The NRLEP and LRLEO criteria

I mean... you can make the "not meaningful" point about literally any real life section. We have to draw the line somewhere. Real Life examples have always been considered a JFF section for examples of Truth in Television, not to say that these things are indeed examples of "tropes occurring IRL", because that's obviously not possible with our definition of what a "trope" is. So we need a clearer definition for these things beyond "they're not meaningful in real life", especially for tropes that really are just personality traits and not symbolic of anything.

I know that we operate under There Is No Such Thing as Notability, and I'm not sure how we'd go about verifying that, but I feel like something like that might be a good option for tropes about "people having personality traits and doing things". There absolutely are real folks who inspire fictional portrayals or who had aspects of themselves incorporated into archetypes and that's worth discussing, but without any notability requirements, the sections are just lists of "people who did things".

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 12th 2023 at 10:39:36 AM

This has nothing to do with the notability rule. That's about works only. It has no bearing here; if it did we wouldn't have rules against troping creators on their pages or anything of that sort.

This is really just... "Real life sections are tolerated as JFF and are only cut if they're deemed problematic". I simply don't see how "people have personality trait" is inherently problematic. Too common, possibly — but that's a different section for a reason. If the only metric for characterization boils down to "personality trait", then it's essentially just a way to blanket ban all character tropes from having examples solely for falling into a rather arbitrary rule that only requires meaning for these specific sections, not an actual problem that can be demonstrated with the sections themselves.

OK, that makes sense. In that case, yeah, I agree that Characterization requires something to be a specific stock archetype with implications e.g. The Stoner or Prince Charmless, "person has personality trait" is just Too Common / Meaningless In Real Life.

Edited by NonexistentYeets on Aug 12th 2023 at 11:07:22 AM

Tropes being crownered for Characterization and Narrative because I think you can use those two to argue that the vast majority of trope pages shouldn't have RL examples. Now, of course there's tropes that are impossible narrative wise but characterization is trickier to explain unless there inherent symbolism or stereotypes involved.

I don't think all of the ones involving personality traits should be cut unless they are clearly causing issues. We still seem to be too focused on cutting RL sections than maintaining them.

Edited by MacronNotes on Aug 13th 2023 at 4:45:43 AM

I actually wouldn't be surprised if RL examples are banned altogether in the near-future.

I can understand why, at the very least. Cutting is easy; maintenance is hard and just gets harder as more and more tropes are launched. I would not be surprised if we end up retiring RL examples altogether at some point down the line, even though it's not something I'd really advocate for at this time.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Aug 13th 2023 at 4:04:10 AM

Uh, yeah, let's not get on this tangent again. We need to focus on the thread's rules right now.

I didn't think that conversation point was what was going to be taken from my other post when that wasn't my focus. Anyways, I probably should have added this to my previous post but I think a valid characterization NRLEP trope would be for things like Hiding Behind Your Bangs because the trope isn't just about a hairstyle and symbolism is an integral part of it.

Edited by MacronNotes on Aug 13th 2023 at 5:17:44 AM

Right, that's what I was getting at before. Things like Meaningful Appearance tropes that give us symbolic meaning to the character's appearance and actions, not just "a character is snarky".

, That seems perfectly logical to me.

So, since this discussion needs to happen in the correct venue... let's talk about True Crime examples.

Would be helpful to demonstrate a handful of examples.

In general I'd lean to a parallel treatment as Sex, Sexuality, and Rape Tropes, but I'd like to see good examples first.

Specifically, I'm trying to get the arguments presented here to be discussed at this thread instead. Read that post if you need a better understanding of the current debate.

I did read that post, but I'm reiterating that I'd rather for tropes about criminals or crime methods to be inapplicable to real people. I'm not interested in the crime community (that's a thing?) as much as it being over Real Life Troping and also way controversial. So if there's voting I'm waiting for a convincing argument to not go with it.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 14th 2023 at 11:20:02 AM

Well, technically "controversial" in the sense of real-life sections applies to when the section attracts controversy in the form of natter, edit wars, etc. In theory, there's nothing inherently controversial about just reporting on things people objectively did.

