Yeah, I’ve seen that used that way more than once before. You can add it if you want.
In honor of Akira Toriyama
General
Why do some tropes have to be so rigid? I don't like it when the rules are too rigid and you have to fulfill too many criteria.
Edited by kkj12345
A Fish
Should we add “What Do You Mean, It’s Wasn't Made On Drugs” here or nah?
Family-Unfriendly Aesop has been renamed to Hard Truth Aesop. Do I or anyone else have permission to update the example?
Should What If? get an entry here? I noticed it's often used to refer to Alternate History, probably because outside of Tvtropes, What If Scenario is a synonym of Alternate History.
Edited by Psychopompos007 Hide / Show Replies
Fighter, Mage, Thief could be included on this. I made the Three Approach System to further combat the Trope Decay. It seems that some people tend to think thief as the "third option" when the other two options are a Magically Inept Fighter and a Squishy Wizard, not realising the "Thief" deals with obstacles "indirectly" through things like stealth, range or speed.
Some people say I'm lazy. It's hard to disagree. Hide / Show Replies
[title currently repossessed by Bank of Carolina until remaining debt of {3961.28 TropeBucks} is repaid in full plus interest}
Could we add some entries about how every mention of bears and sharks gets potholed to Bears Are Bad News and Threatening Shark, respectively, no matter how inappropriate those tropes are?
Edited by One-Three-Seven I don't have much time, the mob war between the Bisexual Mafia and the Lesbian Yakuza is escalating, the code to get into the Don's off- Hide / Show Replies
Please ask Locked Pages: Lock, UnLock and Edit requests.
Edited by IukaSylvie
I've a feeling that this page is on its way to become Self-Demonstrating Article...
It change from "These tropes are often misused because of its name or description" to include "People use these wrong, just because.".
Edited by Kuruni
- Painful Rhyme is when a song or poem tries to rhyme two words that don't rhyme together (such as "sneak" and "bake") and fails horribly. Many people use it to identify forced rhymes, whether or not they are words that don't actually rhyme.
With your permission, I am going to quote the trope's description.
«It's when you hear a rhyme in a song, or read it in a poem, and you're compelled to cringe at how painfully it's forced in. [...] Bonus points if it doesn't even quite rhyme, or if they're just repeating rather than rhyming.»
Starform
What is Adaptation Distillation? This page contains two different definitions of it. Definition one: "it's about works which manage to capture the essence of a Long Runner in a brief adaptation without resulting in Continuity Lockout." Definition two: " Distilling everything that makes a character or work awesome in an adaptation."
The five best Superman writers are Dan Jurgens, Jeph Loeb, Geoff Johns, Kurt Busiek, and Peter J. Tomasi.
The MLP section is probably the biggest source of this. People like to shoehorn tropes into shows they like and all that.
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Same with Avatar: The Last Airbender. I love this show, but people often shoehorn it at tropes where it doesn't really qualify. Also, it's a prime example why Deadpan Snarker is on this page.
Edited by Dghcrh I'm mainly a fan of underrated media.
I feel like we've hit this point with Ambiguous Disorder. While I don't doubt that some of its entries are survivors from its term as "Ambiguously Autistic", I also feel like people have ignored the trope's new definition of "there's something unmistakably but unclassifyably wrong with a character, but it's not meant to be a specific real disorder and any similarity is likely coincidental." and turned it into an exercise of "Fictional Character X displays a couple of attributes of a real disorder or malady and therefore might actually have that." And in practice those real disorders tend to be a pretty narrow band of what you might call the common internet ID'd disorders: social anxiety, some manner of asperger's or autism, depression, bipolar disorder, or some type of sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies.
This is especially noticeable when a popular show ends up with like 2/3rds of its cast listed under its entry. Especially comedic shows, which tend to exaggerate the personalities and dominant characteristics of all their characters for maximum potential zaniness without any actual implication of mental issues attached to it. The point of the trope is that the character's behaviour should seem particularly unusual and abnormal. But if it's a cast full of crazy, then one particular nutjob's foibles shouldn't really stand out.
Edited by The_Nemesis Hide / Show Replies
I second adding this. It's an incredibly common form of misuse.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
I think Fantasy Kitchen Sink should be added.
The reason? The trope is defined as a large amount of completely incompatible Fantasy elements being haphazardly thrown into a work despite some being unable to exist together.
However, a large chunk of the examples seem to define it as "anything involving any remotely different Fantasy elements existing in the same universe" regardless of whether or not they interact with each other or if they are given plausible reasons to co-exist, which really conflicts with the trope description.
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One of the examples:
"Adventure Time is this, in spades- ninjas, zombies, cyborgs, talking candy and animals, aliens, a lich, a legendary hero (who fought a bear, and the aforementioned lich, among other things), knights, psychic worms, a post-apocalyptic setting, alternate timelines and dimensions, the MULTIVERSE, super-chill God beings, different kingdoms each with their own rules, a talking video-game system, unicorn/rainbow hybrid 'rainicorns', princesses out the wazoo, and at least one dragon. And so on, et cetera."
This appears to contradict the sentence "There's no overlap between the different genre creatures." in the main page.
