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All The Tropes:Square Peg, Round Trope: Difference between revisions
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{{
[[File:square peg 7468.png|frame|Remember kiddies, make sure it's the ''right shape'' first.]]
{{quote|''"Not every peg needs to be crammed into some trope hole, even if it seems vaguely apropos."''|'''[[Andrew Hussie]]''' }}
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In any case, if an example doesn't fit, don't add it. Someone else will just delete it anyway. The absolute worst case scenario is when the examples override the intentions of the description, which makes it [[Trope Decay|a different trope altogether]].
Compare [[All The Tropes:Not a Subversion|Not a Subversion]], where an example is a legitimate [[Playing with a Trope]], but it's usually labeled a subversion when it's another form of playing.
{{Examples|It happens often with these tropes:}}
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** Also, [[Critical Research Failure]] is getting this treatment. That trope is about things that any non-expert would know is wrong. Instead, people will pot hole any obscure fact that only someone in the field would know to this.
* Some links to "Do Not Want" are people saying that they "do not want" something to happen. The article is actually about humorous bootleg subtitles. This resulted [[Translation Train Wreck|in a rename to end the confusion.]]
* [[Death Is Cheap]] does not refer to any one character coming [[Back
* [[Deconstruction]] refers to a work that takes an established genre and adds a layer of realism by establishing why associated tropes are used and how they would affect the real world. It is not [[Darker and Edgier]] applied to an entire genre. [[All The Tropes:Not a Deconstruction|We have a whole page on that topic.]]
* [[Deus Ex Machina]] is an unrealistic or out-of-place plot device which shows up out of nowhere to resolve the plot. It is not a [[Pretentious Latin Motto]] meaning "plot points I think are stupid." Of course, the terms gets thrown around a lot in this manner outside the wiki too, making its misuse [[Truth in Television]].
* [[Deus Sex Machina]] is not any sex that's a plot point. It's an ability or item that only works if someone has sex.
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* [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin]] is about titles that are humorously specific, and tell you everything you need to know about the plot just by reading it. A lot of people use it for any title that's not a total non sequitur or a substitute for [[Self Explanatory]].
* An [[Excuse Plot]] is a plot that is clearly there merely as a justification for the gameplay, or other form of flashy, show-offy-ness, to happen. It does not necessarily mean a poorly written, minimalistic, or stupid storyline. Furthermore, this can only apply to [[Video Game]] storylines, but some tropers seem to love to put it as examples [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Like|to movies and shows they don't like]] as if it were [[Cliché Storm]].
* [[Face Palm]] is when someone literally facepalms. Not [[Wall Banger
* [[Fan Disservice]] is when a show intentionally does something gross to invoke [[Squick]]. It's not the same as a show failing at [[Fan Service]], that's [[Fetish Retardant]].
** It also gets used for plain old body [[Squick]].
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* [[Grey and Grey Morality]] is when both sides of the conflict are neither good or bad. Just because a hero has [[Anti-Hero|some flaws]] and the villain has some [[Anti-Villain|redeeming qualities]] doesn't mean the setting is Grey and Grey in terms of morality.
* [[Guide Dang It]] now gets used for any puzzle that's the least bit difficult, not just ones that aren't possible to solve without a strategy guide or walkthrough. A true [[Guide Dang It]] situation would be one where you look up the solution and, after doing it and analyzing it, proceed to exclaim "HOW THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO KNOW TO DO THAT?" If the clues are there and you just missed them or misinterpreted them, it's not an example.
* [[Guilty Pleasure]] means liking something yet feeling guilt or
* A [[Hand Wave]] is an explanation that is too flimsy to hold up under scrutiny, not any brief explanation and most definitely ''not'' "explanations that don't appeal to you".
* [[Harder Than Hard]] refers to when a game has a hard difficulty followed by at least one difficulty above it. It does not simply mean a hard mode that's much harder than the normal mode, or an extreme case of a [[Nintendo Hard]] game. Similar case with [[Easier Than Easy]].
* [[Hey, It's That Guy!]] is when an often-used character actor appears in a supporting role (the whole point is that you know the actor's face, but
* [[Hey, It's That Voice!]] is meant to be used for when a voice actor uses the same voice for characters from different series. Instead, it's often used to note that two characters have the same voice actor, even if they don't sound similar.
* [[Hot Mom]] and [[Hot Dad]] are supposed to refer to moms and dads who the other characters find attractive. Tropers tend to use it to mean "character I think is hot who happens to be a parent".
* [[Ho Yay]] is about homosexual ''subtext''. At one point, even ''[[Brokeback Mountain]]'' had it, which was wrong because the characters are explicitly gay.
