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openWhat warrants a character specific page?
My logic making Character Specific Pages and by what's described on main itself is to reserve it for characters who'd otherwise take up a large chunk of the page. I've been going off word count a lot of the time, and most of the ones I've seen have anywhere from five to ten thousand words. Others I've talked to have argued for trope count instead, but I've seen no steadfast rule on that, so I wasn't sure whether to take it into consideration.
Edited by IkeaHanopenRetcon vs Continuity Error?
WandaVision and WandaVision Episode 8 "Previously On":
- Series Continuity Error: A very, very minor discrepancy when depicting Wanda's backstory in "Previously On" - Pietro recounts to Ultron in Age of Ultron that the Maximoff family was having dinner when the bombings hit. When shown the episode itself, the family is having a TV night, watching The Dick Van Dyke Show together, but clearly not eating dinner while doing so. Wanda's mother is even washing dishes when the scene begins, implying dinner was already over by then. Could be justified if one assumes Wanda's memory of such a traumatic event was imperfect and Pietro's Age of Ultron explanation was him misremembering it.
- Retcon: Avengers: Age of Ultron has Pietro's detailed description of the destruction of the Maximoff home, including that it was during dinner and that the floor fell from under them. This doesn't happen in Wanda's flashback here; instead, the family was watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show when the bomb hit, and it caused the roof to collapse.
- Series Continuity Error: In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ultron created Vision by bonding Vibranium to synthetic human tissue using Doctor Helen Cho's Regeneration Cradle. In this episode, Vision's vivisected body contains wires and circuitry, with no trace of organic matter. However, his head clearly contained wires and circuits when Thanos ripped the Mind Stone out, so it may instead be a Retcon.
Retcons are deliberate changes while error is unintentional so these seem mutually exclusive. I'm leaning to the backstory being a Retcon as it's changing a minor, relatively unimportant detail replacing it with something major and important to the plot. Not sure about the Vision one. Thoughts?
open Is this real life section a RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment violation?
Before I start, I should address that I brought this up in the violations thread about three days ago
, but I haven't gotten any response.
The page for Sensitivity Training has a Real Life section that seems to be more focused on bashing the concept of sensitivity training. Especially the Drew Carey entry:
- According to Bill Maher, before a group of firefighters was allowed to help hurricane survivors, they were required to attend an 8-hour sexual harassment sensitivity training course. Many would query whether sexual harassment sensitivity training is related to hurricanes and see this as a classic example of Political Correctness Gone Mad. However, traumatized disaster survivors are extremely vulnerable and easily taken advantage of, and aid workers are often in a position of such authority that even the best-meaning agencies have some individuals who will do rather horrible things. Pleasant nightmares.
- In the United States Military, SHARP training is emphasized heavily and is often mocked by the servicemembers. There are several reasons for this, including the generally boring and often offensive nature of the programs (more than a few SHARP sessions have stopped just short of saying, "All men are rapists, but some just don't know it yet"), double standards (it's okay if we do it, but it's racist/sexist/otherwise bad if you do it), lack of applicability ("How does this help us kill people and break shit?" is a frequent complaint), and the fact that the officers administering the SHARP program are frequently caught committing some kind of sexual misconduct.
- Drew Carey spoke in his book about how following a slew of sexual harrassment lawsuits at Warner Bros. in 1996, management made it so everybody who worked on the Warner Brothers lot had to be at, and sign attendance for, one sexual harassment awareness seminar. He thought it was a shame when a great company had to go to such "extreme measure" because of the complaints of a few people, like how safety training is mandatory even though only a few people die each year from work place hazard. The few people being "militant feminists" and "everyone else in this society that needs to play political victim and go to court instead of just dealing with it themselves". A celebrity like him could no longer look a second too long at someone's tits or let the women who worked on his show give him a hug without him freezing up in fear of litigation. This had turned his workplace and "every workplace in America into Salem, Massachusetts".
- While he was at it, he didn't want naval aviators to attend sensitivity training either. And that was in response to the Tailhook scandal.
Carey thought "one uptight biddy" (likely Sheila Widnall, who was made the first female Secretary of the Air Force in the wake of the Tailhook scandal) should not be able to come in and stop such festivities. He also believed that while "grabbing some tits" was wrong, it was nothing to lose a career over, and a wimp who couldn't handle having her tits grabbed without calling "a press conference and a lawyer", should be flying kites not jet fighters. Why a pro-military man would want the military to tolerate behaviors that actively reduce its effectiveness is unclear.
