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Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat
Jeez, save it for your PHIL 105 or whatever classroom and quit making GBS threads up the thread.

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Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Jeez, save it for your PHIL 105 or whatever classroom and quit making GBS threads up the thread.

Sorry, I thought you guys might to want to talk about how this kind of thing or at least how weird it was and the stuff I was talking about might be pertinent.

I don't want to thread poo poo though, I'm sorry again.

platedlizard posted:

No actually we don't want to talk about this kind of thing here. Both because it's gross, and because this sort of poo poo was one of the reasons why the last thread got gassed.

Understood. Sorry for bothering you all.

Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Sep 30, 2013

platedlizard
Aug 31, 2012

I like plates and lizards.

Josef bugman posted:

Sorry, I thought you guys might to want to talk about how this kind of thing or at least how weird it was and the stuff I was talking about might be pertinent.

I don't want to thread poo poo though, I'm sorry again.

No actually we don't want to talk about this kind of thing here. Both because it's gross, and because this sort of poo poo was one of the reasons why the last thread got gassed.

e. Content. One of the things that really annoys me about TVTropes is how someone will come along and make little comments about the examples. Like this:

quote:

Not My Lucky Day

There are bad days, there are really bad days, and then there's this day. The kind of day that should have been the luckiest one of your life, except for one little problem that makes all the good luck you should be having mean nothing at all. Maybe your usual numbers won on the week you agreed to stop throwing your money away on lottery tickets. Maybe the Publisher's Clearinghouse letter you threw away really was worth a million dollars. Maybe, on the first day of your new diet, the kid who was right behind you in the 7-11 finds a golden ticket in his candy bar.

In most cases, nobody actually gets hurt, but Lady Luck will rub your nose in all the good fortune you'd have had if something else had gone differently.


Examples:

Live-Action TV

*The Jamie Foxx Show: Some hotelier lady won't let some worker at the hotel buy his regular lottery numbers. And it turns that no one won... and that the "asinine" winning numbers of 1-2-3-4-5, were that worker's usual numbers (Not really asinine, as statistically speaking, any sequence of numbers is exactly as likely as any other.)
*It is more likely someone else will pick those numbers.

Seriously, what is the loving point of that? It detracts from the example given and doesn't appear to have been an event in the episode. So why add it?

platedlizard fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Sep 30, 2013

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

Fanfic: Kyon: Big drat Hero
Fanservice, Beam Sabres, Stable Time Loops, and the Unsubtle Harem Plot.
"Count the tropes! Save, collect, trade for swell prizes!"
Kyon: Big drat Hero is the result of creating a crossover between Haruhi Suzumiya and TV Tropes.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Fanfic: Kyon: Big drat Hero
Fanservice, Beam Sabres, Stable Time Loops, and the Unsubtle Harem Plot.
"Count the tropes! Save, collect, trade for swell prizes!"
Kyon: Big drat Hero is the result of creating a crossover between Haruhi Suzumiya and TV Tropes.
Did they seriously name a fanfiction after a TV Trope named after a Firefly line?

FrozenVent
May 1, 2009

The Boeing 737-200QC is the undisputed workhorse of the skies.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Did they seriously name a fanfiction after a TV Trope named after a Firefly line?

They loving love that trope, so I have no doubt believing that they would name an entire serie of books, with a spin-off TV show and movie franchise after it.

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

The page informs me that it used to be on fanfiction.net but is no longer posted there because it received negative reviews.

How terrible do you have to be for even fanfiction.net to say :frogout:?

FrozenVent posted:

They loving love that trope, so I have no doubt believing that they would name an entire serie of books, with a spin-off TV show and movie franchise after it.

You're not far off the mark, you just didn't adjust enough for the fact that we're dealing with anime-obsessed tropers:

quote:

Thanks to hardworking forum goers, there is now a Visual Novelnote Technically a Kinetic Novel adaptation! Volume 1 has been released, covering everything up to the first half of chapter 5. It can be found here.

oldpainless
Oct 30, 2009

This 📆 post brought to you by RAID💥: SHADOW LEGENDS👥.
RAID💥: SHADOW LEGENDS 👥 - It's for your phone📲TM™ #ad📢

Firefly was Joss Whedon too right?

e: yes it was. They really love him.

ArchangeI
Jul 15, 2010

Lottery of Babylon posted:

The page informs me that it used to be on fanfiction.net but is no longer posted there because it received negative reviews.

