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 controversy 2.0 Print Comic
Our favorite Dark Knight never seems to stay away from controversy for too long, and this time, it's two-fold.
First, Batman's folder in the DCAMU: Justice League character page has Adaptational Wimp, which says: "Downplayed. This incarnation of Batman is still a good fighter and he has his moments like getting the upper hand over Green Lanterns in the Justice League movies. But in his own films, aside from being able to defeat Deathstroke, himself an even worse Adaptational Wimp, in Son of Batman, he tends to get the short end of the stick in his titular films. In Batman Vs Robin he spent most of his fights taking a beating from various Talons, Robin, and the main Talon, while his comics counterpart was able to defeat Talon even after being famished and dehydrated for days. He also spends much of Bad Blood being captured and playing the role of Badass in Distress so he can be saved by the Bat-family. And in Hush, while he did much better in fights, he still wasn't able to defeat the eponymous villain on his own in the end and required the help of Catwoman to do so, whereas his comic books counterpart was able to beat The Riddler when he had been similarly physically enhanced by Venom during the Knightfall story. Justified with Damian. In Apokolips War, a brainwashed Batman reveals that the only reason Damian won is because he let him, and during their last fight he proves to his son that the latter is no match for him."
Adaptational Wimp has been frequently misused over these past few years, but the trope's definition is: "when their usefulness, agency, and contribution to the plot is significantly reduced. It is not this trope when the character "only" easily defeated twenty Mooks instead of a hundred; it's when the character struggled to take down even one. Realize too, that this may be intentional and in a long-running series may have the character take a level in badass to provide Character Development and align them better with the original version."
Then, the Dork Age entry in the YMMV page of Batman (Rebirth) was deleted and added yet again, because apparently, a consensus hasn't been reached about whether or not Tom King's run can be considered a Dork Age. Dork Age, much like Adaptational Wimp, has seen its fair share of misuses, but an entry in a long-running franchise can be a Dork Age if it qualities for any of the following criteria: 1. It has to be a critical and financial disappointment
2. Any changes it brought to the series must be undone by later installments
3. Whenever it's referenced by other entries, it has to be done in a negative manner.
So, what do you say?
Edited by MasterHeroopenSafe to recreate cut page for a Cars game? Videogame
This is kind of a silly question, but I'm here to ask if it's okay to recreate Cars: Race-O-Rama, the page for a semi-obscure tie-in game for Pixar's Cars. It was apparently cut for reading "Like a Wikipedia summary of the games" and not actually listing any tropes.
Since the issue seems to be that the original page was badly written to the point of being useless, I imagine it would be fine for me to make a proper page for this game. I do have a list of tropes pertaining to Cars Race O Rama. I just wanted to ask before doing anything, per the warning on the cut page itself.
Edited by JoestarRunneropenSuspected ban evader
Leedo is a new Troper who is exclusively editing the WMG page for Spirit Ideas for Super Smash Bros Ultimate here
. Most of their editing consists of deleting, and their edit reasons made me raise a brow.
"the Zelda CDI Games are not just not canon to the actual timeline nor even feel like zelda games but also the fact that they are popularity hated for good reasons. Also, Something being for fun does not mean it is okay to violate good rules of Smash Bros. So Mods of this website, stop being too strict"
"Kirby Right back at Ya! is an anime, not a video game. Also, Missingno is just a game-breaking glitch, plus is gone from future pokemon games and for good reasons. So stop with the random choices (whether they are for fun or not). Something being Fanon, head canon, or Canon don't even matter to me, you idiots are just using stupid arguments such as "For Fun", "Fanon", and "Fan Ideas" so you can continue making bad choices. I'm not saying these happened nor i am talking them having to be canon although that does not change using stupid arguments "For Fun", "Fan Ideas", and "Fanon" for why you did what you did is make any of bad on the inside. So please stop."
"Donkey Kong Country animated series is a tv show not a video game. Don't tell understand the concept of fanon, when in reality you are only saying that to get us not accept that we cannot always get you want."
