Rude PM Report

A while ago there was an issue with a player (The_Dag) in the forum game Hunger Games Simulation. I am one of the moderators of the game, and the troper in question proved problematic whenever told to stick to the rules of the game, eventually resulting in us banning him from the game. I made the announcement post explaining that he was banned and not allowed to play the game anymore for his repeated rude responses to our posts civilly asking him to tone things down.

Recently he sent a PM for me, insulting me for the ban, despite the fact that no one was rude to him nor sank to sending rude PMs. We've had issues with the troper's behavior in general, but this was crossing the line a bit too far with unnecessary rudeness.

I'll add that all of these issues have taken place entirely within the site, nothing here has been carried over from outside nor has there been any drama importation involved.

Questionable edits by troper

Tropers.Ajoura is a patriarchal, conservative loyal Russian troper who dislikes strong women and left-wing liberals. (That's not me saying this—it's right there on his Troper page.)

His beliefs by themselves are his own business, but it's definitely seeping into his editing habits. For example, there's this Epic Rap Battles of History page, where he edited the Putin entry to first downplay mention of the invasion of Ukraine, then remove it outright, calling the original entry "propaganda".

He most recently edited the page Movement Mascot to remove what he called "leftist propaganda", and (in my opinion) made the entry sound even more blatantly biased than it may have been to begin with. The example was about the LGBT movement's acceptance of Steven Universe, and he apparently took issue with the use of toxic masculinity being used unironicaly and without scare quotes.

Something concerns me

Edit: Ugh, I'm sorry this is such a wall of text, but I think all the information is important, so I can't trim it too much :(

That something is related to Tropers/{{4tell0life4}}. Now, I want to preface this by saying that I'm not doing this to try and get them suspended, as I think their actual editing is fine, and no big issues have been caused by this so far. I just think it's something that needs to be resolved, as it's been grating on my nerves for a while now, and is a recurring pattern of behavior with them.

They seem to have an issue with the whole... "Consensus" thing. You don't need to take my word for it- their new signature even confirms this; but their actions do, too. Take, for instance, their old TLP record- at least twice, they'd attempted to overrule draft consensus and push their own feelings forward, once where they tried to ignore a crowner going against their opinion, and of course, that time they threatened to change examples on a draft because they didn't want them to be there. They were already banned for being rude on the TLP, but this isn't to do with that- it's to do with their unwillingness to accept that the wiki has to work by consensus, and that big changes need proper discussion.

Why am I bringing this up now? Well, there's been a specific trend on Trope Finder where he'll suggest an unfitting trope, myself or someone else will point out they're using that trope incorrectly, and then they'll insist that the trope itself needs to be changed. This in and of itself isn't a big deal- but they always seem to want to make these changes on the Trope Description Improvement Drive, despite that changes like this actually change the meaning of the trope, and require Trope Repair Shop.

Here's one debate I had with them over how to fix Assumed Win, and the ensuing TDID post where they did in fact attempt to change the trope's meaning there. Just recently, the same thing is happening with Relative Button: They're declaring the trope not broad enough and taking it to TDID, rather than TRS, because they think changing the description like this doesn't change the meaning of the trope, I assume because they already believe the trope's description is "wrong"- rather than that it just doesn't trope what they think it should. There are a lot of similar Trope Finder debates we've had that weren't immediately taken to the forums, and we also had similar arguments on TLP and the forums itself, where it just felt like I was arguing with a wall, who seemed to think that wiki-consensus on things like cut tropes and appearance tropes is just bureaucracy and that the solution is more cleanup, not fixing the problem at it's source.

All in all, this just really worries me, not to mention that their new sig may actually be a shot at me; I don't want to make accusations, but I've used the term "consensus" in a lot of conversations with them, so it makes me a little wary. It all just adds up to someone whose attitude about wiki-issues is at odd with the rest of the wiki's, and someone who doesn't seem to enjoy getting proper consensus before they change things (or, alternatively, dislike what consensus produces).

Edited by WarJay77

Persistent rude troper

Was suggested to make this a new report.

Not long ago, I reported troper Johnny_Joestar for their many rude edit reasons. They received at least 2 rudeness notifiers, responded to one, and came to the thread. A mod also told them to stop with their rude edit reasons.

Unfortunately, their last edit reason reads "Correcting shitty spelling." Between this and their previous behavior—denying rudeness according to the other troper who messaged them, and offering no response in the thread that really acknowledged their behavior—it seems Joestar intends to keep being rude.