How terrible do you have to be for even fanfiction.net to say :frogout:?


I always heard that it was the other way around, that the author removed it because he couldn't get decent criticism to save his life, only the usual "OMG so gud, write moar!". On the one hand, FFN removes nothing because of negative reviews (baring fics that are literally cannibalistic murder fantasies), on the other hand, it would be such a TVT thing to pull your fic in a huff because the "this is garbage" reviews aren't ~real criticism~

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

ArchangeI posted:

I always heard that it was the other way around, that the author removed it because he couldn't get decent criticism to save his life, only the usual "OMG so gud, write moar!". On the one hand, FFN removes nothing because of negative reviews (baring fics that are literally cannibalistic murder fantasies), on the other hand, it would be such a TVT thing to pull your fic in a huff because the "this is garbage" reviews aren't ~real criticism~

It says the author pulled it (or, rather, left the old chapters there but stopped posting new ones) "Due to negative reception". No troper will ever stop posting somewhere just because they only get shallow "10/10 you are the best! next chapter pls" reviews, otherwise they wouldn't be tropers anymore.

Looking at the page again, though, it does claim that the negative reception was for the author's opinions, not the author's works. It doesn't say what those opinions were, or mention much else about the author other than the fans supposedly worship him. Maybe "thinks lovely writing is good" was the opinion they didn't like? Or maybe they were all just jealous of this gorgeous art:



Kyon: Big drat Mero

They even have a page just for lovely fanart of this lovely fanfic.

Browsing the trope list it sounds like the fanfic is an excuse to list trope names while having a bunch of schoolgirls make out with one guy and each other. This is distinct from normal troper fanfics, which are normally just an excuse to include as many tropes as possible (to later be listed on TVTropes itself) while having a bunch of schoolgirls make out with one guy and each other.

I'm not even sure what the point of the "crossover with TVTropes" gimmick is meant to be. As far as I know, it's not something that usually happens in other fanfiction communities - are there fanfics about anime characters posting on Gaia Online? On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have any purpose other than spamming the text with Everything's Better With Capitalized Trope Names - this isn't exactly Pale Fire here.

Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Sep 30, 2013

Kaiju Cage Match
Nov 5, 2012




When I see that picture, all I think of that photo of Rottweiler with his coat and sword.

DaveWoo
Aug 14, 2004

Fun Shoe

oldpainless posted:

Firefly was Joss Whedon too right?

e: yes it was. They really love him.

Joss Whedon, Dr. Who, and anime. It's like their Holy Trinity.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Looking at the page again, though, it does claim that the negative reception was for the author's opinions, not the author's works. It doesn't say what those opinions were, or mention much else about the author other than the fans supposedly worship him. Maybe "thinks lovely writing is good" was the opinion they didn't like? Or maybe they were all just jealous of this gorgeous art:

I'm reminded of another fanfic which used to be very popular on TV Tropes called Dumbledore's Army In the Year Of Darkness (DAYD), which had a number of sequels. It was meant to explain what Neville, Ginny, Luna and the rest of Dumbledore's Army were doing during the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I recall it was fairly stereotypical grimdark slog, by and large, and as you might expect there were a lot of "Why couldn't this have been the real Book 7? It's so much better!" comments peppered throughout the site on pages where it was mentioned.

Now, the especially unsettling thing about this particular fanfiction was that its writer was basically a cult leader, and the fanfic was supposedly meant to be some kind of manifesto.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

DaveWoo posted:

Joss Whedon, Dr. Who, and anime. It's like their Holy Trinity.
You forgot Warhammer 40,000 and lovely YA/game tie-in novels.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 1, 2013

...of SCIENCE!
Apr 26, 2008

by Fluffdaddy

DaveWoo posted:

Joss Whedon, Dr. Who, and anime. It's like their Holy Trinity.

In the pilot episode of the S.H.I.E.L.D. television show one of the characters literally refers to a character's source of his powers as his "origin story" in full winking-at-the-camera quippyness.

Joss Whedon is truly the patron saint of Tropers.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

...of SCIENCE! posted:

In the pilot episode of the S.H.I.E.L.D. television show one of the characters literally refers to a character's source of his powers as his "origin story" in full winking-at-the-camera quippyness.

Joss Whedon is truly the patron saint of Tropers.

I'll never listen to anyone who tells me Whedon is anything but a lucky hack.

