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Ask the Tropers:
openSeemingly Excessive SelfDemonstratingCharacter pages
Mentioned this in the fairlydead SD Character cleanup thread
and the TLP thread
, where someone suggested I bring it up here.
Basically, Roku Alhazared more or less makes a new SD page a day
, almost none of which really seem to have anything resembling a unique voice and while he clearly puts in a lot of work to them, they're little more than a first-person recap of a character. This seems excessive to me.
I haven't messaged him short of trying to ping him to the SD cleanup thread, but that might not have worked.
Edited by LarkmarnopenMemetic Mutation vs. "just memes"
if anyone can help, i'd like some clarification on what should/shouldn't be on a Memetic Mutation entry or subpage.
a few months ago a mod replied as such on the forums
, which suggests to me we shouldn't be cataloging every meme under the sun for a given work (and i believe the actual page mentions something like that). seems fair enough.
fast forward to now, and it seems like i've gotten myself into an edit war with a few other editors on hololive in an effort to follow this. now i'm wondering if they're actually strict guidelines for Memetic Mutation or not.
openProblem Troper
Rtkh 68 has made some very complain-y and shoehorned edits in regards to The Last of Us Part II, and have edit warred.
This entry on this
page, which I've deleted:
"Without the pesky necessity of asking the animators what they thought in the process. Leaks already hint that a lot of people were pointlessly and needlessly made very uncomfortable during a time where a game this nihilistic and depressing REALLY doesn't help with the current climate."
They called the whole game a Self-Insert Fic on the YMMV
page, and added "meanwhile the lead writer turns a scene into a Self-Insert Fic that makes us all cringe until our faces hurt" to the Laconic page.
The Tear Jerker
page has several problematic edits, including edit warring. First all they added was "RIP Ellie and Joel" which is a ZCE and incorrect regardless. It was deleted and they re-added it with "RIP Ellie and Joel, died to a golf club." This was also deleted and they re-added it again with "Rest in Peace Joel, Murdered with a golf-club for wokepoints." This was deleted, and their final re-addition was "Rest in Peace Joel, Murdered with a golf-club for wokepoints." Note these edits were made prior to the game's official release.
The Tear Jerker page also has this entry: "the fact this absolute joke of a game was hailed as a 10/10 GOTY masterpiece by all the official review sources. Metacritic tells the real story."
openNot an example of Idiot Plot? Western Animation
From Idiot Plot - Animated Films:
- The entire Final Battle of Incredibles 2 could have been shortened considerably if not outright avoided, allowing the capture the Big Bad before they fled the ship and preventing the entire crash, had anyone actually targeted the mind-controlling goggles during the fights. It's at least a bit understandable with the kids given their age and lack of experience, but the adults really should have tried just plucking them off instead of running or fighting until the goggles happened to fall off. Ironically the only character who does do this is Jack-Jack, entirely by accident, when reaching for his mom, showing how swift and effortless it really would have been.
In reality, adults did try to remove mind-controlling goggles from other supers as soon as they're freed (of course, with the difficulty of taking away a mind-controlling device from an enhanced human who fights back), and they manage to remove them, they don't just "happen to fall off". It's true that in the previous scenes kids didn't try to remove the goggles, but the entry itself suggests that their age and lack of experience can be a forgiving factor.
Since it's not A story driven entirely by all the characters being idiots that would otherwise take less than five minutes to resolve, but a specific scene, wouldn't that count at best as a Downplayed Idiot Ball, and perhaps not even that?
Bumping because the entry was readded. Edited by gc10
openAgenda edit?
On In Touch with His Feminine Side, Bulsara 413 has just changed instances of "tomgirl" to "janegirl", though page history shows this is something several users disagree on. Is this agenda-based editing? I thought that the term was considered acceptable, since Christine Chandler, a transwoman, used it to describe herself at one point. Thank you.
Edited by PiterpicheropenWe've Got a Scrappy Problem Videogame
About a month ago, I deleted all the entries for The Scrappy on Criminal Case because they were clearly meant to be hated and hated badly. Here it is for reference:
- The Scrappy:
- In the 2014 Criminal Case Wiki Awards
, Miriam Young won the game's "Most Annoying Character" title (by a very huge margin) due to her cold and domineering personality, and her cruel treatment towards Amy (who, by contrast, was voted as the fan favorite). Not only that, several fans have gone as far as saying that she should be in jail instead of Duncan even though he's the Night Walker.
- Albert Tesla also qualifies, for abandoning his son, thinking himself to be Pacific Bay's God, nearly destroying it and killing fan-favorite Frank Knight when he attempts to stop him. He's even voted the game's "Most Annoying Character" of 2015.
