Ask The Tropers

Having looked over the page, I’m going to speak up in agreement here; in particular, referring to a real life murder-suicide as a “twist” and spoiler-tagging the heck out of it makes it difficult to initially tell the page is about a documentary at all.

I haven’t seen the work in question, so I don’t know how much help I’d be in a potential cleanup, but I agree that one is needed.

I think there IS a thread where we handle treating Real Life like this, I just couldnt remember it. And we may not need to do any clean up, this is so blatantly troping real life the page may just be deleted entirely.

Agreed. Per Real Life Troping:

• Examples for Non-Fiction works (especially Biography, Documentary, or Talk Show) must describe either a staged performance (e.g. a documentary Crime Reconstruction), the setting, artistic elements, or the commentary on other works. If a work has none of those, it does not belong on the wiki. Examples are written in the context of the work, not as if these are undisputed historical facts.

I agree; the whole page treats it like a mockumentary.

I would even use "documentary" loosely in describing the film, as the origins of it as described on the page make it feel much more like a home video (albeit one released publicly) than something with a noteable creative direction. I would not object to seeing it removed.

I'd be fine cutting the whole work. While it is a notable documentary, the page is littered with real-life troping. It's a large problem with troping documentaries, but especially with this page.

First things first would be to just remove the spoiler warning for a movie showing real-life murders.

The YMMV page is particularly tasteless about it too (especially the Nightmare Fuel entry that talks about the killer with lines like "the scariest part? there are real people like that in the world" about a real person in a documentary.) I'd cut that if nothing else.

Nightmare Fuel is NRLEP, so I'd cut it

I think there is some narrative merit to keeping the page — the documentary is explicitly framed as a story made of a child, for that child to explain to him when he's old enough to understand what happened to his parents, only for it to have gone off the rails due to real-world events as it was being made, with it being purposefully framed as a twist that Zachary will never live to see it (the narrator speaks entirely in second-person as a message to Zachary; there's never an implication that he was already dead until it gets to that point in the timeline).

That being said, this absolutely needs a cleanup, because yipes, it is weirdly shameless about treating these not as actual people.

Pretty overdue, but I finally got to doing some cleanup to Dear Zachary, removing some of the more targeted editorializing about people in the documentary, and removing spoiler tags on account of this being about real events.