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:
openI think I edit warred by mistake.
I think I edit warred by mistake. So it was decided that the Resident Evil games can't have an FPC on the FPC cleanup thread a while ago. Here is a link
. Leon in particular is given Ship Tease with everyone, and lacks an official pairing which is needed for the trope. However today I noticed an entry on YMMV.Resident Evil 2 Remake. It was for Leon and Claire who are given Ship Tease in the remake. This already makes it impossible to for it be a FPC as it's for non-canon ships, and Ship Tease means that the creators meant for it to be shipped. So I removed it here
. However, I hadn't noticed that it had been removed and readded by tropers that are not me. As I didn't check the edit history.
Did I edit war? If so I will accept the consequences and would like to report myself.
Edited by BullmanopenWMG/EverybodyCries
I happen upon the trope page for Everybody Cries and I'm perplexed to find a WMG subpage. There's no media namespace of the same name, and the page itself (WMG.Everybody Cries) doesn't help much.
openUpdate Zelda Character Navigation Bar? Videogame
So most of the character pages for Legend of Zelda games have a character/game navigation bar at the top of the page, like so. I saw someone put it on the character page for the upcoming Age of Calamity spin-off game, but not add the game itself to the bar. Which got me wondering if it would be a good idea to update the navigation bar on all the Zelda character pages to include the bigger spin-off games that have such pages, like the Hyrule Warriors games, Cadence of Hyrule, and the CD-i games. (I'd say Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love as well, but its character page is so lacking, I'm wondering why it even exists.) So should I go ahead and do this?
Edited by RacattackForceopenCovering a whole example of a work with a spoiler tag bar the Trope itself?
Bittersweet Ending: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP
Is this an acceptable method for editing here?
openSamus Aran from Metroid: Soldier or Warrior? Videogame
With regards to the trope Soldier vs. Warrior there is a list of distinguished soldiers and warriors and clashing ideologies listed as examples. If I may submit a question to the more well-read and better-researched Tropers for discussion and consideration:
Is the protagonist of the Metroid series, Samus Aran, as she is currently portrayed in the playable games of the franchise, considered better fitting the Soldier archetype, or the Warrior archetype? Or neither?
I understand that part of her backstory, as depicted in titles such as Other M, as well as in media outside of video games (such as the e-Manga) does place her as a soldier in the Galactic Federation army. However, Other M also depicts that she does get to be a bit headstrong and doubting of orders, with the example given regarding the tragedy of Ian Malkovich's sacrifice by a command decision from Samus's C.O. She may have questioned his order - and her internal monologue reflects this as well - but doesn't disobey his order at all. In this regard, she does - or did - lean towards Soldier.
However, after leaving the Federation, the English canon tells us that she became a "bounty hunter", which we can interpret as just becoming a freelancer and occasional contract mercenary. In Japan, the generally-accepted "closest" translation is "Space Warrior", as she is marked among an elite class of freelancer specializing in missions few can pull off, and in being an expert combatant. However, based on what's in the Soldier vs. Warrior trope page, it doesn't seem like she fits the Warrior archetype much at all. She doesn't really do it for the glory, or to aggrandize herself, or as some test of strength or out of a sense of competition.
But at the same time, she doesn't currently still fit the Soldier role either. She says on occasion that she works alone, by choice, and hasn't worked under direct authority from military C.O.s since leaving the service, with the two exceptions being in Other M and in Metroid Fusion.
So is Samus an example of a zigzagging of this trope? Or some strange deconstruction of it? Or not in this index at all? I'd like to get a well-researched answer, as I just lack the understanding and the nuances of Tropology to really get how to go about answering this.
Thank you ahead of time!
Edited by Miles07openKaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi cleanup required? Anime
I mentioned this in the Winter Anime 2021 thread, I have not read the light novels or manga. So I didn't want to make changes to the page myself.
I got kind of a skeevy/immature vibe from how parts of this page
is written.
Specifically the "Let the party begin." part and basically all of the times Karmic Rape is potholed. For a specific example see the Karmic Rape trope. It just feels like the article is tacitly approving of those actions.
The thing is, I'm not sure if this is against the wiki policy, or if it should be left as is.
open Was Donald Trump tempting fate?
OK, so I realize that just about any discussion related to Donald Trump is a ROCEJ land-mine, and should be approached with extreme caution. But I wanted to bring this up because it seemed fairly straightforward.