Flesnolk
Apr 11, 2012
How's that? He's done some all right work I've thought, but he's definitely not as great as the internet has made him think he is.

LaughMyselfTo
Nov 15, 2012

by XyloJW
Joss Whedon is definitely overrated by his fans, but I've never understood the backlash against him. He seems to be pretty good at what he does. I first heard of him because of Dr. Horrible, and unless you count Toy Story (he was the fourth of four writers on that I think, no idea how much if any he contributed) that's still my favorite thing he's done.

GrrrlSweatshirt
Jun 2, 2012

Flesnolk posted:

How's that? He's done some all right work I've thought, but he's definitely not as great as the internet has made him think he is.

I agree, I'm not a fan of most of his work and think he's pretty overrated, but he has turned out some great stuff like Cabin in the Woods.

TGLT
Aug 14, 2009
I think the problem is he gets credit like this: "Where Scream put a postmodern twist on slasher films, The Cabin In The Woods takes on the whole genre and twists even harder... The script brings to the fore Whedon’s love of subverting clichιs while embracing them and teasing out their deeper meaning." (http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-cabin-in-the-woods,72287/)

And it's really inaccurate. I think Cabin in the Woods was a pretty good movie too, but it says gently caress all about horror cliches other than that they exist. It was really frustrating when they bring up all the archetypes at the end, and let the fact that the only female archetypes are both sexual in nature (virgin and slut) pass without comment.

A lot of his stuff feels like that. He brings up cliches or stereotypes or problems, but fails to analyze or challenge them in any meaningful way.

Dean of Swing
Feb 22, 2012

Metal Loaf posted:

Now, the especially unsettling thing about this particular fanfiction was that its writer was basically a cult leader, and the fanfic was supposedly meant to be some kind of manifesto.

Woah. A fanfic cult? How would one go about joining this fine religion?

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Flesnolk posted:

How's that? He's done some all right work I've thought, but he's definitely not as great as the internet has made him think he is.

Because for every Cabin in the Woods he's made he churned out ten lovely "HEY HEY I'M POINTING A TROPE OUT, I'm not DOING anything with it but I'm pointing it out!" wink to the camera filled episodes of 'sexy lady punches things'.

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME

Dean of Swing posted:

Woah. A fanfic cult? How would one go about joining this fine religion?
Get suckered by someone who is a LOTR character on the astral plane.

http://failfandomanonwiki.pbworks.com/w/page/65995575/Thanfiction

One survivor has a blog.
http://kumquatwriter.wordpress.com/
(Just look for the Andrew Blake stuff, not the stuff about her life)

And I like Whedon. Firefly was great, and I recently got into Buffy and have watched the first three seasons. It's pretty cool, I like the plots and dialogue, and as a woman I like the way he treats female characters. The backlash is probably just because there are people out there who are :swoon: obsessed with him, which is lame, but he's not a bad writer.

Apple Tree
Sep 8, 2013
Rather than just argue about Whedon, how about some content. I went and looked up Cabin in the Woods, and check out the first page: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/search_r...n+in+the+woods. It is entirely full of entries, headed Film, WMG, Trivia, Characters, Headscratchers, Fridge, Funny, Nightmare Fuel (duh, it's a horror movie), YMMV and Awesome.

I decided to give them some credit and clicked on 'Fridge', since 'Fridge Logic' is supposed to be the moment of 'Hey, now I think about it that doesn't make sense,' and the movie has moments like that. But you know what it's a list of? 'Fridge Brilliance'. No spotting issues, not for them: it just gets cleverer as it goes along! It's full of shout-outs they can feel clever for spotting!

Which is why Whedon is so loved and also why people are so sick of him, I think. His real skill is on playing the audience. He's a third-generation TV writer and highly professional, and he plays like a pro on people who are way too easy to manipulate.

And of course you can slip things past them. Look at the academic, brilliant, smartest-guy-in-the-room debate they had on the 'Fridge' page:

quote:

-Why did the Kyoto incident fail? Remember that most of the "victims" were about nine years old. This can be a reference to Infant Immortality. However, this can also be a reference to Defanged Horrors; watch the scene where they turn the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl into a frog apparently with the Power of Friendship, note that there were no casualities, and then watch your typical scary movie directed at children. In other words? While they invoked J-horror tropes, the scenario turned into a Lighter and Softer Defanged Horrors version instead!

