Victoria Cleanup

This is a thread made to clean up the Victoria page and the abnormal number of wicks it has. It's a work that could charitably be described as 'politically charged' so having 500+ wicks is a bit suspicious, but not against any rules. There's also an issue of the main page sounding a bit too gushy about a story ostensibly about teaming up with Nazis to kill cultural marxists.

I'm happy to go through all of the wicks and any that I think are irrelevant or particularly shoehorn-y, I'll bring up here. I welcome any assistance or input on the topic.

I definitely over-estimated my ability to do this. I don't want to flood the thread with constant 'I have a question about this one single trope' posts, so I'll list my progress as I go through the each letter. I just finished looking through A-B.

Deleted entry on Accidental Hero as Rumford's actions at the beginning that draw attention to him are neither accidental nor viewed in-universe as heroic.

Deleted entry on Activist-Fundamentalist Antics because it was about how the protagonist's actions would be seen out-of-universe as ridiculous and ineffective but that's not how the narrative presents them.

Deleted entry on Amazon Brigade because while there is an all-female army, they're portrayed as ineffective, incompetent, and consistently worse at everything than the men. Not in a 'notable aversion' kind of way.

Deleted entry on Ambiguously Bi because it refers to a female character who lives in the all-female land but there's no indication of any romantic relationships.

Deleted entry on Attractive Bent-Gender because it was regarding two very minor characters who crossdress and seduce someone but have no other presence in the story and their attractiveness is never commented on.

Deleted entry on Became Their Own Antithesis because again, this is not true in-universe, where Rumford is straightforwardly portrayed as a hero who never became what he hated.

Deleted entry on Being Good Sucks because it was a negative entry focussing on how Rumford is only 'good' from his point of view, did not fit in with any of the other examples on the page.

Deleted entry on Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous because it places Victoria in the middle of these two when even in-universe it leans totalitarian.

Victoria is currently at 495 wicks.

...I just rewrote the intro to be less about Audience Reactions since How to Create a Work's Page says we shouldn't put anything about how the work is received. But then I realized it was massively debated before settling on the current. Uh...oops, but it's still against policy?

I don't know this work, and I don't intend to know this work, so I can't help out much. However, you are free to bring up examples that you are unsure about here and other people can evaluate if they fit or not. What I do on the Bojack Horseman cleanup is I delete a bunch of stuff, list out why I did so in the edit description, and link to the cleanup in case anyone has issues. Like here.

If tropes are invalid examples, they should be removed from Literature.Victoria and Characters.Victoria too.

I assume you mean debated on the discussion page? We may have to make an exception to that rule to make it absolutely clear TV Tropes does not endorse the novel's views.

Edited by rjd1922 on Nov 26th 2020 at 1:55:04 PM

A bit late, but before this thread was created, I went through tropes A-Cu, as well as backwards (yeah) from the end of the Related page down to Evil Counterpart/Literature, and removed obvious shoehorns and errors.

Will post here if I find anything that I think requires discussion.

Thanks for the help!

I'm thinking that for all of the incorrect tropes on the main page and character pages, I'll do in one big splurge at the end.

Went through the Cs today.

Deleted an entry on Call to Agriculture because it was an aversion and not a notable one. Also because it was about how Rumford spends his retirement training new legions of 'Anti-Muslim Crusader Knights', which is... eeeeehhhhh.

Deleted an entry on Chessmaster Sidekick because it was about the protagonist, not a sidekick.

Deleted an entry on Church Militant because it refers to a group of religious people who agree on the purpose of a war but don't participate in it. Also because it's about how various Christians band together against the real enemy; Islam. Which is... eeeeehhhhh.

Deleted an entry on Cincinnatus because it just wasn't the correct usage of the trope regarding the protagonist.

Deleted an entry on Clock King because it also was not correct usage of a trope, just a vague description of an advanced society, nothing to do with knowledge of or obsession with time/order.

