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Ask the Tropers:
openTroper with linking issues and a shipping bias Videogame
Mysticalmagic 483 often edits on the Sonic the Hedgehog pages, and I've found myself having to correct their edits from time to time.
- Here
they don't properly link an example.
- Another
example of not using link brackets.
- Word cruft
In addition, they have such an obvious shipping bias. They are a fan of the Sonic/Blaze pairing. They are entitled to that opinion, because this is the internet, and everyone is allowed to have their own opinion even if I don't agree with it.
What they AREN'T entitled to is deleting mentions of the Silver/Blaze pairing because it goes against their preferred ship.
- Here
they take off details of Blaze's Ship Tease entry.
- Here
they delete a point saying Sonic is a Shipper on Deck for Silver/Blaze.
- Here
they remove a segment where both Silver and Blaze blush at being called a cute couple.
- Here
they insist that the pairing Silver and Amy "makes more sense" (no hate to anyone who ships this, but in canon Amy has a Single-Target Sexuality for Sonic).
- Here
they remove another point about her being close to Silver.
Permission to revert these edits?
Edited by deerhornsaresoprettyopenVery self-congratulatory work pages...
The TV Tropes Character Crossover War has several sub-pages like trivia and ymmv, and several of their most frequent editors are people who were already on TV Tropes. And frankly I'm a bit uncomfortable reading these and seeing how self-indulgent and passive-aggressive towards this platform they seem to be, as they're utilizing multiple tropes like Take That! and Executive Meddling to describe TV Tropes and to voice the aforementioned tropers' disagreements with site policy - which means they are effectively troping themselves. Is stuff like this even allowed?
A few examples of this:
- Author's Saving Throw: Despite their frustrations with TV Tropes booting them off the platform and banning the self demonstrating pages from having non-canon interactions, the authors behind the fic came to embrace the opportunity to improve upon the smaller, script-based format into a larger, more-in-depth narrative format.
- One challenge the writers faced was being limited to the characters with self demonstrating pages being the primary focus, only being able to include characters with some interfranchise or vague connection. By being moved off, the board was clear to add in whoever the writers wanted, expand further on the lore, and make changes to the story that made more sense for their new narrative. This extended to the addition of entire universes, most notably with Shrek and Breaking Bad, along with MrBeast as an additional Joke Character.
- Executive Meddling:
- As the story initially started out on TV Tropes itself, the writers were about nearly complete with most of the pre-Night Parade recruitments when the website moderators deemed the fic could no longer be hosted on the site, forcing it to be moved off-site.
- Shortly thereafter, the moderators almost got rid of the self-demonstrating pages altogether, but after a massive backlash towards eliminating the concept, they instead declared that none of the interactions were to remain (sans between those who had actually met in canon) — aka much of the basis of the fic in the first place. The writing team responded by mocking this decision repeatedly, which the moderation team did not respond to in kind (causing author chris4449 to get bounced from the site).
- Writer Revolt: After the TV Tropes moderators forced the story off the website and banned all non-canon interactions between the self demonstrating pages, the writers subsequently began openly criticizing this decision through the story itself (chiefly through Deadpool).
- Growing the Beard: By the writing team’s own admission, while they had fun with creating the original story, they always felt constrained by their original format in order to keep it as true to TV Tropes as possible. When the story was forced to move, the team took the opportunity to completely transform the story into something they felt eclipsed what they had originally created.
openEdit war on TADC
On Characters.The Amazing Digital Circus Players, xVanitas is edit warring:
- RebelFalcon
removed a Secretly Selfish entry, stating that a human wanting affection and attention is a basic need.
- Vanitas
restored the entry (albeit rewritten).