Would this be an OK example for Tempting Fate?
- Over the course of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Donald Trump spent a significant amount of time claiming that COVID-19 was not a serious threat to the American People. He ignored it by holding in-person rallies and discouraged the use of masks. Ultimately, he caught it himself, and more than 200,000 American citizens died as a result of the virus.
Berserk Button: misusing Berserk Button
openCan a Mental Monster be the Big Bad?
I am disputing with a Troper who removed my Big Bad entry for Confess My Love because they said that the demonic!Liza does not mastermind anything and Willie’s torment is self-inflicted. I argue that since Demon!Liza embodies Willie’s inability to move on and must be overcome for him to pass on, therefore the entity does qualify as the Big Bad. The Troper also said that Pyramid Head is not the Big Bad of Silent Hill 2 (because they are just a mindless beast), when they are basically the only Troper I have seen argue that- just about the entire rest of the wiki seems to agree that Pyramid Head is the Big Bad because he is the monster most frequently getting in James’ way, despite being his guilt over killing his wife. So can a Mental Monster qualify as the Big Bad?
Edited by MasterNopenAre meta-examples okay in YMMV?
Somebody mentioned adding a trope to a work page, about the fans of a work (and not the work itself) crossing the line twice. Is that okay? Not okay?
Edited by MichaelKatsuroopenExcessive spoilering. Film
The page for Self/Less is very heavily spoilered, covering entire examples.
This movie does have twists, sure, but it looks excessive. Is there a standard procedure for such a case?
openExclamation Marks (Among Else) In Work Page Titles
Er, kind of a noob-question, but how do I get exclamation marks, question marks, etc. to show up in links to work pages and in the title of the work page itself? I'm in the middle of creating a page for a manga now and the title of said manga has a question mark and an exclamation mark in it that I can't get to show.
openDeleted recap pages
Should recap pages be deleted if they're empty or have few examples? Someone put a lot of recap pages I made for Fudêncio e Seus Amigos on the cut list because they're "stub" or "tropeless stub". The Cut List itself says: "By the way, folks, this is the cutlist, not the "Needs More Work" list. Listing an article here should mean "We give up. This one can't be saved."
That means recap pages should not be deleted since they just need more tropes about the episodes, the person who chose random pages is just evil and this is meaningless. I know I could just remake the pages but some of them already had tropes (even if just one or two), and ALL had the plots, so I shouldn't have to remake them. Plus, there are 163 episodes and I'm the only one working on the pages, so not all of them can be complete.
Edited by CeaselessPhoenicopterineopenProposed MisBlamed addition.
Per this Aesop cleanup
, I intend to ad this to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S3 E13 "Magical Mystery Cure".
- Mis-blamed: Many fans criticize the episode over the alleged Broken Aesop about not accepting a destiny you don't want only for Twilight to accept her destiny of becoming an alicorn princess despite never wanting such. But the actual Aesop, delivered extra-unsubtly through the song "A True, True Friend" is about helping friends in need and find their true selfs which Twilight did do and earn her destiny for or at worst was unrelated as opposed to contradicting it.
Is this a valid example?
Could this situation also fall under Clueless Aesop as it was delivered in such a fantastical way many misinterpreted the intended Aesop?
open Pinokio
I didn't want to have to bring this to ATT, but the user Pinokio has a bad TLP record and isn't taking much of our advice.
Their drafts suffer from nitpicky definitions, improper formatting, walls of text, and a general trend of being confusing and more about meta stuff than actual tropes. Here are
their
three drafts.
Their edit history dates back to at least '19, so hopefully they're at least doing things properly on the wiki itself.
Edit: Just after posting this, I found them making a new bad draft (linked below), a wall-of-text in a forum thread (linked), and a bad TRS thread
.
openCOPS (series) Nightmare Fuel Listing Live Action TV
On the COPS series page, under nightmare fuel is a description of a 'banned' episode that sounds absolutely horror-movieish....and I was wondering if anyone has ANY information behind it because I can find NONE. Anything about what city its based in or what episode number...anything.
