Misused: Foe Yay

Hmm... Resorting the wick check a little

• Mutual: 7
• Villain with feelings: 12
• Intentional subtext: 5
• Unintentional subtext: 15
• Fans ship enemies: 7
• The rest don't have enough context

The only thing that doesn't have an article attached is "Unintentional subtext between enemies / Ho Yay but with enemies of any gender.

Edited by Tabs on Mar 25th 2022 at 3:11:43 AM

I think unintentional subtext between enemies could have its own article. It often leads to Foe Yay Shipping, but they're not the same thing. For example, there's a moment of enmity in Knives Out that comes across as oddly intimate to me, and I'm not sure it is supposed to. And yet, I don't ship the characters involved at all.

As for Foe Yay Shipping, its description currently conflates shipping enemies with seeing subtext. But people ship enemies without seeing subtext between them all the time. Seeing subtext is just one reason for the formation of ships.

I'm ambivalent about cutting it entirely, but if that's what we end up deciding, we should probably go over the subpages and move the examples on them where they'd fit.

I agree that Foe Yay Shipping is separate from unintentional subtext, but wouldn't the latter be included in something like Relationship Writing Fumble?

I don't think so, because Relationship Writing Fumble is for when friendships end up looking like romantic relationships to audiences.

There was a TRS effort to transplant Relationship Writing Fumble's definition to a new name and reuse the original name for a supertrope for any kind of relationship that looks different from what was intended, but the effort stalled and the thread was closed. (I've mentioned considering bringing it back because I think moving the sandboxes to Main/ was all that needed to be done before wick cleanup could start.)

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 9:30:04 AM

Did the wicks actually get cleaned up the first time? Looking at the last page of the linked TRS thread, it was locked with the subpages pretty much intact. Of course we will continue to have misuse if the primary problem is still there.

It looks like the thread clocked out instead of just being given a regular lock, so I'm guessing the wicks weren't cleaned up. I couldn't say for sure, though, since I wasn't active on TRS at the time

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 9:38:56 AM

We also had some TRS that was closed in the middle of a clean-up with "we'll see" and left with about 800 wicks unchecked. In 2 years wicks increased only by 80, but I forgot which one was it.

I brought the thread for Those Two Bad Guys back from the Morgue earlier this year because I don't like clocking threads that are in the wick cleanup stage (while I clocked a starred thread recently, it required a description rewrite before wick cleanup could start and the description hadn't been rewritten, but that's a moot point because someone stepped in and I was able to shut the clock off), which is what happened with that thread before I brought it back. The current state of Foe Yay illustrates the problem with closing threads while wick cleanup is ongoing.

Edit: Based on your reference to having 800 wicks to clean up, the thread for Those Two Bad Guys might be what you're thinking of, because I think that amount was mentioned before I brought it back.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 9:43:43 AM

I mean, I'm pretty sure that the original TRS thread closed without doing the work, because back then that sort of thing seemed to happen all the time. But like I said in the OP, multiple people that I've spoken to were legitimately unaware that Foe Yay was even a disambig. It's such an ingrained part of the site that trying to do cleanup now won't really fix anything. The primary problem is that people think it's still a trope, and that problem isn't going to change even with cleanup, considering people also still use Not So Different, Badass Gay, and Completely Missing The Point, and those were cleaned up completely.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 26th 2022 at 2:08:20 PM

The same thing happened with Contemptible Cover when I was getting close to being done cleaning up its wicks.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 3:11:16 AM

Anything that's bluelinked is liable to be used by tropers who don't know any better... Especially if there's no differentiator between disambigs and normal pages.

The warning icons can't come sooner. And some tropers keep potholing tropes that were already cut.

Wish list wish list. That's all we can hope for.

Anyway, I think "unintentional subtext between enemies" is tropable (what Twiddler said, and was discussed in the old TRS as well). It seems the old Foe Yay Shipping, before the article text was changed, didn't need subtext at all. The two enemies could very well be Ships That Pass in the Night. Seeing subtext between foes might lead to Foe Yay Shipping, or to No Yay, or just a lot of raised eyebrows.

