Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
I am not kidding when I say that, unless all the regular users decide to participate on TRS, putting it on the queue would mean it could literally take at least a YEAR to get to it. I would rather get this done now; what if someone comes in with a candidate who, for example, is bad enough in their own story but fails the “genre baseline”? Do we downvote them because they don’t fit rules we’re looking to change in a year, or upvote them and go against the current rules?
One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.If villains who meet all three criteria (specifically including the 'complete lack of any redeeming feature') are common enough to regularly fill out the page even further, then shouldn't it logically find its way onto the Omnipresent Tropes page and stop having specific examples? Or something similar, since it's a couple of steps below complete omnipresence—there's plenty of even slightly more nuanced villains in the world.
Because, in practice, it feels like the page examples are restricted to "its trope entry, but more", which is... still frankly bizarre. CM shouldn't be being The Same, but More with itself.
Edited by RainehDaze on Jan 24th 2024 at 5:11:02 PM
I mean, you could always just... abstain. Table the character and EP. Not everything needs to be decided right away.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI was going to comment exactly that but War and Mermaid beat me to it - the answer is just that we wait. It's really not that hard, to be honest, and like War said, if people here help out in TRS, then the queue will go even faster. I see literally no downsides to just waiting a bit to make sure we do this right.
You've mentioned that already and I still don't really see why that matters.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99 on Jan 24th 2024 at 12:18:35 PM
Wow so a lot of discussion we have, but I'm going straight to the point and voting
to Ravok's suggestions!
That is indeed one of the possible outcomes. It was exactly what we were trying to avoid all those years ago by assigning more concrete criteria.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It would make sense, because right now the CM description specifies those three criteria—what we could probably refer to as the basic irredeemable villain. The administrivia page requirements, however, are just troping CM as the same but more of that basic villainous archetype (assuming we also factored in 'actually capable of moral agency', but that's kind of implicit in irredeemable). Which just... seems wrong, no matter which way it's sliced.
I highly doubt it would somehow become that common. It would need to be a staple of most works, which it still wouldn't be. Villains would still need to clear the other criteria and be especially bad in their own stories. The literal only difference would be that we couldn't hold works to the standards set by others; really it just sets works on an equal playing field, rather than making some be disqualified off the bat.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI'd just like to note it's the very treatment of this trope as some kind of "exceptional" thing that needs to avoid troping examples from "shock shlock" and the like that lead to the first Restart happening. The idea of "the trope has to be (X) way or it might as well not exist" is exactly how people treated it before the Restart thread, only for discussion to happen to bring the trope more in line with the rest of the site and hammer out the definition. This is only a furthering of that very mindset to make sure the trope is operating on the level of other YMMV tropes, while still maintaining it is prone to abuse and needs to be brought through proper channels for discussion. A threat to lock it down again seems extreme when the idea here is just to continue what this thread stands for: policy.
Also like to note that no other trope in my experience gets criticized for people listing examples like this one has been in the last few pages, as if using a hobby site to fulfill a hobby is somehow a bad thing. "We've run out of things to talk about so let's broaden the criteria" is not what this about, it's simply about following the criteria that is listed on the page and how most of the site treats their YMMV tropes.
Edited by Ravok on Jan 24th 2024 at 9:33:59 AM
No! That is NOT Solid Snake! Stop impersonating him!
x3 We're not looking for a basic irredeemable villain though. We're looking for an unusually horrible irredeemable villain. Or more accurately, this is what the voting threads usually boil down to.
x1 And putting lone-wolf generic irredeemable villains and somewhat comedic and hard-to-take-seriously villains into the equation is going to make it even worse. I don't want to see the whole trope pages locked down again, but the problem is people playing it up, plagiarizing, and using whatever creating way to loophole people they want kept. And removing the heinousness and played seriously criteria is going to make the problem even worse as people will try and attempt to flood-nominate generic killing people villains and the various Simpsons and Boondocks villains that are treated seriously enough and they'll likely still consider it a trophy.
Edited by Mr-ex777 on Jan 25th 2024 at 1:44:00 AM

Thing is, you guys are more than enough manpower to get things moving fast. Most threads have, like, 1 person doing all the cleanup. Like I said, the solution isn't to skip TRS. It's to help threads close. If you want to, of course, don't mistake this for a demand lol
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall