Tropes Needing TRS cleanup and discussion thread

Thinking of adding Hunter of Their Own Kind. The description says it only applies to lone good members of Always Chaotic Evil races, but the title indicates none of this and gets misused.

Edited by nw09 on Mar 25th 2022 at 4:46:46 AM

I think we should just move TRS candidate discussions to the general TRS discussion thread so that we can actually focus on cleaning existing entries instead of adding new ones. This would the thread keep things focused on the cleaning up old TNTRS entries.

I know War Jay already suggested this but I thought I would restate it anyways.

As a side note, Maybe the discussion part of this thread's title should be removed?

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 25th 2022 at 8:01:42 AM

That could work, but edits made there would still need to transfer to the sandbox. Ideally, we just need to get this cleanup done, remove the tag, and move on.

Just added Merchandise-Driven to the main Tropes Needing TRS page, and now I'm looking for more "actually Trivia" tropes... turns out Super-Trope The Merch is a good place to find these.

• Detail-Hogging Cover: This one I'm kinda unsure of, since it's dependent on how much a cover or poster should count as part of a work.
• Everythings Better With Plushies: Is all about external merchandise, and is wicked on 14 trivia pages.
• Official Cosplay Gear: Similar to tropes like The Red Stapler and Defictionalization, which are already trivia. Already wicked on 4 Trivia pages.
• Themed Stock Board Game: Another, more specific kind of merchandise, since it has to be based on a pre-existing work.

Edited by harryhenry on Mar 26th 2022 at 3:35:22 AM

Beauty Inversion is another one.

I think I'll be removing Seven Deadly Sins from the list. The wick check shows way more correct usage than bad usage, and I think a cleanup thread would be more useful.

Anyway, onto the title folder.

Edit: Saw that some things were already deleted. I mostly just added the asterisks. I added them to even the ones that have wick checks under way, and they can just be removed once those checks are done.

In a bit I'll analyze the "Subjective" folder.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 27th 2022 at 1:03:36 PM

Think it would be worthwhile to have a "Tropes not needing TRS" folder at the bottom, akin to Complete Monster's "Resolved Items" folder?

"These tropes have been suggested for TRS in the past, but wick checks or other discussion have shown that they don't actually have issues. If you think they've developed issues since being added here, please do the footwork to confirm that, first."

And we'd want to disable the indexing on that folder, if it were made. (Still a little ??? about the page doing indexing in the first place, but y'know.)

...The page does indexing??? How long has that been a thing?

And yeah, a "doesn't need TRS" folder would be helpful for ones like Nosebleed that keep being brought up.

Looks like the indexing markup has been there ever since Septimus moved the page to Administrivia/ two years ago, so it must have been on the original sandbox as well. I never noticed it until now. I agree that it's not needed.

Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 28th 2022 at 1:51:11 PM

I guess the idea is that the tropes would then be labeled on their own page as needing TRS, but it's kinda :shrug: on whether we even need that.

anyway we made the folder now, will probably comb through edit history later to get items that were resolved as not needing help

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Mar 28th 2022 at 1:21:53 PM

Plus it'd be on the related page anyway.

The complaining cleanup sandbox in my signature is indexed as well. Don't know who did it for the record, but I guess I could look through the history and see.

Here's my analysis of the subjective/IUEO folder (which is a weird thing to combine, tbh). Below are the ones that I think need more discussion or should be cut/moved- if something isn't here, assume it's fine and just needs a check.

• Anti-Climax: Claiming that the end of a story is anticlimatic is pretty subjective. What appears to be anticlimatic to one person may not be the case for someone else. Eh, this entry itself feels subjective. We need a wick check for sure, because a lot of anticlimaxes are intentional.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Common sister trope of That One Level (which is for when non-bonus levels are difficult), where a bonus level is a significant Difficulty Spike. Some wicks are already on YMMV pages, and both That One Level and Difficulty Spike are already YMMV. Difficulty has always been a touchy subject, so this needs more discussion or wicks checked or both.
• Colbert Bump and Newbie Boom: A sudden influx of new fans is more of an Audience Reaction than a Trivia item. A handful of wicks are indeed in the YMMV namespace. I'm not sure I agree with this one, it can be judged objectively if we go by visible numbers...
• Dying for Symbolism: The trope is that the author wants to show heavy symbolism (generally a massive turn for the worse in the author's world) and does so by having an important character killed off. However, most of the examples are not based on Word of God; but on inferral or speculation of tropers who like the work. That makes it YMMV. If the examples are the problem, isn't it more of a misuse issue?
• Fandom Life Cycle: Classified as Trivia, despite being about the status of fandoms and thus an Audience Reaction. Again, this is something that I feel like can be measured objectively. It's not a reaction to say that a fandom fell apart at some point.
• Fan Community Nickname: Classified as trivia despite actually describing fan reactions. Often misused for derogatory nicknames, with Fan Nickname's Detractor Nickname redirect being cut because it was used to cover this form of misuse. Isn't this one about people naming their fanbases? That's objective... I'm confused.
• Fashion Dissonance: This is essentially a fashion-specific version of Unintentional Period Piece, which is now YMMV. Also the "Dissonance" part of the name means there is percived clashing, which means it is an Audience Reaction. UPP issue aside, not all Dissonance tropes are audience reactions, so?
• Isn't It Ironic?: Examples seem split between two things: Misaimed Fandom using music in a way that's at odds with the lyrics (an Audience Reaction) and Misaimed Marketing using music in a way that's at odds with the lyrics (could be objective, but examples often skew towards subjective descriptions anyway). It also attracts overly general examples of "This song tends to be seen in this way", rather than "This specific commercial used this song in this way". Definitely a problem, but I'm not sure it belongs in this folder due to the multiple issues.
• Loudness War: How listeners are affected by the loudness war is subjective (in particular, how the music in question sounds to them, and how audiophiles avoid it), to the point that there's a subpage called The Worst Offenders that lacks objectivity in terms of how examples are presented. But does the trope require we know how people were effected? That subpage can probably just be cut.
• Totally Radical: The description and examples focus a lot on how the audience perceives the work, but the trope is listed as objective and isn't IUEO either. I've never been sure what this trope actually is, but I'm not sure the answer is making it subjective.

