Self-Written Articles?

Dammit, there has to be some way to stop inadvertent Wiki Words like G La DOS — the urge to blueshift that red link seems to be irresistible for some tropers.

We could ask Eddie to lock out that Wiki Word so that it can never be blueshifted.

That would work. But lets see if making it a functioning redirect works, first. It sounds like it never was a redirect in the first place; that whoever Blueshifted it jumped straight to character page.

No, it was a redirect for a while. The thing is, we aren't supposed to use character names as redirects to the works they are in. Like initialisms, the page kept getting cut and then put back.

edited 21st Jun '10 8:31:24 PM by Fighteer

Correct. When the Glados article first went up, I defended it against cutting, reasoning that it was better than a redirect. That was before it had an examples list.

I vote for neither - lock the page as a redlink.

If people are going to continue to link to it inadvertently, it might make sense to just lock it as a redirect.

I vote for neither - lock the page as a redlink.

I vote for this.

Also, I'd like to note that someone has been Entry Pimpping The Joker, adding him as a trope example at every work page he appears at.

That, my friends, is one of the reasons I'd want pages like his removed. Because it gives the fans enough room to come to some illusion that their favourite character is a trope to himself.

edited 22nd Jun '10 6:48:46 AM by Kerrah

Is that really different from including actors in trope lists of works they appear in?

That, also, seems to be missing the point. It's fine to link actors to works, but they really belong in the description, not the trope list. As in:

Super Death Chainsawfest 3000 is a 1999 Science Fiction film, starring Sigourney Weaver, Charlton Heston, and Eddie Murphy.

similar to the Entry Pimping with the Joker page, there seems to be one person - apparently connected with these self-written articles - who has gone on a One Troper Crusade to list Deadpool as Chaotic Evil pretty much everywhere, which no else agrees with as he has been traditionally listed as Chaotic Neutral, but the fact that Deadpool kills people has apparently pushed him in that one troper's mind to be "Chaotic Evil".

edited 22nd Jun '10 1:11:44 PM by DocStrange

Request an edit ban on Ask The Tropers. Maybe it'll get him to talk, or at least leave us alone.

Yeah, I just posted that on Ask The Tropers.

Apparently it's been going on since March or so, long before the recent change to first person although the troper involved was a major contributor to changing the Deadpool page to first-person. If you look up on the history of the page, you can see that one guy (antvasima) has been trying to add Chaotic Evil for months and in his edit summaries (apparently) claims everyone who doesn't see Deadpool as evil! and (possibly unintentionally) anyone who is apart of the current surge in his popularity - is apart of a Misaimed Fandom of a character that should have never been liked.

I'm considering requesting a lock of the Deadpool page so someone - but you know, not me, but someone with more time on their hands - could put it back to being in third person/add back the Chaotic Neutral/other things?

edited 22nd Jun '10 1:27:39 PM by DocStrange

I thought we weren't supposed to add Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil or any of those alignment tropes to works thay didn't actually mention them since everyone always interprates the characters differently.

Why is neutral such hard word to spell?

edited 23rd Jun '10 12:32:35 AM by Scholastica

You are correct. Character Alignment is only for characters that specifically mention it due to it being only useful for extremely flat characters and the like. I can not help you with linguistics though.

I have asked antvasima on the Deadpool Discussion page to come over to this thread and make his case for the addition of Chaotic Evil to the Deadpool page and about the self-written articles, which I know he totally has very little to with initially, but he did do quite a bit of the further first-personing of the Deadpool page.

It seems that since I looked at the Deadpool discussion thread last, antavasima has written a whole spiel there that basically boils down to "Deadpool is an assassin, all assassins are Chaotic Evil, Deadpool is Chaotic Evil" and compares the fictional Deadpool to real life standards to prove such. It's almost adorable in a way.

edited 23rd Jun '10 10:32:19 AM by DocStrange

I'm all for the fancy intro being in Deadpool-speak, but the trope list really should get put back how it was.

