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:
openBatman Beyond videos Western Animation
A lot of the video examples for Batman Beyond specifically come from Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. However, the trope page for Return of the Joker does not itself have video examples. Shouldn't the videos be attributed to Return of the Joker instead of/in addition to the main series?
openPlaying With Page
So I was reading the playing with page for Good Old Fisticuffs and most of it was about a Boxing Battler or a person who incorporates boxing in their fighting against a karateka to illustrate the trope and how it can be played with. The problem is that the Good Old Fisticuffs trope is specifically about a brawler with no established fighting style being better than those who trained in a fighting style or martial art, and boxing is technically a fighting style if not a martial art itself. Normally I'd just edit it myself but it makes up so much of the page that I'm at a loss at what to do.
openOverly Long Notes In Quotes
These are from Quotes.Game Breaker. Should the notes be trimmed down, since they're hard to read even if they do prevent a Zero Context Example?
openGroups of characters as Ensemble Darkhorses?
A few months ago, I deleted a couple of Ensemble Dark Horse entries in the The Powerpuff Girls page because they listed teams of characters as examples of the trope. My understanding is that this trope, as the name would suggest, only applies to specific, individual characters within each group, not to multiple members at once.
A troper has re-added the deleted entries, reasoning that "nothing on the Ensemble Dark Horse states that it has to be individual character". However, the page actually states the exact opposite: "Although this applies to individual characters, as a YMMV item, it should not be listed on character pages."
I also took a look at the cleanup thread and found a couple
of posts
that confirm that groups should not be listed as examples. However, the messages are kind of old, and the thread itself seems to not be active, so I don't know whether the rule still stands.
So, tropers, are those valid entries? And if not, should I cut them again?
openNeed more voices
So the Trans To Cis Censorship
draft, spawned from the discussion over She's a Man in Japan, has only been up for about a day but is attracting a lot of controversy, as the hat-bomb ratio will let you know.
The issue is that, despite a lot of people voting on the draft, the actual discussion is going around in circles. I don't think we're going to get any resolution at the rate we're going, and we need more people to get involved in the debate. The debate itself is mostly over whether or not the trope should expand- I'm firmly on the "expand" side, but I don't care how this resolves as much as I care that it is resolved and that we don't just battle over hats and bombs without actually, properly, discussing the issue.
I'm not going to bring the debate here so I won't go through all the points, it's all on the draft itself, I'm just asking for more people to get involved and give their opinions rather than just tossing a hat or bomb.
openTrope or index
Is Exotic Weapon Supremacy a trope or an index? Its description seems like a trope, similar to Heroes Prefer Swords, but one that places the Improbable Weapon User above all the rest. However, the itself page have no examples, and only lists a bunch of "related tropes" that doesn't seem to be actual subtropes.
Edited by AdeptopenArguing-against-self Narm entries?
I've noticed on entries for Narm across the wiki (I may even be guilty of it myself, not sure) that they occasionally include lines of explanation. For example, "It's hard to take (insert scene here) seriously when Alice's face is so goofy-looking. Though considering she was just drugged, this might explain why."
Would this be considered arguing against a listed trope? I usually see them added by the original editor, and it seems to have less to do with arguing that "Alice's face" is unintentionally funny and more about it being Justified.
Edited by iamconstantineopenFranchise Original Sin for Harry Potter Literature
The Harry Potter saga has acquired enough space to fit its own page for the Franchise Original Sin trope. While some entries are understandable, this one feels kinda odd.
