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Comments
Good post. I would like to address some of your points, if I can.
Troper Tales: As I mentioned a few pages back, I will certainly grant you that much of the criticism about Troper Tales is fair. This is a point I think where many people in the TVTropes forum community agree with you, and while there are some who believe "TT is fine, leave it alone", they certainly don't make up the majority.
The main point of disagreement on Troper Tales from within the TVTropes community is not whether it's a problem, but how far we should go to fix it. Believe it or not, a number of Troper Tales pages have been deemed so un-salvageable that they have been cut, and other editors have been putting in time to clean up and curate pages they felt could otherwise be saved. The process is definitely moving slower than many on both sides of the debate would like, and quite a few Tropers do feel that they should all simply be deleted. Whether you agree or not, for right now the administration is favoring the clean-up and monitor tactic, so we'll just have to see how that plays out in the long-term.
Paedophilia: I want to be clear that, to my knowledge, Fast Eddie and the moderators have never supported honest-to-god Paedophiles or supporters of child pornography. There have actually been instances where people have been banned for being paedophilia-apologists... I believe one such instance was brought up in the SA thread itself.
In regards to fictional representations of children in sexual situations, the issue is more controversial. The opinion of Something Awful on the issue is pretty clear cut, obviously. However, despite the fact that I find such works to be utterly disgusting, I'm still not convinced that someone who does enjoy such works can automatically be deemed a real-life paedophile-supporter any more than someone who enjoys trashy non-consensual romance novels can be considered a real-life rape supporter, or fans of Hostel being labeled supporters of real-life serial killers. Without any solid evidence to the contrary, I don't think I could support the banning of people simply because they like Kodome no Jinkan.
Speculative Fiction: While I agree with you that much in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy will probably never be considered good enough to be a classic work of fiction, everyone has different tastes in what they enjoy watching and reading. Some of those will in fact believe that their favorite author or series is "better" than anything previous centuries have to offer. Such opinions are not unique to TVTropes... most people simply prefer the pop culture of their generation, and they're entitled to their opinion. Short of banning everyone that says they like Lost more than they liked The Iliad, I really don't know how we could change that. And I certainly don't believe that the returns for such a policy would be worth the cost.
No Such Thing As Notability: While I can certainly understand your opinion on TVTropes' notability policy, the fact is that it's a core principle on which the wiki was founded. Since I prefer the policy as it is, and I don't really see any way to reach a middle ground between the two sides of the issue, I think we'll have to simply agree to disagree.
If anyone can't get past No Such Thing As Notability, I feel that it's fair to say that TVTropes simply isn't the place for them.
Japanese Named Tropes: This is another area where I feel the criticism is fair, to a point. However, two things should be noted here:
First, Japanese-named tropes make up an extreme minority of all trope titles across the wiki. Out of somewhere in the realm of 30,000 trope articles, Japanese-named tropes can probably be numbered in the dozens. That is why I believe that this is an issue that is far over-played by site critics.
Second, the renaming of many Japanese tropes is a process that has been ongoing for quite a long time... at least since before I came across the site for the first time a couple of years ago. A number of Japanese titles have been changed in the past, the most recent of which is the much-maligned Nakama. Of those that remain, some, like Tsundere, are in the process of being changed. Others, such as those that apply to specific Japanese concepts such as Hikikomori, will instead have their description and example listings cleaned up so that only examples that truly fit the concept are present.
Cherrypicking: The fact that you can at least admit that cherry-picking and over-generalizations are occurring in the thread is satisfactory to me. As I said before, I can't really blame folks for doing it if they're mainly in it for the laughs... far be it from me to get in the way of someone else's fun. As long as you're intellectually honest about, we cool.
In closing, I would like to comment on my certainty that this post will be massively ninja'd. =P
I was talking about "bipolar bitch", or more specifically, "tsundere". "Psycho bitch" would be "yandere" or "yangire", I think. Not quite either, in fact, I think...
"Hot and cold" might be a better name for "tsundere" altogether.
@Scrye2 > Also, if glasses and shit are a fanservice trope, lump it in with Fanservice! All it takes is one little line of "Some people like people who wear glasses, a la the naughty librarian." Or if that's not specific enough, "Some people get turned on by glasses, and so many creators work in glasses to their characters' designs as a way of fanservice" and leave it at that!
First, chill out, dude.
Second, this isn't the naughty librarian trope. That one is prim-and-proper on the outside and secretly naughty. Meganekko refers more to the quiet studious shy girl personality type that's sometimes typecast for glasses-wearing girl characters, especially in Japanese popular media.
Third, we have pages for subtropes. So why not?
@Juan_Carlos > Vivi was banned for one month, then ban evaded and her/his sentece was increased to...i dunno lol.
Increased by ten days because Vivi ban-evaded ten days into the ban.
@Meeble > That is why I believe that this is an issue that is far over-played by site critics.
Unfortunately, cherry-picking and overplaying criticism is, while often fun, not all that useful in coming up with solutions.
While this is true, many people in the SA thread have explicitly said that they're not interested in solutions, they just want something to laugh at. For that particular goal, the strategy works just fine.
"Hey IJBM guys? Ban everyone posting in this thread. Either they're a creeper trying to
justify incest, or they're too stupid to not immediately close the
tab.
Also, stop loving talking about pedo comics from Japan and ban the
two who admit to liking them, RIGHT NOW"
Suggesting that other communities ban anyone who even discusses non-SA Approved™ controversial subjects is one of the quickest ways to not be taken seriously.
If that comes at the cost of the IJBM board not winning the SA thread Seal Of Approval, so be it. I don't think there's really anything we could do to seriously be in the running for that anyway.