- Sarah Bennet was voted as the "Most Annoying Character" on the 2016 Criminal Case Wiki Awards
. Rightfully so since she nearly killed Jack, killed Dupont and Natasha (regardless of her affiliation with SOMBRA, she's still Marina's mom), and nearly caused World War III.
- Horatio Rochester was voted as the "Most Annoying Character" on the 2017 Criminal Case Wiki Awards, owing to his attempt to fully control Concordia as a city-state and abolish press freedom. Moreover, unlike Justin Lawson, who was ultimately a Well-Intentioned Extremist who Jumped Off The Slippery Slope, Horatio has no redeeming qualities and is motivated by selfish and petty reasons.
- In the 2014 Criminal Case Wiki Awards
I discovered only today that three days later, user pizzasoda66 added them all back. Their reasons were, and I quote, "The description of this trope is "The fans hate this character for some reason.". Just because they're supposed to be disliked doesn't mean they're not scrappies. Why do you think they were voted as the most annoying character?"
Whether or not a character who's meant to be hated can qualify as a Scrappy anyway is a mug I don't wanna chug right now, but their description of The Scrappy as a trope is way off. It's the given explanation on the laconic page, which feels like an artifact of the past, and should be changed to add the qualifier "against the intentions of the creator". Because that being the case, again, none of these assholes are unintentionally hated.
I would go back and say this, but I'd rather not get hit with an Edit War accusation and edit banned for it. What do you guys think?
openEdit War and bad examples Live Action TV
The user Crunchy Crunch
keeps adding [[ https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Characters.ArrowverseSTARLabs
incorrect examples]] to Caitlin Snow/Killer Frost's entry on the Arrowverse: S.T.A.R. Labs
page. Either the examples are blatantly incorrect, a clear example of entry pimping for the character, tremendous Square Peg Round Trope, using different trope names to say the same thing, overexplaining/Purple Prose, or contradicting the example in the middle, making it redundant. They've also edited Barry Allen's
page with the same misinformation to make it seem like they have a romantic connection. When I removed the examples and explained why it was wrong (they seem fairly new to the site and probably don't know about the Edit War rules), they just put them back. I P Med them and they seemed to understand, but then they just started adding them back again. I tried to message them again but the system wasn't working (?), so I removed the examples again and said that if they did it again I would report them, which they're still ignoring. I'm aware that I added to the Edit War and I'm cool with being suspended myself if needs be.
openPossible Edit War Western Animation
On Dec 31st, user K added this to YMMV.Coco:
- While the movie has been in production for six years, and thus wasn't created with the intent of dropping this particular anvil, the heavy subtext of "Mexico is a beautiful country full of beautiful people" is sorely needed in the United States in 2017.
That was removed on Jan 5th after the Trump and ROCEJ thread
stated that edit may have violated the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgement. I personally felt it was shoehorning an opinion in.
On Jan 8th, K replaced it with this:
- Co-Director Adrian Molina, from an interview with NPR, in response to a question about if the meaning of making a film set in Mexico over the course of six years changed at all since the 2016 election: "Well, it's a long time coming for Latinos to see themselves on screen represented in a way that they can be proud of and in a way that reflects the things that they value about their culture and they value about their families. [...] And for a family to go and see themselves reflected on screen the way they experience their lives and see that shown to the world means a lot. It means a lot for your self-esteem, and it means a lot for how you see yourself in the world."
Is this Edit War, and should I message K and tell him to go to the Trump and ROCEJ thread and Coco's discussion pages?
Edited by jameygameropenDon Bluth quotes
Anyone know why all of the quotes on Quotes.Don Bluth that aren't from Bluth himself are so negative?
Is Bluth more hated in the animation community than I thought, or does someone on this site have a negative vendetta against him?
Edited by MrMediaGuy2openpaskalordi is a troll "editor"
paskalordi seems to be a troll who keeps changing What An Idiot to What a Fucking N-word. Not to mention his other edits. His edit history
. He even self-admitted to that on a 3 year old edit
.
openPotentially iffy entry on Dated History
This entry on The Holodomor was recently added to the Dated History page:
- During the Cold War, it was not uncommon for western intellectuals to assume that the infamous Holodomor famine of 1932 and 1933 was an intentional genocide against Ukraine done by Stalin's government, or that the Soviet government in some way manufactured the famine for whatever reason more generally. Various books on the topic, most famously Robert Conquest's 1986 book The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, from before the fall of the USSR promote this narrative, often pointing to official Soviet documents which to help support this case. Even ignoring that many found Conquest—who was a self-described "Cold Warrior" and open about his bias against the USSR and in favor of the west—the lack of anything to back up this notion after the fall of the Soviet Union and the release of various previously classified documents shows this to be little more than baseless speculation, with Conquest himself later making it clear he didn't view the famine to be anything more than the result of bad policy by the Soviets in his later years, although he also added that he believes it could have been prevented if Stalin had not put Soviet interests above that of feeding his people.
