Trope Page Spoilers

According to the Handling Spoilers page:

On that subject, there are some tropes, particularly Death Tropes, Love Tropes, Betrayal Tropes, and Twist Endings (Tomato Surprise, All Just a Dream, etc.), in which all the examples are going to be spoilers just by their very nature. They're about surprises. Just stick a general warning above the examples ("Here there be spoilers!") and move on. You don't need to be sensitive with spoilers here — the reader knows what he's getting into, and any spoilage is their fault, not ours. Note that this only applies to those tropes where merely listing the title of a series would be a spoiler; don't abuse this blanket warning.

There are two major problems with that:

First, it is massively abused. For example almost all the hundreds of Death Tropes got a bolded warning for unmarked spoilers, even pages like Celestial Bureaucracy, Deadly Euphemism, and Family-Unfriendly Death, though usually none of them are tropes where even the titles can spoil. (contrast with The Hero Dies, or Prophecy Twist)

Second, even on the ones where the title appearing there can be a spoiler on it's own, making them even more spoilerrific by banning the spoiler tags is worse than useless.

For example maybe a work title appearing on Prophecy Twist might inherently spoil that there will be something tricky with the prophecy, but nothing stops us from hiding what is the tricky part itself.

What's the point of that current editing form? To make them more easily readable? That's what the "turning all spoilers off" feature is for, if you don't care about spoilers.

If you do care about having your spoilers marked, this just gives you a comfort that you didn't ask for, at the price of giving up a protection that you did ask for.

edited 23rd Feb '11 12:05:55 PM by EternalSeptember

I would be in favor of a trope-by-trope analysis of whether an "unmarked spoilers" warning is really appropriate. The Hero Dies is pretty obvious, as is The Bad Guy Wins. Others, not so much.

My second point applies even to stuff like The Hero Dies. There are some examples, like Death Note, or Watchmen, where it's not that clear who is supposed to be The Hero, there are also some video game alternate endings, I Got Better cases, and the likes, where even a tag over the character's name would still help.

A note that Beware, due to the nature of the trope, even white tags can't give full protection from spoilers would be a lot more useful than telling everyone to give up even trying.

That doesn't help anyone.

edited 23rd Feb '11 12:17:12 PM by EternalSeptember

I think the issue with some trope articles is that you end up with pages and pages and pages of examples all with spoiler tags, which frankly looks terrible. The "Read At Your Own Risk" messages works fine in that regard.

I do agree though that it would merit looking at whether some of the pages really need them or not.

It wouldn't look that extremely white. For example Tomato Surprise is one of those definite inherent spoilers, if they would happen in a work, I would even whiten out the trope name, but on the page itself, (that, for some reason, ignored current rule), looks pretty reasonable, as all the other Handling Spoilers rules are used, people introduce entries with less sensitive information, like describing what the situation looks like, and sum up the sensitive twist in a few white words.

If even that much white text is more annoying to you than the act of getting spoiled about every Tomato Surprise ever, the "turn off spoiler tags" feature is for you.

You and I must have a different idea of what looks reasonable, then, because sizable swaths of the Tomato Surprise page looks awful to me.

Turning off spoiler tags may not be an option, because someone may genuinely not want to be spoiled in other areas of the site, but understand that they have to be especially careful on inherent-spoiler pages.

In my opinion, if the key trope-relevant information has to be spoilered on most examples, it should be a tag-less page with a warning.

I know that my taste about what is reasonable whitelining is arguable, but, so is yours. That page isn't objectively unreadable, so much that you can't read any meaningful sentence, it is just annoying. If you are the type of person who gets annoyed by white lines more than by a revealed twist of the Doorstopper mistery novel you are just reading, you are almost certainly ok with getting spoiled in general.

The problem is, that this entire "Be careful" warning means "be prepared to get randomly spoiled about any possible work that exists, or don't read this page at all"

I mean, you don't know in advance, which works have Tomato Surprise endings, and what could happen in these endings. Not to mention, that even other spoilers, only tangetially related to the trope, can be openly described, and it can't be "unseen", so there is no way to "be cautious".

