Discussion YMMV / TeenWolf

Third question (well more of a point): I'm currently looking into the Complete Monster issue, since the current form is not really what the trope is supposed to convey.

I'm just pointing out again that the YMMV pages aren't meant to be a battleground for Ship-to-Ship Combat. I couldn't care less if you dislike Malia or Parrish because you perceive them as being in the way of Stiles' true love with Lydia, Derek, or whoever, but if you use them for examples, don't try to pass off stuff as general dislike that boils down to Die for Our Ship. We all know that there are other outlets on the net where you can do that to your heart's content.

I've edited Romantic Plot Tumour to be a bit shorter. If you think the old version (see below) should be re-inserted, give me a heads up.

Update: I've partly removed the old Squick entry because it was mainly a rant on why a specific ship sucked. I kept the part about Kate and her relationship with Derek, because there are underage issues here, and added one about Jackson and the snake crawling out of his eye.

I also removed They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character because it was mostly about characters who had left the show (still don't know how they should have been kept around) and had one entry about Liam that was really a rant about Scott (Alternate Character Interpretation?).

I rewrote Ron the Death Eater to remove specific ship names.

I rewrote Spiritual Successor from a sarcastic who are you kidding entry to a normal one, since TPTB have stated Buffy as an influence several times.

I rewrote The Scrappy and made a few other smaller alterations to keep entries in general shorter.

I deleted The Un-Twist since it wasn't the trope (If someone disagrees on this, drop me a line here and I'll put it back).

To be continued. Again, if you think I've made a mistake somewhere, or if I'm doing something that isn't allowed, please tell me!

I've made this trope invisible (yanked it?) for now, because from the trope description, the example just doesn't fit:

• The Law of Fan Jackassery:
  • The violent reaction to female characters being introduced and possibly being a love interest has people frothing at the mouth without even waiting to actually see how the season will go.

I mean, The Law of Fan Jackassery states that the more obscure a fandom is, the louder the "jackasses" will be, quite simply because there are fewer moderate fans who could control the volume of jackassery in the fandom. Correct? And while I do agree that hating female characters for the pure idea of possibly becoming love interests is a jackass way of thinking, I believe this is something sadly ubiquitous in fandom and not just restricted to obscure fandoms. It just seem to be two different situations to me.

"Romantic Plot Tumor: Stalia and Draeden. To elaborate,

"Stalia not only comes out of nowhere with two characters who hadn't had any non-violent interaction until now, but produces a very big, nasty case of Coitus Ensues with truckloads of Squick. Not only was Stiles drugged a couple hours before with some very potent medications, but he was also possessed by a very evil murderous spirit. Not exactly a consenting individual. Meanwhile, Malia, a character previously shown to be a Wild Child who spent nine critical years alone in the woods, should not know how to make babies or how to be a teenager, period. Yet they still have sex in a dirty basement while in a very dire situation. Not only is this a gigantic Idiot Ball coming from Stiles, but the show also doesn't want to address those Unfortunate Implications at all and sells this relationship as True Love. The ship adds nothing to the plot except a convenient and quick way to sex up Stiles."

(Oh dear. I'm elaborating a bit on Malia, and how the whole feral child situation is probably more an expectation what the character is supposed to be than what she really is below.

These two actually do have non-violent interactions before they get together, and only one that could be called violent - she punches him, because she's less than pleased that he and his friends "saved" her from living life as a coyote, and that's that. It's clearly not played for drama, and while the show can be problematic when it comes to distinguishing between "funny" and dramatic violence, you'd have to try hard to see that here.

The interesting thing about the scene mentioned is that we only see them making out, we don't know if they even had sex. The dire situation seems to be a bit of a trigger for the makeout session in the first place, Stiles is clearly not possessed in that very moment, Malia is not on the mental level of a child, and I don't know why OP is so riled up about the dirty basement. For me, there are no Unfortunate Implications here, and I don't think it's presented as True Love, just a relationship between teenagers.

The relationship adds to the characters' development because it helps Malia adjust to being a human and having interactions with other humans, and it's important for Stiles, because it's his first romantic relationship, and it forces him to focus his caring potential a bit.

Watching the season, I didn't really see the relationship as tumorous, or more distracting than other relationships, for instance that between main character Scott and his girlfriend Kira. I think the trope itself is inappropriate in this case, and a shipping trope would probably be more fitting.)

"Draeden basically comes out of nowhere, too. Not only did they have no more than four lines of dialogue in one chapter of the previous season, but it also manages to ignore all the things that have happened to Derek over the course of the series. This includes his high school sweetheart dying because of his own actions, to being sexually manipulated by Kate and having his family killed as a result, to being magically raped by Jennifer, the Darach. This screams Rape as Backstory, doesn't it? Well, too bad, because Double Standard: Rape, Female on Male is in full effect here, and Derek hops into bed with the first unknown, shady woman he sees after two short sessions of chatting, who is self-admittedly a pay-for-hire mercenary. Good thing that consistency of Character Development is an important plotline, isn't it?"