- One of the more common critiques of Crimes of Grindelwald was the titular villain's plan, where he wants To Unmasque the World with the purpose of taking it over and stopping the atrocities of the 1930s-40s. While his imperialist ambitions are undeniably bad, the invoking of Holocaust and Nazi imagery and Grindelwald's legitimate argument about how the Statute of Secrecy ultimately does a lot more harm than good for both Muggles and Wizards ended up striking a chord with a lot of audiences. As a result, it made the "good guys" seem extremely selfish, because when you read between the lines, it acknowledged that wizards could have stopped World War II, the Holocaust, etc., but considered staying isolated and segregated to be more important than saving millions of lives. To an extent, the implication that wizards value their secrecy and privilege over Muggle lives was always there in the original series. Even when Voldemort's supporters were pretty much declaring open season on Muggles during the final two books, none of the good-guy wizards ever considered informing them of the truth despite them finding out what's going on being the best way for Muggles to protect themselvesnote For one thing, the Muggle government could have coordinated with the Order of the Phoenix by combining their resources, and the Muggle Military and the Aurors and/or the Order of the Phoenix could have worked together to track down and kill/capture as many Death Eaters as possible. This could have given the good guys a major advantage over the Death Eaters; even if they don't have magic, Muggles can still fight and kill wizards (and given wizards' general ignorance of Muggle technology, it being used to combat the Death Eaters and Voldemort could have totally blindsided them), and the Muggle population outnumbers the Wizard population. Notably, Dumbledore reaches out diplomatically to a tiny enclave of murderous giants who hate wizards and kill each other for fun, but never considers reaching out to Muggles despite knowing full-well that the Death Eaters want to wipe all of them out. In fact, the only explanation we ever get for why wizards even maintain The Masquerade in the first place is Hagrid briefly claiming that they don't want to use their magic to solve Muggle problems in the first book. While the apparent moral was pretty ugly, the story never really dwelt much on the relationship between wizards and Muggles, which made it easy to ignore or handwave. Crimes of Grindelwald just made it explicit how far their callous indifference went and made it part of the central conflict, rather than a mere implication. It also didn't help that the 1990s were generally seen as a pretty stable era, which made a noninterventionist policy feel somewhat defensible to readers, while the '30s and '40s (and, adding in Reality Subtext, The New '10s) were not.
What exactly is the complaint here? Is the writer complaining that the wizards (and by extension, Rowling herself) chose not to reveal the existence of the wizarding world, even though that was never on Rowling's plans for the series? I'm no Harry Potter expert, but I'm sure the characters and Rowling have explained plenty of times why revealing the existence of the wizarding world to Muggles would be a bad idea. What should we do about this?
openCan't link videos to media source Videogame
I realized that the page for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers didn't have video examples linked to it, but videos for Ret-Gone and Player Personality Quiz had examples from that same game anyway. On closer inspection I noticed that the name of the media source given by the videos on each of the trope pages is not completely the same as the title given by the media page. Is there anyway for me to fix this myself?
Edited by TheGrayShadowopenUnintentionally Unsympathetic misuse?
UnintentionallyUnsympathetic.Western Animation
- Jesus christ, the Diamond Authority, especially White Diamond They had been set up as purely sociopathic villains with no redeeming qualities with the exception of Blue, with White Diamond in particular draining the life force of her OWN children in an attempt to fight Steven. While they were clearly intended to be villains, that alone doesn't put up the fact that they murdered millions of their own citizens, corrupted their minds, and used their OWN corpses in order to destroy one of thousands of planets they had already annihilated for resources. During the Human Zoo arc, they are depicted as being torn up for their sisters's (faked) death, and somehow depicted as sympathetic by the show, including Yellow Diamond, who is still a completely and utterly emotionally dead psychopath. It gets worse with White Diamond, who was advertised up to this point as being a Complete Monster in tier with Ragyo Kuryuin, who is explicitly meant to draw up comparisons to nazi white supremacy, and imprisoned her youngest daughter for decades at a time. Then, after nearly killing him, Steven convinces her to drop all the horrible, repulsive things she's done because she blushed a different color, revealing herself to be a hypocrite. She goes completely back on her word and willingly turns Homeworld into a republic solely because of this, and is depicted as an adorably doting grandmother for Steven in the movie. Needless to say, a lot of fans were absolutely outraged at how easily the show had rehabilitated a horrible dictator, since Jasper and Lars had been depicted as being far more realistically in that regard.
I toned down some of complaining, but I question if it's an example given it's a notoriously controversial issue. I believe it's misused (at least as written) as this trope must explain why they were supposed to be seen as sympathetic despite the circumstances . Those traits are why they were supposed be be unsympathetic as villain until they begin to redeem themselves. It's just complaining about being Easily Forgiven. From my limited understanding of the series it sounds like it exaggerating their negative personality traits.
I've asked
Unintentionally Unsympathetic cleanup but it's been inactive for the last few days and this looks like a big contentious issue.
openNot sure where to ask about pages with weird grammar
I've noticed that this page
contains some grammatical errors.
I was wondering if there is some sort of place specifically for reporting pages with odd grammar.
I thought about trying to fix it myself, but there are quite a lot of mistakes, my own grammar isn't all that great, and there are some sentences which I found... confusing (For example: Is he a person who secretly works as a CIA operative and pretends to be a tourist or simply as a result of being delusional from his experience in war?).
