To-do list:
- Since this is now In-Universe Examples Only, only in-universe references to the concept are allowed. Cleanup is being tracked using Sandbox.Sturgeons Wick Cleaning.
Sturgeon's Law is defined as "90% of anything is bad". It's not In-Universe Examples Only, and is therefore used as an Audience Reaction. Despite this, it's not labeled as YMMV, and is wicked around the site as if it were an objective statement. This leads to tropers complaining. According to the wick check, most examples are like this.
Solution: Probably should be made Flame Bait.
Wick check:
Sturgeon's Law is linked to around the wiki as it were an objective fact, despite clearly being subjective.50/50
- Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000: Most Real Life games that would seem to meet this definition are better received than their fictional counterparts (filtering out Sturgeon's Law, of course), either because they're actually marketed toward small children (who don't care much about quality, as long as the game isn't actually unplayable), or because they're actually good.
- Mage: The Ascension: Straw Feminist: Depending on the Writer. Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law dictates that this interpretation sees a disproportionate amount of representation.
- Gamebooks: Several people have written scripts for Internet gamebooks allowing the players to add new pages. The results are... interesting.
- Game Mod: Unfortunately, game mods are probably the biggest example of Sturgeon's Law.
- Game Maker: When looking at the games made with these, be warned: Sturgeon's Law is in full force.
- Analysis.Darker And Edgier: An inexperienced author using this delicate tool also tends to produce poor results, and fanfiction has varying degrees of quality, both poor results and good ones.
- Analysis.Alan Tutorial: Specifically, he's a facsimile of a large percentage of Youtube creators presenting content like tutorials who don't actually know what they're doing, they just do it because either they like it or they saw someone else doing it and thought it'd be cool to do it themselves.
- FandomSpecificPlot.Doctor Who: So you have a story. In it, the Doctor lands the TARDIS on Earth near where you live and meets a human OC with an inexplicable resemblance to you. He decides this human will be his new companion and the two of them go off to have wacky adventures together. Congratulations, we'll add it to the ninety-percent rubbish pile.
- FandomSpecificPlot.Anime And Manga:
- Some fanfics involve males getting involved with tankery in some form or another. This is often the result of Oarai becoming coed, with the reasoning that even if it avoided getting shut down, it still needs financial help, and the boys often pilot World War II-era fighter planes alongside the girls in the tanks. Said males often end up being Gary Stus.
- FandomSpecificPlot.Western Animation: The "next-generation fics" are massively popular in this fandom. These generally star the children of the Winx, who form their own club like their parents. When done well, they can explore how the canon characters mature over the years. Usually, however, the new characters end up being carbon copies of their parents, with similar powers, names, and personalities. Thus, there has been an increasing backlash to the genre in recent years.
- Fanfic.Time Will Tell: It is now one of many stories about girls falling into Middle-earth, a genre that suffers from Sturgeon's Law.
- FandomSpecificPlot.Video Games: One of the series' most popular fanfic trends is to have an OC, often someone from the real world, join Sora, Donald, and Goofy on their travels, usually during II. Most times, the OC gains a keyblade and falls in love with either Sora or Riku. Some fics even give her the χ-blade itself. When poorly written, the fic ends up being a novelization of the game with the OC shoehorned in. A common unwritten rule when writing these kinds of fics nowadays is "Don't give your OC a Keyblade and don't make Sora fall in love with them."
- FanficRecs.Back To The Future: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth erasing yourself from existence for here.
- Fanfic Recs.Bakugan: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth getting sent to the Doom Dimension for here:
- FanficRecs.Bakuten Shoot Beyblade: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth getting your Blade destroyed here.
- FanficRecs.Baldis Basics In Education And Learning: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth getting sent to detention here.
- FanficRecs.Baldurs Gate: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth gathering your party before venturing forth for here.
- FanficRecs.Calvin And Hobbes: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth being stuck with your sadistic babysitter for here.
- FanficRecs.Camp Camp: Proof that the remaining 10% has tested negative for quarter-sister.
- FanficRecs.Call Of Duty: RAMIREZ! Bring up the remaining 10% that's worth dying for!
- FanficRecs.Cabin Pressure: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth enduring Mr Birling for here:
- Fanfic Recs.Centaurworld: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth jumping into a whaletaur for here.
- FanficRecs.The Office US: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth getting downsized for here:
- FanficRecs.The Orville: For the 10% of fanfics worth the upvotes
- FanficRecs.The Penumbra Podcast: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth losing an eye for here.
- Maleficent: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth falling into a sleep-like death for here.