Edited by iamconstantine

Edit war

On Horrible.Animated Films, Mickey Mouse Fan 12345 added Ralph Breaks the Internet to the list. It was deleted thanks to a discussion on the forum thread. The user asked about it in the thread, and we told them why it didn't qualify.

However, they later not only re-added RBTI to the page despite our comments, but also added Toy Story 4 as well. Both were removed, and I think the user may need a talking to.

Edited by MrMediaGuy2

Complaining troper is still doin' it

I was informed that making a new post would help more than necro-ing my old thread, so here we go.

A while ago, I brought up WDS for several issues, most glaringly their complaining issues. They were suspended (and didn't have the most convincing appeal attempts, either), but released sometime within the last month. Despite this, they still have several edits that have the same issues:

• Potholing Ruined Forever in non-Darth pages, not even noticing that it's a red link
• Using pages to complain — the latter one stands out in that it's similarly worded to their previous complainy edits on Franchise Zombie
• And the one that got more attention: posting a complainy ZCE about the 2016 Ghostbusters movie on Improbably Female Cast, even though it doesn't fit the trope.

Their forum activity seems okay, they have made several good edits, and they've at least learned to use more edit reasons to explain their deletions (most of the time — their edit about Ghostbusters deleted a Silent Hill example in the process with no explanation), but the low-context complaining is still disappointing to see so shortly after they were released from Edit Banned.

Edited by mightymewtron

Bashing Troper

I just want to go ahead and say I don't watch Supergirl so I have no two cents in this one way or the other.

So on Supergirl, there's a character named William who apparently is not liked at all by the fanbase. I suppose that in and of itself is fine to put on YMMV pages since it's a notable Audience Reaction, but there seems to be a problem with bashing rather than just stating. Specifically, Starbrand 1987 has made many, many edits just talking about how much fans hate William. (They also have several grammar problems like no punctuation and no capitalization, but that's beside the point.)

Here Starbrand adds And The Fandom Rejoiced about William possibly dying. Here they put in an entry saying that William flirting with Kara after she turned him down on an episode that aired on International Woman's Day...is Narm.

Most of it is here on the YMMV page. Starbrand puts a large edition to an entry talking about how poorly-received William is, an entry about how his actor and Kara's actress have no chemistry, adding William and Kara's romance under Audience-Alienating Premise ("Not one regular supergirl media reviewer approves of the relationship."), basically accusing the writers under Trolling Creators, and several subbullets under The Scrappy that got deleted.

Forenperser has deleted some entries, but with the reasons "Stop this silly obsession already." and "Natter, poorly written and just plain obsession," I'm afraid this is going to get hostile soon. They were reported to ATT before, but it seems they're still at it.

Edited by iamconstantine

Troper with pretty clear political bias

Wercury seems to be editing with a clear bias in mind when it comes to any examples with a progressive slant.

The most blatant entry was on Assassin's Creed Syndicate. The example in question speaks of the game developers' seeming attempts to address criticism about only having White Male Leads, to which he added "by a handful of 'journalists'" in what is a pretty opaque attempt to undermine the opinion by claiming it comes from a small, unreliable source.

Another example was changing an entry on Street Fighter IV with Ambiguous Gender from "Even if she's confirmed to be transgender, her personally-held gender identity qualifies her to be listed" to "assuming she's really a woman". While Flip-Flop of God goes back and forth over whether or not Poison is a pre-op, post-op or any other specific variation of trans, or even trans at all, the one thing that has never changed is that she DOES identify as a woman. The entry is simply casting doubt on her womanhood unnecessarily, which (generally speaking) is considered transphobic in practice.

On Horizon Zero Dawn - Old World, he added "obsolete and inaccurate" to describe the Out of Africa theory to an entry which said that an Earth Mother character symbolized said theory. Note that theory is NOT considered obsolete nor inaccurate by any accredited academic source. However, a lot of people with specific political opinions will try to misrepresent the theory or discredit it.

And lastly, there's the edits he made just this morning, where he tried to sneak a Sink Hole to Political Correctness Gone Mad to entries describing real-life opinions on pornography and microaggressions.

