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 Two more screwed up custom titles
Bara and Girl Love (both of them locked redirects) are displaying as "Bara Genre" and "Yuri Genre" respectively. This type of move was common in the old days, but we no longer allow custom title renames.
The latter is not to be confused with Girls' Love, itself a redirect to Yuri Genre, which displays properly.
(If the following links both display correctly, the issue has been fixed: Bara, Girl Love.)
resolved Mandalorian Memes Live Action TV
Some of these Memes.The Mandalorian entries have two bullet points each in the page source, yet display with single indentation. What messed up the coding?
- Mando doing sidequests.Explanation Jokes about Din being Railroaded into doing "sidequests" (or favors) in order to get the information he needs have been made.
- Mando making new friends every episode (or at least in Season 2).Explanation The show's frequent use of guest-of-the-week, especially notable in Season 2, where most of the episodes have Mando becoming Fire-Forged Friends with at least one new character.
- "I can help you, but first I need something from you."Explanation Season 2 can essentially be summed as a constant Fetch Quest, as Mando is constantly doing favors for other characters in exchange for something, only to then meet someone else who wants a favor from him in exchange for another thing, and so on. Most egregious when he finally did find a Jedi, Ahsoka, only for her to turn him away and point him to Tython instead.
- Din Cry Laughing after being told to go to another planet.Explanation The summer after Pedro Pascal finished filming The Mandalorian Season 2, he landed two roles in the Zoom-based "play" I, My Ruination, which starred Paul Giamatti as A Streetcar Named Desire director Elia Kazan; one scene has Streetcar writer Tennessee Williams (Pascal) experience an alcohol-induced mood swing, prompting a concerned Elia to exclaim, "Hey!" multiple times, before asking, "What's going on?" After "The Jedi", some Star Wars fans posted the clip with captions referring to it as Din's thoughts after learning he'd have to travel somewhere else to finish his mission.
- The Mandalorian on Omegle by Tiktoker cosplayer tokenasianfriend.
- "Okay, just... just give me one second. I'll be right back."Explanation ”The Mandalorian" meeting a stranger who doesn't like Star Wars or The Mandalorian, prompting Mando to awkwardly excuse himself before somehow appearing in the stranger's house to beat him up.
- "Okay Mando, show me your cock or the kid dies!" "Aw, fu—" Chapter 14: The TragedyExplanation A Boba cosplayer (or more accurately, someone wearing a Boba mask) having a Nerf gun put up to a doll of the Child, demanding to the Mandalorian on the other line to show his... penis or else he'll kill the kid. Going with the common joke about not wanting to be Mistaken for Gay, it's joked that Mando being forced to show his wang to another guy is just as tragic if he showed his face to a living being.
- "You're the guy from Fortnite!"Explanation One of the Omegle people in the same video joking that he recognizes the Mandalorian as a Fortnite character due to him having recently become a sponsored character in the game at the time of the video.
resolved Conservational and Off-Topic Headscratchers
The entry on Headscratchers.Incredibles 2 "Why isn't it called The Incredibles 2?" had the following entry:
- The point of headscratchers is to try and provide an "in-universe" answer to the question provided. Nothing in the story provides any plausible reason for why the title of the movie would drop the "The" so this really isn't an answerable "Headscratchers" question. Any reason given here is speculation or pure imaginative fun.
After this, the discussion shifted to forum like conservation between posters on the purpose and merits of the Headscratchers answers and less on the actual question itself, which seems improper for Headscratchers.
Edited by costanton11resolved Edit War on YMMV for Codes and Geass: Embracing Your Inner Megalomania
On April 12th, 2021, while reading the forum on Questionable Questing for the fanfic "Codes And Geass: Embracing Your Inner Megalomania", I came across a user under the belief that the author of the fic, Tropers/Trickster_Priest, was applying Ron the Death Eater to the characters of Nagisa Chiba and Shogo Asahina.
- Ron the Death Eater: Like many other fanfics, Chiba and Asahina fall victim to this. Contrasted with canon where, while the two are shown more distrustful of Zero after he abandoned them during the Black Rebellion and appeared unapologetic when he returned, and only betrayed him when given sufficient evidence to suggest he crossed the line, the Geass Order massacre for Asahina and the doctored evidence Schneizel provided for Chiba, here they are depicted as disloyal and belligerent from the outset, not helped by Trollouche going out of his way to antagonize them. For specifics though:
- Asahina is made out to be against Trollouche's leadership from the start, to the point he secretly aids an attempted coup d'etat and alliance with the Chinese Federation, and then subjected to a Uriah Gambit as punishment, said gambit resulting in his death due to Kewell emerging in the Siegfried.