- MagmaTeaMerry
removed per the TADC cleanup
- Restored again by Vanitas
I haven't watched the episode but the consensus is that all the edits reek of Ron the Death Eater-esque agenda editing.
openHeavy quoting in more ways than one
I noticed that a troper named OUSIsITH has added a number of quotes in the past couple of months in several pages under Real Life, all of them coming from discussions and quotes from blog posts within the last three years and which take a rather pessimistic view of the future. Some of them are very long, like several paragraphs. Quotes can be found in Reality Is Unrealistic, Terminally Dependent Society, Humans Are Bastards, Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be, and Post-Peak Oil.
Simply being negative might not be grounds for removal, but with the result being in some of these pages being so heavily negative I am not sure whether this by itself merits a review. (I have refrained from pinging the troper in question for now since if this is a nothingburger I'm fine with not bothering them.)
openAssistance in resolving/preventing an edit war on Creator/QuintonFlynn Videogame
Bringing this here since the page's discussion forum doesn't get a lot of traffic.
To provide a bit of context, back in November 2020 images and audio of Voice Actor Quinton Flynn sexually harassing female fans surfaced on social media followed up by multiple accusations from many other women. This led to Flynn losing upcoming roles as documented on the Role Ending Misdemeanor Video Games page. Six months Flynn had sued one of his accusing for stalking him and got a court victory over her, then claimed on Twitter that a judge had found him not guilty of the accusations. This is pretty blatantly a lie; as the plaintiff his guilt or innocence was never under any consideration, he was only suing one woman for stalking him, she defended herself which is a good sign she didn't receive the best legal council, and her being guilty of stalking him does not mean he can't be guilty of harassing her. However some of his fans have taken this as proof that all accusations against him are false and he is 100% innocent since she had to delete her tweets on the matter. So Flynn portraying the decision as him being found not guilty is dishonest and a bit suspect.
Now onto the actual matter; over on his creator page when the judge's decision was brought down Captain Tedium deleted the section on the accusations on April 22 2021 with the following edit reason:
"The sexual allegations have recently been debunked. https://mobile.twitter.com/JasmineDBZking/status/1384605216650059780
Reinstate the detail of what happened in November 2020 only if the proof of Quinton Flynn's innocence is itself debunked. Or if this incident has ended up affecting his career anyway."
On July 4th The Extractor added in a modified entry with the accusations, court victory and the loss of roles with the following edit reasons
"A statement that he alone released, that no one else corroborated, that still contradicts a shitload of visual and audio evidence doesn't remotely absolve him of anything. It also doesn't change the fact that he's effectively been fired from everything and is yet to be re-hired on anything. I'll amend this part so it's more objective and less "hostile", but it stays."
On the 20th I amended the entry to remove the reference to the court case as I felt the way it was written would lead someone to an incorrect assumption of what happened and that to properly explain and provide context would take up a lot of words that in my opinion was largely irrelevant to the point.
There were no further edits to the page until November 6th when Tropers/shaynaynaynot edited the page to add "In April 2021, Flynn tweeted that the accusations came from a stalker
, and he was found not guilty." They also added the same to the REM subpage.
Now what's been added is objectively false (as the plaintiff it is quite literally impossible for him to be found not guilty), but given as this could be described as either the first, second or fourth edit on the matter depending on your definition I'm concerned that reverting it would be considered an edit war, and given that only four of us have been involved in editing there is little hope of getting a consensus. So I'm seeking further input from people who haven't been involved so far.
openMay have caught an edit war + possible agenda
So last night, I found an interesting Anvilicious entry on YMMV.Mr Robot, which, among other things, complained about the lack of a “sympathetic” right-leaning character in the series. I had already taken that entry to the ROCEJ cleanup thread
, where it was agreed to cut the entry.
However, after going back and looking over the history again, I found that the Anvilicious entry was added by Oransel (who added the “lack of a sympathetic right-leaning character” bit) and after doing a quick look through their edit history, found an edit they made on YMMV.Star Trek Picard which talks about the series being even more “preachy” than usual Star Trek. cluosborne deleted the entry with the edit reason being “speculation”, but Oransel added it back with the reason “ How is this a speculation? It is a YMMV opinion, expressed by many people”. (I have next to no knowledge on Star Trek, so I can’t confirm this myself).