-An alternative theory is that the ritual in that case was doomed to begin with specifically because the "sacrifices" were children. None of them adequately fit the archetypes they needed to fulfill, and so the formula didn't work.

-Except that would be following the American archetype, not the Japanese one.

-Except that the Ancient Ones demand that the five archetypes be fulfilled. At first, it could be Fridge Horror by assuming that one of the 9-year-olds must be a whore, but then I remembered that children are taught by someone, and I didn't notice a teacher in the classroom. The teacher must be the whore! It is possible to have an athlete, a class clown (fool), a scholar and (hopefully!) virgins in a group of 9-year-olds, so the archetypes would be fulfilled.

-The archetypes for the American branch, as described by the American Director, need not conform with the Japanese archetypes, and vice versa. The archetypes for J-Horror are very different from those in American film —other than the kids having sex in a car in The Ring, NONE of the five archetypes described at the end of this film are found in The Ring or Ju-on or Chakushin Ari, for instance.

All right, so maybe that's not fair. There's also 'Headscratchers.' Maybe somebody notices the blind spots. Let's see...

quote:

-Ignoring the ending, how would the concept of a "sequel" be handled? The film itself has been said to be a metaphor of horror films and their audiences so how would this business go around preparing a "sequel" should a previous survivor return to the area days, months or years later?

-Easy answer, even with the ending. As the base collapses, a brick or something landed on Marty, killing him. This placates the Ancient, though it's still pretty grumpy. The organization is reformed in one year, with new monsters shipped in, and on a shoestring budget they had sure as hell better put on a great show for the Ancient since the last one went so poorly.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Headscratchers/TheCabinInTheWoods

Ah gently caress it.

Wait, wait, one more thing: one person on that page seems to raise a decent thematic point:

quote:

Humans are more important than Humanity" that's the movie team's explanation for the clusterfuck that is the final few minutes?!? Two scared, pathetic little teens are worth more than all the other Seven Billion people in the world!?!? We are supposed to see that rear end in a top hat pothead's actions as a triumph?!? There are men and women and children, with beautiful, fufilling lives, only possible because someone has the duty to keep the wolves out of the sheepfold, and Marty and Dana are right to let them all die?!? They're both gonna die anyway if the Eldritch Abomination gets out, so the two "humans", if they even deserve to be called that at the end, don't even win, they drag the world down with them out of spite. (My problem with the ending, in case I'm not being clear, is that Dana and Marty, as well as the directive team, act as though people are the problem, Dana even says "give someone else a chance". Who else, bitch? Once the Ancients finish slaughtering humanity, they'll just go and torture the next group of Sapients. The evil gods are what makes this necessary, not their victims, and they aren't gonna give anyone else "a chance". And I don't see how Word of God can justify their claim those two selfish, hateful monsters' prides are more valuable than all life on Earth. If they hadn't said that, I wouldn't even be making this outburst, I would just take the Downer Ending at face value, but they did say that, they said that Marty and Dana had a triumph in killing themselves and the rest of Humanity, and that they as individuals are worth more than the human race as a whole, and that statement makes me sick. A pair of self-righteous Nietzche Wannabes decide that the entire world should die if they have to, and were expected to accept that as a good, disgusting.

If you could knock off calling girls 'bitch' and edit it down to about a fifth of its length, that might actually be an interesting debate point. What are the answers?

quote:

We never really get to see this "world" we're supposed to care about. Maybe in this univers it's more crapsack.

Ah gently caress it.

Apple Tree fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Oct 1, 2013

Lottery of Babylon
Apr 25, 2012

STRAIGHT TROPIN'

Thanks to TVTropes' "no notability" rule, a lot of fanfics have pages just like actual books or shows. If a series is mildly popular, there will usually be one or two pages for specific fanfics of it; if a series is very popular, there might be a half-dozen or a dozen; and for a few really popular (among tropers) series, like Evangelion or Homestuck, there might be about twenty. Out of curiosity, I decided to see how many My Little Pony fanfics had their own separate pages.

Three hundred and seventy-seven. And most of those have several additional subpages. And that's just regular fanfics; when you include fan visual novels, fan webcomics, fan play by post games, fan music, fan videos, fan sites, fan blogs, and other assorted bullshit that also have their own separate pages, the number goes up to four hundred and eighty-six.

For comparison, TVTropes has only four hundred and six pages for pre-20th century literature. All the world's classical literature across thousands of years of civilization, up through and including the 19th century, is given less attention than pony fanfics.