- While he was at it, he didn't want naval aviators to attend sensitivity training either. And that was in response to the Tailhook scandal.
A bracketed-out note was actually added by a troper two years ago
pointing out the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment violation in the language:
"The following entry definitely needs a rewrite for more neutral language. Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement still applies here, and this entry clearly isn't following that. The entry isn't describing the example so much as just barely paraphrasing it with few quotation marks. And additionally, this entry uses langauge jarringly different from Tv Tropes' usual language. What responsible troper uses the word "tits" in a description? All in all, this entry looks like if somebody reading the book itself went "damn right" and then copied the passage directly into this page, only changing first person into third person and putting a few random parts of sentences in quotes."
Any thoughts?
Edited by SkylaNoivernopenZero-context example? Western Animation
So this example caught my attention on the YMMV subpage for VeggieTales:
- Seasonal Rot: A show about talking vegetables was bound to succumb to this. Phil stated in a podcast that he noticed that the post-Jonah episodes aren't as successful (in terms of selling) as the older ones, and speculates how it's probably how the media reacts nowadays.
I think it might be a Zero-Context Example, since you'd expect the example to explain what in the show itself is demonstrating the seasonal rot. How the media reacts to it doesn't seem like it should be the explanation here. So, would it be a zero-context example?
openSpecific image won't upload Videogame
I've been adding images to Characters.Temtem, and today I wanted to add images of Hidody and Taifu. Problem is, the Hidody image
I downloaded from the Wikia wouldn't upload; when I clicked "submit", it cancelled itself before it could load the popup with the URL and formatting in it. I chalked this up to the uploader not working... but a few hours later, I tried again, and it still didn't work, but an image of Taifu
that I downloaded from the same site uploaded just fine. Is the file corrupted?
openUndoing edits without discussion
I originally raised this on the Moments clean-up thread, but it was suggested I flag it in ATT as well. The full clean-up thread post is here
.
The summary for ATT purposes is this:
The troper Bellaboo2 has added back two Tear Jerker entries (removed from YMMV.RWBY Chibi), with original wording intact. The edit reason
is long, but basically makes it clear that:
- They're aware of the Moments clean-up thread and have read the reasons for the removal (since they're twisting one of the reasons).
- They have zero intention of engaging in a discussion about it.
- They seem to be confused about the difference between a summary of a scene and a summary of an audience reaction to a scene.
- They can't be bothered to rewrite the entries as legitimate audience reactions to get them added back to the page in a legitimate way... despite being willing to write audience reactions into the edit reason itself. This baffles me: if you're making the effort to write a legitimate audience reaction, why not do it to the entry itself instead of the edit reason?
Edited to add a link to the YMMV page the edit occurred on.
Edited by WyldchyldopenStock Parody Jokes
I think Stock Parody Jokes may need a cleanup. Some of them are just making comments about the quality of a work (such as "the Super Mario Bros movie is bad" or "the later SpongeBob seasons are just mean-spirited grossout") instead of specific kinds of jokes parodies do.
Also, some of the examples are getting redundant (nearly every work with anthropomorphic animals has a "the show is furry bait" example), and there's even an example related not to the work, but to the author ("HP Lovecraft was racist" is listed under the Cthulhu Mythos in the Literature page, even though that's a joke about Lovecraft himself, not the Cthulhu Mythos).
openWhat Could Have Been use?
I have a question about this I found on a characters page.
- LoveTriangle: [[WhatCouldHaveBeen Had the series continued]] he would have eventually found himself in one of these.
Is What Could Have Been not allowed under character pages or non-Trivia tropes as it doesn't happen in the actual work? Or is it allowed if the series never reached the point to contradict it (the notes the author revealed it in are effectively the continuation of the work as opposed to something they changed their mind about, or does it not count as they might have changed it in the final product?) and/or only allowed if it provides important context for what is there (like what it was building to)?
Edited by Ferot_DreadnaughtopenAnother work page for, uhm, a page that doesn't exist.
Yeah, found this at random: Greetings From Magical Los Angeles
Originally I was going to send this to the ZCE Cleanup thread (because seriously, try counting the ZCE on thr page itself) but after some checking, the last update was exactly a decade ago. And the link on the page leads to a "[[
https://comicfury.com/webcomicerror.php
Webcomic Error]]" something something.
Anyone aware of this thing's existance? Or just cutlist the work already?
openCan someone please explain these two terms to me?
