Troping Works That Promote Bigotry

Yeah you can cut those subpages.

For Victoria? We definitely need to do something to scrub it's influence here with the tons of wicks. Like it has 459 wicks and has brought 28, 000 people to the wiki which uh....

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

It has about 624 on-page tropes. Are they accurate or not?

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 13th 2023 at 3:22:32 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

Well checking the page and having not read it. These one's seem off

• Action Genre Hero Guy: John Rumford fits every item on the checklist, except that he isn't fighting to save a loved one, but his country. A somewhat unusual variation in one respect, however, in that he is also a (working-class, one-liner-touting, ex-military) well-read intellectual, which makes for some funny lines. (ZCE)

Animal Wrongs Group: The Paleopitus, who combine this with fanatical eco-primitivism and a nightmarish neo-pagan religious cult (ZCE)

• Anti-Intellectualism: Zig-zagged. While Retroculture encourages literacy and scholarship, is very scientifically innovative, and supports the teaching of the classical philosophy and culture of Western Civilization, the Retroculturists will only tolerate a certain subset of philosophy, and ban anything that disagrees with their preordained opinions as "Cultural Marxism," slaughtering dissenting academics. It also literally preaches that every single good idea humanity will ever have has already been had, so further study or research with the aim of "advancement" is pointless. Despite all logic and historical evidence suggesting this should result in a stagnant society regurgitating the same ideas, according to Rumford there is a great cultural and scientific renaissance beginning by the end of the story.
  • For certain values of "downplayed", unsurprisingly, as large numbers of intellectuals who don't toe the Retroculture party line are executed without trial (i.e. murdered) (I have no clue what this is saying)

• The Ark: The idea seems to be that Victoria is an island of stability and tradition during the collapse of civilization (going off the trope page. This seems off. This trope seems to apply to actual boats, spaceships meant to preserve life)

• Black Republican: Gunny Matthews, and exaggerated example as he's part of the paleoconservative Victorians (ZCE)

I haven't checked the whole page since its so damn long. But yeah this is a genuine issue.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

Discovered that there's a Victoria cleanup. Everything that can safely be, should be removed, and the history also checked if anything got re-added after being deleted.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

I posted their but I only have mobile. So can't do a full scale cleaning without serious help.

"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."

I can definitely drag myself away from Rollercoaster Tycoon for a few minutes a day to keep the cleanup going. Was looking through the thread at old examples that got deleted and there were things like 'Amazon Brigade - Subverted in that the all-female armies of Azania are terrible at fighting. Chessmaster Sidekick - Subverted in that the protagonist is the Chessmaster, and not any of his sidekicks.' Just absolute non-tropes.

Don't want to sound as if I'm being fuelled by pettiness as well as laziness, because I 100% genuinely do believe "Hey, this Self-Insert Fic about killing Cultural Marxists, written by someone whose writing on Cultural Marxism has been cited by an actual mass-murderer, definitely meets our criteria for 'Ew, you know what? Just get that shit out of here.'" but at a certain point it also feels like if a work was added with such a clear political agenda - especially a work that promotes bigotry - then we could always delete rather than go to the effort of cleaning it up, and if someone genuinely wants to create an accurate tropes page for it in the future (strongly doubt) then they are welcome to try, as long as they do it right next time.

I don't know, it's obviously not my core argument - that would be the Cultural Marxism stuff - but it feels like someone else broke the rules to shoehorn this completely unknown work onto as many pages as possible, and we're all stuck cleaning it up, which will take many hours of effort, and that effort is all in service to keeping around a page for a work which actively endorses genocide.

(x6)

I'd be skeptical of the "brought X people to the wiki" stats because sometimes I'll create a brand new page and see that it's "already" brought 100 or so people to the wiki.

Please visit the "AITA" forum game

There is that one bullshit ratio law. Brandolini's law. Thank you web searches for knowing what our vague phrases mean.

It seems wrong that we need to put more work into making the Victoria page not a wretched hive of ZCEs and shoehorns than the creator put into making it that bad on purpose in the first place.

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

The problem with the work is that it isn't (and shouldn't be) as widely platformed as, say, a PBS Kids show, so it's easier to clean up "Fake News" on a mainstream work than it is to clean up an obscure work, especially a hate-work.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Jan 13th 2023 at 9:58:43 AM

Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

Not sure how much it's worth bringing up - like, the Cultural Marxism stuff is my smoking gun for the argument to cut - but Victoria is only available for sale through an alt-Conservative publisher named Castalia House, and I recognized that name from somewhere. It was founded by Vox Day, the alt-right guy who got kicked out of 'Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America' for calling one of their black members an 'ignorant half-savage'. He then did the Rabid Puppies campaign against the Hugo Awards, and I found this phrase on his Wikipedia page. "Whites are the only tribe willing and able to maintain Western civilization because they are the only tribe that truly values it."

