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Amonimus
(Sergeant)
Zazie122
Since: Jul, 2017

I see a lot of trope examples on work pages where there's no explanation of how a trope applies to a work other than a direct quote which either references the trope or says the trope verbatim. Sometimes it's only one sentence, which doesn't provide much context, but sometimes it can be an entire paragraph (or longer).
A vague example might be:
And then absolutely nothing else at all.
What's the best way to tackle these? I have no idea if quotes count as context. In my opinion, they shouldn't, and like everything else on the wiki ideally be in the troper's own words, but that's just how I feel about it.
A single quote often doesn't tell me how the trope applies to the character/world (although I realise the example I gave does — it was the only thing I could think of!) unless I'm already familiar with the work. I was under the impression that trope examples should always be written in a way that someone who isn't familiar with the work can make sense of how the trope's being used (as much as possible anyway), although I'm aware I could be misinterpreting how that's supposed to be done.
For the example I gave above, it could easily be reworded to something like:
But I really don't know what to do with these kinds of examples and I wasn't sure where to ask on the forums for help, so I'm posting it here instead. (Sorry for all the questions! I just want to be absolutely sure I'm doing things correctly!)
(Also, most of the time when I come across "direct quote from source but no other context" examples I leave them alone, or, on occasion, comment them out if I feel like there's absolutely no context even with the quote.)
Edited by Zazie122