- There was a forum thread for cleaning up "hindsight tropes", and I asked why "Funny Aneurysm" Moment was listed as one despite not having the word "hindsight" in its name, but the only explanation I got was that it was a hindsight trope, so I still don't know what a "hindsight trope" is.
- What are "special characters"? Often, text turns into gibberish in the TLP and people explain that that's what happens when people type "special characters", but what are they?
openNo Title
Troper Curiousice
edited Ambiguously Gay
to change the pronouns on the trope description and inserted some lines that imply deliberate lesbian erasure (when the first example, posted by myself as a queer woman, was clearly meant to be a hypothetical case not meant to speak for all instances of this trope, and the page itself has plenty of female examples). The edits strike me as Righting Great Wrongs. A bunch of their
other
edits
also have elements of editorializing when it comes to LGBT issues as well. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but not in line with troper etiquette on style conventions of neutrality, and the edit reasons are either lacking or quarrelsome.
openNoRealLife Quotes?
I Reject Your Reality is NoRealLife.Too Controversial, so I assume RL quotes are thus not allowed for the same reason, right? I'll cut it unless I hear any objections.
I've seen No Real Life quote pages use RL examples discussing the trope as opposed to giving specific examples. Are those allowed?
openACI misuse?
AlternativeCharacterInterpretation.SCP Foundation:
- SCP-447 may do something unimaginably horrible when brought into contact with dead bodies... or it may simply have a memetic effect that makes people think it does.
I think this is misuse as 447 is not a character so what's being interpreted alternately isn' character related. I’ve seen Ambiguous Situation used for another non-character SCP that was intentionally ambiguous. This sounds more like Wild Mass Guessing as it’s the first I’ve heard it as opposed to the common speculations I’ve seen for 447.
AlternativeCharacterInterpretation.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic:
- The "Screwball" pony flying around with a propeller hat could be like Pinkie: a pony that would be happy if Discord's reign was permanent ("Eternal chaos comes with chocolate rain!"). Then there is the idea that she was created by him.
- When she first appeared there were interpretations that she is a normal pony, possibly a baseball star, who only seemed unusual due to Discord screwing with everything.
- Celestia and Luna being Physical Goddesses is itself an ACI; there are numerous hints for it, most significantly their dominion over celestial bodies, the aspects of nature they represent, and their extensive lifespan, but the actual word god/goddess has never been used in the series. Less common is the interpretation that they are "merely" extremely powerful ponies, or two of the few remaining alicorns after their race was nearly rendered extinct. With the introduction of "Age Spells" in "Magic Duel", spells that can alter the age of the target but can only be cast by the most powerful of casters, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna's immortality may not even be inherent but the product of repeated self-cast Age Spells (which would also explain Luna's difference in appearance between her first and second appearance).
- This is further complicated by the presence of Princess Cadance. Is she also a Physical Goddess? We are told that she is the niece of Princess Celestia, but she couldn't be Luna's child. Luna spent the last thousand years in the moon. So who are her parents? Is she also immortal, and will she outlive her husband Shining Armor? Does she even have a blood relation to the Royal Pony Sisters? (It should be noted that Cadance was originally conceived as a unicorn but made an alicorn because of Executive Meddling.) Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell expanded on Princess Cadence's backstory and where she came from: It is revealed that Cadence was originally an orphaned pegasus that was adopted by an earth pony village. A Wicked Witch by the name of Prismia attacked the village by draining all their love for each other. Cadence somehow defeated her and was magically transported to the same "interstice" that Twilight went to when she completed Starswirl's unfinished spell. She met Princess Celestia there and was turned into an alicorn, adopted by Celestia, and made a princess herself. Whether this is canon or not is up in the air right now, but this is the closest thing to a backstory she has so far.
- Then Twilight became an alicorn, also making her a princess, bringing another whole host of questions. Do all alicorns "earn" their ascension this way? If so, how did the other three do so? Can it be given as some sort of reward or a Enlightenment Superpower? Is Twilight now immortal? And if she is, is this a way to give Celestia some more company for her eternal life?
The first is a very minor background character with only two scenes and seconds of screentime. This sounds more like WMG or O.C. Stand-in as ACI seems misused for one too minor to have primary character interpretation for fanon to deviate from. The second is Fanon/speculation over how alicorns work in the setting and backstory. These seem misused as ACI as they have nothing to do with characterization or character motives/actions.
