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:
open Wiki/VsBattlesWiki
A page for Vs Battles Wiki was created today. The main purpose of that wiki is to categorize various characters by their powers, strengths, and weaknesses and pit them against each other — think DEATH BATTLE! as a wiki and with way more people involved.
The page has only been live for a few hours and already it's filled with tropes about the wiki itself and its users. Assuming the actual content of the wiki is enough to trope, is it worth it to keep the page around?
Edited by Crossover-EnthusiastopenFanfic examples are not general violations?
- A good number of Spuffy fanfics focus on rewriting the largely very depressing season 6, bumping up the healthier and more amicable relationship dynamic for Buffy and Spike that developed in season 7 sooner and undoing all the angst their Destructive Romance caused for both of them. Some of them even make a point of letting Tara live on top of it.
- Many The Hobbit fics change canon events so that none of the main characters die during the Battle of Five Armies. Sometimes this is done by Bilbo or one of the dwarves being sent back in time; other times, the why and how of everyone surviving is left vague in a "look, canon had a helluva depressing ending and we all want to read something Lighter and Softer, so let's assume that everyone who died was just injured and pulled through, okay?" way.
- Many fans were not happy that Starlight Glimmer was Easily Forgiven at the end of the Season 5 finale. Some have taken it upon themselves to write fanfics where she receives proper comeuppance for her actions.
- In Step Right In and Start Again, because of Starlight's tampering with the time spell in the original episode, she has trapped herself in a permanent time loop where every day she reappears in Twilight's castle with no memory of the previous day, awaiting her punishment from Twilight and the Mane Six. It got a fix fic in the form of Starting Over Again
, where Twilight creates a magic crown for Starlight to wear that stores and retains her memories as she goes through each time loop. When she realizes that she is now immortal and will outlive every living thing in existence, Starlight devises a potion of eternal youth and gives it to her friends and the rest of Equestria to use. Everypony becomes an immortal alicorn, the races of Equestria explore and colonize the galaxy, and Starlight lives to the end of the universe with her friends, where her time loop is finally broken and she transforms into an alicorn like everyone else. The story ends with a new universe forming, with every character we know and love being present to watch it.
- In Step Right In and Start Again, because of Starlight's tampering with the time spell in the original episode, she has trapped herself in a permanent time loop where every day she reappears in Twilight's castle with no memory of the previous day, awaiting her punishment from Twilight and the Mane Six. It got a fix fic in the form of Starting Over Again
I worry these violate Examples Are Not General unless it lists at least one example of such fic.
Relating, most of the Starlight Glimmer examples were deleted as "evenge fics at best, and accusation fics at worst. If they truly were fix fics, they would have actually fixed what the author perceived as a problem, but instead they made them worse." Was that valid? How can we tell where it crosses to whick for and are they incompatible? And if Starlight getting karma un-fixes the Season 6 finale where's she's essential to it's happy ending, what then?
Mostly I'm asking if listing genres of fanworks per fandom need specific examples to be valid?
Edited by Ferot_DreadnaughtopenIssues with Franchise/Creator/Genre Killer
Alright I'm kind of new here (having made few edits and having not posted in the forums) and this is my first ATT query, so forgive me if this isn't the right place or I am not the right person to be asking this, or if I am using incorrect formatting.
I have been half-paying attention to some of the cleanup threads of problematic tropes and pages, both Short-Term and Long-Term. It was brought up [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15523303630A12937700&page=12#comment-283
here] that the Genre Killer trope may be in need of a cleanup effort.
Looking at the trope right now, I am somewhat inclined to agree. While the description does say that a genre can be brought back from the dead, I agree that some of the examples of killed-off "genres" are a bit narrow, such as "live-action Dr. Seuss movies" or ""kid uses super-science and gadgets to deal with everyday life" cartoons," and I also agree that some examples don't define which work, if any, is the Killer, with examples including non-work related Killers such as quiz shows being killed off by a major scandal and not a specific failure, or Gangsta Rap being killed off by the murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.. (I have admittedly made a questionable and possibly invalid edit myself to the Music page describing how an album's success killed off the success of a completely different genre, so I apologize for that.)
The reason I bring this up here rather than in the thread where this was originally brought up is because upon further inspection, I believe the other Killer tropes to have their own issues. Creator Killer has examples (such as Milli Vanilli) describing careers destroyed by scandals rather than works (I believe if I am correct that Role-Ending Misdemeanor covers that) or some examples that outright mention a Career Resurrection. Franchise Killer, meanwhile, has problems with examples describing multiple Killers despite the trope description and Laconic stating that only one film can be a Killer, along with some other questionable examples in general (such as one directly quoted as describing the death of "the whole idea of the "peace, love and music" late-'60s outdoor rock festival that Monterey had pioneered and Woodstock made legendary," which isn't a franchise at all.)