Deleted an entry on Clone Army because it was not to do with an army of clones and used word cruft like 'in a manner of speaking... partially subverted...'

Deleted an entry on Conditioned to Accept Horror because it was about two warring factions believing this to be true of the other, whether neither is presented as such in the narrative.

Deleted from Conspiracy Literature because while it may be said about the author, there's no group of conspiracy theorists in the story, at least, not presented as such, who are proven right.

Deleted an entry on Corrupt Bureaucrat because while the protagonist disagrees with a judge and the narrative presents him as wrong, there's no indication that he's corrupt.

Deleted an entry on Corrupt Church because it was regarding how the enemies of the protagonists think of them as corrupt religious people, but the narrative clearly presents them as correct.

Deleted an entry on Crushing the Populace because it was again in contrast to the way the narrative presents the actions of the protagonists in a non-villainous way.

Deleted an entry on Culture Justifies Anything because it was written with an incredibly negative slant about how the protagonists murder, nuke, torture and enslave people.

Deleted an entry on Culture Police because it wasn't an example of the trope.

Victoria is currently at 482 wicks.

Idumean Patriot re-added the Corrupt Bureaucrat example because it was deleted without an edit reason. You really should give edit reasons when removing examples, or at least link to your explanatory post here.

I removed the examples Elmo cut from Literature.Victoria and Characters.Victoria.

Removed

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us - it is when hero headquarters are attacked (and attempt to be taken over) by villains, not when heroes attack villains
• Combat Pragmatism - War crimes against civilians and prisoners of war do not count as combat pragmatism.
• The Commandments - No stated/quoted "commandments" or short, "easy to follow" rules in the text. Even biblical 10 commandments are not followed by the heroes at all, despite their claims to the opposite.
• Death by Cameo - the trope is about work's creator cameo-ing in their work and dying, not some random celebrity showing up and dying.

Edited by youngstormlord on Dec 18th 2020 at 4:19:53 AM

Alright, let's get through the Ds.

Deleted the entry for Dark Messiah because the protagonist repeatedly disagrees with the characterization that he is a messianic figure or anything of the like.

Deleted the entry for Dark Shepherd because it implies that the purging of 'cultural marxists' from society is ultimately a good thing, and in the book it's definitely not ambiguous, and therefore not 'dark'.

Deleted the entry for Day of the Jackboot because there is no hostile takeover in Victoria, the author's intended message is that we're already there because of social justice and feminism and... eh. Wouldn't apply to protagonists either because the narrative presents them as in the right.

Deleted the entry for Death by Racism because it was about the villainous federation losing a battle - but not dying until much later - because, in the author's view, they underestimated the white people. (???)

Deleted the entry for Defiant Captive because the character in question doesn't act at all defiant, and is also not really a captive.

Deleted the entry for Defiant Stone Throw because it's also not an example of someone being defiant, it's just the protagonist talking down to some feminists after he's been ordered not to.

Deleted the entry for Democracy Is Bad because it's an opinion held by minor unnamed characters in the story, with the rest of the characters going the Democracy Is Flawed route.

Deleted the entry for Demonic Possession because... it did not refer to a demonic possession. It's just a madwoman acting mad and being compared to being possessed.

Deleted the entry for Destructive Savior because it refers to Atlanta being nuked, but all characters agree it had to happen and write it off as no big deal, and it's never brought up again.

Deleted the entry for Digging Yourself Deeper because it's about how Rumford gets fired at the start, but the narrative presents him as being totally reasonable and he only gets fired because of his crazy politically correct superiors.

Deleted the entry for Do Not Do This Cool Thing because the opponents of the protagonist are framed as evil, genocidal, incompetent and incredibly naive; nothing remotely positive.

Deleted the entry for Do Not Go Gentle because it's more in-line with mutually assured nuclear annihilation as opposed to going out with a fight.

Deleted the link on the Dramedy page because... um, no? It's not written to be even the slightest bit comedic, at least not intentionally.