If you start reading the page without any tags, you accept that practically anything can be thrown at you, and that requires a type of mentality.

edited 23rd Feb '11 1:07:57 PM by EternalSeptember

I wasn't criticizing your tastes, merely pointing out that the example you gave is, in my opinion, part of the problem.

It has less to do with whether or not people who are reading those pages are okay with spoilers, and more to do with whether or not the examples on a page are able to provide good information about the usage of the trope without them.

There are several consecutive rows on that particular page that amount to "Work title: Spoiler Tag". Still more are small groups of words interspersed between multiple spoiler blocks. And in many of the examples that aren't that way, the information that is actually relevant to the trope most often is what is behind the tag. If the reader is forced to highlight the examples in order to find out why they fit the trope, then the spoiler tags don't serve much purpose.

If the nature of the trope causes a sizable portion of examples to be written that way, I do feel that it's better off without tags. Yes, people are agreeing to risk spoiling themselves on other works by reading through the page with that setup, however that should be a given being that they are reading a page on twist endings.

edited 23rd Feb '11 1:29:37 PM by Meeble

If the reader is forced to highlight the examples in order to find out why they fit the trope, then the spoiler tags don't serve much purpose.

That's not always true, after voluntarily getting a minor spoiler about the fact that the work has a Tomato Surprise, I might still want to decide whether or not I want to know the juicy details, depending on my interest in the work, or familiarity with it.

Maybe this issue should be decided by a crowner, possibly in a more popular forum section, like Wiki Talk or the TRS.

It's obvious that we are only speculating about what people were "supposed to expect" when they choose to keep spoiler marks, or when they started reading a Death Trope page, by putting our own opinions in their mouths, but shouldn't they decide it?

edited 23rd Feb '11 1:49:25 PM by EternalSeptember

I think it may be a bit too early for a crowner, as I would at least like to see some other opinions first, so that the people voting aren't missing possible good points raised by either side.

The current policy definitely needs to be reworked. Look at the first "Good" example:

Good: Connor, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The son of two vampires, he was abducted as a baby and raised in a Hell Dimension by a fanatical demon hunter, eventually returning to Earth as a teenager. His memories are later replaced with an elaborate web of Fake Memories, [I don't watch the show, but this sounds like it should be in spoiler text.] allowing him to live an ordinary teenage life... until a demon tied to his past comes looking for him... [This is very vague, conveying little information to non-viewers of the show.]

So my two problems are that the current policy seems to favor avoidance of spoiler text over proper use of it, and it seems to favor vagueness in place of spoiler tags over informativeness. I want to see the interesting details of shows I don't watch, and I want to be able to avoid the details of shows I don't watch, even when I choose to read inherently-spoiling tropes.

One last thing. I would prefer to read an example that sums up the tropiness in a visible sentence or two, then goes into gory details in a few lines of pure spoiler text, than an example that's mostly visible but broken up by little blocks of white.

edited 24th Feb '11 2:26:33 AM by Silverfire

I would prefer to read an example that sums up the tropiness in a visible sentence or two, then goes into gory details in a few lines of pure spoiler text, than an example that's mostly visible but broken up by little blocks of white.

Except there's no way to do that for many tropes, not without going into the incredible vagueness you said you also disliked.

edited 24th Feb '11 2:09:42 AM by Killomatic

Hmmm. It's not that I hate vagueness in and of itself, it's when boring vagueness is used as a substitute for spoiler tags, thus robbing those of us who are willing to highlight the spoiler of interesting information.

I want to see the interesting details of shows I don't watch, and I want to be able to avoid the details of shows I don't watch, even when I choose to read inherently-spoiling tropes.

I'm going to guess that you meant "I want to see the interesting details of the shows I don't watch and avoid the details of the shows I do watch." And the problem is that these two are often mutually exclusive. The spoilers are the details and the details are the spoilers. What's different is whether you watch the show or not.

If you are talking abou the other point of the policy, I'm not sure that I agree with you about that.

