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:
resolved Mistakenly Cut Recap Page
The Recap page for The Venture Bros. episode "The Venture Bros S 2 E 9 Guess Whos Coming To State Dinner" was cut mistakenly. The reason given is "The only entry on the page doesn't belong on a YMMV, but a trivia page." However, the Recap page itself was cut, not the YMMV page (which still exists).
Can someone please correct this by restoring the Recap page and correctly cutting the YMMV page?
resolved Do moments from trailers/advertising count as shocking moments?
On the Shocking Moments page and various YMMV pages, there are numerous examples for Shocking Moments related to moments from the marketing / trailers (e.g., the reveal of an Unexpected Character or plot beat that took fans off guard), but on the former page itself, it says that:
Keep in mind that meta examples aren't allowed in moments pages. Moments are for things that happen within a work. Things pertaining to the creators, the work's development or the work's critical and commercial reception, while you may think are shocking and we might agree, are outside the scope of this audience reaction. [sic]
So my question is, do moments from trailers/advertising fall into the "within a work" status or are they considered meta examples, since they're from the work's marketing rather than within the actual work itself?
Edited by Tylerbear12resolved Troper with persistent complaining problems, possible wonk(s)
Sponge Bat 1 has been, over a long period of time, adding numerous entries to pages that contain complaining, sometimes with rude edit reasons, and also appears to have a weird wonk over Glitch Productions (which they clearly seem to despise) and Helluva Boss (ditto). Some examples:
- Here
they added complaining about Knights of Guinevere, alleging that the show was made out of spite for Disney's mistreatment of The Owl House, along with further complaining about other shows they deemed to have been treated worse by Disney.
- Here
they used a really aggressive edit reason to complain about the Helluva Boss fandom.
- Here
they added a Designated Hero entry for Helluva Boss character Stolas with similar wording to the above edit reason.
- Another rude edit reason
related to Stolas
- Here
they added a complain-y entry (granted, it's Darth, but still) alleging that Windows 11 is incapable of running games that use Unreal Engine 4. A previous ATT I started on the matter
, along with independent research, additionally could not verify the claim.
- Complaining general example
about Windows computers
- This edit
, while not very complain-y in and of itself, continues the Glitch and Helluva wonk by adding a negative Genre Turning Point example alleging both were responsible for indie animation going upmarket and shutting out lower-budget projects.
- This edit
complains about the AI opponents and difficulty in Diddy Kong Racing
- This edit
complains about the underlying message of Steven Universe, with an edit reason enforcing as such
- This edit
baselessly alleges, on the WMG page for The Amazing Digital Circus, that the series was stealth insulting the entire animation industry
And so on. Note that most of these edits were on page 1.
Now, I know Sponge Bat 1 has been an active participant in cleanup threads, and has done some good work. However, I'm concerned about the propensity with which this is happening. I have not sent any complaining notifiers, but I did send a "general example" notifier for the The Alleged Computer example that I never got a response on (along with a PM on the Unreal claims I also got no response on), so I don't think a notifier would be listened to anyway.
Edited by themayorofsimpletonresolved Concerning lewdness issues in Trope Pantheons forum
The user M1gami Tensei has posted a draft profile for the character Yuzuki from Call Girl in Another World, which we're getting concerned is toeing the line into fetishism. Their third draft of them
has a full 30 paragraphs (which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, but in this case keep in mind most profiles have just around 10-20), many of which describe the character in question prostituting themselves to other deities or other deities attempting to do "stuff" I'd rather not describe here to her, often in eerily descriptive writing. It was even worse in the first and
second drafts
, which notably feature Melkor getting into very uncomfortable and OOC situations with her and outright stating that Frollo "wanted to suck on her titties", though those two issues were removed in the later drafts after pushback from other members of the thread.
From what I've heard, stuff like this does happen in Yuzuki's Manga from time to time, but I find that weak justification to go all in against the "no lewdness" rule. It doesn't help the character herself looks uncomfortably young. While much of the excessive stuff described here was cut out in the most recent draft posted today
, I find the fact that it was written at all and it took us 3 tries to convince him to cut it out very concerning, so I'm making this ATT to see if further action is needed against this user.
resolved Commented-out image note
If I'm making an Image Pickin' thread for a TLP draft, can I just add the commented-out "Page image selected by IP thread" to the draft myself, or does a mod need to add it?
I've already hollered for a mod to lock the thread after an image was agreed on (here
, for reference), but I'm unsure if there was anything else I should've done first.
resolved Image Pickin' dispute
So this issue occurred regarding the page Characters.Our Avatars Are Posting On A Forum Thread Deadly Espresso.