Anyone object to me putting in Humans Are Bastards? People seem to think Humans Are Bastards is just a trope to bitch about humans doing horrible things, when the actual trope is about how humans do horrible things, and the other species don't.
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What an Idiot, Idiot Ball, Too Dumb to Live, and Lethally Stupid are all under the W folder. Why? Is there a non-arbitray reason to start with What an Idiot?
For this, I think examples where tropes get mixed up with other tropes should get it's own folder, also since it seems a distinct issue from tropes being merely misinterpreted.
I'd say "Mixed-Up Tropes" for the folder name, any other ideas?
May I put Istanbul (Not Constantinople) here? Reason is: this trope is for Alternate History versions of locations' names, whereas renaming of places should go to Please Select New City Name. I got it just now, after the Real Life section of the former was removed.
Edited by AgentKyles
Should tropes that have undergone Trope Decay (Awesome Music, Awesome Moments, Funny Moments, etc.) or deletion (Do Not Want) be listed here? This is about misuse, not definition drift, right?
I'm not crazy, I just don't give a darn! Hide / Show Replies
Fridge Brilliance: Why did these tropes undergo Trope Decay in the first place?
I would not say so.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Yes, but be careful.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Can A God Am I be added to this list? The trope itself refers to someone having delusions of godhood, yet there are many examples of people thinking that divine ascension is the same as this trope.
In the entry for Big Bad, it says that villains of a particular arc go to Arc Villain. Yet on the page for Big Bad, it says "At other times, if a new enemy shows up to replace the previous Big Bad, then they are the Big Bads of their individual storylines," meaning that an Arc Villain is a Big Bad. Am I missing something? EDIT: Just to be clear, the pothole is in the original quote.
Edited by 184.58.176.173
A few of these examples need to be more clear. Unfortunate Implications, Adaptation Distillation and Wasted a Good Plot don't explain what the trope should be about, and Fantastic Racism is a bit too vague. It says it's about racism between fictional groups, and then says that it's become about racism between any fictional group. I think I understand why it was added, but the problem isn't conveyed well.
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I think the Fantastic Racism one is pretty silly. Even if a usage of it isn't a very metaphor for a very specific kind of racism, it's still a statement on racism itself.
I noticed that seemingly everything gets potholed and/or turned into Unfortunate Implications these days: a Black Dude Dies First? Racist! Black dude doesn't die? Positive Discrimination! Action Girl dies? Vasquez Always Dies! The girly-girl dies? She was Stuffed into the Fridge and is a Disposable Woman! They both die? It's No Woman's Land! The bad guy is Ambiguously Gay? Depraved Homosexual! And it seems ridiculous as a lot of listed examples just seem to be the result of people reading into something way more than they should. I think it should be put here too.
Edited by Stoogebie
"The key trait of a MacGuffin is that it can be anything and whatever qualities it has are irrelevant to the story. Lots of people ignore that and focus on the fact that it drives the story, or even add items people fight over, when fighting over something has nothing to do with the definition."
...what? This definition seems to imply that the trope means "a thing whose qualities are irrelevant" more than it means "an object which drives the plot". They're both important aspects of the definition, but the second is far more central. By this definition, the little kangaroo Butch's watch was hanging on is just as much a Macguffin as the watch itself.
Edited by johnnye Hide / Show Replies
Would anyone object to me Removing Curb-Stomp Battle from the examples? The post says that it's supposed to be about two supposed individuals fighting and one losing quickly. The description clearly states that it's a breif fight scene where one sides completely dominates the other in short order, usually to establish bad assery.
I think that Our Elves Are Better deserves a place here. I see it getting interpreted in different ways. One is Focusing entirely on the "better" part, using it for Superior Species. Another is that the title is literally about elves being portrayed as superior (or at least being smug toward everyone else), leading some tropers to think there is a more neutral Our Elves Are Different article out there somewhere (its own Playing With section describes the basic trope as "A race of different elves are superior to most inferior races."). All of this ignores that the trope should simply be about the different kinds of elves in fiction.
I see 'squick' potholed for anything the troper doesn't like (gasp, someone under 18 is thought of as attractive! etc). Is that what it's meant for?
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Squick refers to anything that produces a reaction of disgust, horror, revulsion, awkwardness, ect. It's ridiculously subjective, so I'd guess that depends on where you saw it. If it's in the main page examples, maybe it's not the greatest idea to have it there.
Then again, things that can be seen as subjective can effect what counts as Squick; what might just be "someone under 18 is thought of as attractive!" to you could be "some fans have PSL for a 14-year-old kid! (Which means Rule 34 applies as well)", so where one person may not see anything wrong, someone else either has a shorter threshold for certain things or read into the subtext too much.
What about Refuge in Audacity and Refuge in Vulgarity? I used them here
by mistake, surely someone should clarify them?
The Crowning Moment Of Awesome being an example for having to many Crowning Moments for a single work of fiction can be debated, because everyone has a different opinion on what the exact Crowning Moment Of Awesome was in their favorite work of fiction.
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And as it says, very clearly, most people don't even TRY to find a single moment. This is very obvious on most pages.
Anyone else getting the impression that All Love Is Unrequited is being frequently misused as "at least one instance of love is unrequited"?
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing. Hide / Show Replies