RE: Write a Kid-Friendly Series: yeah, that massive list of franchises can just be pulled and burned.
I still haven't revieved much feedback on what to do with the first batch of "under construction" pages
. I don't want to unilaterally cutlist or make massive edits to pages.
SoYouWantTo.Write An Adventure Story has been moved to Sandbox.Write An Adventure Story, with a to-do list at the top. I'm not sure if I should do the same with SoYouWantTo.Write An Alternate Continuity, since it technically seems to fulfil its purpose despite being so bare-bones. Next five "under construction" pages to look at:
- SoYouWantTo.Write A Cosmic Horror Story: At a glance, it seems alright to un-mark. Someone might want to take a closer look.
- SoYouWantTo.Write A Creepypasta: Also seems no longer Under Construction, but may warrant a closer look.
- SoYouWantTo.Write A Gothic Story: The paragraphs here are way too long, and could honestly use a trim.
- SoYouWantTo.Write A Horror Comedy: Another one that looks OK on the surface.
- SoYouWantTo.Write A Horror Story: Seems alright, but is surprisingly short, considering the lengths of the Horror subgenre pages.
RJ Savoy
I wonder if instead of "Greats" and "Epic fails", it would be more helpful and less flame-baiting to list works that are widely agreed to have done remarkably well or badly on particular criteria, without judgement on their quality as a whole.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
punch things and hearts come out!!
I'm opposed to cutting the Greats/Epic Fails sections outright, but I agree that they need quite a bit of work. The pages in this namespace are directed at someone trying to write in a given genre; there's definitely value for that audience in a list of successful/unsuccessful works from that genre, as long as the examples explain what, specifically, those works did right or wrong that makes them worthy of study. Examples that can't do that should be cut or rewritten.
Edited by Mahoxy on Jul 31st 2022 at 10:40:09 AM
clearly things are going well.
i agree, i think there's merit in studying exactly why a work failed, and those sections can be useful if we keep them free of complaining, veiled or open. maybe include a requirement to link to some kind of analysis, post-mortem, breakdown, whatever you want to call it, for the work.
I also agree that the Fails/Greats can be kept, but only if their failures are specific to the genre/character type/whatever.
Another thing that's been brought up but not resolved is the "suggested pages" list (a list of pages that haven't been made, making up more than half the page). Me and Wick have agreed that it should go, but we'd need more people to agree for consensus.
TRS Wick Cleaning
I'm going to hold fast to the idea that the greats and epic fails are unsalvagable. Yeah, in a perfect world we could look impartially on the triumphs and flaws of works but we're only human and no matter how much clean up we do the sections will once again be reduced to Fandom Rivalry and Complaining About Shows You Dont Like.
My biggest concerns with these sections is that since day one they've been entirely composed of gushing about the handful of works tropers stereotypically love (Avatar the Last Airbender, My Little Pony, or Harry Potter, for instance) and piling hate on works tropers stereotypically hate (Michael Bay Transformers, Twilight, and M Night Shyamalan's body of work, although most of these were popular enough that they clearly did something right). It always felt like tropers were trying to enforce something of a canon with the beloved and loathed works of TV Tropes, and those who disagreed were deserving of scorn. It's very elitist and single minded and I feel like we shouldn't be encouraging this mindset anymore.
There's stuff like Fanfic Recs, the seldom used review system, and various threads that are better for recommending works. I don't think this is the place.
Mastermind Rational
In my defense, I didn't know we had a maximum paragraph length restriction when I had researched and written most of the Write a Gothic Story. :-)
Edited by Koveras on Aug 2nd 2022 at 4:57:31 PM
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Don't forget that tropers are more likely to be male white or East Asian American liberals born between 1980 and 2000 (though there are other troper demographics, but not as predominant).
Edited by Nen_desharu on Aug 2nd 2022 at 11:08:40 AM
Kirby is awesome.
There's a lot of fiction that critics consider a "perfect example" of a genre. For instance, Double Indemnity is considered a classic Film Noir and is usually recommended as a good starting point for people interested in the genre. What if we focused on general critical consensus instead of just what tropers think?
It's not really a solid restriction, tbh. It's just that they could stand to be a lot shorter. I trimmed down the Horror VS Terror paragraph to this:
- Horror vs. Terror: A distinction first described by Ann Radcliffe in On the Supernatural in Poetry, terror is the dread and suspense you feel before a horrifying experiencenote (e.g. seeing a Trail of Blood), while horror is the feeling of revulsion and abjection you get after itnote (e.g. actually discovering a decaying corpse). Terror is associated more with the feminine Gothic, whose heroines must repeatedly face their own fears, while horror is more of a masculine Gothic thing, whose protagonists are traumatized by their confrontation with mortality, irrationality, and corruption. A third option, "revulsion" — a visceral gag-reflex, was coined by Steven King, which he sees as the lowest form of scariness that relies on cheap gore instead of psychological nuance.
It's not the biggest cut (about a third is removed), but it's still smaller. I have plenty of experience with overwriting and adding unneccessary detail, so I don't exactly blame you for this, but don't be afraid to cut details or redundant comparisons out.