I think Fan Community Nickname includes fandoms nicknaming themselves and not just the celebrity naming the community. That would be an audience reaction indeed.

I'm against using numbers for Newbie Boom — Colbert Bump, maybe, since you can look at a simple increase in viewership numbers, but it's harder to quantify a fandom.

Honestly I just think Fandom Life Cycle is a bad idea because it requires a constant update on fandom activities and is very hard to measure unless you're in every fandom space. A Reddit fandom can be thriving while the Tumblr fandom is dying. Not to mention Opinion Myopia where people think their fandom is bigger than it is outside their friend group. If it goes anywhere it should be made Fan Speak.

Fair points...

~AHI-3000 added Youkai to the page without discussion, though I agree with his reasoning (and tbh I thought Youkai was already an index/supertrope).

We actually just discussed this in the meta thread. The reasoning was determined to be not sound, but it was determined that the page might be a better fit for Myth/ than Main/.

Ah, okay then. Carry on.

Dropping in to consider Undermined By Reality a YMMV trope rather than trivia. This ties in with discussion on the likes of Broken Aesop and Clueless Aesop being considered to be moved to YMMV, as interpreting of morals/aesops inherently have a degree of subjectivity to them, and the rumination of whether they're sound or not (ie, whether you consider a message broken/undermined) is especially rooted in a subjective value judgement.

A lot of entries on the trope page alone have a degree of pedantry and pointing out contradictions as an excuse to call out the creators in specific, which already hews super closely to Complaining About Shows You Don't Like, but it also rarely feels like it's highlighting trivia. I understand the idea if there is objective documented truth about what happened BTS that seems dissonant with the media, but not only is that not always the case (like complaining about one work making a moral that's different in moral that the same creator did in another work), whether that actually means anything to you the individual is not a universal truth. In practice, this sort of pointing-out of internal creative offense feels most comparable to Offending the Creator's Own, which is treated as YMMV because it does hinge around a contradiction of various intents, but rarely attracts as much of the kind of "hey screw this creator and their opinions" comments as often.

If this must be around, at the very least it should be moved to YMMV and maybe given a narrowing of criteria of what is entry-worthy, as right now it feels like a magnet for "Hey did you know John Lennon actually beat his wife?" vibes.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 6th 2022 at 4:50:54 AM

... it's trivia?

How much of Undermined By Reality is covered by Overshadowed by Controversy or the Hindsight tropes? I think the latter two cover the non-dicey parts of the former.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Apr 6th 2022 at 8:01:36 AM

Undermined By Reality basically is just this meme◊ to me.

Examples with merit can go on the hindsight pages, Overshadowed by Controversy, and (forgive me troper whose name I cannot recall who dislikes this one) even Common Knowledge. I see nothing unique that it really covers that isn't complainy or the aforementioned meme above.

I was the one who first suggested it be moved to Trivia in the first place, but that was because it used to just be a regular trope. I wasn't sure if it should Trivia or YMMV trope at the time, and the thread seemed to think making it Trivia was the better call to avoid complaining.

I never got why it's YMMV. I think it's sufficiently different from OBC and Hindsight in that it's not just about "controversy" and the "reality" must be actually relevant to the work's message, and it isn't exclusive to post-release facts.

So I did an impromptu wick check to see how well the Undermined By Reality entries qualify, just based on the work page. About 20% of the entries I found could debatably qualify as Hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight (regarding something that happened after the work came out), and I also marked 20% as debatably being able to fit in Overshadowed by Controversy (they sound scandalous, though I don't know the target audience consensus to many of these). The rest was other types of complaints.

While I'm here, I also did a check to see the types of entries being written and the nature of how something is being undermined. Estimated 35% were regarding aesops being undermined within the boundaries of the given work and because of something you could directly relate to its creation and its creator(s), some of which could arguably fall into a line of Broken/Lost/Clueless Aesop. 30% was targeting cases of aesops being undermined by issues unrelated to the work itself — usually some kind of broader controversy regarding a company or publisher doing something that cannot be verifiably linked to the specific work or its creator(s), at least to a degree that you can reasonably blame them for. About 10% were arguable cases in between (either because of a lack of citation or ambiguous chicken/egg situations), and the remainder were not aesop-related (usually regarding some kind of retcon or benign revisionism).

Ignoring the entries that seem to exist pretty much out of bad faith (that The Emoji Movie one is especially glaring) or go Ad Hominem (like Michael Jackson's Moonwalker), I think a bunch of these entries already have some kind of significant overlap with other YMMV tropes or prospective Aesop-related tropes, little trivia that I can see. I don't think this is enough to call for Undermined By Reality to be fully dissolved, but it may require some merging and redistribution among Aesop, Hindsight, and controversy tropes in the future. Whichever way, this verifiably seems like it's being taken as a YMMV topic.

Edited by number9robotic on Apr 6th 2022 at 6:52:42 AM