Most of said entries I (or someone else) have either edited or deleted, and I didn't even go over EVERY single edit of his that seemed "questionable". I sent him a PM this morning specifically about the Political Correctness Gone Mad misuse, but I also told him that he seemed to be editing with a pretty blatant agenda and that the wiki is not the place for Righting Great Wrongs. He hasn't gotten back to me yet.

Edited by NubianSatyress

Possibly Agenda-Based Entry Pimping

Tropers.bobby4ize has been entry-pimping quotes by infamous Black Conserative/Libertarian Thomas Sowell, conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity, conservative radio host Neal Boortz and many, MANY others.. Based on their edit history, the pimping has been going on for weeks and they've already got dozens of examples.

The thing is, some of their entries don't seem that bad — such as this one for Tall Poppy Syndrome. It illustrates the trope well enough. Also, there's this example on Society Marches On which breaks away from his other entries by being somewhat progressive.

But then we have entries like these:

Taken from the quotes page for Fox News Liberal.

Taken from the quotes page for DidntThinkThisThrough.

Taken from Playing The Victim Card

Taken from the quotes page for Political Correctness Gone Mad

---

You get the idea by now.

Also, there are several other quotes which have been added to main pages, such as the one on UsefulNotes.Capitalism which demonstrate a subtle bias (especially when you remember the source is a hard-nose free market libertarian).

Like I said, they have been at this for a long, long time, and I doubt that their edit history actually goes back far enough to catch them all.

Edited by NubianSatyress

Troper seems to have an agenda

Some of Matitya's actions imply a certain political agenda. I'm not sure if any of this is worthy of mod attention, but users on the ROCEJ thread suggested that I make an ATT query about this.

• They seem to have a fascination with infamous conservative commentator Matt Walsh, having created a now-cut Useful Notes page for him, as well as pages for his works Johnny the Walrus and What Is A Woman (which was cut due to lacking properly-written examples). These last two works are infamous for being Anviliciously anti-transgender.
• On top of creating the page for Johnny the Walrus (which on its own is not that concerning, you can neutrally trope a work without agreeing with its message), they also created Awesome and Heartwarming moments subpages, which imply that they agree with the book's message.
• What Is A Woman?'s YMMV page also had some suspiciously-worded examples. One that I pointed out in the ROCEJ thread:
  • Uncertain Audience: Walsh’s documentary was meant to expose the falsehoods and harms of left-wing general ideology to the general populace but the film is still behind the Daily Wire’s paywall. Needless to say, people who made paid subscriptions to The Daily Wire likely agreed with Walsh about this already.
  • The way this is written makes it sound like Matitya agrees that left-wing ideology is harmful and full of falsehoods, and only criticizes the decision to distribute it through a service that prevents more moderate viewers from being exposed to its message.
• As shown in this previous ATT query, Matitya has replaced some characters' neopronouns with "he/him".
• And finally, they rarely, if ever, use WikiWords, instead always using curly brackets to link to tropes.

On their own, any of these things would only be mildly concerning and easy to brush off, but together, I feel like they may be painting a picture of an anti-transgender agenda. Again, I'm not sure if there's anything mods can or should do here, but bringing this up was suggested so I'm doing it anyway.

Edited by Zuxtron

Agenda-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 CommanderVisor

Suspicious edits and potential ban evasion Western Animation

This thread is related to one that was made about TinyLittleLetters, a user who has since been banned, back in November. In fact, I originally posted the content of this thread as a follow-up to that one, but I got several replies suggesting that it would probably work better as it's own separate topic (since the last one was getting overly long), and I agreed with that, so the discussion has been moved here.

For the last couple of weeks, a new troper named Unicornia1 has been editing many of the same pages in the same fandoms that TinyLittleLetters did, with the same opinions as them, around the same time of the day as them - and they've been doing this ever since their account was brand new. It could just be a coincidence, and normally, I would probably dismiss it as one, but lately, I’ve started to suspect that they might be the same person because they share the same bias when it comes to Varian and Frederic, where it’s very obvious that they love the former and hate the latter.

Over the last few weeks, they’ve been slowly downplaying or erasing tropes that paint Varian’s actions from early in the series in a negative light, while they’ve swung to the opposite extreme with Frederic, slowly erasing any and all positive tropes associated with him, to the point where they deny that he grew any in the series at all past Season 1, to make it easier to bash his character as much as possible. In fact, one of the very first edits that Unicornia 1 ever made was removing Varian from the Draco In Leather Pants trope and Frederic from the Ron The Death Eater trope on Tangled: The Series’ YMMV page in regards to how the fandom sometimes treats them - which are the exact same edits that Tiny Little Letters made early on during their time on this wiki. The same can be said for an edit Tiny Little Letters made to Frederic’s folder in September, which Tenebrika deleted in December, which Unicornia 1 then restored in February. So that sets off some red flags.