Regarding the alignment, it's far from a "sudden switch" as "Doc Strange" called it, it's been around for quite a while, and was not simply about me. I presented the argument, other contributors agreed with me, made changes to support it of their own, and the previous version was a Your Mileage May Vary between Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral and Chaotic Stupid.

I don't really see why it is suddenly presented here in a very tangential thread and perspective-twisting fashion, rather than in the relevant talk page where it was already handled, and I don't have much time or energy for tedious dragging arguing, but regardless, I see the idea of misrepresenting as extreme a character as Deadpool as somehow "neutral"/harmless as literally shockingly absurd, in the sense of risking to push the moral boundaries so far that only a dishonestly manufactured artificial Omnicidal Maniac threat would qualify as evil, and anything less (i.e. any extreme encountered in the real world) is somehow deemed "okay". Now, most fans who would label him "neutral" obviously don't think like that, they simply like the character as stray entertainment, and if they saw anyone go around murdering thousands of people in gruesome fashions in real life they wouldn't think twice about it. The stories are crafted as Crossing the Line Twice Comedic Sociopathy after all, i.e. a classic manipulative but entertaining Hand Wave, but if we simply evaluate every extreme act the character has actually performed then this isn't really debatable unless anyone wants to make an honest case for an "absolute amorality and anything goes, nothing counts as a crime, no conscience and no compassion whatsoever, Benito Mussolini's wet dream, bunkered-up constantly warring paranoid militias , and the only threat to prostitution-slavers are more powerful cartels, 3rd world warzone" type of society, and regardless that I've followed the Deadpool character through almost every appearance since way back in the first issue of the Kelly run, that kind of "transmitted to a monstrous real world significance" extremist propaganda-style message really gets at me.

The point being that regardless of any casual brush-off distractions such as calling the issue an "endearing" "spiel" (which would take insane amounts of hardcore cynicism to truly believe in btw), and getting the chronological order wrong, as I just got the "invitation", considerably after writing the second post, if we're going for actual matter-of-fact alignment evaluation we have to try to distance ourselves from the fictional insanity of the work and do so as objectively as we can based on what the character truly is presented as.

Here is what I wrote on the Talk the last time around:

"He has personally killed, tortured, and crippled more people than any serial-killer in history in as gruesome fashions as possible for kicks, giggles, impulse, and molah, while cracking jokes and trying to look as cool as possible doing so. He's entertaining in a fictional context, but by real world standards it's impossible to get around that he's a Complete Monster whose sheer scale literally makes Joseph Fritzl look like Mother Theresa. So Yeah, we don't have to be ashamed of enjoying his Crosses The Line Twice antics, but Chaotic Evil it is or we all start to completely mix up entertainment and reality."

"He's an unbelevably sadistic torturing mass-murderer and adrenaline junkie mercenary assassin who always returns to type. To quote Doctor Who: "No, that's just the way your type can live with yourselves. Sometimes you let one of them get away." So, sorry, but if you torture 100 people to death in as gruesome fashion as possible while taking excruciating pleasure and trying to look as cool and appealing as possible doing so, then go help a cat out off a tree and complain about how misunderstood you are to get some sympathy, and then return to doing the same thing alll over again the next day, this does not anywhere near even the scales or make you into less of an insanely bloodthirsty Complete Monster."

As for the self-demonstrating article part, I have no problem with it, as contributors have purt some effort into it to sound right , the fundamental nature of the character of breaking the "4th wall" has gradually increased to almost Animal Man levels, and the article reads as more amusing this way, but I don't really have a problem with returning it to the previous format either. However, if this is the case, it is important that it is handled honestly, i.e. all of the columns should be returned to exactly the immediately preceding wording, not be seen as an excuse to sneak in censorship.

edited 23rd Jun '10 4:43:49 PM by antvasima

More to the point, he's not a D&D character so he doesn't have an alignment in the first place. I don't disagree with your analysis, although I'm unfamiliar with the character, but all mentions of his alignment should be cut anyway.

edited 23rd Jun '10 11:27:02 PM by Clarste

Is that the requirement? I had the impression that it was supposed to be more general. Then why do we have the alignment tropes in the first place, given that they are almost exclusively used to describe non-RPG characters?