Based on what I know of this site’s rules, I’m pretty sure Oransel is (was?) edit warring (and possibly with some kind of agenda). Problem is, the Star Trek entry was from March of last year, and Oransel hasn’t edited since. I’m not sure if possible edit wars are still reportable even if it’s been a year since they happened.
Edited by worldwidewoomyopen Reporting Edit Warring and Vandalism Live Action TV
Editor Rm74 has made repeated edits in the Euphoria pages (Character
and YMMV
as far as I know, but I haven’t checked the other Euphoria pages) that exaggerate a character’s negative traits and actions beyond reason— even outright making stuff up about them that they haven’t done or that they aren’t— and a lot of their edits are simply bizarre. I know that YMMV is opinion based, but even still their edits are beyond exaggeration, or even again just them making stuff up. Myself and some other editors have made attempts to fix these Ron The Death Eater style edits, but RM74 has repeatedly gone and added them back in or made new outlandish edits.
openWeird trivia entry
This Star-Derailing Role entry was added nearly three weeks ago
onto Trivia.Inception:
- Star-Derailing Role: Despite the film's critical and commerical success, Elliot Page's performance in the film was not well-received and was lackluster despite the rest of the cast's performances was well-received. Shortly after the film, Elliot's film career took a major nosedive. His career when he starred in the critically panned remake Flatliners and since then reprised his role as Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Days of Future Past and starred in the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy, His reputation got even when had a gender change in 2020 changing his name from Ellen Page to Elliot Page, While he's still got success in his career on streaming television. He hasn't acted in a film up until 2023.
I wanted to bring this up into Remove Complaining because I'm not sure if its a derailing role (Page's Wikipedia page calls 2015-present "career fluctuations"), but the entry seems to mention his career improving on streaming television, and the entry itself is poorly-written that I'm not sure what's complaining and what's not.
Any thoughts?
open The Deadpool pages are way to difficult to understand for people note well-versed with the comics. Print Comic
I get it, Deadpool is 4th Wall breaking, but does really need to be applied to Deadpool's T Vtropes and all associated pages, especially the tropes themselves? It's actually hard to understand some of it, especially when it's discussing specific events which A. Aren't clearly stated and B. assumes you already are well-versed with all of Deadpool's appearances. The one I have serious trouble reading in Deadpool/YMMV page for Seasonal Rot, not only is the entry needlessly long winded, but poorly explained on what events or comics it's even talking about and just isn't all the useful.
What's worse is that on the Characters / Marvel Comics aka: Marvel Universe page, next to link for the Deadpool page their's a note that says "(And if you're asking why there's no Comic Book sub-page for me, too bad! My page is always permanently on Self-Demonstrating mode, cuz I'm frickin' Deadpool.)"
Like really? Is this what T Vtropes has come to where we say screw making the site actually anyway useful or informative and just make entire sections useless for a cheap overdrawn joke that just simply isn't funny unless your a hardcore fan of the character and make fun of people for it?
I'm sorry but I really do feel the Deadpool really needs to heavily revised to at least make it understandable for people who aren't well-versed with the comics and the character and make it more clear what is even being discussed.
openThe Lobo problem Print Comic
The page SelfDemonstrating.Lobo exists.
The page ComicBook.Lobo doesn't. Once upon a time, it was a redirect to the self-demonstrating page, but it was cutlisted with the following reason "Redirect to SelfDemonstrating.Lobo, causing people to treat the page as a legitimate work page rather than a Just For Fun page. [Anddrix]"
Beyond the fact that ComicBook.Lobo should exist as it is a genuine work, trope examples shouldn't be linking to a self-demonstrating page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I do believe that it was clearly stated by mods that any such link (like SelfDemonstrating.Deadpool or SelfDemonstrating.The Joker to only name common ones) should be corrected to the ComicBook/ namespace.