Now, it's definitely true that the famine may have been "merely" the result of bad agricultural policy rather than deliberately engineered by Stalin's regime. However, the Soviet government's response (selling food that could have been used to help victims to foreign countries and actively attempting to cover up what was happening) means that even if the famine wasn't intentional, it can't be called a tragic but innocent mistake. Moreover, the fact that it coincided with attempts to target Ukrainian cultural identity and the fact that Ukrainian-majority areas even outside Ukraine suffered disproportionately during the famine both heavily suggest that Stalin took advantage of it even if he didn't deliberately set out to cause it.
I'm going to give Ephrom The Josine the benefit of the doubt since I have no reason to automatically assume they wrote this to push some kind of agenda, but this entry nevertheless comes off as lacking in nuance and (especially in regard to current events) potentially insensitive. Still, if they're willing to talk things over, I'm willing to hear them out.
openBen267 and their questionably perverted edits
So I've been looking at the edits of Ben267
, and they seem to be adding a lot of tropes regarding beauty (like Hartman Hips and Beauty Is Bad). They have a lot of edits that are questionable , but two seperate things jumped out at me: their edits to Trixie's profile on Fairly Odd Parents
, and this edit
on Grojband:
Now, they changed the edit to something a bit more tame, but I'm still concerned. Some of their edits have already been reverted by others for misuse (including myself), but I'm getting an uneasy feeling from them.
openTropers with an agenda
A couple of tropers, tsthysys09 and xxdster clearly have an editing agenda in the Final Fantasy XIII Main Party
and Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII
pages (links go to page histories), removing any and all examples that even tangentially refer to the Hope/Lightning ship and also the spoiler warning for Hope's folder (which I thought was extremely odd since that was added per the violation of spoiler policy thread and they didn't retag the spoilers).
Of note, tsthysys09 is a brand new account with only those two edits to the page and xxdster has been inactive since 2016, up until the 13th of this month, again with only edits to those pages. I think that's highly suspicious, either this is drama importation, or these two might possibly be the same person (possibly to avoid being suspended for an edit war) since xxdster would removed some tropes and then tsthysys09 would remove the exact same ones again after they were readded by another troper.
Some of these tropes were added by myself, and I don't want to stick myself in an edit war, so I'm bringing this here for attention.
open Potential agenda editing
So in Trans Audience Interpretation there's an entry regarding Naoto from Persona 4 being interpreted as trans, which says:
- Persona 4: Naoto Shirogane had an infamous character arc and dungeon level centered on gender issues, complete with a laboratory and gender reassignment imagery. The game confirms that Naoto is actually female, with some Values Dissonance about career-related gender roles that didn't translate cross-culturally. Regardless, many disregard what the game itself says because Naoto being trans has more potential to explore.
(Note that the entry was reworded per the complaining thread
.)
After I edited that entry with the one suggested on the thread, user gorobestboy deleted some lines regarding the interpretation
with no edit reason. So I'm concerned that there is some agenda going on here.
openPM from a banned user
Today I received a PM from a forum-banned user in response to a forum post I made. Apparently they were still reading the thread and thought it appropriate to chime in via PM since they can't post on the forum itself.
The PM itself is also of a nature that probably would have gotten thumped had it been a forum post (calling for the death of a real-life person over a bad video game). It is not, however, an appeal for me to help them circumvent their ban by posting for them, for what it's worth.
Do I just tell them to buzz off and block them, or is this something that should be handled by moderation? I'm not entirely clear on the rules regarding the intersection of PMs and forum bans.
open Potential Nazi Apologia?
On YMMV.Extra Credits, this comment was added by Supreme Interceptor under Critical Research Failure regarding this video
:
- Despite what Dan might have you believe about every last soldier in the Nazi military being Nazis and German, not all of them were Nazis or even German. The Nazis had plenty of formations made up of non-German conscripts and auxiliaries that fought under their command including White Russians
, Serbians
, Finns
, and Armenians
. And even more than this, it is a well-known fact that Hitler made an effort to recruit Muslims
from Eastern European ethnic groups like Albanians, Tatars and Bosniaks into the Schutzstaffel's ranks
.