- Chiba regularly badmouths Trollouche, stirred up unrest against the Britannian members of the Black Knights, and attempted to convince Tohdoh to stage another coup while Trollouche was comatose, only failing because Tohdoh had Undying Loyalty to Trollouche and C.C. was listening in, the latter of whom Chiba attacks upon discovering her listening in, only for C.C. to nearly kill as a means of putting the fear of god into her, and only spares her due to Tohdoh promising to kill her himself if she continues her treasonous behavior.
- Butt-Monkey: Ohgi, Asahina, and Chiba all are on Trollouche's shit list because he remembers who was responsible for the betrayal in canon.
- The Chew Toy: Trollouche goes out of his way to provoke people he doesn't like, particularly Chiba and Asahina of the Four Holy Swords. YMMV as to whether he's justified in blaming them for the events of the original timeline or not.
- Rather than step on landmines by commenting in the forums Trickstar Priest, I will just put this here: you are bashing Chiba and Asahina like many other fanfic writers. And remember, please don't remove this just because you disagree.
After adding it, Tropers/shadowwolf75 decided to immediately remove it, their edit reason being:
- Hi, I'm not trickster and you are still wrong; the difference here was Lelouch being more aggressive in calling it out because he remembered they were trouble before, they had NEVER liked him in canon and fucked him over later, and thus it does not fall to the extremes of Ron The Deatheater
- This is a YMMV trope. There are users in the forum who see this to be the case as they call out Trickster Priest for bashing. Just because you disagree doesn't mean you can remove a subjective trope, since you are only a single person. Take it up with trope repair threads if you absolutely must. Otherwise, remove it again, it's officially an Edit War.
While that initially appeared to be the end of it... Trickster Priest edited the page themself using the fact they were the author as justification in blatant defiance of "The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours". They additionally accused me of being anirock and doing this just because they didn't agree with "me".
- I however, am Trickster. And you are misrepresenting the situation and ignoring the nuances. And pulling this because I disagreed with your interpretation in the thread on QQ is especially galling.
This has escalated into a full out Edit War, and rather than do something stupid like restore the entry again or argue with Trickster Priest, I decided it prudent to take the matter to ATT, as Trickster Priest is blatantly ignoring Administrivia, and this is not the first time they have done so. And rather than argue as to why the trope doesn't apply, they instead accuse me of misinterpreting things and being a sockpuppet account for a different user with similar objections. So I am requesting ATT to step in to resolve this dispute.
Edited by RebelFalconresolved Issues with Unintentionally Unsympathetic on YMMV / The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
So some users seem to really want to fit Karli Morgenthau into an Unintentionally Unsympathetic entry on this page. As follows:
Version no. 1:
- Karli gets hit with this quite hard by the end. Sure, she lost her only mother figure and she's the product of a world that lost half of its entire population for five years, but she's only going further and further into the Moral Event Horizon as the show goes on. It reaches a peak in the final episode, "One World, One People", where she callously decides to kill the hostages, completely forgetting that she intended on using them as a bargaining chip instead. Never mind blowing up the GRC supply depot in the third episode. As a result, not a lot of tears were shed when Sharon, a.k.a. the Power Broker, finally put her down for good.
Version no. 2:
- Karli gets hit with this quite hard by the end. Sure, she lost her only mother figure and she's the product of a world that lost half of its entire population for five years, but she's only going further and further into the Moral Event Horizon as the show goes on. It reaches a peak in the final episode, "One World, One People", where she callously decides to kill the hostages, completely forgetting that she intended on using them as a bargaining chip instead. Never mind blowing up the GRC supply depot in the third episode. As a result, not a lot of tears were shed when Sharon, a.k.a. the Power Broker, finally put her down for good. Then again, it it kinda makes sense when you realize the Super-Soldier serum must have amplified her negative qualities too, just like Walker. She may have been a person with good intentions, but probably nowhere as incorruptible as Steve. In other words, "Good becomes great, bad becomes worse."
And Version no. 3:
- Karli is clearly meant to be a Tragic Villain with a sympathetic backstory and motivations, but many feel that she crossed the Moral Event Horizon too many times for them to buy into Sam and Bucky's view that she is ultimately just some troubled teen lashing out at the world when she commits multiple murders and attempted murders, blows up buildings, takes hostages and tries to set them on fire to prevent them from being rescued, and it doesn't help that she has nostalgia for the time when half the planet was dead and resents the Avengers for restoring billions of murdered people to life. Many see her as little more than a murderous whiny teenager with a childish view of how the world works and almost no empathy for problems that are not her own.
