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openOdd Stuff on Arthurian Legend Literature
I want to draw attention to a rather bizarre editing conflict on Myth.Arthurian Legend.
More than three years ago, a troper called Methuselah
added two new entries to the works list on Myth.Arthurian Legend. Here they are:
- Balla na Nathair Corónach, another pre-Roman tale, which also has versions once told/sung in Scotland, Cornwall, Ulster, Bretony, Galicia and Mann, was purportedly (i.e-attributed to him but most likely not written by him given his ficticious nature) written by Fionn Mac Cumhail to honor his Welsh rival (which is debatable considering the average Irish mythologian's attitude toward Arthur), and stylizes Arthur as a pro-Druid anti-Roman bastard (of mixed Roman and Welsh heritage) and nephew/heir of Emrys (his uncle Ambrosius, who is apparently a separate character from Merlin in the ballad) who married Guinevere to bring piece to Britain on the word of his adviser Myrddin (Merlin), although this peace later broke and Arthur avenges the breaking of the pact by attacking the Romans, and later burns the Guinevere analog for killing one of his pre-wedlock heirs. Other iterations are far more anachronistic.
- Reikningur á Hátíð Drekans, a semi-historical (in that it is mostly fable, although similar events did occur, although not during the period when the Welsh canon was being composed) account of a series of vengeance-raids by Celts and other native Bretons against Nordic settlements in Scandanavia. The oldest, least adulterated, and most clearly translated version was found in Iceland. It describes a Serpent/Dragon King (a coded title for one of the possible other inspirations of Arthur, who was allegedly a major Druidic leader) who led these attacks, occupied some villages for a few years, and even extracted tribute until the mid-Roman occupation. Later versions are also more anachronistic and incorporate more post-Norman Arthurian lore.
I consider myself halfway knowledgeable about medieval Arthurian lore. Yet I have never heard about these supposed Arthurian works. I checked some books, googled around, and found absolutely no information about these works. Though Google Translate suggests that "Balla na Nathair Corónach" is Irish and means "Wall of the Crowned Serpent" and "Reikningur á Hátíð Drekans" is Icelandic and means "Account of the Festival of the Dragon".
I also find that much of what is said about the supposed content of these works is hard to believe or does not make sense. For one, I am not aware of any Arthurian work from medieval Ireland; much less a "pre-Roman" one, given that Arthur is pretty much universally placed in time after the Roman occupation of Britain. The entries are also extremely confusingly written, lack focus, and are riddled with vagueness and self-contradictions. Because of this and because I couldn't find any proof for the existence of these works, I eventually deleted both entries. (This was more than two years ago.)
The entries stayed deleted for somewhat over half a year, then Methuselah returned and restored them, referring to my deletion as "vandalism" in their edit reason.
Next I sent Methuselah a private message telling them that I couldn't find any confirmation for the existence of these works, and asked them what their sources were or where I can get information about these works. They replied with a very condescending message in which they tried to present themself as some kind of expert on medieval literature and claimed that Balla na Nathair Corónach has been published in a book called The Celtic Heroic Age by John Koch and John Carey, and that Reikningur á Hátíð Drekans is a "fragment" of an Old Icelandic work called Möttuls saga.
Since then, I got myself a copy of The Celtic Heroic Age and, lo and behold, no Balla na Nathair Corónach. As for Möttuls saga, this is an Icelandic translation of a French Arthurian tale called Le lai du cort mantel (The Lay of the Mantle). I checked out a translation and several synopses, and (you know where this is going) found nothing which fits the material that Methuselah claims constitutes Reikningur á Hátíð Drekans.
I have decided against sending Methuselah another pm. I don't know if they are still active (their last edit was ten months ago), but in any case they have been lying about their sources (if they have any). My impression is that they're intentionally throwing academic-sounding language and work titles around so that others will believe they're an expert and won't question them.
Long story short: I want to delete both of Methuselah's entries for referring to inexistent works. But since I already deleted them once, I want to get consensus first to avoid an edit war. Do I have permission to proceed?
(I will send Methuselah a pm about this query.)
Edited by LordGroresolved Victoria vandalism Literature
I'm on a self-imposed hiatus due to reasons, but this should be brought to the mods' attention.
Walker 45 has edited Literature.Victoria, calling it "a deranged piece of Nazi propaganda" and the like. They have also made forum posts
expressing overwhelmingly negative views towards the work and saying they will remove all mentions of it from the wiki.