But maybe I'm being unfair and these fanfics are good enough to deserve all the attention they get?

Fan Fic: Battleships Universe posted:

The Battleships Universe is a series of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics by totallynotabrony. The story begins in Battleships are Magic, where a modern human battleship ends up in Equestria right as a war begins.

Fan Fic: Equestria Total War posted:

Equestria: Total War is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction written by emkajii. Feeling threatened by the highly magical nature of Equestria, the Kingdom of Gryphonia has launched an all-out invasion. The bearers of the elements of harmony find themselves impressed into service as leaders of the newly created Equestrian army in an effort to repel the invading forces. Unfortunately, they find themselves woefully unprepared for the ravages of war and struggle to remain true to the virtues that they represent.

Meanwhile, in Ponyville, Derpy Hooves finds herself thrust into the position of leadership of a militia of ponies drawn from local civilian populations. What initially becomes a struggle of resistance against the invading forces soon turns into pitched battle as Derpy's competent and inspiring leadership begins to win the admiration and respect of her followers and the attention of the enemy. Derpy finds herself struggling with the necessities of fighting a war while still trying to hold true to some form of morality that allows her and her army to remain ponies.

Fan Fic: The Great Slave King posted:

The Great Slave King, written by TalonMach5, opens with Andrew King — a regular guy — somehow ending up in Equestria. Captured by diamond dogs and forced to work as a slave, King eventually escapes after many years in captivity, but loses his friend and adopted daughter in the process. On the verge of dying of dehydration, he unknowingly stumbles across the Well of Eternity, ascending to godhood and setting in motion a chain of events that will permanently change the world.

Now styling himself as 'The Slave King', the story from here follows his rule as Lord of the Earth as he attempts to gain revenge over those who have wronged him and outmaneuver his fellow deities.

Fan Fic: Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons posted:

Project Horizons is a Recursive Fanfiction for Fallout: Equestria by Somber, and is currently a work in progress.

[...]

Darker and Edgier: Compared to Fallout: Equestria (which is, itself, darker than the original Fallout series of video games. Now that's saying something!). Project Horizons is a lot bleaker in tone, and tackles subjects that KKat only briefly touches on (ie. suicide, rape, and child mortality).

There are Shakespeare plays that still don't have their own pages, but sure, your rapefics are important too.

e:

Fan Fic: Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons posted:

Scotch Tape - a young filly who hasn't even gotten her cutiemark yet - has had multiple sexual encounters with both genders.

Excuse me, I meant pedorapefics.

Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Oct 1, 2013

COBRARocky
Jul 28, 2013

http://web.archive.org/web/20110303073901/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BadassBoast
http://web.archive.org/web/20110114001248/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/NICEHAT
http://web.archive.org/web/20110317041354/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BadassLongcoat
http://web.archive.org/web/20110226124822/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BrilliantButLazy

These were the spergiest parts of Troper Tales. You will find nothing better.

Other favorites include.


http://web.archive.org/web/20090129221140/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BerserkButton
http://web.archive.org/web/20100526232516/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BigBrotherInstinct
http://web.archive.org/web/20110218192921/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/AxCrazy
http://web.archive.org/web/20100904082721/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/HeroicSociopath
http://web.archive.org/web/20110225120453/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TroperTales/BewareTheNiceOnes

quote:

I was born a sociopath. Not sure if holding back the urge of killing people I don't like and raping people I like counts as 'heroic'. Well, I try.

COBRARocky fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Oct 1, 2013

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

:stare: posted:

This troper is a complete social outcast with self esteem issues who is of somewhat above average intelligence. This intelligence is his only remotely notable positive trait and so he uses it to completely define his sense of identity and self worth, but is too afraid to ever put his theoretical genius to the test and apply himself due to the subconscious knowledge that if he does so he will quickly find himself to be not as smart as he's built himself up to be and therefore have an extreme identity crisis.

