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 is for:
- General questions about the wiki, how it works, and how to do things.
- Reports of problems with wiki articles, or requests for help with wiki articles.
- Reports of misbehavior or abuse by other tropers.
Ask the Tropers is not for:
- Help identifying a trope. See TropeFinder.
- Help identifying a work. See MediaFinder.
- Asking if a trope example is valid. See the Trope Talk forum.
- Proposing new tropes. See TropeLaunchPad.
- Making bug reports. See QueryBugs.
- Asking for new wiki features. See QueryWishlist.
- Chatting with other tropers. See our forums.
- Reporting problems with advertisements. See this forum topic.
- Reporting issues on the forums. Send a Holler instead.
Ask the Tropers:
openCan Trivia be played with? Videogame
Exactly What It Says on the Tin: I'm wondering if Trivia can be played with. Specifically, I'm asking in regards to Trivia.Super Smash Bros, as the Unintentional Period Piece has two bullet points; one which explains how the first three games are this (due to them being Museum Games that released before games could be regularly updated, and as such are limited to what existed at the time of development), and one which explains how the fourth and fifth games avert this by adding in new content from games which were concurrent to and/or released after Smash itself.
I looked at What Goes Where on the Wiki and Trivia and they don't mention it at all; compare to YMMV.Home Page, which does.
openLaconic troubles...
Laconic.Zeldas Honor was brought up in the Laconic improvement thread
for being distinctly unlaconic (i.e. way too dang long). We took a crack at trimming it down
, but Chrononaut 70 came back and added many of the unnecessary words back
.
Can't revert it ourself cause that's an edit war, pinging them in the thread
got no response so we think they just don't read their DMs.
halp
openVideo examples for Let's Player without a page? Videogame
I have a potential video example I want to upload, but it's from a Let's Play by HawkZombie
, who doesn't have a page here. His channel isn't very big yet (he has 359 subscribers right now), and I don't know enough about him to start a page for him.
What's the best way to handle this? Is it okay to only use the game itself as the video source? Can I link to the original video, or the player's channel, in the description?
It has to be from this Let's Play because the trope depends on the player's reaction.
Edited by DrNoPumaopenBrokenMasquerade - no examples list
The trope page Broken Masquerade is a bit... odd. To start, it's sort of written "in character", like the writer is part of the masquerade and is delivering The Reveal to the reader. From what I've seen, that sort of thing seems to be used more in Self-Demonstrating/ pages than Main/. Maybe this is actually okay; it just struck me as a bit unusual.
The bigger issue, though, is that there isn't an example list. There's a subbullet under each main "type" of masquerade (like Tomato in the Mirror, Hidden Realm, etc) with a list of "Signature Examples" provided, but it's just a list of works with no explanation of how they fit.
Is it okay to restructure it like a typical trope page, with examples in a separate section? Broken Masquerade currently has 752 wicks, so I could probably find at least a 5-10 good examples to start off the crosswicking.
Edited by Willowleaf24openWebcomic page wiped by creator Webcomic
It seems that we have one of these situations again: Gerbil1
wiped pretty much everything on the The Misadventures Of Gerbil main page and YMMV page. The main page edit had the following edit reason:
As author of this page (and the original comic), this was a mistake. The comic itself has long been wiped from the internet. I'd prefer not to have my name associated with it any longer.
For the record, the link that was on the page does not appear to work any longer, but I haven't done anything past that to see if it still exists in some fashion.
openCan you settle my disputes of MichaelKatsuro's edits on the Ghosts of the Future articles? Webcomic
To complete the plan for my final revisions of the Ghosts of the Future articles and because of the strict Edit War policy and the fact MichaelKatsuro sides with all of his edits, I have to bring up my disputes of MichaelKatsuro's edits here for other tropers to address and suggest ways to settle them. I'd like at least two tropers to address them all.
Webcomic.Ghosts Of The Future / General
- Can the Nipple and Dimed example be reverted back to the previous version? Right now, it's just listing examples of nipple exposure in the comic, which is People Sitting On Chairs. The previous version explored the difference of nipple detail based on gender, which is what the Nipple and Dimed trope is all about.
- What's wrong with the curly brackets? I used to edit [[LikeThis this, when someone one day corrected me to use {{Like|this}}, so I went by that since then (not to mention it saves source code size). Is there a rule against them? Additionally, MichaelKatsuro typo'd Fusion Dance as Fusion Danc.
- Can the adverbs for the Sorceress' nipples can be added back, because they do give a different meaning than without adverbs? Importantly, should we still emphasize the nipples frequently (this is in an American perspective, because I, Evan Stanley, and many tropers are American)? I don't want to traumatize children nor get attacked by angry parents, but I don't want to shame Evan Stanley.