Requesting mod revert of Victoria.
openHarry Potter Acceptable Targets Literature
On the Harry Potter Philosopher's Stone YMMV page, there's this entry for Acceptable Targets:
- Overweight boys. Dudley's weight is openly scorned, with the supposed justification of Rowling's implicit association of it with parental indulgence. Years later, Rowling, outraged at the pressure on girls to be thin, called fat insults "strange and sick." Perhaps as an Author's Saving Throw, later books blame Vernon and Petunia for Dudley's weight, with Dumbledore outright calling them out for inflicting a different kind of abuse on their own son. Dudley also picks up boxing, and switches from being morbidly obese to an example of Stout Strength.
And also on the Goblet of Fire YMMV page:
- Overweight boys. Dudley's increased weight, while treated with some seriousness, is still Played for Laughs. Implied association in previous books of his weight with parental indulgence, his comical resentment of his diet, Fred and George's playful hope for a glimpse of the "great bullying git," and Fred slipping him a toffee which magically engorges his tongue seem to dismiss obesity as idleness. Years later, Rowling, outraged at the pressure on girls to be thin, called fat insults "strange and sick."
I don't feel that these are valid examples of Acceptable Targets. I explained my reasoning on the Goblet of Fire discussion page
. But basically, while it's true that Dudley's weight is poked fun of, I don't see how that applies to overweight boys as a whole. I think that's a stretch. Hagrid is another heavy-set character, and a much nicer and more likeable person, and his weight isn't made fun of (as far as I can remember anyway; it's been a while since I read the books). To me, the entries feel like they're more targeted at J.K. Rowling herself to criticize her apparent hypocrisy on the issue, but I don't see how Rowling's comment in itself really has anything to do with Harry Potter. (I do agree with Rowling's later stance; I just feel it's a separate issue.)
But that's just my take on it. I wanted to get some other opinions.
Edited by StardustSoldieropenBadly-made work page Literature
This page seems very inappropriately made. The issue of self-promotion aside, it contains many instances of This Troper, use of first person and a fair amount of Natter. Anyone familiar with the work care to do some clean-up?
Edited by LogoPresolved Is "All-New Venom" page overdoing it a little with the Paul hate? Literature
I noticed recent edits to All-New Venom seem to be definitively describing Paul Rabin as an abusive asshole selfishly gaslighting and brainwashing Mary Jane into staying with him when she clearly still loves Peter Parker.
Now, I don't like Paul any more than... well... pretty much everyone, including the writers and artists at Marvel, but that strikes me as going into Alternative Character Interpretation territory—indeed, Paul being an abusive asshole who uses gaslighting and dark magic to manipulate MJ into staying with him when she still loves Peter Parker is mentioned under Alternative Character Interpretation on the YMMV page.
If anything, Paul is depicted as a Butt-Monkey who's effectively being cuckolded by the Venom symbiote and is disrespected by Dylan Brock at every available opportunity despite reaching out to the latter and trying to be a supportive father figure.
Edited by Arawn999openTrope misuse Literature
Beastpower 87 has repeatedly added Moral Event Horizon entries to the Harry Potter page that aren't accurate, such as saying Snape crossed it in Book 5 by not teaching Occlumency properly despite the fact he's portrayed as redeeming himself, and claiming Hermione crossed it despite her being one of the heroes which means it wasn't intended by the author (and she's claimed to have crossed it by wiping her parents' memories despite this being to protect them).
Edited by Javertshark13openPage with no existing work Literature
While clicking the Random Media button, I came across the page for Linda. The page has four examples on it, and the description of the work claims that it's a short story hosted on a Google Document. Clicking on the provided link shows that the Document was deleted at some point, and I can't find any other copy of it online. There's no linked account for the author, the history for the page doesn't show who made it in the first place, and only five tropers (including myself at one point last year, to my surprise) have edited the page over the past 8 years.
I would like to ask what's the best course of action for a page like this. Do you cut the whole page, or do you toss it into the Unpublished Works section?
Courtesy link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Literature.Linda
openBorderline Edit War on Andrzej Sapkowski Literature
The trope section of Creator.Andrzej Sapkowski is in large parts dedicated to bashing the author for various grievances that seem mostly to revolve around the author's negative commentary resp. legal battles regarding various adaptations of his works, and the author supposedly generally being an avaricious hypocrite (source: TV Tropes).