** It's also now used for any two guys who are best friends at all - which is the trope [[Heterosexual Life Partners]].
* [[Humans Are the Real Monsters]] (once "Humans Are Bastards") is supposed to be about how humans are complete jerks and worse '''compared to other sentient species'''. Humans being horrible people in general does not count as this trope.
* This is why ''[[I Am Not Making This Up]]'' no longer exists on this wiki, what with everyone potholing anything vaguely weird into it.
** [["Not Making This Up" Disclaimer]] is being misused in the same vein, albeit on a much smaller scale.
* [[Incredibly Lame Pun]] is about puns that ''in-universe'' characters find lame. Tropers think it's "[[Pun]], ''any pun'', no matter how subtle or clever it is."
** And originally, it wasn't even a trope at all, just a page to make metatextual [[
* [[Unexplained Recovery|I Got Better]], despite having a warning against using it for cases of [[Character Development]] or actual "getting better" outside inexplicable attacks of Death, still gets potholed a lot, but since the [[Trope Namer]] line was ''not'' about death, the trope itself might be a case of this. It has been eventually renamed to [[Unexplained Recovery]].
* [[Insane Troll Logic]] is for logic that is incredibly demented to the point where it makes no sense at all. Too many people try to cram [[Logical Fallacies|flawed logic]] into the trope as opposed to the nonsensical logic that it is supposed to reflect.
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** A good chunk of examples are straight up jokes that were deliberately written to be funny, or are examples of intentionally over-the-top comedic acting. In fact, just about any [[Narm]] example from a comedy is probably this.
* [[Nightmare Fuel]] was originally supposed to be about things from media ''[[What Do You Mean It's for Kids?|aimed at children]]'' which are ''unintentionally'' scary. Then it started getting filled with "anything that scared me as a child, even if I wasn't supposed to see it at that age." Now, most of the examples in [[Nightmare Fuel]] have drifted so far that it might as well be a redirect to the [[Horror]] article, but with whininess.
** In the same fashion, High Octane Nightmare Fuel originally
** Bowing to the inevitable, All The Tropes now redirects "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" to "Nightmare Fuel", which here has the definition that "High Octane Nightmare Fuel" used to have.
* People tend to confuse [[No Ending]] with [[Left Hanging]], [[Bolivian Army Ending]], [[Gainax Ending]], [[Cliff Hanger]], [[Sequel Hook]], and nearly every other ending trope on the wiki except for [[Grand Finale]].
** And in the same vein, a [[Cliff Hanger]] does ''not'' constitute a [[Bolivian Army Ending]].
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* [[Platform Hell]] refers to a specific subgenre of games which are specifically designed to punish and frustrate the player as much as possible. Tropers tend to use the phrase to mean "[[Nintendo Hard]] [[The Same but More|BUT MORE!]]". [[Platform Hell]] games are almost exclusively either [[Game Mod|ROM hacks]] or homebrewed games... it's ''extremely'' rare for an official retail product to truly qualify as one of these.
* "The core idea of [[Poe's Law]] is that a parody of something extreme can be mistaken for the real thing, and if a real thing sounds extreme enough, it can be mistaken for a parody," as the first few lines of that page explain. However, examples have a tendency to be more about works or personalities that are either extreme or at least reviled in general, without the "mistaken for a parody" part. This usually leads to [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Like]] while ignoring the trope definition.
* A [[Pothole]] is when a link is [[Pothole|hidden in the text]]. Directly displayed links that use <nowiki>{{brackets}}</nowiki> or [[CamelCase]] are not [[
* [[Precision F-Strike]], as the description says, only applies to characters who don't swear often, if at all. Maybe-''MAYBE''-if the swear is supposed to obviously be part of the drama of a significant moment. Of course, it gets applied to characters who swear all the time, and to moments that aren't the least bit dramatic. And that's not even getting into the number of pages where any single use of the word "fuck" is [[Pothole
* Rape The Dog was designed to be clearly and qualitatively different from [[Kick the Dog]], but the original distinction became muddled to [[Kick the Dog]] [[The Same but More|But More Evil]] and we had to [[Shoot the Dog|put it down]]. The replacement is [[Moral Event Horizon]]. The final proof of its total abandonment of original concept is the belief of many that [[Moral Event Horizon]] is actually a step above Rape The Dog.
** [[Complete Monster]] was also added because the original definition of Rape The Dog was so muzzy, it appeared to many Tropers to apply to characters who already ''lived'' beyond the [[Moral Event Horizon]] and had no need to cross it. On that trope, it refers to a villain who's so evil that they couldn't ''be'' more depraved. Admittedly there are multiple ways of going about that, but when every character who was even slightly mean to someone else is labelled a "complete monster," the trope begins to lose its meaning.