Am I correct in assuming that these tropes may be in need of a cleanup? Or are there bigger issues with the tropes that would require more serious action?
openDubious Trope Namers Western Animation
TropeNamers.The Simpsons lists Glove Slap and The Dog Was the Mastermind. Glove Slap seems like too generic a term to be named by The Simpsons, while TropeNamers.Video Games lists Silent Hill 2 as the trope namer. The Dog Was the Mastermind page itself says in the description that the Silent Hill 2 joke ending is the Trope Namer in the description and the video games folder, while also saying in the Western Animation folder that the trope is named after the Simpsons episode "Beyond Blunderdome". "Beyond Blunderdome" aired in 1999, while Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001. SimCity is also listed as the Trope Namer for Not in My Backyard!, while according to Wikipedia, the term dates back to at least 1980.
openDoes Solas from Dragon Age: Inquisition count as a Greater Scope villain for the first 2 games? Videogame
For Elven characters, the evil god Fen'Harel is considered the evil god of their religion and culture, and part of the reason they suffer in the present, as they are a slave race to humans. But in Dragon Age: Inquisition, in the DLC Tresspasser, we learn that one of our companions, a mysterious elf named Solas, is really Fen'Harel himself, and that the gods of the Elves are mages so powerful, it might be safe to call them gods. We also learn that the only reason he sided with us, was to get the Eluvians so that he could use them to destroy modern Thedes and bring back a civilization he destroyed when he rebelled against his fellow mages. Solas claims he rebelled for a good cause, but in the end, he caused more harm then help as he separated Thedes from the Fade, robbing the Elves of their power, killing thousands of his own people, many of them innocents, and being the cause of the plights of the modern elves that we see in all three games. Does this qualigy him as a Greater Scope Villain? I say yes. What about you?
openNot Insane Troll Logic?
The examples in the entry from EFAP seem a bit too tame to me:
- Insane Troll Logic: A lot of people they cover use this, to which those on the podcast end up having to make sense of and respond to. Some examples include Jim Sterling saying that "there's noting about Joel that ain't loathsome" while showing the scene from Part II where Joel's taking Ellie to a museum at great risk to his own safety just so she can have fun, Browntable saying that "Just because the film isn't as good as The Dark Knight doesn't mean we should brush it aside as an inferior sequel" despite the fact that those two statements contradict one another, and Just Write saying that the reason the newer, less efficient bombers were used in The Last Jedi is because "most people don't know what a Y-wing is" despite the fact that there are Y-wings in the film released just before The Last Jedi.
Even just taking those at face value that they're accurate, they seem like sorta sloppy arguments at worst, and not up to the level the trope describes.
openFridge brilliance that isn't a fridge.
RafKen593
changed the first Fridge Brilliance on Animator vs. Animation to something that isn't really a fridge but a simple fact:
"Of course the Chosen One would defeat anyone who gets in his way."
It used to make sense before because it used to be an Harry Potter reference (Of course the Chosen One would eventually triumph over the Dark Lord) and I tried to tell him that what he put wasn't a Fridge but he wasn't intersted in changing it back or asking on Ask The Tropers to see if it is really a Fridge, so I'm asking myself now: Does the first Fridge of this page count as a Fridge ?
openCreator/ChadwickBoseman
Someone included a part on the Determinator entry on Chadwick Boseman that was about himself and not his works, so I removed it. A different troper added it back, so I'm requesting someone else remove it so I don't get caught up in an edit war.
Edited by Crossover-EnthusiastopenDo we have a cleanup thread for Auto Erotic Troping?
Self-explanatory title. I tried looking in both the long- and short-term forums, but couldn't find anything.
openWicks to a Main redirect as if it were a trope
Today, I discovered Main.Rebel Without A Cause. The page itself is actually just a redirect to the film Rebel Without a Cause. Since we don’t want Main redirect like this, I thought that I should clean out the wicks and cutlist the redirect.
However, looking through the Main.Rebel Without A Cause wicks, I discovered something really strange: most of the wicks used the redirect as if it were a trope page for some reason.
Do we have an actual trope like this? If not, then maybe the redirect could become an actual trope (although it would still have to be cut and launched through the TLP)?
openA very difficult case of AffablyEvil vs FauxAffablyEvil.