(This is kind of an abridged version of the relationship, which consisted of more than a few lines of dialogue. That aside, hopping into bed with someone quickly is actually pretty in-character for Derek (and can be read as a reaction to the Kate relationship, if you want to go psychologically), and the show doesn't really try to present his relationship with Kate as anything other than abusive.

It might be a problem of what the show presents and how it is read again, but at least the former seems a case of prettifying the character's canonical actions because the troper doesn't like them.)

"Lastly, all four characters suffer from They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character." "Stiles becomes a glorified babysitter for Malia, grabs the Idiot Ball so Malia can shine, and proceeds to excuse all the Jerkass tendencies Malia has while also being alienated from the pack. Not only that, but his relationship with Malia has several tones of Romanticized Abuse, which he is compliant to. Yes, the person who stands up to deranged druids and werewolves becomes a Shrinking Violet around Malia. Yet this is declared to be romantic."

(I really don't know about this, because none of these things seemed that way to me. The romanticized abuse part is definitely exaggerated if it refers to the scenes I'm thinking of, which have Stiles complaining to Scott that he's always the little spoon in bed. later it turns out he actually prefers that, which is a reveal that has been set up with that first scene. I have no idea why it reads to OP as abusive, but maybe I'm missing something here. It's either troper blowing the problem out of proportion or the show really sucking at presenting their narrative.)

"Derek's plot about losing his powers gets thrown onto the backburner so he can hook-up with Braeden. He is, again, excluded from the rest of the pack for no reason at all. Until the end, he is utterly uninteresed about his lack of powers, despite taking great pride in being a born-werewolf."

(That's plainly untrue. He talks about the power loss to several people, including her. He's zen about the situation, not uninterested. It's not put on the backburner, it's constantly part of the plot and culminates in the last episode. I mean, this is not even a different interpretation of what happens on the show, it's plainly ignoring what happens on the show.)

"Malia goes from an interesting Wild Child with a possible arc about how she adapts to humanity to a Relationship Sue hinted-to-be The Trickster who manages to get Stiles re-possessed, to a conveniently Black Hole Sue that is an asshole to everyone, with a convenient Time Skip to not show how she can enter high school or have fashion sense."

(Malia is Stiles' love interest. She also adjusts to live as a teenager with the help of the main characters (particularly Scott, Stiles, Lydia, and Kira), helps with the main plot, finds out that her biological father is one of the villains, tries to strike up a relationship with him, gets a substitute father in her boyfriend's father, and starts looking for her biological mother, who mysteriously vanished after her birth.

She obviously isn't a feral child, but if the show wasn't able to make that clear enough it seems more of a writing issue than part of an entry on romantic plot tumour.

She's never hinted to be The Trickster. She is a were coyote, but if that's enough to put the trope in use, it is mostly subverted, since she doesn't really have trickster qualities.)

"Braeden goes from a Badass Mercenary who saved Isaac, gave Lydia and Allison clues, and died in a heroic way. When she came back, fans rejoiced as she was a POC badass character where the only ones previously were either a Magical Negro or minor characters with no screentime. However, enter S4 and she suddenly and violently degenerates into a Satellite Love Interest for Derek, and all her scenes are with Derek."

(Braeden appears in two episodes in Season 3 (and she "dies" in one, as is mentioned here). She comes back in Season 4, helps the main characters and saves them and other people several times, teaches her love interest how defend himself without werewolf powers, risks her life for him, does a minor Roaring Rampage Of Rage when he appears to die, and is given an intriguing plot hook in the last episode.

It's factually not true that all her scenes are with her love interest ("most" would probably hit it, though), and the character actually gets fleshed out a lot more, so saying that she was "better" in Season 3 really reeks of hypocrisy and Unfortunate Implications besides.)

General tone question: is there a bit of ship fighting going on on the page, or is that just me? I edited one entry that had two different shippers arguing whose ship was more mistreated/misunderstood by fandom at large, and two others, where someone attempted to reflect a different point of view on character perception and fan reactions respectively, and got swamped with a bunch of justifications for disliking the related characters/ships. I'd like to cut that down a bit, since YMMV are meant to reflect complaints in fandom, but not serve as a battleground between differing factions.

Resolved.

See above

My first question: is Malia an actual scrappy for her personality/screentime, or is she this mainly for being Stiles' girlfriend?

ETA: I've taken this to the The Scrappy forum in Shortterm Projects, and we came to the conclusion that Malia counts as a Base Breaker rather than a Scrappy. Does anyone else agree or disagree? If I understood it correctly, she can't be both - The Scrappy is more universally reviled, while Base Breaker causes arguments in fandom (which is true for Malia).

Let's talk about cutting this YMMV page down to size.