The description of the 'banned' episode is as follows : A 15-year-old girl calls the cops after her grandma went to investigate a noise outside their house and never came back, leaving her alone in a pitch-black house. Once the cops get there, she finally comes outside and leads them to the abandoned horse pen where she last saw her grandmother go. Everything is completely, disturbingly silent for the entire time and almost completely dark, until a blonde woman throws herself against the bars, and hysterically begs them to help her. However, the real horror comes as she looks to her right and screams at the top of her lungs as a woman wearing all black runs towards them, screaming and brandishing a knife. She is quickly gunned down by a shotgun-wielding cop, which instantly turns the girl into a screaming wreck. She then points out another knife-wielding woman charging at them, who's quickly shot by the same cop. He tells the cameraman and the girl to run as more gunshots ring out. The cameraman ends up driving off with the girl, but it's unknown what happened to her grandmother, those cops, or the woman that begged them for help.
Thank ya'll taking the time to read this.
openWhere do we draw the line between Fan Work and original work?
From what I've seen, Fan Works seem to be defined as content created using previously established media as its basis. However, that eventually led me to asking myself a question: Where do we draw the line between considering something a Fan Work and considering it its own original work?
For a specific example of my question, there's Red Vs Blue. Red vs. Blue is a machinima (a form of work listed under Fan Works) series that uses Halo as its basis. However, outside of a few mentions of Master Chief and the UNSC, the series is largely its own thing with its own original story, characters and world building. So, do we consider it a Fan Work for being a machinima based on Halo, or do we consider it an original work in spite of that?
openIs there any restrictions on what can be considered as a character or not? (Vtuber/hololive) Web Original
So over at Characters/Hololive, we had a debate
on whether we should include a particular character in our Characters page, where each character we have there at the moment is a hololive member & a vtuber in their own right (with the exception of one), each having their own Youtube channel.
A while ago somebody added an entry for a non-vtuber character (Anemachi), who is the sister of one of the hololive vtubers (Suisei). Despite not being a vtuber herself, Anemachi has a character portrait and occasionally makes appearances in Suisei's livestream at an average rate of about "once every few months". So you can say she's a somewhat recurring character on Suisei's channel.
Now, a troper had a problem with the inclusion of Anemachi with their reasoning being that she's not a hololive member. What I would like to know is that if there are any rules on TV Tropes that state who should be "worthy" of having a Characters entry or not. Because otherwise I don't see any problem with adding what is essentially a Minor Character into the Characters/Hololive page (with the hololive members themselves being Main Characters), seeing as even one-off characters from all sort of works get entries deliciated to them on TV Tropes.
Edited by AsoktencheaopenRedundant characters folder
There's a problem I have with the characters folders for the Henry Stickmin Series with the Toppat clan folders. There are folders for some individual Toppat members and one for the clan as a whole which is fine but there is also a folder for "Other Toppats" which was pretty much covered by the "clan itself" folder. Should they be merged ? I tried to discuss it on the page's discussion section but nobody answered.
Edited by jOSEFdelavilleopenSPUMC Venom's gender pronouns Film
In light of the release of the second trailer
for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, I want to put to rest a seemingly unresolved query as to what pronouns should be used when referring to the Venom symbiote. Being a symbiote, it has no defined gender or sex, choosing to assume the form of its host and never refers to itself by any pronouns but "we" across all continuities. Same goes for the SPUMC (Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters) version of the character where it briefly possesses Anne and then morphs into a female form. In the same universe, however, Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock refers to Venom with male pronouns (which his comic book counterpart never really does so), which Venom never objects to, so while there might not be a biological sex, the symbiote seems to identify as male. Gernerally speaking though, the entity formed when Eddie and the symbiote merge together is also called Venom and the combined form is referred to with male pronouns. I just want to know what the consensus is though about what pronouns pertain to the SPUMC symbiote itself before officially altering any associated work pages.

I'd like to create a page for the OEL Manga "Orange Crows", but I'm conflicted over what namespace to put it in; Manga or Comic Books. (Clicking around in the OEL Manga titles section shows that it covers works from both namespaces, which only deepens my confusion.)
On the "Manga" side: the work was generally marketed as a "manga" when the first volume was released in the late 2000's, it was originally published by Tokyopop in their standard 5 in. × 7.5 in. tankobon format, and it draws heavily on manga style.
On the "Comic Book" side: it was written by an American author, it reads from right-to-left, and I can't find evidence that it was ever released outside of the USA. (It appears the author self-published the second volume in a similar tankobon format outside of the Tokyopop imprint.)
I would lean towards putting the work in the Comic Books namespace, but I figured I would pose the question here for propriety's sake. Is there a consensus on these matters that doesn't appear on the OEL Manga page?
Edited by Leporidae