Needs Help: Bury Your Art

Note: This thread was proposed by The Mayor of Simpleton.

Courtesy link to the original TLP draft.

The problem: Bury Your Art is a very new Trivia item, having been created in 2022 as a result of the Old Shame TRS. The item is specifically about when a creator attempts to suppress something they made due to Creator Backlash. Per the description:

The TLP draft's Laconic, however, implies both a creator and a company can count—something not backed up by the description:

Despite this, this Trivia item, most likely due to its vague name, is attracting misuse for any art that a creator tried to bury, including art buried for reasons other than Creator Backlash, art buried by a corporation or creator's estate, and so on. As early as last year, I noticed misuse building up, and I wanted to do a wick check, but decided to wait a year to see if the misuse got worse.

I started a Trope Talk thread about the subject, and was being informed that a corporation burying the art may not count.

Per Morgan Wick:

Per Noaqiyeum:

A little under a year later, I eventually did the check.

Wick check: Link here, but here's the quick results:

• 19/50 wicks were correctly used (with the creator burying art due to Creator Backlash), or 38%
• 9/50 wicks concerned a creator burying art for reasons other than Creator Backlash, or 18%
• 6/50 wicks didn't say why a creator buried the art, or 12%,
• 9/50 wicks were of a corporation or a creator's estate burying the art, or 18%,
• 1/50 wicks were of other use, or 2%,
• 5/50 wicks were zero-context examples or unclear, or 10%, and
• 1/50 wicks were unclassifialble, or 2%

Totaling correct and incorrect use together, that's

• 19/50 wicks correct, or 38%, and
• 30/50 wicks incorrect, or 60%

Analysis: There was a lot of correct use, which is good—that rules out a cut or disambiguation. However, 30/50 wicks being incorrect is still really bad. I noticed there were two big categories of misuse. The first were creators burying art for reasons other than Creator Backlash (with reasons including as a protest against a bigoted creator, backlash from the audience rather than the creator, controversy, and other reasons). The second were corporations or creator's estates burying the art, rather than the creator. There is a not insignificant chance some of this misuse was due to sloppy Old Shame wick cleanup, but I know for a fact some of the misuse dates back to the TLP draft, with some misused examples appearing in the comments of the draft.

Possible solutions: I've got two.

• One possible solution would be to expand the definition to explicitly include corporations burying art, along with creators burying art for non-backlash reasons. I am in favor of this solution, although to what we would expand it to would require discussion.
• If not that, we could rename this trope to make it clearer that it's about the art being buried due to backlash. Backlash Induced Creator Suppression (based on the original name in TLP), maybe?

What does everyone else think? Any other ideas or suggestions?

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 8th 2024 at 10:42:27 AM

Not paging the thread creator due to his absence. Anyway, I'll take a closer look at this later before voting.

Edit: Accidentally only copied about half of the OP when I originally made the thread. That's been fixed, so the whole OP should be there now.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 8th 2024 at 10:44:19 AM

I'm in favor of expanding the definition.

There needs to be more kinds of art to be buried.

Thus, expand.

I'm fine with either but I'm leaning on expanding.

Expand to creators burying for different reasons but not sure about including companies.

Expand.

to Expand

Easy expand.

• Allow corporations and other interested parties on behalf of a creator, and remove Creator Backlash as a requirement

Expand

I am in favor of expanding to creators burying their own art for any reason, but not people other than creators (companies, heirs, etc.) doing it.

Agreed.

I've slept since my last post, and expanding to include companies while also allowing examples of works being buried for reasons other than backlash sounds fine.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 9th 2024 at 1:18:15 PM

Expand.

Expand.

I'm down for expanding.

Expand

I'm in favor of expanding, and I also feel that doing so could require a rename, as the "your" in Bury Your Art might no longer be accurate depending on how much we expand it.

Nah, I think the current name is fine.

I would keep two limits on it: that it must be deliberate (so not a website going down from negligence) and it must be "their" art, so a company that owns the right counts, but not censorship by the government or pressure from an outside group. Otherwise I'm fine with expanding.

I agree, plus keeping the name the same would mean less work, since expanding without renaming would mean wick cleanup wouldn't be necessary (since a much larger amount of examples would be correct under the new definition), while renaming would require every wick to be moved to the new name.

in that definition is think pressure from outside would be fine, as long as the decision to bury it was made by the owner.

Expand but keep the current name.

Consensus seems overwhelmingly in favor of expand, yeah? Let's do that.