Ask The Tropers

Personally, I'd specify in the work description something like, "The main series can be found here, and supplemental material accessed via the creator's Patreon." or such. As long as it's not written like it's trying to sell a product to the reader, I can't imagine that just mentioning it would be a problem.

I don't think a work becomes untropeable just because of a paywall. Most books, games, and movies generally aren't available for free either. Just specifying where in the creator's work the example comes from should be enough if you're concerned about it.

I mean, we have countless works that are behind paywalls. Any given Disney+ or Netflix series is fully behind a paywall. Movies are behind a "paywall" of paying for a ticket or DVD. I see no real reason to really denote it let alone avoid it.

Lots of works require some form of payment. You have to buy a book to read it, or a video game to play it. There's nothing special about, say, Patreon-exclusive content that would make us not list trope examples.

The principle is that someone could, if they wished, pay for and experience the work in order to verify the examples.

There are other forms of exclusivity, such as Discord invitations, that render a work unverifiable, and this is why we don't allow private Discord roleplays and the like.

I've previously brought this up here.

I'm in favor of troping advance paywalled content, but noting that tropes from paywalled material are present on the page as a courtesy.

The only thing I can think of that had a big backlash was troping SA works, for obvious reasons, but it was a matter of goons repeatedly vandalizing pages to force them to be locked.

Yeah, that is true you do technically need to buy a book to read it, buy a video game to play it, use some payment method to watch a movie or show and more.

I agree with Fighteer. We shouldn't avoid troping material just because it isn't free, because then maybe 90-95% of the work pages would have to be cut.

What matters is exclusivity. "Exclusive to Patreons" isn't really exclusive, or at least not more exclusive than "you'll have to pay to watch this movie", because anybody can become a patreon. Exclusivity in this context would be if a video channel were by invitiation only, or if the viewers had to go through some form of vetting by the producer before being able to watch the content. That's the kind of content we don't trope.

The Mousetrap is like the only non-nswf/political work with troping restrictions. Besides that, the only thing that says how a work can be shared online is copyright.

My two cents: it should be clearly denoted, so people don't get confused and think all of the content is free or it's all paid.

RWBY and DEATH BATTLE! also have restrictions, where only episodes that are available for free can be troped. This is because the majority of these shows' fans don't have the paid subscription, so they would not be able to follow those pages without fear of spoilers, making it hard to clean up trope misuse and other issues.

When this was not fully enforced, NightmareFuel.RWBY turned into an awful mess of misuse and gushing because one troper kept treating every little thing as if it was horrifying. Because none of the people interested in cleaning things up were subscribers, this meant that bad examples stayed up for a whole week before we could look at them and clean them up, which apparently sent the message that this was okay.

Yeah, that's pretty much why both RWBY and Death Battle have notices requesting early release info not be added until it's been released for the public.