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I really want to leave Something Awful right now
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Comments
For example, Birth of a Nation is fine to trope, because even though it is in support of the KKK, it's still very influential. But some guy's fanfic set in the Code Geass universe about how the KKK is TOTALLY RIGHT isn't.
And don't get me wrong, I understand that my views (a rule of law should be written deeming what makes a work not worthy to trope) isn't going to happen, considering the "no such thing as notability rule", but it's wishful thinking, I guess.
Honestly, I can't say I agree with you. I believe that even in the most abysmal of works, you can learn something both about writing and the craft in general and the environment upon which is wrought.
Actually, my issue with TvT's focus is not that it involves fanfic, or even that it involves horrible rapey fanfic. My issue is that it focuses on them instead of focusing on other much more interesting stuff and it's often written with praise in mind, which is ridiculous to me.
That's another one of my problems with the site.
And getting a bit off topic here, but I think it should be a rule nobody can write a Troper Works page until it can be proven the work is actually finished.
TVT has the main problem of having a libertarian in charge of something
I somehow doubt that has anything to do with the poor administrative policies.
"Honestly, I can't say I agree with you. I believe that even in the most abysmal of works, you can learn something both about writing and the craft in general and the environment upon which is wrought."
Now I'm curious as to what one can learn from Monster A-Go-Go.
"Pokegirls. It can be troped, yes, but it's basically nothing except women getting raped.
While true, I'd argue that observing it can give insight to internet media misogynism, which is a thing."
Yes, Pokegirls is the nadir of Internet misogyny and thus deserves discussion as such. Just not from a site with no form of quality control, as then it leads the way of the Ryona page in which its main editors end up being the same sick fucks the page was initially set up to criticize.
I never felt there's anything special with Pokegirls. After all those dickgirls it was, to me, yet another weird Internet thing.
Well, Eddie doesn't believe in rules man!
Seriously, I agree with Whale. This is the only reason I can come up with why Eddie put up with all this shit for so long. I just don't believe he wasn't aware of it. I was, and I wasn't the admin of the site. I think he likes to pretend he wasn't aware of stuff as an arse-covering device when he's finally compelled to delete it.
"Porn? On my TV Tropes?"
Wait a minute, why the heck are we still obsessing over some inconsequential thread out of hundreds on a major site anyway?
Because many of us see it as a personal attack, probably.
I was hoping we'd be over that by now. It's been more than a year.
Ditto.
But has it really been more than a year? Man, does time pass quickly. And those goons really have nothing better to do, when after such a long time they're still obsessively trudging through the filthy sewers of TV Tropes.
We've been discussing the merits of TVT for quite a few posts now anyway.
I agree with this.
It's actually easier to make a learning experience out of bad writing/storytelling, because you can more easily see what doesn't work, and learn from that.
THIS idea I can totally support. Maybe qualify that by saying that it's okay if at least one full season is finished, for things like TV shows that just keep on running until kingdom come.
I say if we have a page on ryona (which is a real topic of interest to some people, like it or not), it should be very factual, stating what ryona is, and where it appears or how people have created content about it (such as making youtube videos of female videogame characters getting the crap beaten out of them). However, we do not need to link to such videos.
That kind of thing works for Wikipedia since it has a NPOV policy and thus it lets the fucked-upness speak for itself. Not for a site with a Positive POV policy.
Wait, TVT has a positive POV policy?
"We are also not a wiki for bashing things. Once again, we're about celebrating fiction, not showing off how snide and sarcastic we can be."
...oh.
Fuck, then.
We need to change "celebrating" to "documenting, cataloguing, and analyzing" ASAP.
The weird thing is, gushing is against the rules. But attempts to actually enforce this rule are generally ignored since gushing is seen as less likely to cause problems than bashing (which is true a lot of the time, but when it's not true it's really not true).
I was idly reading the thread until I saw this.