Thoughts?
openEdit war on Characters/MyHeroAcademiaSchoolFacultyAndStaff
Courtesy link: My Hero Academia - School Faculty and Staff, history
The following entry has been removed and re-added multiple times:
- Forgotten Fallen Friend: She is completely forgotten about almost immediately after her death, with no one shown mourning or even acknowledging it. Even Aizawa, her childhood friend, bluntly states that it doesn't matter and they have "more important things" to worry about.
- It was first added by Some New Guy on April 24, 2021
- It was then removed by Bio Yu Gi on June 24, 2021, with the edit reason "She is very visibly mourned by the students"
- It was then promptly re-added by Some New Guy the same day, with the edit reason "Yeah they mourned her for about a single panel before the cast and the story itself acted like she never even existed."
- Then removed by jdixon0151 today, with the edit reason "Her death was acknowledged by present mic, and it has not been that many chapter since then, so we really can't just say she has been forgotten or that the story is acting like she never existed in the first place"
So in addition to the edit war they are holding a discussion in the edit reasons.
Edited by SynchronicityopenBad history in OlderThanDirt
I believe I asked about this a year or two ago, but can't find the old thread.
Someone has added highly contentious statements about the oral traditions of certain cultures to Older Than Dirt - claiming without any hedging that they accurately record memories of events from tens of thousands of years ago. While of course this is possible, the truth of these claims is fundamentally unknowable, and for this reason the vast majority of relevant scholars don't take these ideas terribly seriously. As Older Than Dirt itself notes:
"Note: Tropes originating in mythologies/religions that aren't Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, Vedic, or Chinese are never indexed here, as we have no idea whether those stories even existed in 800 BC, or what form they had, centuries or millennia before they were first written down. [...] Early folklorists often started with the assumption that folktales and myths were primordial; more research has shown that people can and do modify all sorts of tales for any purpose."
I think we should generalize the above statement to cover oral traditions as well. Otherwise, we'd need to list every single culture with a flood myth, as it's at least conceivable that such myths retain a memory of some Ice Age-era deluge.
openDewicking help?
Is there an appropriate place to ask for wick cleaning help? Famous Last Words has 4000+ wicks that need cleaning post a TRS decision, and Last Words itself (which is an index, and therefore shouldn't be listed as a trope) has a similar amount.
openNot an example of Idiot Plot? Western Animation
From Idiot Plot - Animated Films:
- The entire Final Battle of Incredibles 2 could have been shortened considerably if not outright avoided, allowing the capture the Big Bad before they fled the ship and preventing the entire crash, had anyone actually targeted the mind-controlling goggles during the fights. It's at least a bit understandable with the kids given their age and lack of experience, but the adults really should have tried just plucking them off instead of running or fighting until the goggles happened to fall off. Ironically the only character who does do this is Jack-Jack, entirely by accident, when reaching for his mom, showing how swift and effortless it really would have been.
In reality, adults did try to remove mind-controlling goggles from other supers as soon as they're freed (of course, with the difficulty of taking away a mind-controlling device from an enhanced human who fights back), and they manage to remove them, they don't just "happen to fall off". It's true that in the previous scenes kids didn't try to remove the goggles, but the entry itself suggests that their age and lack of experience can be a forgiving factor.
Since it's not A story driven entirely by all the characters being idiots that would otherwise take less than five minutes to resolve, but a specific scene, wouldn't that count at best as a Downplayed Idiot Ball, and perhaps not even that?
Bumping because the entry was readded. Edited by gc10
openReadding incorrect entries Web Original
On Characters.Death Battle Season Eight, this entry was added:
- Adaptational Wimp: Not Link himself — who puts up a strong fight against Cloud before losing — but his much-hyped Fierce Deity form, which gets hit almost immediately by Cloud's Omnislash V5 Limit Break and then dies seconds later without even so much as landing an attack.
I removed it with the reasoning that it was less about Link being nerfed and more of Cloud simply being stronger, as seen in the animation itself
.
Then Gf93, a troper that I have brought up multiple
times
for reinserting entries before, readded the entry under Clipped-Wing Angel, which again, does not count since the Fierce Deity is never shown as a detriment to Link.
Is it okay if I remove this entry?

I launched my trope Lady Luck from TLP the other day. The page itself looks fine. But if I look at history in TLP, the draft is listed as nuked, not launched. And the trope isn't showing up in the tab of recent launches. What gives?
Edited by pyroclastic