The page in question is a personal one for me, given that it's about avatars I use on TV Tropes' "Our Avatars Are Posting On A Forum Thread" roleplay. There's been a recent dispute regarding the way images were used on the thread, with Animuacid thinking some were of bad quality or were not useful for the article. However, rather than Animuacid personally suggesting me to clean up the article for images that weren't useful, they instead took it to the Image Pickin' threads and made other users suggest some of the images be taken down without my consent. As expected for someone who had made my Characters page into a personal project of mine, I got fed up like someone finally being to clean up their damn room and took cleaning up the page into my own hands, because I thought if I want something about my own content being done right, I better do it myself. However, the Image Pickin' thread wasn't closed after my attempt at cleanup, and even after notifying Animuacid about the cleanup, they haven't closed the Image Pickin' thread.
Was Animuacid's approach to getting my page cleaned up improper and should've just been a private talk with me, or am I just being unnecessarily bitchy about someone making unwanted modifications to an article that's become a passion project of mine? Any sort of compromise to get the page in better shape would be ideal.
resolved Low quality edits - formatting & English
I guess I'll be the rat and I hate to do this (since I share the struggle), but it's just tiresome at this point.
Troper kruczak has zero regard for the English grammar and spelling. For months now, I've been carefully cleaning up his mess whenever I've stumbled into it, especially in works from the Polish Media index (since that's where we are both usually active, for obvious reasons). But after nearly two years of this, I'm absolutely done.
This isn't even that he's making mistakes. It's the scale and level of them, where he can't even be bothered to first check in a preview mode if his entries display properly (or notice there are red links or the formatting is off after posting). So "naturally" stuff like doing the spellcheck or fixing the grammar is off the menu. And it's almost always a one-and-done type of deal, with no attempt to fix things later, revisit or anything like that.
I get it with some of his mistakes. Polish doesn't have articles of any kind, so it's pure abstraction trying to grasp the English ones. But for Christ's sake, we reached the technological point where the browser itself is going to pick up half of the slack by itself, highlighting mistakes, and there are dozens upon dozens of grammar autocorrect tools readily available (guilty as charged for always double-checking with those and I'm still unsure most of the time). There is literally no excuse to keep making the same basic mistakes that a mid-schooler would know better than to make.
So pretty please, do something with this guy, for I'm done being his editor or covering for him.
A sample of his most recent edits, but they are all
like this:
(No, I can't PM here, I'm banned from using PMs, someone else will have to do that)
Edited by Tropiarzresolved Another troper with a wonk against a character.
Reddish Guy 1 seems to have a wonk against character Lizel from Kamen Rider Gavv:
- They first added an entry in the Tear Jerker section of the show claiming that "The vast majority of Rider fans seem to have a very easy time not feeling pity for Lizel."
When I reverted it back to what it was since YMMV is still subjective, they removed it again on the basis that it is "not objective"
.
- They replaced this more neutral entry with this
— and particularly the part "the episode is supposed to" makes it feel like a jab against the episode itself.
- Now they're trying to insert
a Karma Houdini entry for her despite it being previously deleted on the basis that the Laser-Guided Karma trope exists in her character page.
resolved Need help parsing "Crippling Overspecialization" Entries
This morning, a new user, ~amybranch posted a handful of Crippling Overspecialization entries on Characters.Dungeons And Dragons Classes Fifth Edition Classes, describing a few classes (namely the Barbarian and Monk) as suffering from this. I disputed them because to me, their descriptions seemed very misleading and off-base for what qualifies as Crippling Overspecialization: they're focused entirely on having nerfs between the 2024 and 2014 rules while ignoring their side buffs, as well as their holistic design — they're painted as "only" good as combat classes in ideal combat scenarios despite that being kind of the intent of their design.
I removed most of the entries
because these examples didn't illustrate being "crippling" or even "overspecialized" to the degree that the trope warrants, but they were added back just now
with this edit reason:
That doesn't sound right, right? I don't think a character being as equally weak to certain types of damage as other charactersRef."2024 Barbarians are resilient against enemies that only deal bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, and especially vulnerable to anything else." constitutes "crippling", or that a class explicitly about specializing in a particular form of combat is "overspecialization"Ref.While describing the Bare-Fisted Monk class, "The result is a class that's good at running up to enemies and punching them...and very bad at anything else.". The fact these character are — anecdotally speaking from my experiences in the community — generally seen as pretty strong, makes me really have to tilt my head as to where this is coming from, and so I'd like some extra eyes here to help judge these examples.