- Can the bit about Evan Stanley Lampshading the Talking Heads trope be added back, since that really adds to the example?
- Revised example for Ghosts of the Future's example on Mohs Scale Of Violence Hardness:
- Ghosts of the Futurenote Would've been a level 6 if it weren't for Sonic dying with large yet crudely-drawn bloody flesh wounds, the sight of Tails' bloody corpse with a large gash in one eye, and a character being impaled in both of his hands which results in thick blood dripping out of his wounds and huge bloodstains
Characters.Ghosts Of The Future
- Why are the "(UNMARKED SPOILERS)" notices removed? Is there a rule against folders with unmarked spoilers now? I think most of the spoilers for characters are Late Arrival Spoilers now, but I'd appreciate if they had spoiler warnings tagged for those wanting to enjoy the comic. I think if there's such a rule, the sheet might as well as Spoilers Off to be fair for all folders.
- Can the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment example be added back? I think the nipples are shocking enough to point Evan Stanley regards them as Old Shame- How about Shocking Moments instead?
- In issue 6, the Sorceress of the Dark Isle transforms into Darkwing and becomes naked. While her other parts are covered up with a Censor Shadow, her nipples are shown, yet lack so much detail they barely count as nipples. Many readers were shocked by this bit of partial nudity showing up in a Sonic fancomic, and Evan Stanley has now sees it as Old Shame.
- (Another Shocking Moments example) In issue 17, readers were shocked by the incident in which Mettalix impales Silver's hands and an abundant amount of red blood draws out.
- Proposed revision of the What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids? example (and its identical counterpart on the trope example), which I think is better and lacks Word Cruft (Word Cruft takes the form of unnecessary words, these words add more detail for people to get a glimpse of the work; also, should the bit about one of the pages' description on DeviantArt having an erection joke be added back because I think that's still part of the work, as Evan Stanley considers her DeviantArt profile to be the comic's main host, or is the comic itself PG-13 enough to overlook that?):
- Even though Ghosts of the Future is a Sonic The Hedgehog fancomic by who is now an official Sonic comic artist and writer, it is not for children. The comic starts off with Sonic and his best friends being bloodily massacred by a mind-controlled Shadow, which results in Sonic and Shadow enduring trauma and guilt. There's shedding of red blood, infrequent and usually mild profanity, some sexual innuendonote such as the Visual Innuendo of the Sorceress holding the long neck of a jug between her breasts, and brief, non-sexual, and partial nudity in the form of rudimentary-looking yet visibly erect nipples. Nevertheless, little kids still read the comic, which encouraged
Stanley to add Content Warnings to the issue 17 incident.
- Even though Ghosts of the Future is a Sonic The Hedgehog fancomic by who is now an official Sonic comic artist and writer, it is not for children. The comic starts off with Sonic and his best friends being bloodily massacred by a mind-controlled Shadow, which results in Sonic and Shadow enduring trauma and guilt. There's shedding of red blood, infrequent and usually mild profanity, some sexual innuendonote such as the Visual Innuendo of the Sorceress holding the long neck of a jug between her breasts, and brief, non-sexual, and partial nudity in the form of rudimentary-looking yet visibly erect nipples. Nevertheless, little kids still read the comic, which encouraged
- Move Evan Stanley's quote in The Woobie examples to the first bullet point, next the "The Woobie:".
openMore custom titling kerfuffles
Colon Cancer was recently custom titled to be self demonstrating. While this is somewhat amusing, it also renders the title nonsensical and isn't even an actual example of the trope since there's only one colon, not at least two (and there can't be more colons without breaking the words up, of course). We discussed this a bit here
already. I personally think it should be changed back; do I have permission to do that?
openIs this a Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment violation?
I think it's pretty obvious that discussing Chris-chan can easily fall under Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment, so seeing this in Muse Abuse was a surprise. It appears to be old though, since it still uses Chris' deadname:
"Back in 2006 and 2007, Christian Weston Chandler wrote about his then-"gal pal" Megan, portraying her as a Sailor Soldier head over heels in love with him. Megan wasn't pleased with his assumption that they were in a relationship. Fast-forward to November 2007, when Chris posts a porn drawing of himself having sex with Megan on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Megan sees it and is horrified; Chris defends the art by explaining the sex act to her while missing the point that Megan was not horrified at the act depicted, but rather at the subject of the pic. He later claimed that what she was suffering was nothing compared to what he was going through at the hands of the trolls. She hasn't talked to him since."
It is an awful thing to do and I'm not defending it, but the It's All About Me link and the fact its about a contentious figure make me wonder if it violates ROCEJ.
Edited by SkylaNoivernopenAccentuating the Negative
I feel like Website.Tumblr has an overly negative feel to it. Most of the tropes seem to talk about how banning adult comment resulted in tons of other problems. It feels like said problems are the focus of the trope page itself.