Besides Frederic and Varian, they’ve also expressed a lot of the same opinions about Rapunzel (1, 2, 3), Cassandra (1, 2, 3), and Arianna (1, 2, 3 4) that Tiny Little Letters did before they were banned.

Suggesting that someone is a sockpuppet is a pretty serious accusation, and one that I don’t make lightly, but there seems to be a lot of signs pointing towards that - so could an IP check be done just to make sure that isn’t the case?

Edited by TheCoolKat1995

Ban Evader

I have reason to suspect that The Master Chand is ScumBagMan. He focuses on many of the same works (Catherine, Mega Man, Xexyz, Godzilla, Mass Effect, and Star Trek) and the Unintentionally Unsympathetic example he added to The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is suspiciously similar to the one Scum Bag Man added back in 2019. Compare.

Scum Bag Man's example: "One may forgive it for not saving the Nightmares, but more than a little harsh that it lets even those had nothing to do with their schemes die as well. Leaving the guy who saves him stranded in the ocean and clinging to driftwood isn't particularly nice either."

The Master Chand's example: "You can forgive him for letting the Nightmares die, self-preservation motives or not, but the general residents of the island are harder to overlook. There's also the issue of leaving the guy who just saved his bacon stranded in the ocean clinging to driftwood."

Edited by Sammettik

Worrying troper with an agenda

Peterpol 94 edits with an agenda.

• He frequently removes the word

"Western" from various articles.

• Here he changed "American attitudes" into "Black American attitudes."
• Here, he gleefully accuses Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation of "incredible hypocrisy." He continues the same bizarre vendetta here.
• Here, on an entry that says that Spike Lee movies are "somewhat divisive among general (read: predominantly white) audiences", he changed "white" into "mixed".
• Here, bizarrely, he changed a passage that compares King Leopold II to a modern-day capitalist, so that Leopold II is now compared to "an older time capitalist". Which is poor grammar, and also, Leopold II was an olden-time capitalist.
• HERE he removed a Historical Hero Upgrade entry about how, in a movie, the NWA members all reconcile with Eazy before he dies of AIDS, even though that's not what they did for real. No edit reason is given except for "Work". It's a bit worrying that he doesn't want reconciliation with an AIDS-victim to be listed as a good thing.
• HERE, most damning (if you'll forgive my melodramatic phrasing), he changes an entry saying that Cubans don't want Guantanamo Bay, so that it instead says that it's the Cuban Communist government that doesn't want Guantanamo Bay.
• HERE he uses bad indentation and bad grammar.

I could go on, but I've gotta get to the store before closing time and buy a toothbrush.

Edited by MichaelKatsuro

Guide - How to use smilies in Ask The Tropers and more!

EDIT: Confirmed that this also works on the TLP AND reviews as well!

This is not a question, but more advice and a solution for people who want to use the arrow/emoticon feature in Ask The Tropers without typing "[up]" (which doesn't actually work) or "^".

This took an irritatingly long time to figure out, mostly because the image markup doesn't actually work with any images outside the "/public" directory (which is what the smilies are). Apparently you have to throw the entire link in instead.

Anyway, I think I managed to get it. Copy and use the markup as much as you want to! (You can also highlight the emoticon and use the old copy+paste.)

---

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_up_emoticon_3268.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Thumbs_down_emoticon_3571.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tinfoilsmall.GIF =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bug.gif =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_evilgrin.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_grin.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_smile.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_surprised.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_tongue.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_unhappy.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_waii.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/emoticon_wink.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/lightbulb.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/cool.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png =>

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/user_ninja_2074.png =>

Edited by SilverCrown

Rudeness and Edit Warring

On February 1st, Tropers.Captain JJC made this edit on The Rising of the Shield Hero, which I later edited for containing Word Cruft like “but one must consider the following”.

Twenty-one days later, he fully reverts my edits and reinstates his own saying (paraphrasing since I’m currently on mobile). “Guy who told me not to add word cruft added more of it”, making it clear that it was a retaliatory edit, as well as a post > edit > revert Edit War. I sent him an automated PM for rudeness.

