Topic on Forum:Wiki Talk

One of things that caused me major annoyance back when I still edited TV Tropes was how they moved all the potentially controversial tropes to the YMMV subpage ghetto. This wiki isn't supposed to be afraid of subjective opinions - such as Disaster Move being bad - so therefore I propose getting rid of the YMMV subpages and integrating all the examples on the corresponding main pages. This change would provide more color and honesty to the wiki.

I can definitely agree with your sentiment, that just because something is "controversial" doesn't mean we should shove it away where no one can find it. But we should still keep audience reactions and the like in the YMMV subpages, since they are not actually building blocks of fiction, but metanarrative.

Nerdanel, I definitely sympathize with you, but I also agree with QuestionableSanity that the fan opinions belong on the YMMV pages. However, I can agree that the Happiness is Mandatory nonsense on TV Tropes is foolish, so if you want to leave a review that is critical of a work, you can do so on our review pages without fear.

Another reasons why YMMV Tropes are on a subpage is for a reason on TVT I can agree with: it prevents fans having edit wars on the main pages, and let's face it, on tropes guaranteed to cause fans to get into heated arguments, this is inevitable, so they do serve a useful purpose in minimizing disruptions on the wiki.

However, I do support your position on being honest, and if something is objectively bad, YMMV Trope or not, then feel free to state that, as we have no Happiness is Mandatory policies here.

I'm going to copypaste this from Forum:My idea, because I think it's relevant to this discussion:

So, how do are those things currently covered on the wiki? Recap pages, more than anything, seem to be about plot. They have summaries, and often recurse into trope pages (subplot tropes) Quotes pages are sort of a selective form of recapitulation. Image Links is kind of the same deal, but in graphic form. Laconic could honestly be anything, but it usually comes down to genre and plot. Characters pages are, unsurprisingly enough, about characters. Ho Yay is occasionally about characterization. Trivia is ostensibly for the craft and its medium, but honestly it's for stuff that TVT folk don't quite consider a trope. It also includes audience reactions, which is actually a different thing entirely. Radar pages are also about the craft, in allowing communication across social norms. Analysis pages are about the theme of the work, it's particular uses of symbolism, and social context. Audience subpages include: Emotion class: Crowning Moment of Funny, Heartwarming, and Awesome subpages are primarily about the reader's emotional connection to the work. In this case: laughter, love, and joy. Nightmare Fuel is the same thing, but for fear. Tear Jerker is the same, but for sadness. Reviews, naturally, are about the viewer's overall perception of the work's quality. Ho Yay is some portion audience reaction, combined with characterization. On second thought... categories include: Fridge -- works that are more brilliant/scary/confusing in hindsight. Headscratchers are the same, but even more confusing in hindsight, so I'm going to complain. ... and the second half of Trivia, which tends to be about mass audience reactions. We also have metacanon pages, too. Fanfic Recs are for adaptations, continuations, or transformations of the original canon. Memes is a variant of this, in a bite-sized, pithy adaptations. Haiku are inline metacanon, poetry inspired by other works. WMG are thought-experiment extensions to canon. YMMV is a really odd bird. Content can really belong to any category, so long as people agree that it doesn't always belong.

I've long thought that YMMV pages were kind of a ghetto, and Trivia is as well. Trivia itself has plenty of Audience Reactions, just disguised as more objective things, like Acclaimed Flop and Hitless Hit Album. They can be objectively quantified, but they're still about the audience. Mid-Development Genre Shift seems to be about the writing process interacting with the results of the show, which means it really is about storytelling.

YMMV itself has weird tropes in it like Stuck in Their Shadow which is not really up for that much debate -- all the examples are In-Universe even. Or Death of the Author, which is more about the fact that differing interpretations exist rather than being subject to interpretation itself. And honestly, one of the main examples given for YMMV trope, Complete Monster, I actually feel is an objective trope, insofar as it's a character type that the author intentionally makes.

