The NRLEP and LRLEO criteria

I mean, as mentioned earlier, both Audience Reactions and Trivia are literally about real-life reactions and events. The only reason people don't think about them in terms of the RL policy is because they're different and focus on the events surrounding a work, but by definition these things are still real life events.

You can't separate real life from something like, say, Ensemble Dark Horse or Hostility on the Set. At least not without either making some really weird definitions of "real life" or making them all IUEO and NRLEP (since in theory real-life events are still "in universe").

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 29th 2022 at 5:17:59 AM

I'm not sure how YMMV can even have RL examples if they can only be in a subpage of a work and Real Life isn't a work. Except meta examples about Creators, which we remove out of principle.

Not well put together argument.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 29th 2022 at 12:30:37 PM

What else would you call Audience Reaction examples about how real life audiences react to a work, if not "real life examples"?

Trivia and YMMV/Audience Reactions must always be connected to a specific work. Examples go into the folder/subpage dedicated to the medium of the work the example refers to.

By "Real Life examples", I mean examples assigned to a "Real Life" example section that treats Real Life like a medium. Like, collecting "Audience Reactions" for historical events or "Trivia" associated with historical figures.

It doesn't mean that Trivia or YMMV example entries can never refer to real life facts, ever. Whether a certain movie is a Franchise Killer (or not) should be empirically demonstrable; obviously this is a real life fact. But it's not what we call a "Real Life example".

Edited by LordGro on Aug 29th 2022 at 11:29:03 AM

By "real life examples" I call examples in Real Life media folder.

I retract what I've said, as I was going of in mind of crosswicking and sleepy thoughts regarding not letting RL exapnd to other areas, but we already have KRLEP that are on-page examples only. Memetic Badass is ironically one of them.

I view it more like Trivia and YMMV are explicitly tied to works and such examples would be misuse anyway. You can't call a guy on a basketball team who gets five minutes of playtime the entire season but has a ton of fans an Ensemble Dark Horse because basketball isn't a tropable work and people can't be "minor characters".

Edited by Synchronicity on Aug 29th 2022 at 4:32:32 AM

IDK man, the fact that they still catalogue non-fictional events that just so happen to be related to a work, I feel, makes them real-life tropes. They catalogue the real world, those events just happen to be about things like what happened backstage of a show or whether or not fans liked a particular character; you can't say they aren't "real life" just because of a few technical distinctions.

You can argue that they aren't what any real-life example policy is talking about, but how then do you propose that we would be able to write a blanket-ban policy without running into the problem of still discussing real-world things? Like, I can get why people wouldn't consider them "real life", but the impact such a rule would have on these parts of the site wouldn't change just because people think they're different. Any rule that bans real-life tropes period would have to account for these things; that's the reason I brought it up — because, frankly, it's kinda bizarre for people to say that all these tropes are off-mission and troublesome while still condoning these other sections when they do still deal with real-life stuff.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 29th 2022 at 5:39:12 AM

Exactly. If a trope is "NRLEP", then that means its example section can't have a "Real Life" folder.

It seems obvious to me that YMMV and Trivia have no business of having a "Real Life" folder. Our Trivia section is for trivia about tropable works, not trivia about anything.

Since Trivia, Audience Reactions and YMMV items are not Tropes, they don't "trope" anything. When we talk about "real life troping", we are not talking about them.

Edited by LordGro on Aug 29th 2022 at 11:50:07 AM

I mean, yeah, nobody has said that that's what the section should be for. My argument is just that real-life events are real-life events no matter how you want to organize or segregate them. I consider anything that isn't about the fictional narrative of the work to be real life just because... well... what else would it be?

All I'm really getting at is if we happened to implement some sort of wiki-wide ban then people will start to question what we do about trivia and audience reactions. And part of why I think it's a problem is because this subject came up in the TRS somewhat recently; there was a vote to make an Audience Reaction or Trivia trope "NRLEP" or something along those lines (I remember the convo more than the thread itself) and I questioned what exactly it actually meant, and what we were actually attempting to do... Because as far as I remember there was no real "real life" section and so it was really ambiguous as to what people actually wanted.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 29th 2022 at 5:43:26 AM

but it's been said multiple times that real life examples are fine unless they become a problem. why shouldn't that apply to trivia pages? if they're too common, they can be cut on that basis. if they're ROCEJ issues, they can be cut for that. a blanket Trivia ban is unnecessary.