Putting aside that a character can't crost the MEH more than once, I don't feel like proper protocol was followed. as you can see here
, the first version was added in by Your Boy Russell on April 23rd before being edited to the second version by Hissing Aurora 94 the same day. I then deleted it a few hours later because it was a self-arguing entry, telling them to take it to the cleanup thread to discuss it first. Then the third version was added yesterday by Dragon 101. They did not bring it to the discussion thread, or really discuss it in any way before re-adding a version of the entry.
Look, I don't really care if some people don't like one character on the show but this doesn't work, right? At best the entry is bad and needs to be edited, at worst it needs to be deleted for poor curation.
Edited by MinisterOfSinisterresolved The Mask Film
I found this page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanWorks/TheMask
I don't know if it's a written rule, but I don't think Fan Works pages should be filled with unpublished fanworks (I googled them and found nothing). I know I can delete the page itself by putting it on the Cut List. But the three pages within, I'm not sure that they should be deleted, maybe they could be moved to Unpublished Works. How does one move them? Is it a job for admins or can regular users do it? Is it okay if they're moved?
resolved Not related stinger on main DMC page, keep or delete? Videogame
User TimeLordVictorious added this edit
to Devil May Cry, which on the one hand, I can understand some of the humor behind it. However, on the other hand, it's completely unrelated to the page itself, so was wondering if it should be removed or not.
resolved Author's saving throw misuse/concern
So, after talking about it
on "Is this an example?", on the advice of a mod I decided to come here. I'm pretty much echoing what I write over on "Is this an example?" but...here's what's up.
I'm a bit concerned about a trope under the category of Author's Saving Throw. As I was going through the trope page a few months ago, I noticed Misterian wrote the following a while ago:
- The first two chapters of RayFox faced some criticism 4 years later for its narrative expecting readers to sympathize with the citizens and authorities of Meva City for persecuting and vilifying Ray as an arsonist and terrorist despite not knowing (or seemingly not trying to look into) the full story of Ray's vigilante exploits simply on the basis of "he broke the law and destroyed property, so it warrants consequences" with little to no nuance, especially regarding why he did. Chapter 4 shifts the narrative from Ray joining S.O.S. to atone to the authorities extending the offer to him out of recognition for the lives he's saved and sees his help as something desperately needed, with implications that the public have grown suspicious of the accusations against Ray. The S.O.S. is friendlier and open-minded toward Ray in contrast to previous chapters, with some seeking further details from Ray about the Meva Arsenal incident. The end of Chapter 4 fully cemented this with Rayfox upstaging a public speech held by Morales to fully explain who he is, the powers he possesses, and what he's been doing, Making clear his goals to improve himself as a crime fighter he's forming at own request rather than anyone shaming him for his apparent disregard for the law, as if the author has taken to fully embracing the viewing of Ray as an earnest aspiring hero rather than the young careless vigilante the previous chapters tried to portray him as.
At the time, I had tried to trim it down so that it was more laconic, but he added a whole lot more while putting it on the comic page via edit requests, and now I'm beginning to wonder if it actually is valid; almost feels as if it's a bit "braggy" on the troper's part, as if he feels the author suddenly changed the narrative of the story because of 3 reviews on the Tropes page.
Regardless of my gripes with the comic, this seems like a rather inaccurate use of the trope. Unlike with stuff like Unintentionally Sympathetic/Unsympathetic, it would have taken a good chunk of the audience vocally criticizing it for this particular trope in question to count, and given that the audience isn't really that big or publicly vocal in general (with the exception of his fans, and even then, they aren't 100% present from what I've seen), it doesn't feel like it applies. I'm very tempted to remove from both the trope page and the comic page via edit requests, but I dunno.
I can confirm that there is no ill-intent behind this, only a simple misunderstanding of the trope and what it really means. But still, I would like to get this taken down.
EDIT: After speaking with the original writer of the entry, it seems we agree that the entry doesn't fit the trope. As for the comic page, I still have to get a consensus for that to actually be removed.
Edited by Stardust5099resolved Trouble with Trivia/CodesAndGeassEmbracingYourInnerMegalomania
Hello again, little bit of an issue regarding the trivia page for this fanfic, and hopefully the last one I bring to ATT since I am attempting to disassociate myself from this fic.
