Having actually attempted to understand the description, I find that, as is so often the case, it doesn't seem like the laconic has it quite right:
- And behold, many of their stories did deal with Chosen One protagonists, insomuch that these writers did spend much labor crafting phony-baloney scriptural prophecies to flesh out the protagonists' back-stories.
- Now it came to pass that these prophecies were contained in sacred texts, which the writers did toil exceedingly to invent.
- And behold, the writers did send forth a law, yea even an exceedingly strict law, by which these texts would be known.
- And the law did read thusly:
- Behold, the text that thou shalt write shall be exceedingly ancient and obscure, insomuch that thy audience might have no expertise on the culture of origin, and will just have to take thy word for it.
- Ancient shall be thy text, and ancient and exotic shall be the language in which it first appears.
- Behold, thy text shall be written in Aramaic, or in Chaldean, or in proto-Mongolian, or in Sanskrit, or in Mayan or Sumerian or some demonic language that thou hast invented on the spot.
- Though the potential origins of thy text shall be many and diverse, thou shalt always generate an English version of thy text, which thy protagonist or his lackeys shall translate from the original in an unrealistically brief amount of time.
- And it shall come to pass that when thy text is translated to English, it shall be written in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
- Yea, thy verb conjugations shalt be incorrect, even to the point of meaninglessness.
- Thy sentence structure and writing style shall be based on the King James translation of the Bible, regardless of the culture and language of origin.
- Thou shalt not use all the styles of the King James Bible, which are diverse and many. Instead, thou shalt focus on those bits for which thou hast read the Cliff's Notes.
- Thou shalt begin as many sentences as possible with the words, "Thou Shalt" or "Behold".
- For behold, if it is good enough for the Ten Commandments, it shall be good enough for thee.
- Thou shalt frame all of thy prophecies in the language of the Book of Revelation, particularly the parts about rivers turning to blood, seven headed dragons, and women riding monsters or wearing crowns of stars.
I'm not sure that prophecies are actually that relevant to the trope though; I half-expected a reference to the Book of Armaments to pop up in the description (and it's also the second example in the oldest version in the Internet Archive
), even though that's not (what I would consider to be) a prophecy. (There apparently was discussion back in 2008 but it seems to be lost. There's an associated YKTTW linked from the discussion page but it appears to have been a later duplicate, despite having a similarly self-demonstrating description while not being specifically about prophecies.)
Edited by MorganWick on Oct 31st 2023 at 12:46:55 PM
So it clearly has other issues, as well.
But for the time being, can we at least get a consensus to re-write the description as I mentioned above? What is there is an unclear, confusing abomination.
When I saw the name Hollywood Apocrypha I assumed it was a trope about inaccurate Hollywood portrayals of the actual apocryphal books of the Bible, in the vein of Hollywood History.
Hi
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I had no idea we had this page, and when I saw the link in the title that’s what I immediately thought of before I read the OP.
I stumbled upon Hollywood Apocrypha and had no clue what it was about even as I read through the 25 "verses" listed there. It wasn't until reading the Laconic page that I actually understood it's a trope about made-up Bible verses. That description is just confusing overkill.
I know that Antiquated Linguistics once had a similar issue and had it's former, challenging-to-read description moved to a Self-Demonstrating page while the "Main" namespace description was updated to actually describe the trope more clearly.
I believe that same thing should be done for Hollywood Apocrypha to make it clearer. Thoughts?
Edited by BeerBaron on Oct 30th 2023 at 11:52:59 AM