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Good idea, although the title seems a bit unclear — it sounds like an admonition not to use time travel tropes.
Something like Trope What Happens Not What You Think Will Happen Is unambiguous (but long I know.) Or maybe Dont Extrapolate The Plot.
Edited by DracMonster
Good suggestions, but the problem with the last one is that it's not always related to a plot.
What about Dont Extrapolate The Trope?
Would these not be the beginnings of Implied Trope? Maybe a Downplayed Implied trope or something?
Or Ambiguous Situation mixed with Implied Trope?
Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576
Implied Trope wouldn't apply to any of the examples I mentioned, except perhaps First Girl Wins. But even then, a First Kiss doesn't inherently mean a couple has officially gotten together and that the other love interests have "lost".
In the other examples, the trope just plain old hasn't happened. Either a base is broken or it isn't and either a limb gets replaced or it doesn't.
Speculative Troping as a title perhaps?
Health sure is versatile. It's possible to be both light-headed and dim-witted. At the same time, no less.
Ooh yeah, that's on the mark I think.
Speculative Troping could also include admonishments against trying to predict the work's tropes based on the trailers, previews, and previous works.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Excellent ideas!
I'll submit it a bit later.
Probably still needs a lot of work.
I agree with crazysamaritan. After all, we have a trope called Never Trust a Trailer.
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't always get what you want.
How common is this problem? People tend to overestimate the benefits of extra policy pages and underestimate their problems.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This is currently covered by How to Write an Example - Don't Speculate, Don't Prognosticate.
^Maybe expanding that to cover the sort of wording that's mentioned in the original post would be sufficient, akin to how Examples Are Not Arguable contains examples of words and phrases that act as red flags for violations of that policy. Doing this and referencing the existing name in edit summaries would be an alternative to changing the name to one of the names mentioned in this thread, but at least one name change happened in the past (the name of Keep It an Example was changed to Examples Are Not General).
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't always get what you want.
@Septimus Heap: I don't there's really any way to answer that question.
Speculation is one of those cleanup jobs which is often minor or overlaps with other issues, such as removing a few words an example that bloats itself with trivial detail just shy of Fan Wank, or arguing about whether a trope has been implied or not. All of us have probably done this dozens of times without even thinking about it and probably wouldn't even be able to point at each specific time.
Edited by NubianSatyress
I think the same function can be filled more elegantly with a slight expansion of the Don't Speculate, Don't Prognosticate section of How To Write An Example and a new redirect to that page (Speculative Troping sounds fine).
Edit: another option for the redirect might be Examples Are Not Speculative to fall in with the "Examples Are Not X" scheme (Examples Are Not General, Examples Are Not Recent, Examples Are Not Arguable, etc.)
Edited by HighCrate
@Septimus: I don't know how common this is with 'actual' tropes, but it seems like a huge proportion of the misuse for certain YMMV pages like Broken Base involves jumping-the-gun knee-jerk stuff. I feel like a mere subsection of How To Write An Example doesn't seem to be cutting it.
I think you may be underestimating how much good having a redirect specifically for this problem to link to in edit reasons can do.
"General" examples were at least as big a problem as this, and that didn't need its own page, just the Examples Are Not General redirect to give people a clear, easy link to follow to the relevant portion of the How To Write An Example page.
I agree with nrjxll. My experience is that a redirect to How To Write An Example doesn't solve much.
That page, in my opinion, is so heavily cluttered that I don't see how direct links addressing the individual problems in detail can't be of help.
Edited by NubianSatyress
Yeah, that page itself may need a repair thread on the forums.
By the way, if someone thinks a trope is going to happen in the future, isn't that Wild Mass Guessing? If so, just insist all such speculation be put there.
I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.
Okay....that's not helpful criticism.
If there's a problem with the page that you think is problematic enough to need TRS before it's launched, then now is the perfect time to be specific so that they can either be addressed or the page can be nuked if it's unsalvagable.
^I'm pretty sure the first sentence of DragonQuestZ's post was agreeing with what you said about cleaning up the How to Write an Example page.
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't always get what you want.
It was. Sorry for the confusion.
The rest was stating that if there is to be a message, it's that it's to note that any speculation, even of a trope that hasn't happened yet, is still Wild Mass Guessin.
I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.
I'm sorry. I don't know how I missed that.
As for Wild Mass Guessing, the reason people don't post their speculation there is because WMG is kind of regarded as an "unimportant" subpage. When people post speculation, they're usually subtle about it and try to give it as much legitimacy as they can get away with.
Edited by NubianSatyress
I've actually argued in the past that it's unfortunate that WMG amalgamates both actual serious speculation about where a story might go and joke or impossible theories - this might be some support for that.
Are we still allowed to submit Administrivia pages? I wanted to present a page on TLP based on a common problem I've seen around here that I call Troping The Future.
Troping The Future is a bad troper habit whereas examples of a trope (or YMMV) are added based on the potential or setup of a trope happening...but the trope hasn't actually happened yet. For example:
And so on and so forth. Personally, I just think it'd be nice to have an Administrivia page to link when doing cleanup.
Edited by NubianSatyress