Edited by GoldenCityBird on Aug 2nd 2022 at 4:37:50 PM
TRS Wick Cleaning
Loserswithwifi
Maybe Greats and Epic Fails could be renamed What To Do and What Not To Do or something like that, to emphasize that they're there as helpful examples for the reader and not just Things AverageTroper1999 Likes/Does Not Like.
While I'm here; less than half of Write a Spoof Movie's sections have anything written in them, and what is there is very brief. There's only one Epic Fail and none of the Greats have any explanation of why they're great.
Mastermind Rational
That kind of trimming is fine, but I implore you not to neglect proper punctuation (quotes around the title of Radcliffe's essay) and correct name spelling (Stephen King, not Steven) when you do it. :-)
I did end up trying my best to rectify the Write a Creepypasta page, but its still missing a few sections that simply don't seem to apply to the genre, although I'm open to being proven wrong. There won't often be, for example, consistent props between stories- its a very wide genre, unlike a specific type of horror like Cosmic.
I'm for chopping the Greats and Fails- if anything, just include the Trope Codifier.
I hate spoilers
I was just at SoYouWantTo.Write The Next Yu Gi Oh, and I noticed that some of the series are labelled as Epic Fails. Doesn't that seem kind of harsh, considering that some of them have plenty of fans? Specifically, Arc-V, VRAINS, and 5D's (after the Dark Signers arc). The latter in particular is considered to have gotten its act together after Team Catastrophe was defeated. There's also the matter of Common Knowledge, where the changes to the script WEREN'T because of cults.
Everyone look at my sandbox
The Epic Fails and Greats sections of pages have been discussed here before. Consensus seems to be that they're pointless bashing/gushing.
Another note about the page: it seems less like "How to write a story like Yu-Gi-Oh!", and more like "How to write a Yu-Gi-Oh! installment". I'm not sure which way these "write the next X" pages are meant to go towards, but I'm fairly certain it's meant to be the former, especially with the YGO page's starting paragraph. Something will need rewriting on that page either way.
TRS Wick Cleaning
For the 'write the next' pages, I'd much prefer if they were treated like 'what made these work' rather than 'how to be a copycat'. I don't know why I'd want to write the 'next' anything.
Nice Housepets avatar by the way.
Edited by WinningPony on Oct 3rd 2022 at 5:55:13 AM
I was redirected here from the complaining cleanup thread. I found this section in SoYouWantTo.Write A First Person Shooter, and I think it should be removed for being mostly bashing. What do you think?
Study the ones people mock or complain about in order to see what not to do. And these include...
- Aliens: Colonial Marines had bugs, bad A.I., unbalanced gameplay and low-quality graphics; overall a disappointment to the long-running Film/Aliens video game franchise. Thankfully, Alien: Isolation made up for that, although it was developed by a different studio and was more of a survival horror game.
- Call of Juarez: The Cartel has two lessons to teach. First, if you're going to write a story about current events, do plenty of research, carefully consider what messages you're sending, intentionally or not, and treat the topic with the respect it deserves. This is important in the FPS genre because it often involves gunning down loads of Faceless Goons without a second thought, which can easily raise some Unfortunate Implications if said goons are based on real groups of people. Second, don't skimp on teammate AI. It's fine to optimize for multiplayer, but any and all AI helpers should be up to the task. Nobody wants to end up with an Escort Mission due to poor programming.
- Cyber-Cop: One of the shittiest games ever made. Navigating and targeting enemies are nearly impossible, enemies can sneak up to the character and hurt him without alerting the player and many other horrendous design choices. Pure shit poured into a Genesis cartridge.
- Cyborgs: Invented mouselook but had terrible controls that essentially, required four hands. Somewhat entertaining but extremely difficult to play. One of Origin's few mistakes before E.A's takeover. Play the Crusader series instead. Though a third person shooter, it succeeded where this game failed.
- Daikatana: The first name in "bad FPS," and, like Trespasser, tried to bite off more than it could chew. In this case, the touted selling points—an RPG-like advancement system, sidekicks, and enormous variety of weapons and enemies—all worked against it, with useless character stats, sidekicks that got you killed, and enormously redundant weapons that hurt you more than the enemies, along with a host of bugs (literal and metaphorical), stupid enemy design, and a teeth-gratingly dumb storyline. A harrowing study in everything going wrong that could go wrong.
- Ethnic Cleansing is an excellent argument against propaganda games in general. Content aside, it is one of the laziest and most incompetent things ever made. Whether the player agrees with the message or disagrees and likes how pathetic it makes its viewpoint look, the only way this game can be enjoyed is through Confirmation Bias.
- Hour of Victory: Released when the popularity of WWII-era shooters was beginning to wane, this game pretty drove that genre of shooter into the ground. The game was hobbled by dysfunctional AI, mediocre graphics, and a bare-bones multiplayer.
