Ask The Tropers

The Infogalactic link is on Theatre.Parade and its YMMV page. Ryzov also had a bit of an editing conflict on the YMMV page over a Critical Research Failure example that I don't think is valid.

Also, Ryzov unilaterally changed the image on Impossible Pickle Jar on December 13. If there's an IP thread, I can't find it and Ryzov didn't cite it.

Specifically, they changed it to an image for a webcomic called Sister Floriana. They created our page for it and incorrectly placed it in the Fanfic namespace; it's a work of original fiction as far as I can tell. And given that the description says it's about the Spanish Civil War, which the second point OP raises is directly related to, raises some eyebrows - wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be alt-right leaning too.

EDIT: Yup, Sister Floriana is thinly-veiled alt-right historical revisionism. Promotes Francisco Franco as a hero, downplays his atrocities or presents them as good things, etc. The author has a twitter account littered with alt-right ideology - memes promoting the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, pedophilia apologia, supporting high-profile "self-defense" murderers from the past few years, and - to tie this all together - frequently retweeting stonetoss and his comics. Perhaps the most insightful quote from it: "Whiteness is oppression of sin, dishonesty, crime, and communism. If you hate whiteness you champion all of these things."

So... yeah. With that plus Ryzov's behavioral track record on I would not in the least be surprised if the guy is editing the wiki for the specific purpose of promoting works by alt-right creators and pushing the ideology therein.

^ I took a look, Sister Floriana does seem to be more of a fanfic with illustrations than a webcomic, so at least that's not an issue.

Then again...it's original fiction I think, not fanfic.

Ryzov is being a bit disengenious there, he created the stonetoss page, then got banned for pushing it and other alt-right talking points, then acted shocked that people considered the comic racist.

He also Edit War 'd here over an entry on Moral Dissonance saying Orwell "sided with the rapists and murderers".

Digging further Ryzov also removed an entry on Francisco Franco that referred to him as the last surviving fascist dictator of Europe, on the basis that "he wasn't fascist."

Dude has opened an ATT query asking to re-create the page. Is not getting much support at all.

I created an Image Pickin' thread for Impossible Pickle Jar. If Sister Floriana is an original online work of written fiction, it should be moved to the Literature/ namespace.

It looks like Ryzov has forgotten the warning Fighteer gave the last time.

^ Well, that's unfortunate. Gonna go ahead an ping 'im.

^^ they are a single issue wonk, it appears they only came here to try and normalize alt-right material, I highly doubt they're going to start work troping Disney+ shows all of a sudden

He's also inserted his revisionist "Franco and the nationalists did nothing wrong" narrative into For Whom the Bell Tolls, apparently. Here:

• The Nationalists in reality were fighting for their right to religious freedom and political representation. They only attacked because the government threw out the results of a completely fair and valid election, favoring the socialist minority.

• Villain Protagonist: The main characters are all fighting on the side that tried to institute communism in Spain and raped and murdered Catholics for their religious beliefs.

For anyone who isn't aware, Francisco Franco was backed by the Nazis in his revolution, actively aided them in identifying Spanish Jews for eventual implementation of the final solution, had thousands of political dissidents executed over the course of his rule, etc.

^reverting that, that's blatant ROCEJ violations there what with the rewriting history to serve your own political beliefs

EDIT: He is also edit warring on the Homage to Catalonia page, repeatedly inserting the following (even though its been reverted):

• Moral Dissonance: Orwell came to Catalonia to fight for freedom and equality... except for the Catholics, who were raped and murdered en masse by the anarchists. While he may not have approved of it, he still knew it was happening and fought on their side anyways.

Digging further I'm starting to suspect that Ryzov is the author of Sister Florentia. The author's twitter also included claims that Leo Frank was a murderous rapist, plus their shared interest in historical revisionism regarding Francisco Franco and Nationalist Spain. The author also insists on calling it a "fanfic" despite it being a completely original story.

They’re re-suspended; go ahead and revert /remove any problematic edits and that image change.

Well, it's at least nice to know that I wasn't just being paranoid the first time.

