"In distress", my ass.
In general: Example Indentation, spoiler adjustments to bring spoilers more in line with Handling Spoilers, some context, and namespacing. Some specifics:
- Potholing the trope name to read as another name is prohibited (see Sinkhole).
- Battle Couple: Gretchen and Jeff don't actually fight together, even at the end of The Saxon Uprising when Stearns' Third Division breaks the siege.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Gretchen wasn't really a prostitute, as she wasn't being paid for sex but was forced into it by Ludwig.
- Heroic Sacrifice: The speedboat crew wasn't sacrificing themselves for anything, they just got unlucky.
"In distress", my ass.
Example Indentation, spelling, reducing some nearly Zero Context Examples, and assorted tweaks, in addition to the following changes:
- Because You Were Nice to Me: On second thought, Buckley's using Nice to the Waiter, where he's already listed.
- Boom Town: The third point wasn't really a seperate issue, given it was talking about the same town as the first, and as Word Cruft the "somewhat subverted" didn't help.
- Finns With Fearsome Forests is a Useful Notes page, and shouldn't be used as a trope.
- Putting on the Reich (pothole text aside) is about uniforms as a shorthand for "evil group", not "uniforms resemble those of an evil group".
PaperMaster
- Badass Spaniard: Ruy Sanchez De Casador y Ortiz.
Badass Spaniard has been renamed to Dashing Hispanic. The trope requires some necessary characteristics, like being a rogue Anti-Hero of wit and charm, kind of like Zorro. There is not enough context to tell if it fits here.
"If you aren't him, then you apparently got your brain from the same discount retailer, so..." - Fighteer
"In distress", my ass.
Example Indentation fixes throughout, plus some other stuff.
MacGuffin: Time Spike is irrelevant to this series. Both use the shards to change events, but nothing that happens in one series affects the other.
Mighty Whitey is about differences in race, not just origin. As most Europeans of the 17th century were white, MW doesn't apply there.
Misplaced Nationalism is about nationalism on the internet, not just nationalism in general. Not quite Patriotic Fervor, either, even though PF's page says that MN is the internet equivalent.
Monumental Damage: de-natterfied. Julie's opinions are irrelevant to the trope.
Moral Myopia: Misuse of the trope.
Reasonable Authority Figure: Natter removed, the other stuff wasn't relevant to the trope.
Shown Their Work: I know I was responsible for the text as it was at deletion, but re-reading it I was struck by a Take That! vibe, which isn't cool.
Token Minority: Kinda natterish, and "this troper" isn't acceptable on TVT.
Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Pulled the following:
- Arbitrary Skepticism: The writer goes out of his way to assure us that downtimers aren't really superstitious enough to believe the Ring of Fire to be witchcraft. Under the circumstances though, why the heck not?
- The downtimers believe this simply because they conclude that thinking the devil had that power would be theologically troublesome and because the Grantsvillers are obviously not witches but simply the future counterpart to Dutch Burghers. They conclude, mostly, that God sent them back, as to their way of thinking, only He could have such power.
...on the grounds that (1) it's a violation of Repair Dont Respond, and (2) considering the Ring of Fire to be a miracle instead of witchcraft doesn't really constitute skepticism.
"In distress", my ass.
Removed this because DNDTR is not supposed to be used as a trope. I don't know if there are tropes for the individual items, but none come to mind offhand. If there are applicable tropes, feel free to add them back in where appropriate.
- Did Not Do The Research: From the sheer amount of name-dropping in the first chapter featuring Gustav Adolf, it is clear that a fair amount of research has been done, but that doesn't stop mistakes from being made:
- Flint has admitted that he got the Thuringian landscape wrong in the original novel.
- The naming of Historical Domain Characters is also a bit dodgy sometimes. Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld is referred to as "von Spee," which is a common rendering of the name but historically inaccurate. Then there's Pappenheim, who is referred to as "von Pappenheim" instead of "zu Pappenheim," which denote very different things in the nomenclature of Germanic nobility.
- A relatively minor (and forgivable one), but Flint's attempts to phonetically render a Scottish accent can get a bit...ropey.
- The only dangerously venomous spiders in Europe are found to the south — on the Iberian peninsula or in the Mediterranean region.
- The translation or the usage of alien languages is also spotty, for example "thank god" has three words in german "Gott sei Dank."
"In distress", my ass.
Is it just me, or are the sub-examples for Politically Correct History kind of needlessly extensive and nattery?
For quick reference:
- Politically Correct History: subverted to hell and back.
- It varies. Several times, the books make the point that Europe in the seventeenth century was less strait-laced than Americans might guess, although still far from egalitarian. Down-timers definitely aren't happy with women wearing pants or serving in the army, but those are dwarfed by the appeal (or threat, as the case may be) of American technology. It definitely helps that Julie Mackay is stated to have nearly Olympic-level skill with a rifle.
- Flint and other authors make sure to point up on several occasions that "down-timers" are much more straightforward about sexual matters, and somewhat bawdier in their language, than "up-timer" Americans raised on the Puritan stereotype might expect. However, "down-timers" get all huffy when "up-timers" take the name of the Lord in vain (i.e., let out a good loud "Goddamn!" and such).
- Case in point: betrothed couples. Flint and other series authors point out, repeatedly, that formally betrothed couples are considered to be, for all practical intents and purposes, married (though the official ceremony still hasn't taken place); when coupled with the fact that 17th-century Germans often married relatively late in life, the general attitude among downtimers is that allowing betrothed couples to discreetly enjoy sexual relations is nothing less than the humane thing to do. ("Discreetly" is the operative word because, in the narrow technical sense, it's still what would be termed "fornication" even if nobody would get huffy about it under those circumstances.) Thus, for example, in 1634: The Baltic War, the English "down-timer" Victoria Short, betrothed to uptimer Darryl McCarthy, gets quite upset because he hasn't "come through the window" to share her bed, and feels no hesitation about saying so to her male relatives. Her male relatives reassure her that it's not out of disinterest but rather a cultural difference regarding sex before marriage, though they know that the real reason is because he's in on a plot to break out of the Tower and doesn't want to risk leaving his betrothed behind, alone and pregnant.
- One that is not mentioned but can come as a little Fridge Horror or kinda disgusting is that woman, especially camp followers, would neither have the utensils to depilate themselves or maintain proper hygiene (a story in the Grantville Tazette is about the introduction of the razor shave and toilet paper being considered a miracle by Wallenstein) nor had the tradition to use it, meaning that many of the female protagonist and side characters are quite, well, hairy in places not considered aesthetically pleasing from general 1999 standards. Yet this is never stated or shown in the stories, which could mean it was handwaved as Artistic License or else as evidence that het guys' standards of female attractiveness can be influenced by general lust.
Never Trust
(edit) Whoops, misremembered the entry. Still, like I said in the edit reason on the main page, nothing says humans are unique in that regard.
As for where it's mentioned, it's the last part of the prologue to 1632.
Edited by Nohbody All your safe space are belong to Trump
Cromwell
Where exactly do you get the "an unpleasant person even for his time" consensus from? Mike Duncan for one has a far more nuanced view of him. And what happened in Ireland is not exactly what Irish Americans seem to be telling their children to scare them straight. Cromwell was not innocent, but he did not personally kill every Irishman.