I am roughly 99.99999999999% sure that this is a sock puppet of Leirdo, the troper who
was hacking-and-slashing entries on the same page for rules that they unanimously made up, and then, when they were reported, said that everyone who spoke against them were "selfish dumbasses" who deserved "a good slap in the fucking face" and demanded we all apologize and be punished. Same pages, same agenda, still calling other Tropers and mods idiots, and their username is almost exactly the same. Leirdo > Leedo
open I want a shadow the hedgehog self demonstrating article
Shadows basically every parodied Shonen rival ever conceived and plays it subversivally and for laughs. If Vegeta gets one why not Shadow?
openThe page for Self-Insert Fic is a bit of a mess
The page for Self-Insert Fic is soft split into three sections: "Fanfic examples", "Canonical and In-universe examples", and "Meta examples." First off, canonical examples are covered by Author Avatar. In fact many of those examples are already on the Author Avatar page. Saxon, there seems to be no difference between in-universe and meta examples. It seems to me that the third section is unnecessary.
openReport Troper
Alright, there are two threads dedicated to the same problem Troper and it's getting a little ridiculous, so I'm gonna consolidate everything and file an official complaint.
A troper named DL 32918623 (edit history here
) has been bouncing up this page recently because of a film called Brotherhood and its sequel, of which the pages consisted of nothing but an image that had been tweaked upwards of thirty times. It was reported here
, at which point it became clear that the troper in question had blanked the page in an attempt to move it somewhere else and replace it (instead of using a disambig), only to then leave the blank page while tweaking the image constantly. This was not an isolated incident, as they created multiple subpages
filled with blank folders and a few images. When confronted with this, they complained
(twice
) that the pages had been cut without giving them notice and proceeded to point the finger at pretty much everyone involved, including sending someone a notifier
for removing a page from the index ahead of cutlisting it and outright accusing the site
of not properly representing British culture (as commented below), then created another thread
to help clean up their mess.
There's also evidence that they plagiarized
The Other Wiki in their page for the musician Stormzy; their response
to the accusation suggests that the bio is, in fact, plagiarized, though they’ve now apologized and claimed it was “a mistake”.
Overall, the issues involved include creating stub articles, blanking pages, adding unapproved images, inappropriate notifiers, plagiarism, serial tweaking, complaining when no one else would trope the works they like, opening two separate threads calling for backup to trope pages, being evasive and confrontational when confronted with their issues, and deflecting blame to the site itself for their own mistakes.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99openNo Title
- Win Back the Crowd:
- Depending on who you ask, the game itself is an example of this.note Many people legitimately liked the New Super Mario Bros. games when they were released. When it was first announced, a lot of people were not impressed and already wrote it off due to it not being a game in the vein of Super Mario Galaxy or being "Super Mario 3D Land HD". Or New Mario Bros crossed with Mario 3D Land. But when the October 1 trailer went up, it changed a lot of people's minds about the game and restored interest to those who are/were tired of Mario platformers because of the New Super Mario Bros. series. Then the game actually came out and blew folks away with the amount of thought and creativity put into the title along with new visuals and music. It actually feels like a new game rather than a retreadnote Which some felt the New Super Mario Bros. games were with new power-ups thrown in. The multiplayer aspect certainly helped as well.
- The new Bowser's Fury mode also wound up doing this to the Switch port. Initially, the port was written off as yet another lazy decision on Nintendo's part and not being worth $60. (Being announced at the same time as Super Mario 3D All-Stars, another controversial decision by Nintendo, didn't help much either). Come further information on the new mode, however, and more people had their interest peaked, including a Super Saiyan-esque form for Mario, a dark and intimidating new form for Bowser, and being an open-world collect-a-thon platformer in the vein of Super Mario Odyssey.
Can Win Back the Crowd even apply if the audience wasn't interested in the work initially? That'd be Win The Crowd, correct? Also, I remember people were excited for Bowser's Fury when it was announced, I don't remember anyone going "oh this is just another switch port so it'll blow", especially with the teaser at the end.
openHow there is no mention in AwesomeBossBattle / Videogames to Ghost of Tsushima?
The videogame is a GOTY and its gameplay is awesome, especially the boss duels. I personally haven't played it and my narrative is not very good cause iam not enaglish native, so I'm not going to add it myself yet.
open Music-Inspired narratives? Music
Honestly, this could be a trope itself. I’m thinking of music-inspired narratives like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, Afro Samurai, Baby Driver, ETC.
Name more music-inspired narratives. Maybe this could be its own article or something.