(Sorry if this isn’t making sense, I’m sleep-deprived.)
openAgenda-based editing?
Malcolm Crown added these to the most recent edit on the YMMV.Them 2021 page:
- Audience-Alienating Premise: A lot of people weren’t interested in the idea of yet another TV show with a black main cast focusing on black pain and Woke Identity Politics at the expense of good storytelling. As such, many viewers both white and black just wanted a new and original horror story in the vein of Film/Us in which the main characters being black was just a matter of fact, as this would have done much more for fair representation than racism being the crux of the story, thus once more reducing people of colour to nothing more than the colour of their skin and the suffering that can come with it.
- Broken Base: Some think it’s a great, terrifying horror story that conveys the suffering of the black community in the 1950s in a visceral way that hits you like a gut punch and leaves you feeling relieved with the Catharsis Factor of the final episode, others say that it’s degradation porn and others think it’s just Woke shit.
They also added this to the Unfortunate Implications part:
- All of the black characters are completely good and all of the white characters are corrupt, weak or pure evil. This is in stark contrast with other stories about injustice such as To Kill a Mockingbird or X-Men which makes a point that immorality and bigotry can come from either side of the aisle.
- As in Get Out!!, the most despicable among the white human antagonists is a woman, which is full of Unfortunate Implications of racist misogyny towards white women, not helped by the recent emergence of the Karen meme. What makes this worse is that Alison Pill has herself described Betty as a "Karen".
Their edit reason was: "Much as I love the show, it's not above criticism." No citations for their Unfortunate Implications and violating the 6-month wait rule for Broken Base aside, the "woke shit", "woke identity politics" phrasing and seeing Betty's storyline as racist towards white women are rather concerning.
I've also checked their edit history and I'm not sure what to make of it since I'm not familiar with these other works, but I've also found an edit on YMMV.Torchwood that removes mention of Torchwood being believers in "extreme imperialistic and racist British nationalism" to just "extreme nationalism", with the edit reason being "Torchwood are never shown to be racist and not everyone would say that imperialism and nationalism are necessarily evil."
Outside of that, their other edits including on the other Series.Them 2021 pages seem fine, but these still feel like red flags.
Edited by CommanderVisoropenCharacters.SeriousSamBosses - Regarding ZumZum: BeeAfraid or WickedWasps? Videogame
So, basically, more than two weeks ago, I was busy prowling through Bee Afraid wicks to clean them up (since Bee Afraid now covers only dangerous/antagonistic bee characters or species; the original definition is covered by Scary Stinging Swarm). One of these wicks was located in Characters.Serious Sam Bosses, describing a boss called ZumZum. Here's the entry that contained the wick:
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: A freaking huge wasp.
Naturally, I replaced the wick with a wick for the Wicked Wasps trope. But later, a troper called AM_NK added the separate Bee Afraid wick, describing ZumZum as "a giant mook-making bee" (yet, surprisingly, not rewriting other wicks and not even removing the Wicked Wasps wick), and then added ZumZum as an example in the main Bee Afraid page.
Now, that's when the confusion rises. I was very hesitant to remove the Bee Afraid wick (since it would count as an example of edit-warring), but the page now simultaneously calls ZumZum a wasp and then contradicts itself by calling it a bee. And as far as I'm aware, no insect can simultaneously be a bee and a wasp.
To settle this, I decided to browse the internet for the information regarding ZumZum. The wiki page on Serious Sam Wiki
calls ZumZum a hornet-like creature (and its Russian counterpart outright refers to it as a mutated hornet). Also, judging by how the character looks
◊, it looks more like a wasp to me. However, [[https://serioussam.fandom.com/wiki/ZumZum_Jr
. the mooks it spawns]] definitely resemble bees more, which would make ZumZum itself a weird-looking bee by association.
I've never played Serious Sam game series in my life, so I have zero understanding about the game's lore, characters, and stuff. So I'd like to ask, what should be done here? Should we rewrite the entry to call it a wasp (therefore, removing the Bee Afraid wick), or a bee (therefore, removing the Wicked Wasps wick)? Or should we just Take a Third Option and call it a "bee/wasp thing", keeping both wicks?
Oh, and should we bring AM_NK to this thread? I'd like to hear what they have to say on this stance.
Edited by I--Vanya--IopenPossible agenda based editing
Swim To The Moon made some edits that seem to be agenda based.
This query
shows they had an edit reason which said negative stereotypes about Egypt were actually true.
