Troping Works That Promote Bigotry

Hate speech is not allowed on the site, but troping works that contain hate speech and promote bigoted views is, and there's been disagreement on whether these works should be allowed here at all.

I personally think that troping these works isn't necessarily bad, but we need to take care when approaching them. We don't want to promote their bigoted views ourselves, of course, but these works' pages are often rife with complaining and bashing. It's understandable why, but we're still supposed to trope them neutrally like we do any other work. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Update: Pages Attracting Edits That Promote Bigotry was created to track problematic pages.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 16th 2023 at 5:25:31 AM

what i said in the moderation thread is still what i think: anti-bigotry is the neutral position here. indicate how the points they use are anti-science or otherwise debunked, but they're subject to the same bashing and snark rules as the rest of the wiki.

The policy I'd refer to is the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment. Stonetoss was tossed, as I understand it, because it couldn't adhere to that - any attempts to trope it would inherently become a fight.

We've got stable pages for Victoria and Triumph of the Will. What we do is we note the bigotry and trope it; that's not the same thing as endorsing it.

No. It's not neutral, it's picking a side - in a fight where it's not moral to be neutral, but it's picking a side and we need to work from that basis, rather than developing a special dictionary.

Edited by Ramidel on Dec 25th 2022 at 3:36:42 AM

I don't have a problem with picking said side with how the specific troping is either. While I get consistency, a line being drawn seems reasonable to me. These kind of works having condemnation is reasonable, as long as the entire thing is full of objective tropes properly too and it's not just pure complaining as well.

I do have an issue with YMMV being complainy no matter the work.

Right, I think it is possible to strike a neutral tone while still getting across that something is bad. History books do so all the time, after all.

Perhaps we could make a case for removing YMMV altogether from those pages, to discourage opinionating?

Edited by Redmess on Dec 25th 2022 at 2:00:00 PM

Stonetoss wasn't dumped for being bigotry; it was dumped for being untropeable bigotry. There was no narrative; the entirety of the work was "librulz bad". (The author attempting to use the page for his own political benefit was also a factor here.)

The Turner Diaries et al have narratives, even if they're inherently ridiculous narratives.

If we can't clean them up and lock them, sure. I don't mind removing them altogether. But I think we should try and follow normal policy first~

I feel we can't inherently do that due to the nature of the work.

Cutting the page is a last resort. It should only be considered if all other options have failed.

Same applies to creator pages for the likes of Ben Shapiro, it was cut because he didn't make any tropable content on top of being controversial.

I think the main issue here is that we have a wiki policy of neutrality (hence our highly active complaining cleanup thread, among other things). That means that for severely bigoted works, we run into the challenge of either uncritically recycling their bigotry in trope format, or whitewashing them by avoiding mention of their bigotry despite it being a key part of the work. This seems a particular problem on the YMMV pages, which are all about common audience reactions to these works, but is not by any means limited to those.

This topic kicked off from discussion of Stonetoss (which was considered untropeable without running up against our rules on complaining and negativity) and Billy the Heretic (which has an extremely negative YMMV page because no duh, it's Nazi-inspired antisemitic propaganda).

If being moral isn’t being neutral (even though it totally is), I would rather be moral. These are things everyone allowed to use this site can agree on.

Agreed.

Agree with Guma.

I think it's entirely possible to note that a work has bigoted depictions of something without outright complaining about the subject. For a hypothetical, compare:

"The work depicts people who wear big hats as primitive simpletons, despite that not being true on real life."

vs.

"This work SUCKS so bad because it's made by a horrible, big-hatphobic waste of mankind."

Exactly.

I mean, sure, condemning them is probably necessary to make it clear we aren't outright neutral(we aren't), but they don't need to be only complaining/negativity to get the point across.

There is an actual ability to properly trope their objective materials and condemn the work without being purely negative. Some unwilling to do that doesn't mean it's impossible at all. It's only the YMMV pages where this is highly questionable if it could work. But the main page? Nope, easily workable.

There are pretty good examples of works where you can invoke Death of the Author, where the work itself is good, even if the writer is or becomes a piece of shit later on.

Sinfest, Harry Potter, Hammer's Slammers and even John Ringo which is a massive Po S but actually made good work.

However there are works where the author not only is a Po S but the work is entirely built on promoting theri Po S views. Tunner Diaries, Vicotria, Mein Kampf and The Birth Of A Nation 1915 all have tropes attached, mostly because of both the medium but also because they have a narrative, it is hard to have a narrative that doesn't have tropes.