Deleted the entry for Drink-Based Characterization because it was about how Rumford drinks bourbon in one single scene.

Deleted the entry for Drugs Are Bad because it's just about how the protagonist doesn't like drug dealers, doesn't go into any specifics on the actual drugs themselves. We can assume he's not a fan, but it's not a very good example.

Victoria is currently at 462 wicks.

Edited by Elmo3000 on Feb 2nd 2021 at 12:54:46 PM

Make sure you remove them from Literature.Victoria and Characters.Victoria too.

At the ROCEJ thread it surfaced that most of these wicks were added by a single user, Idumean Patriot, who is now suspended for political flame-warring on the work's discussion page.

Letter E checked.

As much as I loathe looking at even the related page, is this project still ongoing? I keep seeing this book shoehorned into the literature examples of many trope pages and I'm down with removing them as I see them if they aren't strong examples.

Found and removed In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves and Velvet Revolution

Misused example in Possible War removed.

Sorry I've been neglecting this, but work has been claiming a lot of my time.

Anyway, letter F has been checked.

I don’t think we need to write a “TV Tropes does not endorse” disclaimer. After all, the general rule is that TV Tropes doesn’t explicitly endorse any political ideology. Putting disclaimers on works has the potential to be a slippery slope, before long you’ll see people adding disclaimers to any work they find offensive.

Simply describing the extreme views held by the work is enough. That should be off-putting enough to anybody who isn’t already aligned with those views.

I think the page needs to be cleaned further. Their are tons of partial context examples I'm finding in it that need to be either removed or commented out.

&

Just to add to this, there is now a broader (and very active) Troping Works That Promote Bigotry thread - which has signposted a couple of us here.

This one can specifically focus on salvaging (or scrapping) Victoria, and elements such as disclaimers on problematic work pages can be tackled over there.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jan 13th 2023 at 2:55:33 PM

I'm another person who set out to clean up the entries, and, well, I've been slacking off. G-H have been checked now.

However, as people have also pointed out in the "works promoting bigotry" thread... I can cut obvious shoehorns, and rewrite gushy entries to make them neutral, but without having read the work, there's only so much I can do if an entry is neutrally written and fits the trope it's in. The book has definitely been entry-pimped, that much I can tell.

For those interested, there is a snarky read-through of the book (with plenty of quotes) here. I only read about half a dozen pages of the thread before my brain couldn't take any more stupidity, but I should probably continue reading it for fact-checking purposes.

(contd. from another thread)

Well, it sets a bad precident. "What's the harm in deleting any of our articles?" isn't exactly the kind of mindset that people running a wiki would have if they wanted to ... y'know ... have a wiki.

The fact that we're the top search result also shows we're the first thing anyone would see if they've heard of the work and googled it.

Now, if we cut our article, then who knows who'll fill that niche?
I just incognito-googled "victoria william s lind" to see, and below us it's a mix of 1) bookstore websites where you can buy it, 2) blogs that review books they consider bad featuring it (incl. Space Battles liveblogs), and 3) the odd paleoconservative website recommending it.

Given that what's underneath us in search results is a mix of selling, criticizing, or praising Victoria, I don't think us being the top search result is entirely the worst thing in the world.

One thing that I think people are forgetting is the amount of wicks this has. Even if we do decide to cut the page, we'll still have to do wick cleanup; it's not as easy as slashing the page. So we should at least try and do a misuse cleanup before we do anything else.

Not voting, but if it comes to it, removing 457 wicks sound rather easy compared to TRS cleanup.

Easy until you factor in the fact that none of us have read the book, and the fact that even if the page gets cut I don't think we'd be allowed to just erase it indiscriminately. We don't even do that with P5-cut works.

I meant if all needed to be removed. If some (and again would need a list which) should stay, then it's make difficult to even cut the page.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 25th 2023 at 1:01:05 PM