Eh? I checked the first entry in Foe Yay Shipping's history and it still mentions subtext. (It also had a pothole to Foe Yay, which reminds me of how Bumbling Henchman Duo's Laconic at one point had a wick for Those Two Bad Guys.)

Update: OK, so I rechecked the old TRS thread and this is actually the old name of Foe Romance Subtext and not Foe Yay Shipping, and it wasn't originally YMMV. So it looks like the unintentional subtext is a case of Missing Related Trope.

Another update: Oh, I see what happened after looking at the history of YMMV.Home Page. That now-defunct thread for making pages YMMV (which was closed much sooner than the Trivia thread) voted to make a disambiguation page YMMV. And this was mere months after it was decided to rename it to Foe Romance Subtext and disambiguate the old name.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 26th 2022 at 4:30:42 AM

While there's a distinction between "fans ship these characters", "fans see subtext between the characters", and "creators intentionally add subtext between these characters", I'm not sure how useful it is to have separate pages for each of them. Intentional vs. unintentional subtext is especially hard to gauge and I'm afraid in practice they'd say pretty much the same thing.

Oh, I don't know. Considering that Rian Johnson put an intimate scene between Rey and Kylo Ren in TLJ before supposedly sinking the ship by having Kylo pull a Redemption Rejection on Rey later on, that scene in Knives Out might be deliberate.

I... How... What

I can only assume they voted that way so the icon appears on main pages, but that logic is flawed.

But it wasn't YMMV before the YMMV thread stepped in, so there was no reason to make the icon appear. The TRS thread even brought up the fact that Foe Yay wasn't YMMV, and the fact that it was for intentional subtext and not unintentional subtext is why it was renamed to Foe Romance Subtext (Foe Yay Shipping, which is YMMV, was a separate page even back then).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 27th 2022 at 9:10:23 AM

And this is why the YMMV and Trivia threads no longer exist and we do things in TRS now.

Anyway I am still in favor of a cut, with applicable examples moved to fitting tropes. I rescind my PRLC vote, however, per Gaston's reasoning about the inability to recreate tropes.

I think I might have actually been in favor of closing the Trivia thread before Septimus actually asked whether to do it (but either way, I told him to go ahead and close it when the time came, and transplanted the remaining crowner entries to Tropes Needing TRS since he asked for that to be done).

But yeah, I don't think the folks in the YMMV thread read the TRS thread for Foe Yay, which was still open at the time, before bringing the page up, especially because the entry on YMMV.Home Page gives the definition for Foe Yay Shipping and not Foe Romance Subtext.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 27th 2022 at 4:58:14 AM

Man, I'm glad we communicate better now. Helps that so many TRS regulars are also project regulars.

Yes, because misuse on work pages attracts more misuse. With the example subpages left on the article, I'd argue that editors could even look at the page and convince themselves it's a supertrope, not a disambiguation. To match the rate of the other page (which did have the on-page examples removed), there'd be 150 wicks added each year since the TRS thread. Possible, but not actually given as evidence.

I'm contending that a half-done job would naturally fail to accomplish the goal set by doing it in the first place. It's like partially cleaning an abandoned lot, then complaining that there's still trash years later. Yeah, I agree that others are likely to add to the trash, but leaving it there in the first place doesn't prove that cleaning it up fails to reduce the work.

Leaving "on-page" examples literally caused editors to add examples despite a warning: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=FoeYay.Theatre#edit25660987 this is no different than a sign that says "No Littering" being ignored because of all the trash underneath the sign. Have you seen any disambiguation attract examples of they didn't already have them?

We do definitely need to get rid of the on-page examples (I'm counting subpages as on-page examples) and wicks and remove it from every index except for Ambiguity Index if we keep it as a disambiguation page.

Considering disambiguating it was already decided on years ago and whoever decided to add it to the YMMV index didn't bother reading the page beforehand (or just briefly looked at the page, saw that there were examples, and didn't bother actually reading anything after seeing that there were examples), the idea of stripping it down into a vanilla disambiguation page via mod fiat is tempting, but I'll hold back.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 28th 2022 at 9:12:13 AM