We have trope page for other Castalia House works - none of them seem to be as openly and immediately recognizably bad as Victoria - and a creator page for Vox Day, and... I feel like calling for a blanket ban on Castalia House works would just give credence to people who would likely see this as a slippery-slope issue, but all the same, I have to say, uh...

Ick.

I think the thing with Victoria is that it only has a page because of some alt-right chud, but now that it does have a page we have to... deal with that. Like the page existing in and of itself doesn't violate our rules, but the way it currently exists and the reasons it does are problematic

Listen to my podcast

Unfortunately, the only thing against the rules here when it comes to works is porn and pedo pandering. That's it. It doesn't matter how bigoted it is, if isn't just porn and pedo content, then it can stay on the site. Unless you can find some pedo stuff inside it, it seems like we'll have to deal with this dumpster fire.

Edited by CardboardBot on Jan 13th 2023 at 7:36:39 PM

While it's quite a high threshold to reach, we have cut things before for being too bigoted, too impossible to trope neutrally, and generally not being tropeworthy. We can provide a platform for almost any work - even a raging dumpster fire - but we are definitely not compelled to.

Stonetoss was one exceptional case with specific reasoning it became a problem to keep, we normally don't do that. Unless I've missed something, it's not "things" we've cut.

If after cleaning it becomes apparent unknown people keep adding half-assed examples for the sake of bloat, Victoria can be locked or more.

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

The only other work I remember being cut for "bigotry" was Moon Man, but as I've said before, a text-to-speech "rapper" spamming the N word has no creative value. (And it was more of a meme than a serious work.)

I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.

If you head to the Permanent Red Link Club then there are several dozen pages that we have cut. We cut Ben Shapiro because he's just a pundit with no creative works. We cut Louder With Crowder because his content was nothing but politics. We cut Mister Metokur because on top of ROCEJ issues, his YouTube channel got banned, so it was troping a bunch of videos that were no longer available. We cut a page on the website Stormfront, for the wonderfully-phrased reason "Neo-Nazis are not really a phenomenon that merits a work article." We've cut pages for Scientology, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and... Mass Effect 3, for various reasons, whether it's drama importation, promoting bigotry, or just bluntly not warranting a TVTropes page.

Cutting a page should not be taken lightly, but the idea that Stonetoss was a one-off and we don't frequently cut pages for controversial creators or inflammatory works for similar reasons is just not true.

None of those were cut "for being bigoted", they were cut for lacking any tropeworthy value or having other, unrelated issues. There's a massive difference. Claiming that we've ever in the past cut a work just because it had bad politics is objectively false.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 13th 2023 at 1:14:35 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Actually, for Victoria, could we just clean up all the shoehorned examples and then lock the page?

Please visit the "AITA" forum game

The thing is, to know which tropes are shoehorned or not, someone has to actually read the book. No one in this discussion's gotten to that point yet.

Edited by badtothebaritone on Jan 13th 2023 at 12:23:27 PM

That does, of course, depend on whether you consider our standing rule against paedo-pandering to fall under the 'bad politics' umbrella. That's one kind of propaganda we certainly have a zero-tolerance policy on, which raises the question of whether we should maybe do the same for, say, overtly pro-genocide works (or at least lock their pages and submit new edits to site review as we do on occasion).

Edited by Iaculus on Jan 13th 2023 at 6:24:24 PM

What's precedent ever done for us?

That's not politics, that's just us erasing CP. Also note that until the ads were pulled such works were just fine and dandy. The porn/pedobait ban isn't a moral decision, it's a pragmatic one. It just feels weird to lump it under "bad politics".

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 13th 2023 at 1:26:07 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

One thing that I think is under-considered (is that a phrase?) in this discussion is also what message our response sends to people who want to create gushy pages for works that... let's be blunt; promote genocide of minorities.

Because right now, the way we're treating Victoria, that message seems to be "Go right ahead! In fact, don't even do a good or even passable job of it, because even if you get suspended, we'll clean up the page for you and then keep it anyway."

I mean...

Cleaning up after people who leave messes on the wiki is what nearly the entire projects forum + TRS is for.

So it's not like there's any special treatment here. It's just that, like any other scenario, the person who made it had proven untrustworthy, and hadn't come back to fix the problem they started.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 13th 2023 at 1:31:46 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

"create gushy pages" is not allowed by site rules in general. "pages for works that promote genocide of minorities", until we add a 5P-like policy, for now falls under "we're just documenting stuff".

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 13th 2023 at 9:32:09 PM

TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup

The existence of a TV Tropes page isn't supposed to be an endorsement of the work's quality or viewpoint, though. We have pages for some horribly written stuff, as well as works that have either aged really badly or were always toxic.

The Birth of a Nation (1915), Triumph of the Will...

...and we manage to keep most of them clear and neutral. In fact, it's probably easier when the work's well known. It's the stuff that's poor quality and niche and full of toxic views that it becomes a time sink.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jan 13th 2023 at 6:50:39 PM