TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Ask The Tropers

Go To

Have a question about how the TVTropes wiki works? No one knows this community better than the people in it, so ask away! Ask the Tropers is the page you come to when you have a question burning in your brain and the support pages didn't help. It's not for everything, though. For a list of all the resources for your questions, click here. You can also go to this Directory thread for ongoing cleanup projects.

Ask the Tropers:

Trope Related Question:

Make Private (For security bugs or stuff only for moderators)

Fighteer MOD (Time Abyss)
2014-12-15 15:25:38

Do not pothole those types of tropes unless it's explicitly the reviewer's opinion, not that of the person writing the example.

A review is a work and, as such, subjective tropes that are expressed within it are considered In-Universe. In other words, it is a fact that Zero Punctuation thinks that a game has a Disappointing Last Level.

Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
supergod Since: Jun, 2012
2014-12-15 15:47:26

So the way those examples are written are fine then? I mean, would I have to rewrite the first example as "Mr. Internet Critic has this reaction after seeing what he thought was a narmtastic scene in Film X", or is the implication enough?

For we shall slay evil with logic...
DracMonster Since: Jan, 2001
2014-12-15 16:09:27

^It's better to clarify that it's the reviewer's opinion, rather than stating a YMMV trope as empirical fact. Otherwise someone will come along and add a "No it wasn't, you jerk!" Justifying Edit.

Edited by DracMonster
SolipSchism Since: Jun, 2014
2014-12-15 16:14:04

Besides which, many YMMV tropes, including both of the ones in your examples, are inherently complainy. As mentioned above, unless it's explicitly the reviewer's opinion, using a phrase like "a narmtastic scene in X" or "X's Disappointing Last Level" just sounds like a troper stuffing a gratuitous bashing into an entry that is supposed to be about Laughing Mad or Angrish.

To avoid giving that impression, if it is the reviewer's explicit opinion, you should rephrase it to make that clear.

Actually, off-topic, but I'd also rephrase so that you're not writing examples that are essentially "Trope Name: Alice has one of these during blah blah blah." Describe the actual example, don't just say "this happens," "X has an example of this," et cetera.

Edited by SolipSchism
Top