>FYAD exists as a place to make fun of everybody on the Internet, and be as funny as possible. The humor is engineered to be as funny towards FYADers as possible. Many people who dislike FYAD's use of slurs (which are, themselves, used as a way to make fun of the people who actually use them in earnest) also dislike their general sense of humor and feel that many of the posters are not actually as "ironic" as they claim. It is then explained that FYAD does actually call out those that are being "ironic" to mask their actual bigotry and not to be funny. They are still arguing over it.
>It's really fascinating stuff, really.
Toot toot! All aboard the apologism train!
I've got nothing against FYAD (and were I a goon I'd probably spend time there) but don't try to fit into a way so it magically doesn't go against your liberal values.
And why the hell are you working so hard to defend SA? They're big boys. I doubt they give a shit about what some tiny spinoff of TvT thinks.
Same reason people get so adamantly worked up about one freaking thread.
I've got nothing against FYAD (and were I a goon I'd probably spend time there) but don't try to fit into a way so it magically doesn't go against your liberal values.
And why the hell are you working so hard to defend SA? They're big boys. I doubt they give a shit about what some tiny spinoff of TvT thinks.
I think you mean socialist libertarian.
And FYAD is thought of as FYAD because it's led by a guy whose username is Portland Faggot and they post racial slurs and homophobic insults, and occasionally a guy will show up who'll use it as an excuse to actually be racist and homophobic and he will get called out on it. I'm not defending FYAD; people were interested in what the deal on SA nowadays was. Even if you disagree, I'm taking the word of multiple posters on this, both within and without FYAD.
I explained that the two terms are different, and their difference lies outside the scope you're talking about. The two terms are purely about sexual preferences, and say nothing about power structures, consent issues, or real-life impacts.
The dictionary definitions of these two terms? You are correct, they only talk about the sexual preference. But this is what I am trying to say:
1) "Ephebophilia" as used by tropers, and other pedophile apologists, is a term used to disguise pedophilia. It's often used because it's not as bad, or doesn't have the social stigma that pedophile does. Eight times out of ten, when somebody on the Internet is talking about ephebophilia, they are talking about an unhealthy obsession with a younger person.
2) From the Wikipedia page on pedophilia:
Studying child sex offenders, a review of qualitative research studies published between 1982 and 2001 concluded that pedophiles use cognitive distortions to meet personal needs, justifying abuse by making excuses, redefining their actions as love and mutuality, and exploiting the power imbalance inherent in all adult-child relationships.[57] Other cognitive distortions include the idea of "children as sexual beings," "uncontrollability of sexuality," and "sexual entitlement-bias."[58]
Because mid-to-late adolescents may have physical characteristics near (or in some cases, identical) to that of full-grown adults, some level of sexual attraction to persons in the age group is common among adults.[6] Ephebophilia is used only to describe the preference for mid-to-late adolescent sexual partners, not the mere presence of some level of sexual attraction. Generally, the preference is not regarded by psychologists as a pathology when it does not interfere with other major areas of one's life, and is not listed by name as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), the ICD-10, or as a paraphilia. However, the preference can sometimes be diagnosed as a disorder if it results in dysfunction or exploitative behavior, under the DSM specification 309.2, "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified."[14]
Much like sexual assault, the search for having sex with somebody signifacntly outside you age group (not, for example, a 20-year old having sex with a 16-year old, but rather a 30-year old having sex with a 17-year old) stems not only from a want to have sex, but a pathological desire to have control, dominance, and power. There is no difference in examining pedophilia and ephebophilia when one takes into consideration the power structures that exist between one and one's significantly younger partner.
And getting a bit off topic here, but I think it should be a rule nobody can write a Troper Works page until it can be proven the work is actually finished.
Agreed.
I'm not surprised to hear ts12 acted like a condescending prick in that Games thread, since that seems to be his default mode. It's tolerable only as long as the person he's arguing with is even worse.
Some people need to get over LF (including me).
Poe's Revolving Door strikes again!