While the entire page could certainly need a big clean-up, an almost-Edit War has lately ignited over the following example of Disowned Adaptation:
- The Hexer movie. Sapkowski euphemistically expressed his negative opinion about the film: "I can answer only with a single word, an obscene, albeit a short one". What he carefully "forgets" to mention nowadays is the big pile of money he so eagerly took for selling the rights for adaptation and then started slandering the production the moment he realized there will be no second tranche of money. While the film is a disaster, Sapkowski is doing his best over the years to pretend he didn't help make it in such form in the first place.
Recently troper Revolutionary_Jack removed the last sentence of the entry, with the, in my opinion very reasonable, edit reason that
The deletion was restored (with a slight expansion regarding the author's "messy and utterly pointless copyright battle") by Dratewka. I myself got then involved by cutting everything after Sapkowski's statement on the movie, on the grounds of it not actually belonging there in the first place.
Dratewka has again reverted the example, the only change being a further expansion in form of a lengthy note, the point of which seems to be the argument that the author is to be blamed for the movie being bad. Edit reason:
Courtesy link to the edit history
.
I'd be glad for other tropers or a mod to weigh in.
Edited by LordGroopenRepeated Trope Misuse on YMMV/TheVillainessReversesTheHourglas Literature
I’ve been trying to clean up the pages for the Webnovel/Webtoon The Villainess Turns The Hourglass (which is in the wrong directory but that’s a different problem) and one of the editors
keeps trying to shoehorn the same entry about the protagonist into different tropes that it does not fit. The character is a Base Breaker but the issues related to why are already well documented in the Base Breaker entry, so this just seems to keep veering into Complaining about a character they don’t like.
The trope text that keeps moving:
- As noted by some readers, Aria herself wasn't a good person in her previous life, and while she was unjustly executed, she's not exactly the case of an innocent persecuted person. After being reborn she's basically a 24 year-old woman in a teenager's body (and later, due to Rapid Aging, in an adult body) getting revenge on a teenage Mielle, who had not yet done anything particularly heinous. Even after realising Mielle was just a child manipulated by her nanny and Isis, Aria still continues to bully and humiliate her. The fact that Mielle herself is revealed to not be a very bright girl makes Aria being duped by someone like her in her previous life, and taking revenge on Mielle in her current life reflect rather badly on her.
- In fact, several readers pointed out that Mielle herself would be a prime candidate for a Peggy Sue story of her own, where Aria would be considered an outright villain.
So when I first removed it from the page it was listed as Protagonist-Centered Morality, which isn’t YMMV and this text doesn’t meet. Now it’s at Designated Hero, but I’m this case the main character’s not a hero, isn’t described as a hero except by people who she’s concealed her nature from, is honest with herself that her actions are not heroic, and constantly calls herself “the villainess.” Whether she’s a likable Anti-Hero isn’t this trope (and again, that’s already well-written up in Base Breaker.)
I want to remove the text again but I’m concerned about being accused of edit warring. I sent an indicator to the editor about the misuse with this explanation.
Edited by RebochanopenFound a 4chan forum story, is Literature the right place for it? Literature
Luke: The Plague Son of Nurgle
While doing some cleanup work, came across the above which appears to be an unstructured forum story told by multiple people in 2009 and interspersed with comments from anonymous posters. It's not referenced anywhere else on google besides tvtropes and the forum links themselves.
What is the criteria for a web original forum work being listed? Does it need to have an attributable author? Does it need to have evidence of a reader base? Is there some other criteria we use? Does it need to be something someone can actually pinpoint and consume with a clear line between the work itself and people commenting on it? Is there any kind of minimum length requirement?
When I came across this one, it didn't really seem to fit the "Literature" media space to me though I know WebSerialNovels do get classified under literature.
However, I'm not sure this forum story can even be classified as a novel so that's adding to my confusion.
The work page has 1 wick under "The Pig-Pen", 171 total inbounds, and looks to have been created on November 20, 2021 though the original 4chan threads look like they were all from November 2009.
openOdd Stub Page Literature
A Place of Greater Safety has a lot of tropes... on its character pages. The work page itself has a full description but no trope entries, not even commented-out entries.
What to do here?
openFandomSpecificPlot question Literature
A Christmas Carol has hundreds and hundreds of adaptations, but also fanfics, some of which have specific plots.