The Trivia page is only meant for trivia, right? Well, the author of the work, Tropers/Trickster_Priest, has restored several tropes that were removed for not being trivia tropes. Namely two Useful Notes, BDSM and Oda Nobunaga, and one normal trope: Insistent Terminology. Shouldn't they be removed though since they are not trivia?
They have also removed two tropes, Dear Negative Reader and Hostility on the Set, and an entry for another trope, Creator's Pest, with no given reason whatsoever. Unless they are cases of misuse, isn't their removal not permitted under the ruling of The Fic May Be Yours, but the Trope Page Is Ours?
I apologize for troubling you, and thank you in advance for resolving this.
Edited by RebelFalconresolved A troper who keeps posting dubious tropes on the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Main Character section. Videogame
Someone named Frankie 3 keeps re-posting the same ill-fitting tropes on Tifa Lockhart's character page despite me and other tropers already having pointed out why he needs to stop doing it. Like for example, trying to pin the "Token Good Teammate" label to Tifa when the rest of the party aren't even evil people, at worst having some anti-heroic traits that don't even scale into particularly dark levels. And then there's him posting links to some random wiki to try and add proof of claim when it directly violates troping rule that pages are only for what is found within the work itself. What should be done about him?
Edited by 9thOutworldsManresolved self-promotion in tlp comments
so there's a tlp draft
being proposed. (full disclosure: I have my own issues with the proposal that are unrelated to my question and have made that explicit in the comments for the draft.) My question is: does the site allow self-promotion outside of explicit forum threads? the sponsor wrote in the comments that they have a youtube channel that discusses the trope they are proposing and then linked it in the comment. is that allowed? disallowed? allowed but frowned upon? Felt weird about it tbh, so i'm asking here.
resolved Memetic Mutation misuse? Music
Found this on YMMV/Deftones:
- Memetic Mutation: Stephen revealing himself to be a believer in several conspiracies
, including the flat Earth theory, anti-vax and COVID-19 denial, was immediately met with widespread scorn from the fandom along with several memes referencing songs such as "Hole in the Earth".
This is already in need of a tweak of some kind since that Vimeo link is dead, but I'm not even sure it's an example of Memetic Mutation - it's more focused on memes made in response to a scenario rather than the scenario itself becoming a meme.
Edited by Akriloth2160resolved CerebusCallBack applied to fan works
There a a few Cerebus Call-Back subpages for fan works that were previously under Cerebus Retcon, but were cut as, per this thread
, they were in regards to things that happened in the original work, not the fanfic itself. Do they apply under this trope?
resolved Kill Count and Dead Meat are separate pages Web Original
As the title says, I've noticed that The Kill Count and Dead Meat (the latter of which refers to the channel that the former series is hosted on) are separate pages, but most of the Dead Meat page and its subpages focusses on Kill Count, with hardly anything talking about the rest of the channel's content. What should we do about this (besides possibly renaming the page for Kill Count to remove the "The" if we're keeping the page, since that's not in the title of the show itself outside of James' signing on/off phrases)?
Edited by Akriloth2160resolved Creators removing Audience Reaction tropes
This concerns the YMMV page for Rae Kohai (though honestly, every subpage there has their own issues even before getting to how the work itself has been impossible to trope thanks to every episode being privated back in 2019, combined with drama surrounding the work's creator that I'm not going to touch on here). There's one specific issue I'm unsure about that I'd like a second opinion on.
I've been reading up on various administrivia pages on when creators add and edit pages for their own works, and I can't find anything that specifically covers when creators remove YMMV tropes rather than add them. The particular trope that concerns me is a First Installment Wins example that an account with a very similar name to the work's creator (which is currently inactive but mostly seemed to only edit their own work page) deleted without giving an edit reason.
Is it kosher for creators to remove audience reaction tropes even when Zero Context Examples and factual inaccuracies aren't factors?
Edited by Akriloth2160resolved I have a proposal for Complete Monster, where do I submit? Live Action TV
I have a proposal for a complete monster. It's Yuri from Girl From Nowhere, she fits all of the archetypes to be a Complete Monster:
- She had a mom, but after she got Nanno's powers, she has completely abandoned her and didn't give a damn to check on her, which foreshadowed her selfish and callous nature.
- Her freudian excuse of Nana and Tuptim having her raped by their goons for their snuff ring ended up being redundant because throughout season 2, we saw her become as monstrous as them. She outright said that she didn't care about justice but wanted to take over the business to hurt more innocents in order to get rich, which was the first evidence of her heinous nature.
- She kills a harmless dog to give students a reason to beat a former senior to death, even if it wasn't necessary, Nanno said it herself, which foreshadowed Yuri being a dangerous threat in the series.