* [[Real Women Never Wear Dresses]] has developed many, many problems. It gets potholed incorrectly all the time, despite its straightforward title. Moreover, it's usually
* [[Recycled in Space]] means a show that is recycled from another show with a gimmicky premise added to make it seem different. An example would be ''The Suite Life of Zack and Cody''(show about twins living in a hotel) and its spinoff ''The Suite Life on Deck'' (show about those same twins on a cruise ship). However, far too many examples are either 1)Shows that are in the same genre that share characteristics 2)"Show X is Show Y in space" where Show Y was actually made after or at the same time as show X 3) Examples where Show Y is so obscure/did so poorly that it's a moot point 4)Shows that the editor doesn't like or 5)Show X is a show that Show Y has a [[Fandom Rivalry]] with.
** There's also the subset of people who take the trope name literally and use it to refer to any work set in space.
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* [[Scary Black Man]] is exactly what it sounds like, an intimidating black guy. The definition seems to be relaxed to refer to any minority character or even in some cases characters that just barely qualify for [[Ambiguously Brown]], whether they're scary, intimidating, or not.
* [[Schoolgirl Lesbians]] is often used to describe any lesbian relationship, regardless of how seriously the relationship is actually treated, or how old the characters are.
* [[Scrub]] and [[Stop Having Fun Guy]] refer to gamers who impolitely impose their ruleset on everyone who plays with them. Poor skill level alone does not equal a Scrub. [[Challenge Gamer|High skill level]] and a
* [[Seasonal Rot]] refers to one particular season of a show that is judged in hindsight to be markedly inferior to other seasons. Way too many people are using the term to mean "I don't like the current season." It also does not mean "got less good over time," which is [[Jump the Shark]].
* A [[Shout-Out]] has to be intentional on the part of the creators. It is not a coincidental similarity between works. Before you succumb to the urge to write "Looks like a [[Shout-Out]] to", consider how likely it is that the creator of Work B is familiar with Work A. In fact, if you don't ''know'' it's a [[Shout-Out]], probably best not to mention it.
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* [[The Untwist]] became so bogged down with [[Complaining About Shows You Don't Like|"I saw that one coming a mile away"]] entries that we had to nuke the page and start over.
* [[Villain Song]] is supposed to be about a villain in the context of a storyline, but the vast majority of the music examples are simply [[Sympathetic POV]] songs. Because of this, it is very, very difficult to make a proper example of a villain song outside of the context of a [[Concept Album]] as the trope doesn't describe a [[Sympathetic POV]], but rather a song describing a story's villain in song.
* [[
** Furthermore, the trope name implies that these plot points cause fans to abandon the work entirely (the "wall bang" being the sound the script/DVD/book/game/etc. makes when it's thrown against a wall). Far too many examples imply that the editors who added them continued to watch the show afterward, meaning the example was not truly a [[
** This also doesn't approach the similar trope, [[Dethroning Moment Of Suck]], which has since become a borderline unspeakable horror. Seemingly haven taken the above's definition as a moment so singularly stupid or offensive that the viewer/reader/player outright quits, it's been worn all the way down to just "I didn't agree with this." Some of them are even worse than that, such as an example for a comedy show that's summed up as "I didn't laugh at that joke."
* [[The War On Straw]], at least when it comes to TV Tropes. [[Wikipedia]] notes that the "straw man fallacy" is the lumping of a strong opposition argument together with one or many weak ones to create a simplistic weak argument that can easily be refuted. However on TV Tropes, due to tropers not following the [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement]], [[The War On Straw]] means "A character who is drawn only for the purposes of either proving them wrong or ridiculing them" and [[Real Life]] examples are no longer tolerated.
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** Another problem was confusion with [[Evil Plan]] because of poor word choice at the article's start. It has since been corrected.
* The [[Your Mileage May Vary|YMMV]] tab is for stuff in the [[Your Mileage May Vary|YMMV]] index as well as [[Audience Reactions]]. Some people misuse it as listing objective tropes that they [[Tropes Are Not Good|think make something they don't like sound good]], or [[Tropes Are Not Bad|the other way around]].
** There are some odd and oddly pervasive instances of a sentence or phrase unambiguously gushing or complaining about a show but potholing to YMMV, likely the result of [[Justifying Edit|stealth justifying edits]]. This doesn't work even when one ignores the fact that potholing YMMV in the middle of an example ''at all'' is not supposed to happen. (For that matter, [[Justifying Edit]]s are not supposed to happen, either.)
* [[You Suck]] had to be renamed to [[This Loser Is You]] because people kept thinking it was for instances of a video game mocking the player for being terrible at the game, when it's really about an [[Audience Surrogate]] portrayed in a negative light.
* [[Zeerust]] refers to ideas of "futuristic" that, while still futuristic-looking, have a "retro" look to them. Back in the Troper Tales days, people wrote Troper Tales about how they prefer their older electronics to modern-day ones, which is completely different.
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[[Category:Wiki Tropes]]
[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]
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