:what: posted:

•This troper's mother tells him he is this on a regular basis. I admit to being slightly lazy, but not this at all. This is due to the fact that in eighth grade, my grades dropped to a straight C average because I DID take the time off to be lazy (I still consider large parts of that time as good times) and I have trouble with honors classes. After this, I got almost entirely As (a couple of Bs and one C) the next year. Still nothing because of that one C. This year, I am in one honors and one AP class and am fighting epic struggles with doing all my work for both (I usually get around five hours of sleep a night) but still getting Cs, which I always get in honors classes. My mother still believes I can succeed if I try hard enough, and mentions the example of my neighbor, who is in both and succeeding, and everyone including his mother says I'm smarter (I call bullshit on that one, because I know the guy and he is smart) Due to my refusal to believe this and the fact that instead of blindly accepting, I argue, I've switched from being The Favorite to The Unfavorite in a couple of years (I harbor no bitterness as that just shows the positions are meaningless) Due to the fact that my mother does most of the talking at my annual checkups, my PHYSICIAN is now joining in on the act, telling me to get it together and I can still succeed. I used to like him, but after listening to him and my mother kvetch about me together, I'm slightly irritated to say the least.
◦So, you're getting C's on AP courses and have enough trouble with the work that you can only get five hours of sleep, yet you call yourself "brilliant?" And of course you're not bitter, why else would you be bitching about how you're mommy doesn't wuv you any more because your grades are slipping?
◦This troper thinks that the above troper is quite mean, and that the aboveabove troper deserves a cookie, and a full nights sleep.
◦Yeah, I think OP is more saying people THINK he's the trope, but he isn't really and so wishes they'd stop banging on about it. That's what it sounds like to me, anyway.
▪Ah. That makes more sense, then. I feel a bit guilty about what I wrote above if that is the case, and you should indeed get a good nights sleep and a few cookies. I will, however, leave it up as commentary to 'other' people who legitimately mistake above-average workloads for genius. Get some sleep.
◦I second that well-reasoned motion and note the poor lad's remarkable resemblance to myself in years gone by. Give the wee lad a cookie.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Oct 1, 2013

COBRARocky
Jul 28, 2013

quote:

This Troper is known for wearing many of hats,but his most famous so far is his red black and white hat,that had his internet name on the front of it.

quote:

This troper has a nice trilby. Not an as-nice-as-that-one one (Hyperlink to Zero Punctuation), of course, just a plain-old-nice one. It has feathers in, but that is subject to change.

quote:

This troper adores her grey fedora, but occasionally swaps it out for a violet cloche, a fuzzy lavender...something, a beret, or the golf hat she stole from her brother. This troper really likes hats.

quote:

This troper has a thing for wearing beat up fedoras, a habit he stole from his brother.

quote:

This troper wears a hat adorned with fox ears, and badges attached to it, pretty much everywhere.

quote:

I have been well known for my large colection of trilbys.

This loving hat.

What is it about this loving hat.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

COBRARocky posted:

This loving hat.

What is it about this loving hat.
I'm convinced that it's an attempt to give their amorphous bodies definition, a bit like George Lucas's beard.

Big Grunty Secret
Aug 28, 2007

Just one question, though. Is there a way to take off my pants?
Ugh every time I hear people being proud about "Brilliant but Lazy", I'm reminded of myself in high school. Turns out it doesn't really impress any teacher when you don't turn in work all semester.

I think part of it is that Tropers see themselves as above doing menial schoolwork each day and should only be given EPIC CHALLENGES TO TEST THEIR LIMITLESS INTELLIGENCE. Even if your homework is piss easy, doing it is a sign of personal responsibility and respect to the teacher, something I wish I had known in school.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I'm convinced that it's an attempt to give their amorphous bodies definition, a bit like George Lucas's beard.

It's this, same reason fat guys with round faces have goatees.

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

Weep for the 33 pencils.

Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

Lottery of Babylon posted:

But maybe I'm being unfair and these fanfics are good enough to deserve all the attention they get?

Most of those pages are the result of people going "I want more people to read my fanfic, and TV Tropes isn't going to stop me from advertising it because of its notability clause. So..."

Speaking of unneeded fanfic pages...

Knight of Lolicon posted:

Mike is an everyguy who still holes up with his parents. When some day he decides to smash all those stereotypes and go out for an adventure, he finds and saves a rather stunning girl from falling down a bridge and cracking her head, by painfully cushioning her. As the lass has lost her memory (prior to her encounter with Mike) the boy names her 'Linda' (Spanish for 'pretty') and takes her in to his house. No parents of her's around, no clue about them except for a mysterious letter... 'Just sleep a night, and then everything will be alright'. They do so and when they awake... a whole animated world gives them a non-welcome. Mike makes a pact with the resident Mentor Mascot: 'Shonenji, Genderiel of Shonen' in exchange for power to help Linda... and now he has to find all Genderiels and restore their goddess: the Goddess of Lolicon, in the off chance that she has the way to return them home. Along the way, a rival appears: the evil Lord Xig-Lem, who thinks about lolis as just sex dolls, and his helper: a corrupted Genderiel called Shojonoe.