@QuestionableSanity: Is it even possible to remove the author's environment from his writing?

Anyway, I'm weakly for merging both, unless someone can come up with a reasonable 1-2 sentence description of what belongs in YMMV and Trivia. And what "Trivia" even means on a site that's more or less dedicated to trivia.

The current list of YMMV has things like Most Annoying Sound, Dry Docked Ship, and Idiosyncratic Ship Naming which I agree don't need to go to the main page, but on the other hand YMMV includes tropes like Moral Event Horizon, Designated Hero, Mary Suetopia, and Moe. which properly describe the work itself.

For example, I've been thinking that H. G. Wells made First Men in the Moon have an Idiot Plot on purpose. I think the main character isn't very smart or perceptive at all to the point of being an Unreliable Narrator, and then the Idiot Savant inventor of the space ship and and the hyper-specialized natives of the Moon are really meant to be Too Dumb to Live as an authorial choice to express Wells's chosen philosophical/political themes. As other characters barely appear, an Idiot Plot is the natural result. I don't think this kind of analysis belongs to the section about audience reactions.

There is a YMMV element to the nine D&D alignments, but that's largely because the D&D definitions of Law and Chaos are collections of disparate traits so that, for example, "keeps one's desk orderly" and "has no imagination" are both under the Lawful umbrella. Someone may be extremely Lawful in some ways and extremely Chaotic in others. It is a bad system for classifying characters.

I think the YMMV section is trying to be two things at once: a dumping ground for real tropes that could invite arguments and a page about things relating to the fandom. A character being or not being a Mary Sue has always an element of judgement in it, but the same goes for things like determinining whether an ambiguous character is an Anti-Hero or a Villain Protagonist.

I don't think the right response to edit wars is to hide the object of contention out of sight. I think the best way to deal with controversial tropes is to enforce some rules about not letting rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, and counter-counter-rebuttals get out of hand. I think we could limit any trope controversy, even for the tropes not currently on the YMMV list, to both sides getting to make their point, with editors encouraged to strengthen the point for their side rather than sniping back and forth.

Like this:

• Character so-and-so is a Purity Sue because X, Y, and Z.
  • On the other hand, she also A, B, and C, which makes her not so perfect after all.

No third level needed or wanted.

I like the idea of encouraging editors to present cases for and against particular tropes in an orderly manner like Nerdanel suggested, but I'd personally prefer that we keep a separate page for tropes that are likely to debated in such a manner.

I think most of the "ghetto" problem TVTropes had with their YMMV pages was they treated them as ghetto pages. Character tropes were likewise separated to another page and didn't have the same stigma about them.

Two other points that are not quite related to the topic of discussion but are tangentially related to what's been brought up here:

• Can we get rid of TVTropes' policy that character tropes should be listed only on the character pages? It seems to me that it would be advantageous to list them in both places: On the main page to see all of the uses of a particular character trope in one place, and on the character page to put all tropes about specific characters in one place.
• The Trivia page should really be renamed. I like the idea of the page (things that require outside knowledge of the work), but it has little connection to what its name is. Perhaps something like "External tropes?"

Muninn, I can see the logic in having character tropes on both main and character pages, especially if some are used in a general sense and some are used in more specific cases.

As for the Trivia pages, trivia generally means things that are interesting facts about something (in this case a work of media) but aren't absolutely essential to enjoyment or understanding of the work, so I think the current title is fine.

As for subpages being treated like a ghetto, it's our policy to just regard subpages as just....subpages. They have their purpose for specific items, but they aren't marks of shame here as far as I'm aware.

Even if the YMMV subpage isn't officially treated like a ghetto, that's how it'll be perceived.

There is a lot of YMMV about what is YMMV too. For example, I think Baron Kelvin in Black Butler is well qualified to be called a Complete Monster. We're talking about a case where that really isn't controversial. The guy has an astonishing lack of redeeming traits. He's so loathsome in every way that no one ever writes him as a Draco in Leather Pants and there isn't a Misaimed Fandom for him. There is no "your mileage may vary" in this, and we're talking about a fandom that has shown itself very capable of seeing the best sides in evil people.