I added "* Fandom-Specific Plot: Many fanfics tend to revolve around freeing Jacob Marley of his chains or setting Scrooge up with Belle after his reformation, usually by having her husband die. Other common fics have Scrooge/Marley as a pairing, in life or after death."
to the book's page since it was fandom-specific and many of the ones I've read are based on the book as opposed to a movie. jamespolk then removed it saying it should go on an adaptation page, but many fics are nonspecific about which version they follow so most people assume they're book-based unless said otherwise. Where should it go, if anywhere?
Also apparently Fandom-Specific Plot itself isn't a YMMV trope, but its related page shows it on tons of YMMV pages.
Edited by lalalei2001openIncomplete Work Page Literature
I came across Literature.Rai Kirah today while checking my watchlist updates. It's a recently created page made by indigoazure
.. The issue here is that, at the time of this writing, there's no description for the work whatsoever. All it has is, and I quote, "(Also commonly written as Rai-Kirah). A fantasy series of three books by Carol Berg." and then a list of the three books in the trilogy. There's a few issues with the tropes themselves, the most glaring being three tropes listed on one bullet and whose context was quotations direct from the book itself. I just flat out deleted those and commented out anything else blatantly zero context. (EDIT: The editor has fixed the three on one bullet tropes by putting at least two as their own tropes with context)
I've sent the page creator a PM about fixing the description, specifically linking to How to Create a Work's Page and quoting the relevant portion to make the point. I'm mostly posting here, too, to have everything "on the record" so to speak in case any further action is needed later.
Edited by sgamer82open potential Edit War with Bense in the Hobbit Literature
This other troper and I have been arguing. We can't agree on anything. The problem is that I am willing to keep entries on our debate neutral, and he keeps asserting his point of view as fact. The problem is that his views I just cannot bring myself to leave them be. They simply clash with all my interpretations of the book and I feel a little sick looking at what he treats as fact, since in order to be at peace with it I'd have to change my very moral compass, and I can't just do that on short notice!
openSweeney Todd Literature
Hello! I'm someone who's familiar with Sweeney Todd despite not having seen the musical and only saw clips of the Tim Burton movie adaptation, but has found the penny dreadful the musical and film are adapted from.
However, something about one of the pages bothers me. Even though the original tale titled The String of Pearls is listed as the original source, there is no page/article regarding it by itself, if that makes sense.
Personally, as a literature enthusiast myself and someone who likes looking into stories and authors I don't know of and acquire them to read, I find it disappointing the book isn't a topic.
Is it possible to create a page/article concerning The String of Pearls, even if only to give the written story itself the credit it's due?
openFranchise 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?
resolved A page in a very bad shape Literature
I stumbled upon Literature.Ill Become A Villianess Who Goes Down In History (title misspelled; it's supposed to be "I'll Become A Villainess Who Goes Down In History") and the whole page is a mess.
- As said before, the title itself is misspelled.
- The work does indeed exist, but there's no proper description for it.
- Spacing is whack.
- And so is the grammar.
Permission to copy the text, get the page cutlisted, and start all over?
Edited by moxedenopenVictoria Literature
So, questions regarding Literature/Victoria have come up several times, but discussion always peters out with no solid conclusion, so I hope to just get an answer once and for all. First, the description states unequivocally that the comparison to The Turner Diaries is unfair. No reason is ever given for this (it claims that it is self-evident by comparing their trope pages, I have and still don't see it). The other point of concern is the Tearjerker page
, which seems really suspect. My main question is why we seem to feel so strongly about maintaining neutrality on this page. I know we claim that as a universal policy, but it clearly isn't. Look at the page for the aforementioned Turner Diaries or Birth Of A Nation or (to move to the opposite end) Mission to Moscow. We would never tolerate any of these being described as merely "controversial", as Victoria is. Hardly a line on these pages goes by without a denouncement of their politics. Even works that are merely widely hated but nowhere near as odious get far less balance, like Fifty Shades of Grey. So why is so much neutrality demanded here?

Ian78668
is very much into the Alternate History story Player Two Start, having most of their edit history devoted to its work page. However, they seem to be adding their own concepts and ideas (usually about Don Bluth or Pokémon in some form) into the work page that aren't in the text itself. Even the author had to step in and take some of this out
, only for them to add yet more of their own fanon. I sent them a few notifiers a while ago, and they seemed to comply at first... but just recently came back again and added yet more of their own fanon into it. Since I didn't want it to be an edit war, I sent them another notifier and bringing up the problem here.
Edited by harryhenry