This still leaves the question of what to do with FanFic.Sister Floriana, which I'm now thoroughly convinced is his own story. Wrong namespace, includes YMMV items he wrote, and is thinly-veiled neo-nazi historical revisionism glorifying Francisco Franco and Nationalist Spain.

^ would it be wrong to simply cutlist the page, since it's the work of a twice suspended user, suspended for pushing alt-right points that he promised not to push anymore?

I'd be mostly down for it but there are some niggling qualms keeping me from saying we should straight up go for it right now.

I haven't read the story itself and don't intend to but judging by the summary and the contents of the page so far it does seem to have an actual, tropable story structure, and the historical revisionism, while horrible, seems to be... I hesitate to say "in the background" but it doesn't seem to be the focus. It seems to be more of a cutesy slice of life series where the lead characters happen to be fascism-supporting religious fundamentalists. Then again, like I said, I refuse to dignify this thing by reading it, so who knows.

So... it might be propaganda but it might also just be generic fiction that has serious Unfortunate Implications due to the author's fucked up politics. Either way this feels like something that should be discussed in a similar manner to how Stonetoss getting cut should be discussed.

This is ultimately a fictional story, right? So trope it as a fictional story - just use caution. The issue with Stonetoss was mainly that we couldn't definitively call it political propaganda on the page, and it had little to no narrative to trope besides its politics. We don't remove works just because of the author's crappy behavior, both on and offsite.

late but i kinda want to say that the guy writing a shitty fanfic based on someone else's artworks is very not cool tbh.

especially if the fanfic is some alt right bullshit thing.

Is this based on someone else's art? Are you sure?

The Sister Floriana page openly says so, with a link to the artist's twitter.

What it doesn't say is whether the artist is okay with their work being used in this manner. (The Wattpad page that hosts the story has one of the pictures as the header of each page.)

flipping through the artist's twitter and other pages, I'm almost, 99.99%, certain that the artist has zero connection to or even knowledge of the work.

Ok, so assuming the artist isn't aware of this story's existence (or at least, doesn't approve of them using their art), that means this "fanfic" is using stolen art to push an alt-right propaganda piece.

If that is the case, I really don't see any problem with taking this work to the cut list.

Again, it's still a legitimate work- maybe a very shady one with ulterior motives and amoral practices, but it's a work nonetheless. Do we know for sure it's propaganda? Has anyone read anything from the work itself? I skimmed some of it and it seemed, well...not very well written or interesting, but also not outright political.

Yeah, we can't just devolve to bashing the work and even try to deny it a page because of the behavior of somebody we speculate to be the author. I also don't think we have a policy against troping work that stole content from other works.

^ Hell, if we did have that policy, we'd be unable to trope fanfiction on a technicality, since those works are defined mostly by being copyright violations.

I read the first dozen or so chapters to see what it's like. The writing is terrible (e.g. "Thank you," so-and-so said, thanking him) but it does seem to be, for the most part, harmless slice-of-life nonsense. The most political it got was the sermon quoted on the trope page under Rousing Speech, and that could be taken as just the views of a character, if I didn't have outside knowledge.

Yeah, using stolen art doesn't stop us from having pages on the work; we have pages on Limbo of the Lost and Hunt Down the Freeman, both of which notoriously plagiarized assets. But this discussion is getting too long for ATT; maybe take it to the ROCEJ thread? Also, I restored the image on Impossible Pickle Jar since it has an ongoing Image Pickin' thread about it.

Composing a post on it there now, thanks for the suggestion.

He also added an image to Does Not Like Spam without permission.

Hopefully the mods unlock the IP thread so we can discuss what to do about it.

Do we need the creator’s permission to add a page image? Aren’t almost all page images copyrighted, and do we have the creator’s permission to use them?

If it's something like art or a stock photo, yeah, unless it's half of the original image or less. Things like screenshots of a TV show/film/video game/etc don't have the same copyright issue as the uploader is usually the one who took the image.

And a single frame of a TV show doesn't break any copyrighr rules AFAIK.

Can we please not bump threads about banned tropers? Changing a banned troper's image isn't a good reason to bump a thread when the issue can be resolved in the forum, and it takes attention away from newer threads that need attention.

As far as I know, this is someone else's art which Ryzov stole without permission.

^ Fair enough. I guess we can lock this query.