They also added this to Live-Action Films (0-F) about Black Christmas, which has some rather questionable attitudes about feminism and according to another editor also contains false information (havent watched the movie myself)
"Then there's a fact that the film was made purely as an angry feminist diatribe who seems to hate men. While the original 1974 film had a political feminist subplot, said subplot only took up 10 minutes of that film. The whole movie's plot is that a year after main character Riley was sexually assaulted by a member of a fraternity, they stumble upon a conspiracy that said maternity are members of a cult trying to kill people on campus. Saying the film is Anvilicious is an understatement; the film drops an entire factory of anvils on the viewer; the most blatant example happens halfway through when the film stops completely in its tracks to have its characters engage in a screaming match at each other over whether or not all men are rapists, a scene that doesn't even tie in very well with the film's core message, especially since the film goes back to the way it was like nothing happened. And as if this wasn't bad enough, the movie can't even get its own moral values right. The film's twist is that the fraternity are a cult being mind controlled by a humanoid alien. So for all we know, the men themselves may not have raped anyone knowingly, and taking this a step further, it also turns out that Riley accused the wrong guy of sexual assault, yet the film still acts as if she was right to do that. Because remember, kids! false rape accusations are completely okay!"
openLobo Self-Demonstrating Page Print Comic
Lobo is a thing, but Lobo isn't. Should the latter also be a thing, like we did for Deadpool?
openQuestionable use of SixthRanger on Yu Gi Oh Card Game Character Sheets
So a lot of folders on the Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Game Character Sheets use Sixth Ranger to describe... a lot of different things. These uses primarily concern the relationships between individual monster cards and card archetypes, likening the archetype to the ensemble and the individual monster to the sixth ranger in the definition of Sixth Ranger.
- Often times, the trope is used when a monster card that is not a member of the archetype supports the archetype's playstyle. These individual monster cards are sometimes related to the archetype's theme and/or have explicit lines in their effects that name the archetype, while other times the monster-archetype connections are more fuzzy and the connections are purely on the gameplay level.
- Example: Characters.Yu Gi Oh Card Game A To B, Burning Abyss: While not a Burning Abyss monster herself, Beatrice, Lady of the Eternal supports the archetype and can use a Dante monster as a shortcut to summon herself. (Writer's note: Beatrice is theme-wise directly related to the Burning Abyss archetype)
- Sometimes, this trope is used when an archetype receives new supporting archetype monsters long after its debut.
- Example: Characters.Yu Gi Oh Card Game A To B, A-to-Z: The ABC machines were added long after the VWXYZ series were introduced.
- More rarely, it's used when a card is a member of an archetype (often on purely technical, Exact Words scenarios) but supports the archetypal playstyle poorly.
- Example: Characters.Yu Gi Oh Card Game E To F, Egyptian Gods: Because of its name, Blaze Cannon is a member of the Blaze Accelerator archetype, and can thus be added from the Deck or Graveyard to the hand with the effect of Volcanic Rocket. However, it is unrelated to other Blaze Accelerator cards and the Volcanic monsters, and does not support their playstyle.
There might be some other fringe uses that I haven't fully covered.
My question is, are these uses misuses? Should I cut them or rephrase them to fit the trope better?
Edited by WuzopenCalvin and Hobbes Headscratchers page
The main C&H Headscratchers page used to be an index for the pages devoted to the comic itself and more meta/Watterson examples. Now the meta page is gone, so there's no need for the index anymore. Could someone move Calvin And Hobbes In Universe back to Calvin and Hobbes?
(And if the old meta content is still kicking around somewhere, could we salvage it and move it to YMMV/BillWatterson?)
open Cannibalism Superpower Question
This trope is about someone having the ability to gain another persons power by eating a part of them. But there is one example that I don't think counts regarding My Hero Academia character Tamaki Amajiki/Suneater.
Tamaki has the Quirk, Manifest, that allows him to gain the attributes of whatever he eats, like gaining talons and wings from eating chicken or a cattle hoof from eating beef. On both the Character page and on the main trope page it references one scene in which Tamaki manifests crystals after he eats a small crystal shard that was made by a villain who can make crystals with his Quirk. However, I'm pretty sure that doesn't count as an example, as Tamaki is simply manifesting the crystal itself, not copying the guys power to make crystals. Especially since I couldn't find any official source that states that he is copying the power or that it is an ability of his Quirk to copy powers.
This is why I don't think it really counts as an example of Cannibalism Superpower However, I wasn't sure whether it was right of me to remove it without asking first.
Edited by NejiiuynopenWhat is this bullshit Videogame
Alright, who the hell decided it was a good idea to add a page image to Awesome.The Binding Of Isaac? The page itself is shoehorning a lot.
Edited by Spidey

Is Lying Creator supposed to refer only to cases where the creators lie about the plot in order to protect plot twists? The page itself has many examples of creators "lying" about other things. I kind of feel like stretching it beyond twist-hiding lies might make it too complain-baity and subjective.