Misused: Dueling Works

Dueling Works is a page that's riddled with problems.

The first and most visible problem is that the tables are nearly unreadable. The first two columns on every subpage are only one or two letters wide, and the third one can also be needlessly thin as well, which only serves to make the pages needlessly long and annoying to sit through. This might be more of a site-wide glitch than anything TRS can fix, but it's apparently been like this for years and I see no reason why it's taking so long to fix it. Dueling Products has the same problem.

But the more urgent problem here is the high level of misuse that the trope has attracted. Literally the first sentence on the page's description says "This page is a list of similar works made during the same period of time." The end of the description also reiterates the "same period of time" part. A very hefty amount of examples both on and off the page either compare two works that aren't similar at all or weren't made during the same period of time; sometimes both. I made a wick check of some off-page examples and (to cut a long story short) came up with an 82% misuse rate, including the aforementioned misuse, as well as things like the duel not involving works (which is what Dueling Products is for), the duel being for first place on a magazine's list, or even the two works supposedly dueling before they're even released (which is a huge problem on-page as well). Not a good sign.
And the on-page examples? Well, we've got such exciting duels such as Arthur versus The Loud House: CatDog versus The Fairly OddParents!: Baby Looney Tunes versus Camp Lazlo: Planet Sheen versus Unikitty!: and my personal favorite, Scaredy Squirrel versus BoJack Horseman. All of these are actual examples just from the Western Animation subpage, and if you know anything about any of these shows, you can see how big of a problem we've got here.

Also, Disney keeps winning all their duels and I hate it.

Edited by WoodKnapp94 on Sep 20th 2021 at 9:58:27 AM

Yikes. Opened.

Not sure if this can be saved, honestly. If so, the on-page examples need a revamp. Tables look bad on mobile.

I was never fond of these pages because they're ridiculously subjective despite being classified as Trivia and not YMMV, and since they're an eyesore due to their layout, so I'm in favor of cutting them.

I think it's worth mentioning that one subtrope, Dueling Musicians, was already cut years ago because of how contentious it was.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 20th 2021 at 8:40:42 AM

Wow, the columns formatting doesn't seem to age well. Super Weight also has this problem when you click/tap on the label notes.

Anyways, having it as Trivia only attracts bickering, and if OP is anything to go by, keeping this may be more trouble than it's worth. At the very least, make it JFF and don't link elsewhere. Not opposed to having them gone either.

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Sep 20th 2021 at 6:45:24 AM

What in Jesus's name? Okay yeah this page probably isn't salvageable. Cut cut cut.

EDIT: Added a TRS banner.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 20th 2021 at 10:29:10 AM

I didn't expect to see so much agreement towards cutting it, but now that I think about it, I don't know how this could be salvaged either. Changing the definition to fit the misuse would just make the trope more redundant to Follow the Leader or Surprisingly-Similar Stories, a rename wouldn't work because the name already seems clear enough^note and I'm sure as hell not gonna let it be replaced by any more clunky names like Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, nobody would want to do a cleanup because there's a crap ton of on-page examples that we can't read because of the tables, I don't think JFF would work because again, we've already got Surprisingly-Similar Stories and it looks like nobody bothers to check release dates, and I can't think of any other possible solutions... Plus, the idea of "two works competing with each other" sounds like a classic case of People Sit on Chairs; competition is one of the most basic parts of economics that everyone goes through.

Also, if we're gonna cut this, should we cut Dueling Products as well? It comes off as a Real Life version of Dueling Works and it has most of the same problems, albeit on a much smaller scale.

I think it could work as a Trivia, but remove the on-page examples, including the subpages. The "Winner?" column is just going to attract needless complaining and/or gushing, which might encourage adding the worst of the misuse examples (with people just wanting to make their favourite works the "winner" of some non-existent duel).

If nothing else we definitely need to remove the column format.

Removing the column layout would still take a lot of work, since it would mean having to go through the source code of several pages' worth of columns and removing the code used for the layout. Considering how cumbersome the markup is (even if it's slightly easier on the eyes than what it produces), you'd also have to make sure nothing breaks when removing it.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 20th 2021 at 9:58:18 AM

Would it help to limit examples to works that have been arranged into "duels" by critics and journalists? For example, there was once an IGN article (written by former member Matt Cassamassina) discussing whether Okami or Twilight Princess was better.

Do we have enough examples like that?

Honestly I would just cut the trope I don't really see any value in it.

Dueling Works (and its subpages) and Dueling Products should be cut. There's no point salvaging them. Both pages attract complaining and gushing galore. That's not even mentioning the difficulty of reading those pages.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Sep 20th 2021 at 11:24:55 AM

A Bug's Life and Antz comes to mind. Also Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War. Especially the latter pair - almost all the reviews I read inevitably compare one film with the other.

Edited by Adept on Sep 22nd 2021 at 2:08:17 AM

Throw the page to the lions.

I was asking if we have any examples like that listed on the wiki. If we redefine something to match a certain kind of usage, we need to actually have examples that match that usage.

The thread for Suddenly Sexuality showed why you shouldn't vote to redefine before finding examples that match the new definition.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 21st 2021 at 7:48:33 AM

Cut the trope and run.

Definitely cut for now as the table format does make this a royal pain to read. the sheer So Bad, It's Good factor in some of the ridiculousness of entries makes me consider eventually restoring in some kind of archive (because in JFF it's kinda redundant with SSS as stated above), ngl.

Edited by Piterpicher on Sep 22nd 2021 at 5:52:01 PM

Cut.

Eh, I suppose a cut is fine.

While I understand why people want to cut this trope, I do feel like there should be an attempt at a clean-up. I know the "same time period" rule is still in there, but I think that maybe there should be a few more rules to avoid it turning into Surprisingly-Similar Stories. Specifically:

• They need to either have a very similar story/premise along with a similar target audience, have the success of one be considered the reason for the other's failure, or have proof that the production teams of both works were copying one another.
• They need to have been released, and maybe even have a brief waiting period. This is since most examples where the "outcome" is "TBA - Show X hasn't aired yet" just reek of Speculative Troping.

With these guidelines, I can still list off several examples off the top of my head ^note There's A Bug's Life & Antz, The Wild & Madagascar, and Treasure Planet & Titan A.E.. I think Megamind & Despicable Me also counts, since the similar premises and release dates being so close to each other is considered by many people to be a big reason why Megamind failed., so it's not like there would be nothing to put on the pages. I don't know, I just feel like "the formatting's bad and there's misuse on the main trope page" is not exactly a good reason to completely cut an otherwise valid trope entirely.

I can't really see this as a valid trope.

Actually, after looking at the trope page again... yeah, it's too similar to Surprisingly-Similar Stories for my taste. Maybe a separate trope for the valid scenarios of two works being blatantly pitted against each other? I'm a bit hesitant to cut this because... well, there's a few examples that don't really fit into any other trope.^note  For instance, I think the fact that A Bug's Life & Antz were constantly compared to one another by critics, along with the production teams looking over each other's shoulders pretty much the entire time, is a valid Trivia concept. However, I do feel that, in order to do this, Dueling Works will probably need to be relaunched entirely with a different definition (and without that god-awful table layout), and I do get why people want to cut the trope entirely.

It could maybe possibly be recycled into a trivia trope (since two works being pitted against each other isn't subjective), but that might be too much of a headache.

Yeah, I mean, even if the concept works as a valid trivia item outlined in , it seems like it'd just get derailed by people using it as a ground for Fandom Rivalry wars.

Edited by Adept on Sep 22nd 2021 at 8:20:20 PM