This goes back to the old debate on how we don't just have any category for tasteless or uncomfortable sections. Everything must be part of a specific category, and right now these true crime tropes don't fit into any of the ones we currently have. They aren't morality — most of these tropes have no specific moral leaning. They aren't gossip — it's all factual and public news.

Like, do we need these examples? Probably not. But right now the sections are being kept on the principal of "they aren't actively causing problems and also the crowner reasons are consistently incorrect or misleading".

I think by "controversial" I mean "sensitive topic". I don't mind RL examples, except when they are about a specific person, those I think are a problem by even being.

That's how I think about it, too. I also feel like there's usually some element of gossip involved.

What's gossip about news?

And like I said, we currently can't get rid of pages just because we find them uncomfortable, at least not without trying to shoehorn them into categories that they objectively don't fit in as defined.

This is a major problem at the thread right now, and it's why there's sudden pushback. It's not that a lot of us are clamoring to keep examples about serial killers and the like — I couldn't care less about the examples themselves personally. The issue is entirely about not having valid crowner reasons and people misunderstanding what the categories entail. It's only real an issue with "true crime examples" since those were recently discussed in one of these debates (regarding if they can qualify as morality and gossip).

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 4:50:48 AM

Echoing #415, I'd tend to agree. Tropers go into a lot of detail on some recent crime examples.

Dead Man's Chest recently tackled this with a 150 year NREP rule, but some of the deleted examples were longer and more fascinated with detail than they needed to be.

Even if we cut all of that on squick grounds, do we really need or want examples of RL serial killers keeping their victims' corpses as trophies in freezers? Or the equivalent for the other tropes?

Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 14th 2023 at 9:53:00 AM

There are 7 NRLEP categories. We can add True Crime and Real Squick (not necessarily together? "Too Personal?") as the 8th.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 14th 2023 at 11:53:34 AM

When I say gossip, I mean the excess detail that shows up a lot. There's a difference between sharing enough to understand what happened and going through the uncomfortable/gory/sensationalist stuff with a fine-tooth comb.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Aug 14th 2023 at 3:56:28 AM

The problem with a blanket ban on "true crime" is that the topic is a bit broader than just murderers and rapists (the areas that tend to attract the most problems). There's also white collar crime, corporate crime, petty crime and the like, attracting examples that are usually harmless, occasionally inform fictional uses of tropes (Al Capone's arrest for tax evasion is likely the trope maker for Intimidating Revenue Service), and sometimes hilarious (the story about the man who was arrested for stealing from vending machines and tried to post bail in quarters is listed on Paying in Coins, Suspicious Spending, and Not Helping Your Case). A blanket ban would get rid of stuff like that on top of the examples that people seem to actually want gone.

I mean, we could, but that would need discussion (my proposed "other" category has never gone through despite a lot of support for the idea). I've also been in favor of not requiring the categories at all since they're causing an extreme amount of issues right now...

But as currently is there's simply no valid case for removing these examples beyond personal taste, and that's what the issue really boils down to for me. I understand why people would want to get rid of them but that is not the thing we need to figure out right now.

Yeah, that's not how we currently categorize gossip though. Gossip is for things like rumors, or discussing people's private lives, or something like that. Excessive detail is completely unrelated.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 14th 2023 at 4:56:52 AM

To take one of those deleted Dead Man's Chest examples and remove the cruft and detail:

• In August 1991 the skeletal remains of a small child (later identified as Anjelica Castillo) were discovered in a picnic cooler by the side of a road When her cousin, Conrado Juárez, was eventually arrested, the police were horrified to discover that the Anjelica had been starved until she was small enough to fit in the cooler.

That takes out all but the basic facts. It's still pretty horrible. Personally, I stil don't see the benefit of keeping RL examples like that on the site.

If someone creates a fictionalised version for a crime novel or film, that's different.

Edited by Mrph1 on Aug 14th 2023 at 10:01:34 AM