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Exley was an alien who loved baseball so much that he decided to stay on Earth, taking the form of a black man playing in the Negro leagues so he wouldn't draw attention. The entry isn't wrong, but the parenthetical part isn't really relevant to the trope, I think.
Edited by Tabs
Even if the Negro league part is relevant, I think the word "Negro" in that example should be substituted for "Negro League Baseball"—in that case, the reader would understand NLB as a proper noun referring to something that existed in 1947 and check Wikipedia themselves, rather mistaking it as a reference to Black people.
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"Posing as a player in Negro League Baseball" would probably work better.
I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me
Or even "NLB Baseball Player"
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^It's relevant that the NLB was a league for black players, so if you don't spell it out, you'll probably have to explain what the NLB was.
I don't know how it's relevant at all. The thing making the protagonist pass out is that Exley is an alien, not that he was posing as a black man playing baseball. So it could just say "he's been posing as a human" and have the same meaning.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I think that Tabs and Bean are right: not relevant for this particular trope example. (Though probably relevant to understanding the episode as a whole - but that would be on another page.
The rest of you did give me better ways to say this in a case where this particular point was relevant.
I ran across this example while working on a TLP - the examples were mined from another page.
I'm aware of recent discussion on Trope Talk to the effect that some tropes maintain dated language in their titles because the specific connotations of that language are part of what the trope is about.
What about here? I don't want to whitewash the time period, or bury the existence of Negro League Baseball
, but I don't think this is a direct quote from the episode either.
What's the most appropriate way to phrase this? I've not seen this episode... is the character's (assumed) ethnicity relevant? I'm kind of guessing that it might be... someone treated as "Other" turns out to be much more other than first thought...
EDIT: I think I was getting too much tunnel vision due to alphabetizing
Edited by underCoverSailsman