- Making Fiends: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth creating fiends for here.
- Madness Combat: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth fighting through The Other Place for here.
- Marvel Universe: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth having your series discontinued for here:
- FanficRecs.Yandere Simulator: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth getting murdered by a Yandere for here:
- FanficRecs.Yona Of The Dawn: Proof that the remaining 10% are worth dying for here.
- FanficRecs.Yin Yang Yo: Proof that the remaining 10% is worth dying for here:
- Complex Doom: Various add-ons for LCA, widely yet somewhat homogenously varying in quality.
- City of Heroes: In full effect with the Mission Architect. Even with the search options, it is a huge chore to actually find missions with actual stories instead of being just a farm or meant to be a challenge.
- Chip's Challenge: In full effect with the user-generated levels in Chuck's Challenge, which tend to range from "OK" at best to "Who the hell thought this was a good idea?" at worst. In contrast, fanmade levels for Chip's Challenge tend to be very well done, with the very best being compiled regularly into "CCLPs".
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Enough of them to build several whole new games. In fact, several mods are there for just that purpose. Sadly, Sturgeon's Law is in effect for many of them, and they're only useful if you run the PC version.
- Super Mario Maker: People can also share the courses they make online with other players. Needless to say, quality of the courses made in this may vary.
- Roblox: Inevitable in a game where 95% of the content is user-created.
- Pillars of Eternity: The quality of the vignettes for the backer-written NPCs varies. There's some legitimately interesting gems to be found, but a significant percentage are pretty cookie-cutter: unstoppable badasses, perfectly cunning rogues, et cetera.
- Mega Man Maker: Since the Wily Challenge uses random user-created levels, it is possible to find levels with diverse difficulty, which also includes Sturgeon's Law rearing its ugly head in here. Because each level is randomly picked, there's no telling what the next stage has in store for you. It becomes worse when set to Hard (the difficulty just adjusts your lives counter) and the length to Long. Thankfully, the levels can be skipped, but at the cost of one of your lives. So if you die to a hard level and decide to skip it, it will ultimately cost you two lives.
- N: A staple of every game in the series - complete with multiplatform level sharing. Sturgeon's Law is in full effect, obviously.
- Need For Madness?: This came into full effect the moment registered players were allowed to use cars they made in NFMSP's Car Maker in NFMM.
- Pac-Man: In full effect with the web game World's Biggest Pac-Man; for every genuinely good maze you come across, there are hundreds that either go above and beyond Fake Difficulty by throwing you into a maze with very little or no walls and a field of Pac-Dots, giving you very little means of protecting yourself from ghosts, or a series of straight linear path(s) littered with the occasional dead end, giving ghosts plenty of opportunities to trap and corner the player.
- Microsoft Sam Reads Funny Windows Errors: Although by no means the first of its kind, the resulting popularity and subsequent influence within the "Text-To-Speech" community has helped it define and influence an entire generation of text-to-speech video makers, for better or for worse.
- Contrasting Sequel Main Character:
- Valerie in Kingmaker was a Lawful Neutral sellsword who had trained as a paladin of Shelyn, but Rage Quit the church over a combination of believing that most art was crap and frustration with her many Abhorrent Admirers. Sosiel is a Neutral Good cleric of Shelyn who believes that searching for the beauty and love in the world and creating whatever art you can is an inherently useful pursuit: if nothing else, it can keep morale up.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker Party Members
- Sturgeon's Law: Discussed. The biggest friction point between her and her Order was that, while her order appreciated all art, and expected her to do the same, she believed almost all of it was terrible, and not worth her time or protection.
- Analysis.Nintendo Hard: The concept has recently been satirized on the Internet, most famously by The Angry Video Game Nerd, who pointed out that via Sturgeon's Law, most examples of Nintendo Hard games are often a result of sloppy or bad design.
- Analysis.Disco Sucks: Among the critics, nobody who wanted to be taken seriously treated it as much more than vapid, disposable pop, a type of music whose few good early hits were drowned out by the volume of garbage that followed, while among mainstream listeners, it was associated with a snobbish, decadent big-city lifestyle that they wanted no part of.
- Fanfic.Takamachi Nanoha Of 2814: Here's the author's opinion of this trope in action, courtesy of Ch. 13 Author's Notes:
- "I have come to the conclusion I'm too good a writer to be able to write Purple Prose. On the upside, it means I'm too good to write anything as horrible as Twilight. On the down side, it means I'm too good to write anything as marketable as Twilight. It was an actual labor to write it. I had to read SO many bad fics to even try to get it down. I couldn't stop laughing at how stupid it all was. Anyone who can do this and KEEP doing it for more than a thousand pages has... well, not talent, but some kind of anti-talent. Purple prose is HARD! Though I have also discovered, to my horror, that I have my own personal brand of Purple Prose. I need to lie down..."