Edited by TheBryceKrispyopenMods Tropes.
If we want to make Trope examples of mods, say Friday Night Funkin', then how do we go about it? No Mods for that game are really long enough to warrant their own Trope pages, but can fit several tropes and are fairly professionally made.
This is true for a lot of works. For example, the Inigo mod for Skyrim is very in depth and has many tropes that people might be interest in posting somewhere without needing to make a whole new Trope page for it. Since the Inigo mod its own world, but exclusive to Skyrim we don't need a page for it, but Inigo, himself, fits many tropes.
Edited by Thecommander236open Troper seems to have a problem with "bashing" Fairy Tail.
A troper by the name of Zero Hunter
seems to have a Single-Issue Wonk when it comes to the series Fairy Tail. They appear to be going on to random pages and deleting examples that they believe are "bashing" the series.
I'm sure this would be fine, but I feel a problem arrises when their edit reason only consist of the phrase "Getting rid of pointless bashing." and nothing else, leaving no actual reason as to how these examples are bashing the series. Some examples include this edit
for Ms. Fanservice (which also turned two examples into Zero-Context Examples), outright deleting several tropes
from the series' YMMV page (which have since been restored), and editing other tropers
predictions on the series' WMG page (which, as far as I'm aware, isn't against the rules, but is considered extremely rude), among many other edits.
Basically, I feel this troper may be a problem and should probably be discussed.
Edit: After looking through their edit history a bit more, I've also noticed that Zero seems to do the same with EDENS ZERO (a manga by the same author of Fairy Tail), as seen with their edits
to one of the series' character pages.
Also, while I've tried to avoid being rude in this post, after looking through their edits, I feel at this point I should say this: It seems that Zero's definition of "bashing" is actually "anything I perceive as slightly negative to these series" (even when the trope itself isn't negative in nature).
Edited by lpk675openSelf demonstration on We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies
Is the description of We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies taking it too far?
open TinyLittleLetters Western Animation
Tiny Little Letters makes a lot of edits on Tangled: The Series pages. I deleted shoehorns here
, here
, here
, here
, and here
— darn, I cut a lot; have I grown trigger-happy? I wrote an edit reason for each deletion though. But what I want to talk about is that I suspect this troper does Draco in Leather Pants.
- Here
, meet Rapunzel the Death Eater who makes the poor Varian suffer.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Done en masse. Toward the end of Season 1, the people of Corona turned their backs on Varian and denied him when he begged them for help. Now, he's allied himself with the Saporians and has taken over the kingdom, with Corona's citizens being forced to mine crystals for Varian's chemicals so the Saporians can use them to their advantage.
A few days ago, the same troper added this on YMMV.Tangled The Series:
- Catharsis Factor:
- After seeing them display disturbing Lack of Empathy towards his problems in the second half of Season 1, with King Frederic hunting down Varian for the Demanitus Scroll and chasing him out of his own home, and Rapunzel never checking on Varian after Zhan Tiri's blizzard was over (thus abandoning him for months on end), as well as expressing little-to-no concern for his well-being even when seeing Quirin encased in amber, Varian gloating in their faces over abducting Queen Arianna is quite satisfying, especially when he taunts Frederic to his face and puts Rapunzel through physical pain while using her hair as a drill. This also goes true for Varian, in his giant automaton, grabbing Arianna away from them, after they'd shared a warm and long hug right in front of him as he breaks down over failing to free his father.
So, what to do about this? Maybe I should talk to this troper but I don't know how. "Even if you're grief-stricken, it's not nice to enslave and kill innocent people?"
openWandaVision edit war
There appears to have been an Edit War over the entry on YMMV.Wanda Vision Episode 5 On A Very Special Episode over an Unintentionally Sympathetic entry. I don't have context for the show, but I figured it was worth bringing up to those who did.
Lighthammer added it as follows:
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: While Hayward does go overboard with his attack on Wanda, he is absolutely right in the fact that an entire town is being held against their will by -what seems by all accounts to be- her. The trio of Darcy, Monica, and Woo on the other hand, seem to ascribe to Protagonist-Centered Morality.
emeriin removed the entry with the edit reason, "they're not saying she's not being awful just there's something more (like massive trauma) than just 'terrorism'."