However, in the case of Lobo, the result would be a red link. (There is currently 259 wicks.) What shall we do? Re-creating the redirect would seem to me the absolute minimum, until someone knowledgeable and/or courageous enough create an actual work page...
Edited by StFanopenTime to reach concensus Film
There was a bit of the controversy going on with the Protagonist-Centered Morality on the Spider-Man: Far From Home page and troper HighCrate
pulled the contested example to the example thread
. It happened at Jul 15th 12:24 AM. Two tropers replied to him there, and six hours later, at Jul 15th 6:25 AM he pulled the example back "per concensus". What kind of concensus can be reached during 6 hours when none of the people originally editing that example got the chance to be involved in the discussion? To be clear, I was not among them but I find it wrong.
The resulting example "per concensus" is factually incorrect. It states that Tony Stark "proclaimed himself a hero" for creating E.D.I.T.H. while nothing like that happened in the film. How do I delete that part when "concensus" was reached?
Edited by Asherinkaopen [Resolved] Suspicious TLP
This TLP draft
is for an H-game. Judging from the draft, it's probably not something that the P5 would want here, and the Wikipedia page for it
has a very, uh... questionable plot summary itself. And that's not even getting into all the problems with the actual draft, like the broken formatting, zero-context examples, or the fact that the draft uses the game's Japanese name rather than its English name of Stepmother's Sin. This draft needs to be nuked.
But that's not all. The person who posted the draft, YusukeYagami777, named themselves after the game's main character. Said troper has no edits on the wiki or posts on the forum, which makes me think they're here for the sole purpose of launching a hentai page.
Edited by SeracopenEdit War on Azumanga Shitposts Anime
Reporting a belatedly-realized Edit War scenario:
- Troper.Stop Hating Tv Tropes Plz 123 adds the following Condemned by History entry
to YMMV.Azumanga Daioh, subsequently tweaking the format over successive edits
- Troper.UFO Yeah deletes
the entry, citing poor formatting and complaining
- StopHatingTvTropesPlz123 re-adds
the entry, including a confusing question about YMMV.Fate Stay Night and YMMV.Oreimo's CBH entries
- After StopHating's entry is brought to attention of Condemned by History cleanup thread
, it is again deleted by myself
(not having seen the history proving this was an Edit War yet)
I apologize for unknowingly engaging in an Edit War, but what should become of StopHating's entry? And should we keep watch in case they decide to add it again?
Edited by Galileo26openEdit war on Ranma Saotome Anime
Okay, I didn't want to ring the alarm prematurely, but lately the page Characters.Ranma One Half Ranma Saotome is veering into an edit war between Midnight Star Hunter and Valentine Meikin, with some peanut gallery comments by Wandering Browser. (Myself, I'm only doing the occasional grammar edit on the page.)
The latest edit by Midnight Star Hunter includes an absolute Wall of Text of an edit reason accompanying an absolutely bloated trope entry; please check it out. I think that everybody needs to cool down and discuss it out before any further addition or removal.
openA bit of weirdness going on with Mouthscreen
palatiinas appears to have a fixation on the Mouthscreen trope. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but in a lot of their examples, they seem to feel the need to point that "X character's mouth is played by Y actor's mouth", which is unnecessary and seems a bit weird and fetish-y to me.
I'm asking if I can remove those details and what is the appropriate notifier to send here.
openPotential page revert
I have a concern about a recent group of edits from the user wonderpix45. Basically, they edited the page for Characters.Lost Main Survivors four times, seemingly just to trash the character of Libby. Among other things, they removed entries for TheHeart and HairOfGoldHeartOfGold as "incorrect assertions"
, edited the entry for The Shrink to say she's a "self-proclaimed" psychiatrist when there's no indication she's lying about her profession, added a Truth Twister entry to nitpick things she says (in a conversation where she's convincing someone not to kill himself and is very clearly using turns of phrases that the user is taking literally), and changing a Nice Girl entry to "zig-zagged" and saying that her romantic relationship with Hurley is depicted as "questionable" (this is, quite frankly, not true - they are treated as soulmates for the entire show, including the finale which the entry itself acknowledges). Along the way, they've had some questionable grammar and put multiple tropes in the wrong alphabetical order. I would normally go to the Discussion page, but these edits are four of the user's five total edits, which makes me think an agenda is in play.