Edited by number9roboticresolved Does this part of a Pop-Culture Isolation example really qualify? Live Action TV
On YMMV.Squid Game, 8BrickMario
recently added
the following bolded sentence to the page's Pop-Culture Isolation example:
- Pop-Culture Isolation: The reason the reveal in "Front Man" that the Front Man is Jun-ho's missing brother In-ho was more shocking to Korean audiences but kind of got lost in translation internationally is because the Front Man's actor – Lee Byung-hun – is one of the top A-list megastars of all of South Korean cinema, and whose film Inside Men was explicitly referenced earlier in the series by Ji-yeong in the past episode "Gganbu", even mentioning Lee by name. While Lee has also played roles in Western cinema before Squid Game, most notably Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe film series, neither Lee himself nor the use of Celebrity Paradox via passing dialogue are anywhere near as popular in Western media. From a Western perspective, imagine if a player sarcastically referred to the games as "our mission, should we choose to accept it", only for it to turn out that the mysterious leader of the masked guards is portrayed by Tom Cruise. Perhaps recognizing that Lee Byung-hun's reveal didn't hit as much outside of Korea, the show does pull off a similar casting effect for Western audiences by Season 3, where we see an American games recruiter played by Cate Blanchett!
The issue is that this added sentence was apparently to mention how the series "corrected" the pop culture issue with another big-name actor, but I don't really get how it can parallel to the issue of Western audiences not regarding Lee Byung-hun as much as Cate Blanchett, since the latter's character is someone who appears only once (unlike the former's major role) and didn't first appear masked before then having their face visible to amaze audiences at the actor, nor is there any mention or reference to said actor and/or their other roles beforehand.
I'm wondering, could this added sentence feel too redundant for what the example is referring to? What are your thoughts?
Sent a PM to 8BrickMario so they can be aware of this query, by the way.
Edited by Inky100resolved YMMV/LindsayEllis
This is something that I think will require the attention of mods or those who have access to the records of such, but I'm noticing that YMMV.Lindsay Ellis seems to be an active page again, being launched in March 2025, after it was previously cut. The last archived instance on the Wayback Machine from before it was cut was December 2023
; why was the page cut to begin with if it's just going to be around again? Should it stay, or should it leave? Because based on what I'm seeing on both instances of the page do seem like they warrant existing (they're largely referring to discussing Lindsay Ellis' video essays rather than she herself as a creator).
resolved Foreign Remake - Same Roles, Same Characters? Live Action TV
I made a page for Marry My Husband: Japan, which is a Foreign Remake of Marry My Husband set in Japan instead of South Korea (itself a live-action adaptation of the original webcomic) made by the same studio behind the first series.
Since the characters are obviously different people such as the protagonist Misa Kanbe having the same role as Kang Ji-won, would certain character tropes apply to the equivalent roles if they're unambiguously meant to be the same? For example:
- Adaptational Villainy: In the original webcomic and series, Min-hwan's mother Kim Ja-ok is abusive and overexpectant of Ji-won at worst, while her Japan equivalent Hirano Masako not only openly mocks the late Misa at her funeral for supposedly committing suicide, but was willing to help her son Tomoya commit fraud by using her job at Misa's insurance firm to illegally change her life insurance beneficiary to Tomoya instead of Misa's grandmother.
resolved Redirect to MothersDayCelebrationPlot
Hi,
I intended to make Fathers Day Celebration Plot a redirect to the newly launched Mother's Day Celebration Plot, but I can't create it myself as I keep getting redirected to the TLP. Can a mod do it for me please?
resolved Possible sockpuppet of Traveler123
I have a hunch M 2 Medium might be Traveler 123 aka Aces Full ban-evading. I randomly stumbled upon Traveler when browsing the TLP Community Issues thread and seeing them mentioned, and comparing Traveler and M2, there's a strange amount of overlap.
- Their TLP
replies in particular are quite alike
, using "team" to refer to collective tropers, using the phrase "marathon, not a sprint" in reference to TLP itself, calling descriptions "threadbare", giving advice about "honing your skills" among other things. Individually I wouldn't give these a second thought, but they're the only two accounts I've seen exhibit this specific pattern. ([1]
and [2]
, [3]
and [4]
, [5]
and [6]
)
- These
comments
on a draft M2 adopted from Aces are pretty suspicious. They claim they aren't the OP unprompted, and express a "it has to be done this way" type of ownership; nothing "gatekeep-y" per se, but they were still pretty direct about it. They also bumped
a draft that had last been commented on by Traveler close to 2 years prior, and, again, said response comes off as suspicious (the "searching for parking" scenario sounds plausible on its own, but it's sandwiched between claims that they're a newbie).
- This
comment/thread talking about misuse of Reckless Gun Usage, which was their last post prior to being banned, is pretty similar to M2's first post, which is about misuse of
Real Life examples of Let's Get Dangerous!.