Even if the designation isn't that clear, that doesn't mean that there will be a vicious edit war. I remember an example from the eartly TV Tropes where I was looking at the page for a particular work. "A Complete Monster? I'd have called him a Smug Snake instead. Oh well..." And then I didn't do anything about it.

Things like shipping tropes aren't really subjective either. Even if you don't ship a particular pairing yourself, a look at fanfiction.net will provide an unbiased overview of what the fandom as a whole is shipping and what the pairings are called. I support making a "Fandom" subpage for things like the shipping tropes and most annoying noises and character tiers and such, maybe memes too, and shunting the rest of the old YMMV to Main.

The difference should be whether you examine the work's fandom (and anti-fandom, if any) for the data or if you look at the work itself.

@Munnin: With regards to the Character tropes on Character pages only rule, the motion to overturn is GRANTED, the rule is REPEALED.

I basically thought that was used as a "this page is getting really crowded" thing. TVT was good at making everything look like admin fiat, so maybe it was just that. Anyway, stuff like this should be covered under a the rule of doing what you think is best... which should probably be in All The Tropes:Be Creative once I actually get around to writing it. That is to say, not every trope needs to be on the main page, and the choice of where is best to put it involves some degree of judgement on the part of the troper.

@Nerdaniel: Hey, that's a surprisingly nice segue to the greater discussion here. Ultimately, the position of every trope is going to be some sort of judgement call. Forcing a particular alignment doesn't really help. (Recap subpages with YMMV subpages are especially annoying to me, because I pretty much screwed up the placement of all of them on import and they just don't really fit our site structure.) I think at least some flexibility is called for here, under All The Tropes:There is No One True Way. Certainly, debate about the applicability of a trope is always allowed, so long as it doesn't kudzu grow over the page content.

I've said earlier that TVT tends to have an obsession with structure and classification, which is really strange for a Content Creation Wiki. Maybe the YMMV and Trivia pages are just a symptom of that greater problem. I'm now more or less stuck between wanting to integrate them to the main page, or using them as organizational tools as Looney Toons says below.

"External" doesn't really strike me as the right name, at least partially because I served as External Chair of the UC Davis Grad Student Association, and I didn't like the title back then. We've pondered "Production" or "Production Notes" which sounds great for movies, not so sure about books. "Metacreation", "Environment"? I think I'm striking out. I do not like "Trivia", though.

@Munnin again: D&D alignments are pretty much always Square Peg, Round Trope anyway. I'm a Pathfinder player and I still almost wanna delete those pages. We've been talking about Complete Monster long enough, I think that needs to be made objective. Mary Sue needs a better description if it's gonna be made anything like objective.

"which should probably be in All The Tropes:Be Creative once I actually get around to writing it."

So I guess you could say you need to... be more creative?

...I'll get my coat.

"Mary Sue needs a better description if it's gonna be made anything like objective."

See, I think the best way to treat that trope is to split its contents into a ton of Mary Sue subtropes (pre-existing and original), and turn Mary Sue itself into a disambiguation page. (But you know me, I like my disambiguation pages.)

That's not a bad idea, but the problem is the massive use in the fandom. That use needs a pretty long definition on its own. And even then, Mary Sue probably has meaning as a collection of related tropes.

> Can we get rid of TVTropes' policy that character tropes should be listed only on the character pages?

Huh. I was never aware of that policy. I certainly didn't think any such thing applied here -- I trippingly scatter character tropes everywhere I write, regardless of the page type.

On the broader topic, I have to agree with Geth -- I've never perceived the subpages as any sort of ghetto, even YMMV. Regardless, I am also of the opinion that there should be no enforcement of any kind when it comes to what belongs where. The subpages are organizational, to make it easier to find things, and that's all they should be.