They have pages because they are a trope for games. They work OK for RP Gs, where the characters tend to be flat. But then it became a thing to shove complex characters into them, even though they aren't designed for complex characters.

And that began to cause problems, because depending on how you personally interpret "Lawful" or "Chaotic"; "good"or "Evil"it's not only possible, but probable that there will be vehement disagreement over which pigeonhole the character should be stuffed into. As you have just been a part of.

That's why we are actively discouraging assigning D&D-style character alignments to character that weren't designed with that system in mind.

huh. I did not see the discussion with other contributors about the change from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Evil when I looked through the discussion.

But yeah, I totally agree with everything Madrugada just said about character alignment. In fact, that's what I was going to suggest before I got off track with the whole thingy targeting antvasima (sorry about that, you just seemed to be the most passionate about the whole thing and it was slightly tangential of me, but we were on the topic of the Deadpool thread and the alignment seemed to be the most contentious part of the article since (although it could have been the same before) the switch over to the self-written style).

This discussion about character alignment is a very interesting discussion and I might start a discussion about it later (if one hasn't already been made), but i've gotten everyone off topic (just like I do in real life! )

Anyway back to actual topic of this thread, have we made a consensus about the self-written articles yet?

EDIT: linky to the Character Alignment thread I just started up to continue this discussion in a thread that its actually about.

edited 24th Jun '10 8:36:09 AM by DocStrange

Oh, I do feel strongly about the larger issue, for mostly the reasons detailed above.

The way I remember it: The discussion was carried through a combination of edit summaries and different viewpoint in-page commentary, and settled on the YMMV. Later cclospina posted that the discussion was decided, changed it to Chaotic Evil alone, whereupon I added the Chaotic Stupid, given the random insanity, and that was that.

Recently the page was reformatted to 4th wall-breaking in-character self-description, and some new fans (either Misaimed Fandom who didn't want their "hero" to be perceived as bad, or simply ones who haven't seen him in really extreme form) took the opportunity to state that they wanted a switch to Chaotic Neutral, so I wrote another (now semi-annoyed due to the repetition) summary of why this didn't make any sense (and also consider a dangerously amoral message) and joined in on the "self-written" tone to incorporate some of the points into the page and hopefully avoid further redundant discussion about it in the future. That's pretty much it.

edited 27th Jun '10 6:24:02 AM by antvasima

The Deadpool intro is golden, but the trope list falls flat and, last I checked, wasn't even completed. Keep the intro, revert the trope list back to third person.

As for Self-Written articles, they work well for characters that stand strongly on their own, outside of their respective mediums, and have a personality that is both nearly a trope unto itself and unique. Good examples include the Joker's, Doctor Doom's, and Lobo's respective pages. Gla DOS, whilst being a great character within Portal, only appears in Portal and does not stand very well on her own outside her medium, plus, she's your basic example of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. I think self written articles should continue to be made in exceptional cases, but only after the character for which the article is being made has been okayed by a wide majority of tropers and mods to keep any of the crappy examples from resurfacing or from this becoming too widespread.

But that's just my personal opinion.

As for alignments for non-D&D related characters, well, sometimes some characters not made with that in mind still fit the archetype to a 'T', such as Riddick from Pitch Black and Jack Sparrow from Pirates Of The Caribbean. Many others, however, ARE too complex for the system. Deadpool is one of those, as, throughout his many comics and appearances in media, the guy has danced between Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil, and Chaotic Stupid so many times that the guy should have whiplash. He's definitely Chaotic, at least, and one could leave it to that.

edited 27th Jun '10 12:03:27 PM by Inferno232

I agree on the keeping the intro and reverting the examples/tropes list back to third person. I would axe the alignment though too much trouble.

As a point of courtesy to others to include the discussion in area that is more visible then the behind the scenes discussion that took place.