?
>Even if you disagree, I'm taking the word of multiple posters on this, both within and without FYAD.
I fail to see how this makes it not apologism.
I've nothing against places like FYAD existing so people can act out like such, but to give it some obtuse justification (especially involving the word 'ironic') reeks of hypocrisy.
Quite frankly, Brass paints a better picture of the place than you do.
@Pumpkin: From what I've seen, the word "ephebophilia" is way more often used on the internet to describe general attraction to adolescents, without implying a pathological preference, and that colloquial meaning was what I was thinking of when I wrote those posts. If we define it strictly by the medical term, we are in full agreement that those people are sick fucks who ought to get treated.
Man, fuck semantics. They can cause one hell of a confusion, right?
Getting back on topic (didn't even read page 2, tbh):
>There was a wave of SA-idolization among several veteran TVT forumites.
That's what I was complaining about earlier!
@Pumpkin: From what I've seen, the word "ephebophilia" is way more often used on the internet to describe general attraction to adolescents, without implying a pathological preference, and that colloquial meaning was what I was thinking of when I wrote those posts. If we define it strictly by the medical term, we are in full agreement that those people are sick fucks who ought to get treated.
Man, fuck semantics. They can cause one hell of a confusion, right?
I fail to see how this makes it not apologism.
I've nothing against places like FYAD existing so people can act out like such, but to give it some obtuse justification (especially involving the word 'ironic') reeks of hypocrisy.
Quite frankly, Brass paints a better picture of the place than you do.
It is apologism, make no mistake about that. I know that FYAD can be a stupid place sometimes, and sometimes posters do, in fact, go to far on FYAD. But as long as the poster in question isn't attempting to use the subforum as an excuse to be bigoted (which they'll quickly get jumped on for), there's little problem in it.
And CaptainBrass probably does have a better picture of the place than I do, considering the fact that he has an account and I don't.
I find myself asking every time that chart gets posted if it counts as a bingo if you just mark a shitload of X's in the lower-left. Like a 3D bingo or something.
I mean seriously, can we stop sperging over that and let it go? Once? Ever? This is exactly the sort of thing they ream TVT over, and frankly, it's one of the ones where they're right.
--marks the 4th in the I column--
I think what Pumpkin is saying about the FYAD/D&D dichotomy makes a lot of sense, and it does tie back into the OP's original point: in a number of discussions that have recently been running on SA, we've been witness to the phenomenon of people falling all over each other in a rush to "call out" how terrible/non-progressive something is, in a way that simultaneously (and perhaps more importantly) declares themselves to be on the good/progressive side. When this kind of thing gets taken too far, it actively gets in the way of the goal of having humorous content on the SA fora, because there is always going to be something for people to take offense to.
You can see examples in this behavior in the Feminism thread at times, and I agree with others who have pointed this out in the Reddit and TVT threads.
You can also see this in the way some of the more militantly vocal ex-tropers behaved prior to getting banned from TVT. At points it became pretty clear that some were posting with less of a concern for legitimate improvement in the wiki, and more because they had a gang of people in the peanut gallery cheering on their increasingly aggressive posts against the "TV Tropes establishment."
This is not to say that everyone who calls out offensive speech on SA is like this, or that everyone who expressed concern on TVT were either. It's more a highly visible minority in both cases.
What's interesting is that this likely arose from SA's attempts to rid itself of the shittier aspects that had grown to a point where they were no longer seen as nuisances, but legitimate problems. (Examples being lolicon fans in the anime subforums, MRA types, people who unironically espoused racist and homophobic views, etc.) In so doing, the pendulum began to swing too far in the other direction, and so now the SA mod staff is having to take further steps to correct the course to one that is more in line with the site's original goals.
The reason I find this interesting is that the parallel between this and TV Tropes' recent issues is pretty obvious. It leads me to wonder if these kinds of growing pains are something that a lot of fast-growing internet communities go through at one point or another.