I know I just asked about a similar case earlier, but there's an even more complicated case of a character being listed as both, and in this case, I'm genuinely wondering if he doesn't zigzag between the two in the one and only episode where he appears:
Dr. Dave from CSI. Both tropes are listed on the series' page:
- "Affably Evil: Doctor Dave, the serial-killing dentist from the episode "Sweet Jane". He has a pleasant chat with Catherine about loving his work (dentistry, not serial killing), and how he especially takes care to make a child's first trip to the dentist the least frightening and painful as possible. And when she confronts him about his crimes, not only does he never once deny that he is, in fact, a murderer, he describes the killings in the same affectionate tone that he just described trying to make a trip to the dentist less scary for kids. Ned Beatty's note-perfect performance was a complete blend of utterly friendly and utterly scary-creepy.
- To push this even farther, when Catherine is trying to mix the putty for his dental impression, he remarks that she's not quite doing it right and does both the mixing and the impression himself; again, as politely as one could possibly be while fessing up to being a serial killer."
- "Faux Affably Evil: No greater example than Doctor Dave from the episode "Sweet Jane", a very nice Cool Old Guy and dentist who does gags to keep kids from being afraid when they visit him... and he is also an utterly unapologetic Serial Killer who targeted girls that had just arrived to town and was not caught for decades (it helped him that he only felt the urge to kill at least once a decade or so) and he said that he still could recall the girls' names but refused to tell the police (so they would remain Jane Does forever) in the same peppy tone he used to chide Catherine about how she wasn't mixing the dental template gel right."
I hate to bother you all, but this seems...complicated.
openOdd example on DMOS/WebOriginal
I was bored, so I decided to look through the Web Original section of Dethroning Moment Of Suck, and found...this.
- Phionix Powers: Ok, i didn't want to start this, but why did TV Tropes axe the Real Life Tearjerker page? Some of the RL cuts, like Nightmare Fuel, I sort of understand, but there were many Heartwarming tributes to the deceased on the Tearjerker page. There was an entire line of Deviant Art tributes of Steve Irwin, for pete's sake! Maybe this is just my macabre self, but when we lose those we love, some of us need a bit of catharsis to see that the world cares. Yes, there were many personal anecdotes, and we can lose those, but funerals and such should remain. Please don't ban me.
This sticks out compared to other examples I read, and I'm very suspicious about it in general.
openLordGro in TLP
Lord Gro is being incredibly rude and kind of irrational. They're insisting that this
needs a better name, but then he doesn't suggest any new name. He also said "It's not an extravagant demand to use the right terms with the right definitions," except the name does use the correct definition. He also seems to be contradicting himself, changing his argument as the conversation goes on.
It's one of those "I just want us to be correct" sort of back-and-forth nonsensical gibberish. Then he bombed the draft "for irrelevance and garbled definition."
Except the proposal is relevant and the definition is not "garbled."
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?
openAlphaBitch
I noticed in passing on the Is This An Example? thread that an observation was made that Alpha Bitch is always female. However, the trope description itself states 'almost always female' (confusingly, with a pothole to Always Female) and goes on to state that there are rare cases of Alpha Bastards. There is an existing redirect for Alpha Bastard (there are 21 links). The comment about the Alpha Bastard existing was added in 2012, so it's been around for a long time, but not as long as the trope itself has existed.
So, is it an Always Female trope or is it definitely the case that rare Alpha Bastard examples can indeed exist?
openFilm.LaColonia has multiple titles?
Film.La Colonia has multiple titles?
Wikipedia: Colonia / The Colony
, Page Image: Colonia Dignidad
◊, and the page title itself, all disagree.
openGermans Love David Hasselhoff Anime Bad Grammar.
- Ask a Latin-American fan in their twenties or thirties (and if you're lucky, maybe even in their early fourties) about it, and it's highly likely that they will mimic their favorite attacks and correctly give you their dubbed names. And that's just the start... (the Brazilian cast said the show was marked the start of fans seeking who were the dubbers, and that their voices still get emotional responses when recognized as being from Saint Seiya)
I want to correct this but I wanted some help because I dont have perfect grammar myself.
openRoberto Jalareno
RobertoJalareno's edits
are a mess, consisting of making subpages for himself (which I'm pretty sure isn't allowed), and the few edits he has on other pages have formatting and grammar issues.
Also all of the pages he made come up as "Make Video game articles" and not Roberto Jalareno, which...I don't even know how that happened.
Edited by ArctimonopenHow To Create A Troper Page
So, I'm fairly new to being a troper, and I wanted to know how to make a troper page for myself. Sorry if this has been covered somewhere else, but I really didn't know where else to ask.

So apparently I got banned yesterday for making fun of the person who made Gay trope in TLP. And I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to hurt anyone. But is there's a way to get unbanned from TLP or should I wait until I got unbanned? Btw I tried go to this forum (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=5cma6iojg5o27puhulc24sje&page=871#comment-21771)
to explain myself but I don't know if people will go there .