Playing With Wiki: General Cleanup and Writing Help

Surprise Jump: Not sure how high a Played Straight needs to be:

Basic Trope: Jumping high due to a big surprise.

• Played Straight: A balloon popping close by makes Alice leap and bump her head on the ceiling.
• Exaggerated: Alice is hiding in in the woods, when something steps on a fallen branch, and the fear makes her jump to the top of a tree.
• Downplayed: Alice is walking and listening to music, when a Scare Chord ringtone plays, making her flinch a few inches into the air.

Can Non-Appearing Title be played with? The main trope page reads like trivia, but it's not officially Trivia.

Is this "deconstructed" entry from PlayingWith.Broken Bird correct?

• Straight: Since the death of her beloved brother Henry, Gabriella has become cynical, hard-hearted and more prone to aggression to cope with her pain.
• Deconstructed: After a while, it becomes too hard for Gabriella to keep up the appearance of being strong, and she has a Heroic BSoD.

Language Equals Thought's description claims that a language having a clunky way to describe a concept is a case of Subverted Trope. Is that accurate? Because to me, it sounds like Downplayed Trope, which possibly didn't exist back when Language Equals Thought was made (2009 vs. 2011).

(x3) I'm leaning on saying it can be Playing With because it currently technically isn't Trivia.

I think so, though I might be wrong.

The first three "downplayed" entries don't seem to be correct. Cut?

• Basic Trope: A character who can manipulate fire.
• Downplayed:
  • Blaze can increase the ambient temperature to high, but not burning, levels.
  • Blaze can't get burned from fire.
  • Blaze uses a fiery sword he can control by his will.
  • The flames on Blaze's palms are the same as that from a lighter.

What trope?

PlayingWith.Playing With Fire

(x3) I guess the Flaming Sword one counts. While I'm unsure about the final example, the second one is misuse in my opinion because Playing with Fire just involves fire powers and the character doesn't have to be immune to fire; characters who qualify just often are fireproof. I'm also leaning on saying the first example is too separate from the trope to count.

PlayingWith.First World Problems:

What kind of play is this example from the work page?

Edited by Malady on May 27th 2023 at 7:45:48 AM

I found this on PlayingWith.It Works Better With Bullets:

• Justified:
  • Alice took it from the north wing mantle, what did she expect?.

Is that supposed to be a reference to something? I'm not sure what the editor meant.

I think it means it was a decorative gun hung over a fireplace.

I found PlayingWith.Doorstopper, and the examples on there just make me think that this "trope" is actually trivia. In particular, the Justified examples are actually Enforced, and the Deconstructed example is about the book being bad.

Doorstopper isn't listed as trivia, so it can have a Playing With page until that changes. If the entries you listed don't come across as accurately defining that mutation, you're free to rewrite them. However, you should probably run it through this thread first.

As for It Works Better with Bullets, should the example I listed be rewritten for clarity?

If you feel it should be trivia, you can do a usage check and run it through TRS. For the Playing With page to be meaningful, it should either come from the perspective of the book's length being a deliberate choice on the part of the author, or refer to an in-universe example.

Actually, "actually Trivia" threads don't need wick checks—they can just be put straight on the TRS Queue with an OP.

See, the thing is, you could just as easily say it should be IUEO as Trivia; I don't think the page has any firm standards on what qualifies as a Doorstopper in real life, so out-of-universe examples could just as easily be YMMV, and in-universe examples have their own section and folders, so making it Trivia would mean making those examples jump through hoops to be included on the page. Also, at least three of the subpages seem to be things that aren't normally tropable, so the out-of-universe examples are arguably more "real-life examples" than the actual core of the trope. On top of that, "this work is really long" seems kind of Chairs-y for a trivia item, if that makes sense (the Fan Works subpage and some of the Video Game examples refer to things that don't even have a physical presence, amounting to "these works have a lot of text" in those cases). So a usage check could be useful in this case to see how many off-page out-of-universe examples there are, whether or not they might be problematic, and if there are any patterns in how they see the trope, and just to generally inform how the thread might go.

Edited by MorganWick on May 31st 2023 at 4:41:38 AM

If the issue isn't just "actually Trivia" and its "usage is mixed enough to be a problem", you are correct that a wick check is preferable. I was operating under the assumption that it was a simple Trivia move like Dummied Out or Abandonware—if it's more, a wick check is absolutely necessary.

PlayingWith.Crash Into Hello heavily focuses on love interests even though the description says romantic cases are one of the many doesn't make it necessary

Edited by Amonimus on Jun 4th 2023 at 10:33:28 PM

Where does it say that?

I've meant to say that from reading the description it appears that being love interests is only optional

Maybe? It's a little vague, since it starts out by talking about Meet Cute and mentions things like Love at First Sight, but it also then mentions things like pickpocketing and stuff. So I think it is meant to be romantic but maybe it decayed a little over the years?

The description doesn't make it clear that romance is one of the options. It reads as the primary form of the trope and also that's part of the reason why the image was changed to something more romantic. Regardless, it's unclear if the trope is romantic only or if it's flexible enough to count platonic examples. I assumed the latter.

The playing with has platonic examples as a "downplayed" version.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jun 4th 2023 at 4:19:04 AM

Found this in PlayingWith.Featureless Protagonist.

• Basic Trope: Ageless Faceless Gender Neutral Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person.
• Straight: You can choose the MC's face, name, species and gender.
• Exaggerated: The Five-Man Band change their jobs with the Job System. The only thing they have of their own are their names, which you chose using the Hello, [Insert Name Here] mechanic, and their genders.

Edited by ElRise on Jun 6th 2023 at 3:01:41 AM

It's hard to see to the increase in strength of "less things being static about the Player Character", if Job System were "backgrounds" or something instead, a.k.a literally changing their pasts, then it'd make more sense.

PlayingWith.Character Select Forcing:

• Exaggerated:
  • It is flat-out impossible for the 'wrong' hero to advance at ALL in levels that aren't tailored to fit their strengths.

Is this more overlapping with, or is it actually Required Party Member, along with But Thou Must! choose that character?

Huh, both Required Party Member and Character Select Forcing were made on the same date. Sounds like I should take this to TRS.

Edited by Malady on Jun 17th 2023 at 6:45:53 AM