I’m bringing this here because the edit in general really seems to be overly verbose and all over the place in getting to the point, but I don’t want to edit war further.

Malady

I didn't really want to make this report, but at this point I'm not sure there's any other way to resolve the issue.

To put it briefly, Malady has consistent issues with making and fixing TLP drafts. A lot of their drafts are born from very specific split concepts but are also simultaneously prone to being really vague, such as an index for the number 2, A seemingly redundant status-effect trope, and most recently, a stubby split off from another very bombed draft.

Malady's a splitter; that's obvious. They like to find specific concepts and split them off into subtropes. On paper, there's nothing wrong with that. In practice, their splits tend to be... kinda odd. A lot of times they seem to hone in on very specific and relatively minor things and will attempt a split while still in the TLP stage for the other draft. Their split attempts often end up seemingly overly-specific or technical, and no matter how many times people point out concerns like this they continue to attempt it.

Another recurring issue is their description-writing abilities. They tend to write in individual sentences, making their trope descriptions often really vague and stubby. In the case of "Deliberately Non-Lethal Attack", I noticed a lot of grammar issues they sort of just glossed over in their reply to me, and I'm not the first one who noticed grammar issues with them. With their stream-of-consciousness posting style following similar issues, it's hard to get them to fix it unless you really break down the issues with it... and then they'll just do it on another draft anyway.

Basically, what I'm concerned over is that the attempts to help fix their draft-making skills never seem to stick, because they keep making the same mistakes on other drafts. And while they have managed to launch a bunch of them, more often than not I see their drafts sit on the launch pad for months, gathering bombs and not really making any progress even when people attempt to point out issues they have with those drafts. It's a recurring theme with them that's starting to feel really... frustrating, since half time, when I attempt to critique their draft or give them advice, they'll respond to my concerns but then carry on without altering anything. And I've seen other people have similar experiences.

So... yeah. I thought it was about time I addressed this problem head-on. Malady is a good troper who does a lot of good work, but when it comes to the TLP they're having more issues than successes.

Darkon44 removing social justice-related YMMV

Darkon44 removed YMMV from Pathfinder about tabletop games often being criticised for being neocolonialist and white, and removed a line about drow being weird because they're drow and not because they're black.

Also minor, but they removed an 'X-Card' reference from Monsterhearts - for context, 'X-Card' is practiced by some tabletop groups to bypass or drop scenes with content a player doesn't want, usually violent or sexual in nature. As with anything related to social justice, the mere mention of an X-Card gets a lot of people pissed.

Maybe this is kneejerk, but agenda-based editing makes me wary. I've restored all three examples.

A Concerning Trend

I'm not sure where else to discuss this so here goes. Tropers.vidkid has a habit of deleting "negative" tropes and wording about My Hero Academia's League of Villains, usually through downplaying their crimes or claiming that the "negative" trope is Alternative Character Interpretation, without any discussion. In other words: Draco in Leather Pants.

Link to vidkid's edits. (Every single one of their edits has been for My Hero Academia's pages since August. Not a reason for concern but just something I noticed.)

On August 30th 2020 vidkid deleted a bunch of "negative" entries from My Hero Academia - Tomura Shigaraki with the edit reason that they were supposedly "Alternative Character Interpretation". The Alternative Character Interpretation they used was incorrect (it ignored canon facts and was thus removed by Rebel Falcon at a later date).

On October 18th vidkid deleted part of Blue-and-Orange Morality from Toga's entry on the Characters.My Hero Academia League Of Villains (which said Toga was lying and mentioned her anger that someone considered her a victim) and completely deleted Hypocrite's entry (another "negative" trope).

Today, vidkid deleted a line from NightmareFuel.My Hero Academia about the implication that Toga killed an old woman to take her blood in order to trick Uraraka. For context, Uraraka says "You mean you stole that woman's blood, killed her, just to ask me a question like that?" in response so it's not Fridge Horror.

These are only a few of the concerning edits I noticed. Some are minor, and there is nothing wrong with liking the villains of a show, but I feel it's reached the point of DILP-ing, especially with the deleting of "negative" tropes on the characters' pages. I hesitate to call this an "agenda" but something is certainly going on.

I think the deleted entries should possibly be re-added. What else should be done?

Edited by EmeraldSky