Dragon Master 408 re-added it, while also adding more context to the entry. Their edit reason was "Unintentionally Sympathetic is about characters who are unintentionally sympathetic. And as it stands, I think there's a good case for Hayward being this, especially since Darcy herself describes him as a dick before it cuts her off, so it seems like we're supposed to find him in the wrong."
Then The Goddess Is Dead tweaked and moved the entire entry to Informed Wrongness saying, "It's not about sympathy for characters. It's more about the fact that the episode accidentally presents that Both Sides Have a Point when they clearly only intended for Woo, Darcy, and Monica to be right."
Not sure if it needs to be discussed further as Goddess seems to have found a compromise but it felt worth noting.
Edited by mightymewtronopenWhat kind of page do mods and fanmade songs for Friday Night Funkin go into? Videogame
So, I'm the main guy who launched and frequently checks the Friday Night Funkin' page, and as I've been looking around the edit histories, it's become evident that a few tropers would like to add examples of mods/fan created songs to pages like Awesome Music and Nightmare Fuel. I for one think that FNF has a healthy modding community ripe with lots of examples and I was hoping that these would breath new life into the page during the lulls of waiting for the game itself to be updated, so I tried making a fan works page, since you can't add examples of mods to main pages. Unfortunately, I used the page incorrectly (Accidentally. My bad.) and it got cut. I can only assume that we should use the Fanfic Recs option? I'm a little confused on the matter since I wouldn't really consider game mods fanfics.
Edited by GraysonBaueropenReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming and a Halo franchise example with possible spoilers Videogame
My main concern is how to write this so as to avert creating a Self-Fulfilling Spoiler. The Flood in Halo is very clearly named after the Genesis flood narrative, but how would I go about adding this in to the page without creating a Self-Fulfilling Spoiler since in the backstory, the Flood were effectively created as a means to purge the Forerunners, who retaliated by creating an Ark to preserve most species?
Edited by EclipseMTopenWhat to do with this?
YMMV.The Mandalorian S 1 E 1 Chapter 1 The Mandalorian
- "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: The Running Gag of IG-11 trying to self-destruct when his situation goes remotely south turns into this after Chapter 8, where he uses his self-destruct mechanism for a Heroic Sacrifice in a scene that isn't played for humor.
Recap pages are Spoilers Off, so when to we allow or not allow spoilers for later works? Removing the spoiler part would leave "The Running Gag of IG-11 trying to self-destruct when his situation goes remotely south turns into this after Chapter 8." which sounds like a Zero-Context Examples as it doesn't explain how.
Also, as part of the same season they were written alongside each other so it was probably intentional by the writer. Does "Funny Aneurysm" Moment count for deliberate examples or is that Chekhov's Gag played for drama.
openPage with little source
I was planning on making a second character page for the series Gamaran focused on the characters appearing in the second part of the series, Gamaran Shura. However, the point is....
As mentioned on the main manga page, Shura, while still ongoing (first came out in 2018) is still so far Japanese-only, as I've yet to see even a translated scan, and only a handful of chapters are avaible in a Japanese site. I got most of the info (including something I've already added to the pages of Gamaran itself by getting info from the Japanese Wikipedia page dedicated to Gamaran.
I was thinking of making the character page using the information I got from that page, doing my best with what I understood from that page. I'd rather want to know in advance if I can give it a shot, or if it's too far fetched. It's not much, but I swear I'll do my best.
Ps: The "second character page" is both because Shura is a sequel and because I don't want to put too many examples in a single character page.
Edited by MukademaohopenIssues concerning WMG/FIsForFamily
Recently, an Edit War has broken out between two factions; a troper named Johnny 2071 who has acted in violation of Complaining About Shows You Dont Like, and both myself and fellow troper AHI-3000, who have taken issue with his edits. Johnny 2071 has an obsessive hatred of the Netflix show F is for Family and has taken to venting his frustrations about the show on the WMG page. Prior attempts to negotiate with Johnny 2071, on my part, have only led to tempers flying high. This attempt to resolve the issue personally has gotten me nowhere, so, on AHI-3000's suggestion, I have come here to try and work things out far more professionally than previously handled. How do you suggest this issue be resolved?

Edited title. I'll get the answer to this question and then proceed with specifics in Trope Talk.
Edited by AGuy