The video itself is controversial, to say the least, but this seems like both A) misuse of Critical Research Failure, as the topic wasn't related much to the video anyway, and B) potentially trying to whitewash the Nazis, saying that they weren't that racist. Is it just me, or does this seem problematic?
openProblematic Review Web Original
Kelekona
left a review for Protectors of the Plot Continuum
, which is basically them importing personal drama from their interactions with the authors and not actually reviewing the work itself.
I flagged the review for drama importation, and Very Melon left a couple comments criticizing the review for that. Kelekona then decided to make a YMMV page for them, accusing them of being "pro-bullying". So now, this has descended into personal attacks against other users on the site.
Edited by chasemaddiganopenTroper Report
I'd like to report a Troper by the name of Zibmaster (edit history here
) - they've edited sporadically since 2015, but I wanted to talk about their small edit spree over on Manga.Death Note and YMMV.Death Note. A while ago, I added this entry to the main page:
- Ambiguous Situation: A little less than two weeks after Light's death, Mikami dies in his cell under mysterious circumstances, and Matsuda confronts Near with the theory that Near used the Death Note on him to ensure Light's defeat and killed Mikami once he no longer had use for him. Near doesn't say anything before Matsuda walks off in disgust, and apart from Word of God saying "Near cheats", it's never explicitly confirmed nor denied (only in the manga; the anime removes this ambiguity by having Mikami kill himself on the spot during the final confrontation)
Zibmaster deleted it from the main page by essentially saying the theory didn't make sense (which is pretty irrelevant for Ambiguous Situation when the work specifically posits the idea), and decided the best course of action was to put it on the YMMV page. Over the next twenty minutes and four edits, they then deleted the star from an unrelated Adorkable entry, put the Ambiguous Situation in the wrong spot and had to move it, put a blatant justifying edit underneath it explaining why the theory might not work (and decided to be rather loose with punctuation and not include spoiler tags), then tweaked the justifying paragraph twice.
Since I wrote the initial entry, I'm nervous about doing anything to it and being in an edit war, but we've got main tropes on YMMV, justifying edits, tweaking, not spoiler tagging when necessary, and punctuation issues just to top it all off.
Edited by STARCRUSHER99openShould there be a "linking section" on every MCU film? Film
Troper TheExtractor has taken to unilaterally adding a section to the top of all the MCU films that links it to the previous/next film in MCU release schedule.
Do we really need such a thing given that there is a Franchise page Marvel Cinematic Universe that lists all the films in the franchise and allows such navigation to each film already?
It's going to make the MCU films formatted differently than other films and does that open itself to having a "link section" for other film franchises like James Bond, Star Wars, etc?
The main thing that concerns me about this is that TheExtractor did something similar back in January 2021, where they unilaterally added a "cast list" to every MCU film.
Yet, they never seem to post any kind of discussion item beforehand of "I think this would be a neat thing to add to all MCU films" and then ask for feedback and wait for consensus before making changes to dozens of pages.
Edited by rva98014

There is a dispute between myself and Catcher In The Wry on YMMV.Mulan. In short, I removed an entry he wrote, and he took offense to it, PMing me to say he was "annoyed" and that he would take it to a mod. He has not restored the entry, so it's not an Edit War yet, but from the tone of his PM, and of the entry I deleted, I figure it's better to get here first.
The entry was for Unintentionally Unsympathetic and Unintentionally Sympathetic; the first I deleted because it was, to my judgment, factually inaccurate — it stated that Shang gave no instruction (despite the Make A Man Out Of You montage showing him leading the group in exercises, as well as the group improving, clearly implying that his teaching is effective), and that all he did was demand the recruits like Mulan perform expert level feats and scowl when they failed. Basically, the entry seems to assume that the actions shown in the aforementioned montage are literally the only things Shang did with the group, and therefore Shang is an unreasonable bully for not teaching Mulan anything and then being annoyed that she isn't an Instant Expert.
It also had indentation issues, with a second level bulletpoint that just further expounds on Shang's supposed failures.
The second I deleted because it's based entirely on the first — saying Obstructive Bureaucrat Chi Fu is sympathetic because he's right to be critical of Shang's alleged incompetence. As the first entry is factually inaccurate, the second one based entirely on that should also go.
So far he has not yet PMed me over removing his Alternative Character Interpretation (which I deleted because it doesn't actually explain the alternate interpretation, it just sort of trails off with a parenthetical about how what Chi Fu did was justified), but given his reaction to my removal of his other entry, I expect it's forthcoming.
In all, the entries appear to be based less on the content of the work, and more on this troper's personal dislike for the character Shang, which is in turn based on a factually inaccurate understanding of the movie.