- Jurassic Park: Trespasser: A stern warning against folk who would innovate beyond the limits of current technology. One of the first, if not the first, FPS to make extensive use of semi-realistic physics, the game was buggy to hell and back, crashing for enormously arbitrary reasons. The game's innovations conflicted with each other in a violent way, resulting in most of the selling points being crippled, removed, or dumbed down enormously to get a semblance of playability.
- Legendary: The Box takes an interesting premise and completely wastes it. The player battles mythical beasts, but these enemies are distinguished by gimmicks that only serve to annoy the player rather than keep them on their feet. Non-interactive set-pieces substitute for exciting gameplay, and these get old fast. The player can collect and use magic from slain monsters, but it is only used in healing and some scenario objectives, nothing else. Much of this stems from the developers refusing to listen to the testers, so be sure to take QA's feedback to heart. You worked hard on the project so far, yes, but the testers are making sure that effort doesn't go to waste. You're all on the same team here.
- Star Wars Battlefront II (2017): If there's one big lesson to be learned from 2017, it's that excessive microtransactions and loot boxes will piss off the Internet to the point where EA lost billions of dollars and governments began enacting laws regulating loot boxes. Case in point, this game.
- Hunt Down the Freeman is one of the most profound examples of how not to make a Half-Life 2 mod, let alone any FPS game for that matter. While there is a great deal of controversy surrounding stolen assets and YouTube celebrities as voice actors, the game itself almost completely lacks direction with its gameplay mechanics and level design, so much that players often look up walkthroughs or noclip through certain areas out of frustration. Adding onto this is gracious amounts of enemies faced at once, atrociously long Hold the Line sequences and lengthy Hold The Line sequences with massive groups of enemies, hammering in the lesson that a game should have its difficulty restrained enough for the player to not be overwhelmed and/or exhausted by it.
Personally, I think that section should be cut. It adds no workable advice ("bugs are bad" should be a no-brainer), and most entries just seem to exist to bash the game in question.
Seriously, if a developer needs to be told not to emulate Ethnic Cleansing, I'd say they have bigger problems than just incompetence...
Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash on Oct 17th 2022 at 2:53:01 AM
.....
Hmm... I think not all of them are actually mindless bashing. Here, let me give a rundown:
- Aliens: Colonial Marines: This one can go because it only lists how disappointed they are compared to the predecessor and successor.
- Call of Juarez: This is actually a legit constructive criticism and what not to do. I think it can stay.
- Cyber-Cop: Blatant bashing and doesn't do constructive criticism. Remove.
- Cyborgs: Bashing and advertising on 'which one is better'. Has some legit criticism like the first part: "Invented mouselook but had terrible controls that essentially, required four hands." The rest isn't at all defining 'why this is an epic fail'. If you can rewrite, do it. Otherwise, remove it.
- Daikatana: This is actually one of the most infamous examples of what not to do in an FPS game, something that took down John Romero's name with it. Just tone down the negativity and kindly explain why this game utterly failed. I think this can stay, but it will require a heavy rewrite.
- Ethnic Cleansing: This can be modified for good. Currently, it's about 75% showcasing negativity of its message. If you can improve on why gameplay-wise it fails rather than concentrating on the 'message delivery', do it. Otherwise remove. For God's sake, this is "So You Want To Write A First Person Shooter", not "So You Want To Avoid Sending Controversial Messages"!
- Hour of Victory: This seems to be pure bashing, not enough constructive criticism. Remove it.
- Jurassic Park: Tresspassers: Hmm, this has potential. Especially about how semi-realistic physics not used potentially. It can stay, but probably gonna need some modification to make it smoother.
- Legendary: The Box: Has some actual criticism about the teamwork within the development team. Probably rewrite to focus more on the last parts about developers not communicating well with the QA.
- Star Wars: Battlefront II: ... Feels like just a gratuitous platform to bash EA because... hey, it's EA, it's every netizens' favorite punching bag! ... Remove it. (It also fixed itself in the latter date. If you insist on making it stay, just focus on how the microtransaction and lootboxes ruin the game, rather than "ARRR MICROTRANSACTION/LOOTBOX BAD! ARRGH EA BAAADD!!". We're looking for the how.)
- Hunt Down the Freeman: The advices seem to be a bit general and applicable to every other mods out there that aren't necessarily FPS genre. I think this can go.
That's what I think, though. What do you think?
Edited by ChrisX on Oct 17th 2022 at 8:40:34 PM
i think that's an excellent analysis, fantastic work. ![[awesome]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/minis/award_star_gold_3.png "[awesome]"){kind=small}
I've removed the ones you mentioned, plus Cyborgs as it apparently doesn't exist. I also tried to tone down the complaining in the remaining entries.
Avatar by Butterscotch Arts. Used under license.
.....
Gave the Daikatana section some extra contents, and we're good.
I think the name "The Epic Fails" is a bit much, but otherwise we're probably done.
Avatar by Butterscotch Arts. Used under license.
I find it odd that SoYouWantTo.Write A Kid Friendly Series doesn't include any video game series, despite a good number of family-friendly video game series containing memorable plots.
Kirby is awesome.