free accounts with ads.

For Japanese manga, very little is simultaneously translated (I think Shonen Jump is the only magazine doing it?), novels/light novels are basically nil. So it's a bit of different situation.

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 16th 2022 at 11:04:36 AM

We have not ever said, nor do I think it would make sense to say that a work cannot be troped until it has been translated. The original language version is the official release to the public.

TV Tropes is an English-language site primarily, and we have a policy that all articles must be written in English before any translation attempts occur. That may change in the future if we get more resources dedicated to multi-language support (including moderators), but one could extrapolate that to mean that media should be available in English before being troped.

I don't necessarily agree with that. As long as someone can write an English article, it shouldn't matter what languages the original media is available in. This is a completely separate issue from the one of paywalled content, although they may overlap if the original work or its translations are behind paywalls.

What defines a "paywall" in this case, at least as far as I can determine, is when a work that will be made available to the general public has a "preview" or "pre-release" period during which you can receive exclusive access.

• "Made available to the general public" means released in theaters, on television, in book stores, in game stores, on major streaming services, on a public website, etc. Whether these distribution methods require payment is not relevant.
• "Exclusive access" means invite-only premiers, work-specific donation schemes such as Patreon, invite-only Discord servers, etc.

What matters is the expectation. "You special people get to see this a week before everyone else."

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2022 at 9:17:23 AM

Of course, if a translation is not confirmed or expected to take a very long time, that's a different story. I'm talking about stuff like the Viz Shonen Jump site, where the official English translation is made available legally and for free a few days after the Japanese release. In that case, I think it's just common courtesy to not spoil the latest chapter before the English release.

General philosophy would say it would be a whole other problem if that was a policy, as different countries have different release dates and restricting troping by US release is absurd. Something available to purchase, whether it be a webcomic or theater ticket, is fair game to trope.

Now, there may be some early information available due to conventions or test screenings (my brother is on a Microsoft list of playtesters for video games and has played some games like a year before release), which is superficially interesting but that is also pre-release, pre open-audience reveals that is not really tropeable at that time. May make for interesting What Could Have Been post-release, but isn't really what we work with.

No policy we put in place would be met with universal agreement, because people obviously don't see eye to eye on this. It's about establishing consensus.

Points of view:

1. Just wait a damn week to trope the thing. You won't burst.
2. If people don't want spoilers, don't read the article.
3. No general rule, respect the wishes of the creator or the general fan practices around each specific work.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2022 at 12:19:54 PM