I don't know what the procedure is when I'm contesting this many entries at once, especially due to concerns about an agenda - can I outright ask for a mod revert, should I just revert it all myself, or is there a third option I don't know about?
Edited by STARCRUSHER99openComplaining?
Alinho Alisson has been editing The Lion King (1994), but his entries tend to demonize the protagonist while excusing the antagonist's actions. These include arguing that Simba wouldn't fare much better as a king than Scar did
; claiming that the lions uphold a totalitarian system that damages the environment
; and saying that the hyenas are only motivated by hunger, despite the film blatantly showcasing how cruel and sadistic they really are
.
The first two examples have already been deleted (the former by Alinho himself, with no explanation; the other one by me, with a rather long edit reason), while the third one has been added today. They all read like Complaining About Shows You Don't Like to me, but I would like to read other people's opinions before I took further action.
openUndermined By Reality cuts
These were cut from Undermined By Reality citing "The MLP examples are all either Broken Aesop or Complaining."
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- "The Cutie Re-Mark" has An Aesop that you should not allow circumstances to get in the way of your friendships, as seen in Starlight Glimmer's Start of Darkness when her friend got his cutie mark and moved away, which had near-disastrous consequences. However, the same thing happened between Twist and Apple Bloom earlier in the series. Twist's voice actress moved away from Vancouver (where the series was produced), meaning they have been unable to interact as friends ever since Twist got her cutie mark, which has gone without consequence. In the same season where Starlight Glimmer was introduced, when the similarly demoted-to-background character Babs Seed got her cutie mark, Apple Bloom went out of her way to prove she still considers her a friend, yet the writers have done nothing to suggest that Apple Bloom and Twist are still friends, even offscreen.
- Diamond Tiara's Heel–Face Turn in "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" was intended to show that you can be more than just a bully and become a better person if you wanted. But despite the writers wanting to give her and Silver Spoon more episodes showing off this Character Development, the higher ups turned the idea down, believing their story to be "over". Thus, they had no plot relevance afterward as the writers were not permitted to depict them as anything other than bullies.
- The episode "Fame and Misfortune" teaches that while some people will miss the point of and unfairly criticize your work, the most important thing is that others will get and appreciate it. But the episode's "writer", M.A. Larson, denounced the episode, feeling that the criticisms the background ponies brought up were valid (notably, all the complaints lampooned in the episode actually were addressed in the show, meaning the writers agreed they were issues but called the complainers out anyways), and that audiences would miss the moral entirely due to the episode's allegorical nature and Dear Negative Reader undertones. He tried to rewrite the episode to fix this, but the higher ups wouldn't let him do it any other way, prioritizing their desired story over audiences getting and appreciating it.
- "Shadow Play" has the lesson that you should not assume the worst of others and should get both sides of the story before treating them as irredeemable. This is undermined by the next major villain, Cozy Glow, who the characters and narrative would treat as unquestionably evil despite making no attempts to explain or figure out why/how a child could turn out so evil. The official reason that she was written this way being "It seemed fun and subversive at the time" suggests that the writers have gotten tired of, and no longer endorse, the show's pro-redemption themes and messages, and they would proceed to never forgive a villain again: even King Sombra's well-received sympathetic backstory and traits introduced in the Expanded Universe were ignored entirely in favor of making him a Generic Doomsday Villain, while Ahuizotl was retconned into a guardian spirit unfairly painted as a villain in order to sidestep the need for a redemption to make him a good guy and bring Daring Do's story to a close.