Edited by PowogaopenChristopher Priest
Found this when cleaning Boring Invincible Hero off the wiki:
Christopher Priest (comics) has a really weird example section that just flat out tropes his works as if the page itself is a work's page; it's not common tropes he uses or anything, just tropes that appear in at least one work he's written ever.
I know Creators Pages can sort of do this if the works don't have their own pages... but these works have their own pages.
Edited by WarJay77openWhy is this still an index?
The page TurnOfTheMillennium/ProfessionalWrestling no longer exists, having been replaced by Professional Wrestling of the 2000s . However, pages that were added to the first one still have it as an index (e.g, Mike Quackenbush). Why is TurnOfTheMilennium/ProfessionalWrestling still an index when the page itself no longer exists? Thank you.
Edited by KJTropesopenRecent Launches
I'm... not really sure what's going on here. A Family Affair is no longer on the recent launches list, despite...well, still being launched. Science Is Good just launched, but the page claims it's a cut article and the page itself is locked. This leaves One-Track-Minded Artist, which launched before both of these, now being claimed as the wiki's newest trope.
For that matter, everything launched by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93, launcher of A Family Affair is gone from the launch list.
This a glitch? Or am I just missing something?
openTroper with indentation issues
DKW001 has issues with indentation, even after a notifier was sent.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Characters.Doonesbury#edit23312205
Here's the latest violation. Note that the entry itself seems to be natter too.
openD20 System pages
In another round of "should this page be Useful Notes?", we have TabletopGame.D 20 System. This page only explains about how this game system works and contains no tropes, only an index of the actual tabletop games that use this system, so I would normally be strongly in favour of making this Useful Notes.
However, we also have TabletopGame.D 20 Modern and TabletopGame.D 20 Rebirth, and I have a sneaking suspicion there may be other pages like this as well. Unlike the above, both of these pages do contain tropes: quite a lot of them for D20 Modern, in fact. Thus, I'm actually unsure on how to handle this, since it would seem awfully inconsistent if only one gets moved and the others stay.
P.S. This is tangentially related to the query, but still pretty important. The "Select Medium" feature to the side currently doesn't contain anything for Tabletop Games, so I couldn't apply it here. Moreover, its spelling for the video games medium - "Videogame" - is considered incorrect on the wiki itself, where all the relevant pages are meant to use Video Game namespace, and pages that spell it with lower-capital g are considered accidentally miscapitalized.
Edited by NTC3openYMMV.KannazukiNoMiko page... kind of overly negative? Anime
This page. I get that it's a controversial show, but why is it that it looks like being written not by a neutral party but more like the detractors hamfisting what they don't like about the show? I've already made several edits about it, but I feel like I should rewrite in a more neutral manner.
Should I? Is the page negative enough?
The main page itself looked rather old, with a lot of ZCE's (I plan on fixing that too), so I was thinking that this was why a lot of its 'negativity' (if confirmed) went unfixed. What do you think?
openMispelling and lack of context Film
Troper markband added a rather confusing Brought Down to Badass entry in Darth Vader's character section. It reads…
- Downplayed. Before he was critically injured on Mustafar, Vader had the potential to become the strongest Force-user in the galaxy. While in Legends his injuries hobbled his force potential and his strength in the force to were he was stated to only have about 80% of the strength the emperor had, in canon Vader never lost the raw power he had in the force but was unable to use it to it's fullest given the precarious situation of being reliant on machinery to keep himself alive. Basically, Vader couldn't use some force powers like force lightning because they would obviously endanger the cybernetics keeping him alive and he couldn't use his full power because of the stress tolerances of his bionics. The emporer even called Vader's power "unparalleled" in the Dark Lord of the sith comic.
I had to correct it to…
- Downplayed. Before he was critically injured on Mustafar, Vader had the potential to become the most powerful Force-user in the galaxy. Even after, he was still able to use his Force powers and remained an effective Hero Killer and symbol of fear.

Removing non-YMMV items from YMMV.The Last Of Us Part II when I found this:
It does not condone Abby's revenge. It condones Abby realizing revenge was wrong and making a more successful attempt to give it up than Ellie (the problems with that are covered under Unintentionally Unsympathetic). And I think the only way attempting to kill like Ellie intended isn't morally wrong is self-defense which isn't the case here. Thoughts?