> If that comes at the cost of the IJBM board not winning the SA thread Seal Of Approval, so be it.
[CT Magus quote goes here]
Not this shit again. Bros can have all the icky fantasies they like as long as they don't shove it into anyone's faces and show a sane distiniction between fantasy and reality, and those two seem to adhere to that sentiment so we don't need another tiresome rethread of that debate.
people that flounced
I don't see the problem here.
any level, is fine by me. i just apply DADT and that should be it.
Wrooooong time to use that acronym, bud.
Cripesmonkey-feathers! ninja'd!Scrye: I can already imagine the briefings on that being face desk quality of stupid.
There's no point in trying to make TV Tropes better. There's too many people who like the site the way it is, and if you try to argue against site policy, it'll end up being one person against 10 people, most of whom are mods or highly respected members of the site. Anyone on SA who tries will be dismissed because they are from SA.
We have a few too many tropes like that but getting rid of them is a bit hard with so many people getting wrapped around the axle about them.
I'm not interested in bashing you guys or trolling or anything, so don't worry about that. I just want to explain why I say what I say (especially re: anti-intellectualism, because it's a sticking point of mine) and why I bash TVTropes.
First off, yes, the TVTropes thread on SA bashes TVT to the point that it often becomes hyperbole. You can say that's unfair, and you're completely correct. But you know what? That's completely fine. Does the thread on SA exist to try to make a concerted effort to change TVT? No. Is it trying to make a well reasoned argument to leech TVT of users? Some people might say so, but no, not really. It exists because it's funny. You might disagree, and honestly it's fine. Humor is subjective, especially when it comes to taking the piss out of other people. Don't worry about that.
But when it comes down to it, we're posting in this thread to laugh. We don't hate you as people (well, not all of you), we don't want to try to change you, we want to point at stupid shit people on your forum/wiki post and laugh. That's it. Maybe some people on SA think of it as something more, but when it comes down to it reading ridiculous shit said on TVT makes me laugh. Reading ridiculous shit that is completely made up and exaggerated but sounds like a more extreme version of things that are said on TVT also makes me laugh. It's not debate club, I don't care if what I'm saying isn't strictly true. That's humor to me.
Take it as you will, but what I do kind of get annoyed by is how TVT handles media analysis. Not enough to want to try to change it, but enough that I will certainly make posts bringing it up to laugh at in our humor thread.
To start, when I (and many of the other people making these arguments) say that TVT is anti-intellectual, I don't mean that every user is an uneducated dumbass who would never read a classic. I'm saying that TVTropes, as a whole, is by current design anti-intellectual.
Now, this isn't to say that the very idea of tropes is bad. Tropes are an important element of literary analysis. Joseph Campbell's Hero with 1000 Faces is a highly regarded work dealing with the concept of recurring actions and themes in literature, for example. However, there is more to analysis than cataloging. TVT often treats tropes as the be all, end all of analysis: by pointing out a recurring theme you are analyzing it. Mods have gone on record saying that TVT is about cataloging, categorizing, as if you can do that and call it analysis. And frankly this is just untrue.
Real analysis requires discussion about why an author did what they did. It requires understanding of the cultural context that surrounds the work's creation. It requires introspection, to see how what they did relates to you and your own human experience. It gives you a deeper understanding of the work as a whole and hopefully teaches you something about yourself and your own life experience, too. That's the whole point; it's why we teach literature in school in the first place.
Honestly, TVT used to have some of this. It would explain where a trope first came up and the reasons it existed. However, as time has worn on pages that contain this have become rarer, in favor of more tropes that are literally just "yup, this happened in more than one work." And so many things are so banal and inconsequential that it's impossible to read into them at all, but TVT gives those things just as much credence as major themes and recurring character archetypes.
The reason this makes me call TVT anti-intellectual is that putting works into neat little boxes only really works well for a narrow subset of works, and when you try to apply it to something more complicated, it causes you to lose some parts that can't just be written into a neat category. Is there a trope that explains how Catcher in the Rye will make a completely different impact on someone based on when in their age? Can tropes really get across the hilarity of Catch-22, make a troper feel bad for Lt. Slothrop's situation and attempts to escape fate in Gravity's Rainbow, convey the horror Lovecraft was trying to get across? Classic books often give us abstract concepts to wrangle with, and tropes just can't explain these very well.
And the thing is that losing these things, pretending they don't exist, takes out the biggest part of the equation when it comes to analysis. You can't use tropes to tell your friend why this amazing book helped you come to terms with your parent's break up, or showed you you weren't the only one who acted like a stupid teenager, and felt what you felt. TVT, as it is now, gives its users the illusion of depth, but it only really digs a little bit and then just stops before getting to the really good stuff.
And you can say that this is just for fun. That's fine. But TVT presents itself as a group of people looking to analyze literature. And that's just dishonest. All it helps you do is play I Spy with works. Is anything really gained from that? It doesn't teach you how to write. Tropes aren't even about writing, tropes are the result of writing. Writing with tropes explicitly in mind is stifling, because everything you write has to be a nice little lego structure. It's just not good for your writing.
Okay, that was an awful lot of words and I'm not even done, but it's enough to get the idea across. Hopefully it doesn't seem like an attack, because I'm not indicting any tropers, just the system that leads to stuff I'm not a fan of. Respond however you'd like and I'll be happy to talk about it, but that's pretty much how I see it.
A policy in the military that as long as you did not admit to or commit acts of homosexuality you could serve in the military.
Basically if you were in the closet and were never caught you could be in the military. If they found out you were summarily discharged after a often short investigation.
...At least, in theory. In practice, the people that post in Troper Tales are the same ones who shit up pages with That Guy With The Glasses links, so...