Conciseness is good. Even when there are no spoilers involved, everything else than the fact that the trope happens, should be kept to the possible minimum. If spoilers are involved, that's not a reason to be even more concise, but even more reason to be consise.

edited 24th Feb '11 9:53:38 AM by EternalSeptember

I think it may be a bit too early for a crowner, as I would at least like to see some other opinions first, so that the people voting aren't missing possible good points raised by either side.

Though it's rare to see any discussion that ends up with anyone being convinced about the opposed statement, () but at least most of the time, one side's argument falls apart, so unbiased spectators will start supporting one side.

But in this case, even if 5 or 10 people will come and tell their opinions, we would only have 5-10 more anecdotes about personal tastes, but not anything that verbal kung-fu could manipulate.

As I see it, the crowner options would be:

• Keep the spoiler policy as it is
  • Pros: completely whitelining-free pages for everyone, specially marked as such.
  • cons: no protection at all, not even for those who already chose whitelining over spoilers for other cases.

• Delete the questionable segment of the policy, apply the same rules to all trope pages.
  • Pros: Anyone who is annoyed by witelining can turn it off, so anyone who is annoyed by spoiler content, should turn whitelining on, and still safely read those pages.
  • Cons: Due to the nature of these tropes, there can be even more than usual whitelining this could still annoy people who otherwise chose whitelining over spoiler content.

• Limit the amount of whitelining to things that are not directly related to the nature of the trope. (e.g.: in a Death Trope, openly write that someone dies, but spoiler tag the circumstances, if they would reveal more content)
  • pros: People would only get spoiled about the trope that they are coming for, and there would be a balance between white and black text.

edited 26th Feb '11 1:37:33 PM by EternalSeptember

Bump?

My problem with never being able to spoiler tropes is that there are some works where the trope name just by itself is an instantly obvious spoiler if you know anything at all about the work, so being concise in the example part doesn't help.

For instance, I keep tabs on a works page which has "Kill Em All" as a valid trope, and there's only one set of characters it could possibly refer to. There's really no way to dance around that fact in terms of trying to hide the spoiler without spoiler tags.

edited 26th Mar '11 10:31:27 AM by Jeysie

Trope titles can be spoiler tagged on work pages, either normally, or if there are too many of them, by collecting them on the bottom of the page.

Ah, I see, I guess I misread the situation, then. :P

Although admittedly it is still a factor in that there's some spoilers that no amount of careful wording or tagging is going to save.

edited 26th Mar '11 11:51:45 AM by Jeysie

Yes, that's true, for example it's true that we can't do anything about work titles being listed on the spoiler trope pages, for example on The Hero Dies page, but it's still no reason to completely suspend the usage of tags, and allow even more spoilers there.

If I understood correctly, Endless Nine, your main concern is the current policy may spoiler other tropes in a spoiler heavy trope, right? As in, reading about The Hero Dies may also spoil me The Bad Guy Wins(since people may not use any spoiler tag at all).

If so, I agree the best solution would be not spoiler-tagging the references to The Hero dieing, but all references The Bad Guy Wins as result should be hidden, as this is not what I was expecting when I decided to read the trope.

Other tropes, and also the worst details of the spoiler trope itself.

It's less noticeable with The Hero Dies, that usually spoiles who is the character who dies, so there is not much we can do about that one, but with some others, like most Death Tropes, we could even hide the identity of the dead one with a single white word, or at Twist Ending, the nature of the twist with a few white lines.

So the inherent spoilers could be reduced to revealing that someone dies, or that there is some sort of twist ending.

There is no reason to make the page "more readable" for people who already chose white lines over the spoilers.

edited 27th Mar '11 9:33:58 AM by EternalSeptember

Oh, I see. I agree with that as well.

That's both selfish and shortsighted. Just because you don't care about spoilers doesn't mean that we should merrily say "Well, screw you anyway, if you don't want to be spoiled. If the page is a mess for you, we don't really care." to the people who don't want to be spoiled and stop caring about giving them a readable page.

edited 27th Mar '11 11:34:07 AM by Madrugada