Is this just a silly series of coincidences and/or me being paranoid, or are they really the same person?
Edited by Coachpillresolved Removing (non-problematic) edits created by ban-evader
As you probably all know, a user going by the name of Blase Son Of A Gun 1988 revealed themself to be a ban-evader.
For a short time, they were a contributor on the page for Our avatars are posting on a forum thread and its subpages. Most, if not all of their edits were relatively tame.
Is it okay to scrub these edits (and possibly all mentions of the characters they played) due to them being a ban-evader or do the edits have to be problematic to justify it?
Edited by The21zonzresolved Trimming down wordy entry. Live Action TV
So there's this entry over at the Live-Action TV subpage for Overshadowed by Controversy that's just a Wall of Text. It has to do with the talk show Karamo. It reads as follows:
- Karamo was a talk show similar to Maury and wasn't really popular, but now it's remembered for when Tiktok Chef Pii of the infamous Pink Sauce brought on a critic and proceeded to insult and gaslight her for the entire segment without letting the woman really defend herself. Making things worse, Karamo stood by her side and condemned the critic as well, accusing her of ruining the woman's life and complaining for no reason. Pink Sauce is actually known for misleading information, the chef's incredible inexperience in sauce making, not knowing what the FDA stood for, and the fact many sauces have been delivered spoiled or damaged. The critic in question wasn't just complaining to complain, and it was clear there was either some miscommunication or no research at all here. Comments even brought up why they didn't bring on people who actually lied about what the sauce did to them compared to someone with legitimate critiques. The audience cheered on the chef as well, making the critic feel like a pariah, and even when she sadly had to concede and say this should make everyone think, Karamo threw it back on her and said it was her problem and her fault before ending the segment there. This backfired for everyone except the critic; Chef Pii's reputation sunk further, and Karamo was lambasted online for his poor research and gaslighting, with people accusing him of showing favoritism to black women guests over the white ones. This culminated in him leaving a nasty tweet online calling these critics haters before deleting it, and his show scrubbed the video itself from the internet, with reaction and commentary channels being the only evidence of what happened in that episode. Many comments on newer videos continually bring up that Karamo should apologize to the critic; he did eventually contact Ally, four months later, and he still showed no real remorse to gaslighting her and, as comments pointed out, the apology felt half assed and that he was simply saving face because people were still posting comments begging for him to apologize to Ally. He even seemed to use her own words against her. Karamo went from the helpful guy on Queer Eye to a gaslighter.
How should I trim this entry so that it's more readable?
Edited by ArielLightningresolved Self-demonstrating character page
Does it have any purpose? Should any characters have one?
resolved HuniepopCompletionist
Huniepop Completionist has a habit of adding ROCEJ-breaking edits to pages, multiple of them having been brought up in the ROCEJ cleanup thread. One of them was a Hindsight shoehorn that amounted to "The cameo by [creator] can come across as this after their later transgressions"...but on overdrive. Even after I sent notifiers, they replied back to me today about the edit in an aggressive manner, accusing me of being wrong and not understanding the trope. I'll post the HIH entry here and let you decide if it breaks ROCEJ or not. This is from Primeval:
- The cameo by wildlife documentary host Nigel Marven in season 3: episode 4 can come across as mean spirited when in a 2025 youtube interview
Nigel cited Primeval's fall season airdate as the reason for the cancellation of Prehistoric Park which Nigel starred in.note Prehistoric Park aired in the summer in the UK which meant that children who were most likely to watch it were outside instead of inside watching tv. The show did have amazing DVD sales and was a hit overseas, but that was after it's cancellation While Nigel didn't hold any ill will towards Primeval, the cameo now comes across as a bit childish and mean as in it Nigel portrays a Jerkass TV reporter and is killed off, with it heavily being implied that the reporter is meant to be a direct caricature of Nigel himself. As if the show is gloating about ending his series and implying he's secretly a jerk off camera.
Also the rest of their edit history
and reports of there edits in the cleanup thread
for good measure.

Troper/Renangtry has gone and rewritten vast chunks of UsefulNotes.Aboriginal Australians and UsefulNotes.First Australians to 'address racism and inaccurate information'. Now, while I don't disagree that both pages were due a clean-up (and indeed some of the information provided is new), and I also agree that the best place to learn about Australia's First Nations is from sources with First Nations input, they've not only basically rewritten two pages unilaterally, they've also gone and deleted quite a bit of historical information (mainly regarding the historical treatment of Aboriginal Australians by colonists as well as the various colonial governments) in the process. Furthermore, the fact that they've only got a grand total of 4 edits made over the span of a single day on both pages is suspect in of itself. What would be the best solution here?