- Night Mind: Nick really doesn't look fondly at shoddy CreepyPasta that tries to pull this off with existing cartoons such as Squidward's Suicide and Suicide Mouse, finding almost all of them exceptionally lazy, uncreative and blatantly attention-hungry. His one and only exception is Lasagna Cat, which he perceives to have seriously set the bar.
- Matt McMuscles
Matt: Clearly this was a cow that would never, ever run dry, right?
Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 6th 2022 at 11:16:29 AM
I think we can call this now.
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallBoth "Make IUEO" and "Allow on-page examples" have more than a 9:1 consensus. Calling the crowner. The trope will not become YMMV or Flame Bait, as those options were less than 1:1.
Please begin removing out-of-universe references and adding examples to the trope page.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.Are we agreed to remove the wicks from the Fanfic recommendations template?
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.I'm for it, for the record, though don't think there's been any feedback on that topic yet.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupI added a notice to the discussion page. I saw that this was already added to the IUEO index and removed from the NOPE index, so that part's out of the way.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.Will create Sandbox.Sturgeons Wick Cleaning to keep track of cleared namespaces.
EDIT: And created.
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Oct 19th 2022 at 9:55:59 AM
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall- 1 for removing this page from the fanfic rec template. It's just a Take That! at this family of works.
I agree. I feel like this being IUEO means it already has no business being there, or at least no longer does.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 19th 2022 at 9:04:49 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.Agreed with removing it from the template.
ETA: Went ahead and removed the DO banner from the description and added the Pathfinder: Kingmaker example since I was familiar with it.
Edited by StarSword on Oct 19th 2022 at 1:06:31 PM
Does this mean that Sturgeon's Law may no longer be linked to Fanfic Recommendations pages, in the format of "Proof that the remaining 10% is worth ______ for"?
Check out my Pantheon Search Database prototype!Yeah I think the first line Template Page For New Fandom Recommendations can go away and all FR/ wicks with it.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupShame, that. I always liked seeing the different variations of the phrase.
Check out my Pantheon Search Database prototype!Optionally we can just remove the pothole, though I question if the jokes would make sense without it.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupI forgot that Template Page For New Fandom Recommendations was locked. I removed the wick (plus the rest of the line).
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 19th 2022 at 12:53:34 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.I'm going through the work namespaces now and copying keepable examples to a doc so I can add them all at once.
Sounds good.
I'll handle the Fanfic Rec wicks. I'm sure all will need to be nuked at this rate.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope ReportOne interesting pattern I've found: in video game example lists, it's frequently misused for Vendor Trash.
Whoops, my bad!
Edited by StarSword on Oct 20th 2022 at 1:35:29 PM
I should probably point out that Vendor Trash has been split into the trope Shop Fodder for items that serve no literal purpose and the YMMV item Better Off Sold, where an item does have a purpose but no one wants to keep it.
Welp, did a count for the number of Fanfic Recs pages with the wick. We started with more than 1600 in that namespace alone. So, it's almost 3/4 of the entire list.
So, I'll focus on one-offs for now. Maybe I'll squeeze in some removals from that namespace every so often.
Edited by Berrenta on Oct 20th 2022 at 6:00:34 AM
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope ReportI think I've got nearly all of the usable on-page crosswicks at this point. Pretty substantial list, even if half of it is Internet critics.
Internet critics also ended up being a major source of on-page examples when TRS made Pet-Peeve Trope IUEO and removed its No On-Page Examples status so in-universe examples could be listed.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 21st 2022 at 12:40:25 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.All right, so I'm thinking at this point about what to do with the page description. It's pretty long and I think quite a bit of it can be cut: we really just need the part about Sturgeon's revelation and then an explanation of how it's applied in fiction.
Since a lot of namespaces have already been taken care of according to the wick-cleaning sandbox, I decided to work on this since I'm done with my previous dewicking project, and Main/ is now dewicked.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.Done here, so locking up.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Crown Description:
Sturgeons Law is frequently used as a Pothole Magnet. What should be done with it?
I went ahead and added it.
Edit: Added another option for whether to allow on-page examples if we limit it to in-universe examples. Maybe that could have been one option, but since Pet-Peeve Trope handled the two separately, I erred on the side of caution with this.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 16th 2022 at 5:01:34 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.