Real Life examples are off mission for the whole wiki. they're not more off mission for Trivia than they are for any other page type. you can't justify blanket banning them on policy grounds because the policy doesn't support that.

and yes, ive said i would prefer it if the wiki didn't have real life examples at all, but that is not the policy.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 29th 2022 at 2:43:10 AM

Ugh, can't find the thread I remember, I know for a fact this discussion took place but I can't remember the context, it might not've even been in the TRS... I just know that there was definitely this conflict brought up relatively recently due to the ambiguity of what "counts" as real life when you're discussing nothing but real-life events anyway.

just to be clear, since you didn't make the post red: is that with mod hat on? if so, i accept that that overrules whatever the policy might imply.

I am stating the policy as it has always stood, as far as I know. If you can find contradictory statements, point them out and I'll clarify.

If you want pink, I'll do pink.

Edit: I did forget an exception: Audience Reactions become objective tropes when they are used within a work by having the characters react to a Show Within a Show or other diegetic content, or when a derivative work includes reactions to its parent (e.g., shipping). This means they could apply if a work has its characters reacting to Real Life events, but that would go as an objective trope on the work's main page, not in a Real Life section.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 29th 2022 at 6:37:02 AM

This'll be my last post on the trivia/audience reactions stuff since it's honestly not a hill I actually care to die on:

The point I was trying to make is just that I think it's weird to separate these things from "normal" real-life stuff when they are still about real-life things, the only real difference is that they're real-life stuff related to works. So I just can't really see much of a distinction in regards to subject; purpose and category sure, just not in terms of what they're actually about, and my concern is just that a policy that outright bans real-life examples would conflict with how these concepts work and create some odd ambiguities to work around, which the current policy doesn't.

I'm just saying this since I don't want my posts to be misconstrued; I'm not arguing that these pages should have "real life sections" or anything, just that they cover a non-fictional subject matter and thus can definitely be affected if we start banning these things. At the very least I can imagine people bringing it up down the road as a "if the policy says X, what about Y?" situation.

i just don't get why Trivia is so exceptionally harmful that it needs a blanket ban for gossip rather than being handled on a case-by-case basis like the Main/ namespace, but it's not my responsibility to interpret the policy; it's my responsibility to respect the policy as the mods interpret it, so i will also drop it here.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Aug 29th 2022 at 3:38:46 AM

Getting back to something closer to the original point... I think the most valuable Real Life sections are for tropes where Art Imitates Life and there are specific real-world examples that inspired or heavily influenced its use in fiction; Life Imitates Art and something that was previously considered speculative is eventually achieved in reality; and Reality Is Unrealistic when something that seems like Artistic License is actually mundane (if perhaps obscure).

If "common, controversial, or impossible" are signs of a RL section that should be removed (and I really like that summary), these seem like equivalent signs of one that actively benefits the wiki.

...at some point I'm going to want to start a discussion about this, in another thread of course, because to me it seems like making a false dichotomy between "inherent" tropes and "presentation" tropes.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Aug 29th 2022 at 11:45:42 AM

But we don't keep or cut RL based on its "value", only on it's proven ability to cause problems.

Would an RL section that doesn't contribute much value cause more problems than it solves?

For this argument to even progress any further you would have to define what makes a real life section "valuable". Considering the mission of the wiki is documenting tropes in works of fiction, it's already an uphill battle to say that real life somehow falls into that remit.

Whereas defining problematic is easier, if the section has problems that attract natter and bloat, endless flame wars, or just plain ickiness, we take a vote to cut it.

Keep Real Life Examples has Audience Reactions and Trivia: Memetic Badass, Harsher in Hindsight, Hilarious in Hindsight, Role-Ending Misdemeanor, Memetic Mutation, is that fine?

But Trivia is essentially real life ... things like Role-Ending Misdemeanor are real life events that happen behind the scenes of fictional works.

...which is why I was trying to address exactly when real life examples are directly relevant to that mission in my last post.

Role-Ending Misdemeanor is only relevant when it happens in the context of a creative work.

We don't list when your neighbor Jacob got fired from his McDonald's job for jerking off in the fryer.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 30th 2022 at 10:56:52 AM

sounds like it's time to make another spinoff wiki then!

i see your point about gossip, though, irrelevant REM entries would definitely be gossip.