- She gaslights and exploits an innocent girl's situation with her parents using her influencer life as a cash cow in order to further her cat-and-mouse game with Nanno and force her to go too far to make herself doubt her actions. Yuri then taunts her about it, happy that her first step to take down Nanno is complete.
- Her second step to overthrow Nanno is to make a psychopath Junko her henchwoman to do most of the dirty work for her as the world's new "god". She hatched a death trap for Nanno where she has Junko attack her mom and even goads Nanno into interferring, knowing what her weakness is so that it could lead to her "death" by Waan and later has the latter executed by Junko once she has outlived her usefulness in assassinating her.
- At this point, nobody knows why is Yuri so evil. Or has she always been evil before those mean girls tortured her. But all we know is she loves to cause misery and pain in her victims for her own amusement.
resolved Bloated-if-not-questionable Cowboy Bebop At His Computer example Web Original
On the Trivia page for Jimquisition, there's a Cowboy BeBop at His Computer example that was added and serial tweaked across last November, and while I already take issue with the unwieldy length of the example, I watched the episode it's referring to, and I'm not sure it's accurate. Here's what it is:
- In "Why Emulating Nintendo Games Is Good, Probably"
, Jim kept equating Piracy and Emulation as one in the same throughout the video; which it is not. Piracy would be stealing a game rom to play on an emulator, whereas emulators themselves is the means to play said game. While they can be used to play pirated games, if one is prepared enough, you can just dump the games yourself (something all emulators suggest you do specifically to avoid lawsuits and copyright infringement). Jim doesn't seem to realise that emulators can also do a lot more than just play games. You can outright make homebrew games for that system, mod the game to make it look better with texture packs and custom levels, or use cheat codes to enhance the experience. None of this was mentioned by them, despite being perfectly legal activities to do, and also a draw to emulator enthusiasts. If emulators were the driving issue, Nintendo and other game companies would've attempted to sue them all years agonote and there is a reason most emulators are open source; to prove to the companies and their users that their code is not stolen from outside sources or was made with a leaked companies' data. The premise of the video is also flawed because they claim games media doesn't talk about emulation because it's a taboo subject, and goes off on a tangent about how the media relies too much on connections to get news and review copies. While the observation is mostly true, It doesn't occur to them that a press outlet featuring emulators semi-frequently will inevitably lead to the Streisand Effect; more people pirating games to try out the emulator because they heard it in an article that would otherwise not feature it (something Jim themselves is an example of; Jim went out and bought a handheld game emulator loaded with what they imply are illegitimately obtained roms because they wanted to use an emulator to protest against Nintendo's online service that they found out via a news article via Kotaku).
Except the video doesn't treat piracy and emulation as the same thing. In fact, going off of the way that Jim words themselves, the video acknowledges and understands that piracy is a mere facet of emulation more than it is the same thing. Jim's video treats it as part of the bigger issue of how Nintendo does nothing to make their service worth the money in the face of people being able to access their older games for free illegitimately, and it seems like that's the actual premise of the video more than the topic of gaming media being coy about emulation, especially since the early portion revolves around an article that's being anything but coy about it. More to the point, the video backs this distinction up further by explicitly pointing out that the Kotaku article in question isn't encouraging piracy so much as it's reporting on something that's proven to be possible on emulation software.
From what I can conclude from rewatching the video, this example seems to revolve around a lack of distinction that not only isn't visible anywhere in the video, but wouldn't have been important to the video's point even if it was. It can't just be me noticing this, right?
At the very least, the example looks like it could do with a trim and a tiny bit of grammar cleanup, if we were to keep it.
Edited by Akriloth2160resolved How to suggest a rename for a trope?
Ever since I saw the Everything Has Rhythm trope existed, I've been thinking it should be renamed to Rhythm And Brooms.
The reason for this is because the stereotype involves brooms being used as a makeshift dance partner, and is a pun of “rhythm and blues”.
I haven't suggested it, because A) I don't know where one would go to do that. And B) I don't want to do it myself, as I'm pretty sure that changing a trope name without consultation is tantamount to vandalism.
Anyone willing to give me a hand?
Edited by Trogdor7620

Reposting from here
.
Taylorswiftscat edited the quotes page for replacement scrappy
, just as one of johnnyfog's socks did, along with johnny himself. They also edited a bunch of quotes pages and the WCW page
.
They do seem suspiciously familiar with the wiki for a newcomer, based on my interactions with them.
Edited by SkyCat32