Broken Aesop doesn't apply as it's events outside the work causing this as opposed to the event within the episode. (BH was deemed not to apply if broken by subsequent works as it's about the specific work giving the Aesop contending itself at the time.) The last part of the last entry I can say is complaining and misuse (Neighsay, Garble, and Caballeron get become genuinely nicer redemptions), not sure how the rest are excessively negative given the inherent negativity of Undermined By Reality. Should it be restored and/or the negativity (if someone can point out where exactly it's excessive) fixed?
Worth noting the examples were previously cut by a separate tropes without edit reason, but restored per ATT
.
openBan evader or not?
I’m still convinced mati2002
(who started editing in April 2021) may be laar2002
(suspended in Dec. 2020 for edit warring on NightmareFuel.Pinocchio). The IP/geolocation was negative when the mods first checked, but not only are their usernames eerily similar, their edits have some similarities.
I will first admit that mati has not edited JustForFun.X Meets Y pages like laar (though this may be to cover their tracks), and they have usefully added alphabetization notices to pages (even pages that don’t need them such as Moments pages).
laar’s modus operandi, through scrolling through their edit history, was adding images to pages, even those that already had images (I personally told laar that wasn’t allowed, though that didn’t stop them from reinstating their own change on the Fellowship of the Ring NF page), making nattery and often superfluous edits to Nightmare Fuel and similar pages (often comparing works to other works), and being a serial tweaker to great extents
. They also violated the “don’t say an example is pictured” rule note to be fair, I used to do that too when they were around.
mati’s MO so far has indeed been adding images to pages. Some are great, while some are not
. While they have not replaced images, they have sometimes added images on pages with Image Pickin' tags
, they added two images to HalfDressedCartoonAnimal.Western Animation (don’t really know our stance on that for non-Moments pages), and they once tried to add an image in a trope page folder
. They have also serially tweaked to fix minor mistakes several times like laar did before, and they have also violated the “don’t say an example is pictured” rule just as often.
They made a very questionable edit
on UncannyValley.Animated Films, adding an image and adding an IP notice for the thread for UncannyValley.Film, a thread from 2016 they did not participate in.
It’s probably not much, but I feel there are too many similarities to overlook, even if they have seemingly improved themself.
Edited by PurpleEyedGuma

Back in June, hubakon1368 cut a large number of examples from TabletopGame.Vampire The Masquerade — the edits can be seen starting here
. The first edit provides the standard template Example does not sufficiently explain how it applies reason; the later two do not. However, two problems:
There is also this bit, which is a ZCE, but should have been commented out instead of being cut:
(In some instances, I omitted bullet points that were kept.)
I don't think that any of these are ZCEs by any definition of the term. However, I find it notable that several are connected to "Wormwood", one of the apocalyptic scenarios presented in the Gehenna sourcebook, where God kills off vampirekind but gives a small group the chance to redeem and become human (other scenarios have vampires destroyed by other supernatural forces, or just do each other in in civil war). Some of the cut material is unrelated, like the first entry on Always a Bigger Fish, Believing Their Own Lies, and Beneath The Earth, but I think it's notable that the editor purged all material related to this scenario from the page.
Permission to restore the cut material?
(Beneath The Earth would need to be moved to other applicable tropes if such as available, obviously.)
(Also, for the sake of transparency, I feel I should mention that a decent portion of the cut material was originally written by me some time ago, which is part of the reason why I'm not just restoring things myself.)
EDIT: I looked through their edit history, and there were some other suspect edits at the same time:
This is a fairly thorough campaign of removal focused on Vampire: The Masquerade in particular, and the general pattern seems to be:
- Removal of examples of Always a Bigger Fish and Outside-Context Problem.
- Removal of examples based on a gameplay scenario where the Abrahamic God kills off vampires.
- Removal of examples describing werewolves being stronger than vampires.
Edited by Theriocephalus