We can still point out, both through the presentation and through the tropes, why the author, the work and the message are downright evil.

Works that like of Stonetoss and Ben Shapiro, outright have barely narrative. Stonetoss exactly because his simple format, no continuity and story on his work and his content is barely more than "racism funny and libruls suck! Laugh now!". Ben Shapiro on the other hand talks a lot and makes articles riddled with all the sort of bullshit. It makes as much sense as making pages about New York Post or Daily Mail editors instead of a brief look about their outlets or editors.

The problems with these two assholes is having a page dedicated to them and then having to deal with them or their fans trying to edit it to their favor and specially having to avoid any bullshit slander accusations against TVT due to calling out their bullshit and labeling them for what they are.

Actually, we're not supposed to condemn the author by rules of ROCEJ. There's little to point out but purely objective facts. That can include why they could be discredited as an Author or stopped writing, etc. As long as it follows ROCEJ, anyway.

plaky verbalized my thoughts better than i did.

one further thing: lack of narrative wasn't the reasoning for cutting Stonetoss. we have pages for other gag-a-strip webcomics like Cyanide and Happiness and xkcd. Stonetoss denied that the strip supported Naziism and contested our page calling him as such. we got rid of it because we couldn't trope it honestly without dealing with him.

Edited by ChloeJessica on Dec 25th 2022 at 9:00:17 AM

I'd personally maintain the principle of documenting works for what they are. If needed, we can do what Disney (?) did with the rereleases of old movies and put a disclaimer that the work contains content the site doesn't share view with.

You know, do we have examples of pages on odious works, that are either apologetic or ranty? I'd like to see concrete examples of the issue mentioned here.

I'd be careful before assuming that a work page can only be either apologetic or ranty, too. Real Life laws about Holocaust denial and advocacy of racism typically do differentiate between discussion about Holocaust denial and advocacy of racism, and discussion that is Holocaust denial and advocacy of racism.

We should for sure aim for a nuetral, clinical tone when describing controversial or morally-objectional works. When in doubt, be as objective as possible. And frankly, we dont need to go out of our way to point out how bad something is if we're not gushing over it and we arent the ones that wrote it. Most of the work pages on this site lean in the direction of fun, playful and mildly gushy. A rare single page where every trope is described in objective, blandly-worded sentences like it's from wikipedia tends to make it pretty clear anyway that the tropers arent endorsing it.

And i agree that endorsement or white-washing is a false dichotomy.

"This work is written by a white supremist and promotes racist extremism" is a statement of fact, doesnt downplay or whitewash the content of the story, but also clearly does not imply that Tv Tropes endorses the work

Edited by Tremmor19 on Dec 26th 2022 at 4:34:45 AM

You cannot possibly apply Death of the Author to Sinfest, it's creator is routinely using it as a vehicle for his political views and escalating conspiracy-mindedness. Arguably, that is the whole reason that webcomic became so bad in the first place.

The Death of the Author means "interpretation of a story is the audience's responsibility and the author's opinion should be as grounded in the text as anyone else's", not "stories must be treated as though they spontaneously emerged from the void, disregarding any knowledge of the context of their creation."

(Edit: in other words, it's wiki policy as explained on The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours.)

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Dec 26th 2022 at 7:06:55 PM

I don't pretend to be familiar with Stonetoss, but how exactly is it "un-tropeable"? Nothing is "un-tropeable", not even The Tropeless Tale. Look what we did to The Ugly Barnacle. These pages exist in part to demonstrate that almost anything has tropes in it, even if the substance of the work is no more than, as you put it, "librulz bad". Is Mein Kampf any more tropeable? It's little more than Hitler ranting about things he hated, and yet it's got a fairly fleshed out page.

My personal opinion is that as a website, we need not get too bent out of shape at people assuming we support something just because we don't condemn it at every opportunity. We have a trope about people who do this: And That's Terrible. I especially wouldn't worry about it with respect to Nazism, because the site as a whole demonstrates often how evil Hitler and Nazism were, and we've got things like Godwin's Law and Hitler Ate Sugar that only work if we assume Hitler was a really bad guy.

The only reason I can think of to delete (rather than "ban") a work like Stonetoss is if it's a troll magnet, which falls into the definition I mentioned in the other thread that it's not a work we can rely on the public to discuss in a mature fashion. Even then, one could sandbox it and lock it like we did for Sonichu. But if even that would attract trolls arguing about how we "did it wrong", then it should stay deleted, but the "troll magnet" basis, not the "un-tropeable" basis. The important thing is for the work to fall into a broader category rather than be deleted ad hoc.