[...]

The premise itself is strange. The Goddess of Lolicon appears to be for all intents and purposes your run-of-the-mill deity, and the lolis are nothing more than regular girls from each Universe that lend the hero Power Ups via simple platonic hugs.

It's only in the sequel where the links to Lolicon are revealed, and even then the story's moral is that lusting after little girls is bad.

"They're not sex objects!" says the person who wrote an entire fanfic series centered around the concept of being attracted to little girls...

Knight of Lolicon posted:

Alternative Character Interpretation: Invoked by the author. The fic runs on the idea that the very first fictional Lolita (Dolores Haze) was a real person that died and became some kind of goddess/overseer of the Toon World, after her soul was cleansed, to represent the Lolicon phenomemon... On the same note, Humbert is bleached into being a hero for supossedly turning his sexual love into the fatherly kind, and shooting the 'villain' who was trying to, you know... make his daughter star a porn film.

Mazz, on the discussion page posted:

I was cleaning up this, but I reached Gag Boobs and kind of hit a snag.

I think my brain doesn't want me to continue.

This page was a candidate for deletion at one point for being incoherent pedoshit, but was kept. This was brought up in an earlier thread, but it's worth bringing up again because... buh.

BaDandy
Apr 3, 2013

"This taste...

is the taste of a liar!"
Not really a huge thing content-wise, but these things stuck out to me for some reason.

Somebody points out that Gendo Ikari is listed as a "Woobie" (ick), I go to check and-

quote:

Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Definitely in the manga.

...Okay. They don't explain why it's the case for just the manga, which is another thing that's pretty annoying. It seems like they assume that other fans of the thing they're writing about are reading this and don't feel the need to expand on what they said.

What IS Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, anyway?

quote:

This is a character who wants to destroy everything and everyone in the story, and is suddenly in a position to do so (on a small or large scale); but in contrast to the Ax Crazy Omnicidal Maniac, he/she has some plausible, outright tragic reason to do so. In some cases, the other characters outright sympathize with this one (whether or not the audience does too is out of the equation here), all the while accepting that they must be stopped. Sometimes, the character is even portrayed as likeable, just...not with the right mindset.

The essential element is that the destroyer has been pushed beyond all reason. This may or may not make them The Woobie, but either way they are portrayed as having a crappy existence. This is a character who, by definition, is constantly beaten up, kicked around, and lives an all-around miserable life. Should they lose everything and everyone they trust (be it through betrayal or in other cruel ways), and then just so happen upon the instrument of revenge against the cruel, heartless world that brought them so much pain, one need not be a genius to figure out whom the character will cast their hateful gaze upon. Think of this person as a Jerkass Woobie, only with the jerkassery replaced by insanity (though many characters do fulfill both tropes).

This trope is less about the Sliding Scale of Villain Threat and more about how much a character has been broken — physically, mentally, and emotionally — before they finally snap and blame the whole world for all the crap they has been through. Of course, they must crack and pose a sudden threat of some sort, to the characters and/or the setting. And some of them do get their finger on the nuke trigger. In a few extreme cases, they themselves are the nuke.

Not to be confused with Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds, where a bumbling but otherwise nice person accidentally destroys actual worlds, leading to What the Hell, Hero? and Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moments.
This trope is more closely related to Break the Cutie, Freudian Excuse, Bullying a Dragon, Who's Laughing Now?, and Then Let Me Be Evil. May have emerged as a deconstruction of the Cosmic Plaything.

Not the same as Put Them All Out of My Misery, which is the trope for characters who rationalize their destructive behavior by insisting that society, or the earth, must be somehow cleansed or punished for some past injustice, making it the inverse of this trope. Motive Rant, Cry for the Devil, and Strawman Has a Point are more typical of that trope. For characters, especially villains somewhere in between this trope and that one, see Jerkass Woobie. Also note that overlaps between the two tropes are not impossible.
May overlap with Death Seeker, if they want to die, but intend to make sure that everyone else goes first. Also, be careful about applying this label to someone who did have a breaking past, and yet let the "destroyer" part override the "woobie" one and crossed the Moral Event Horizon: that's certainly a huge Draco in Leather Pants in the making.
And just to be clear, a character does not have to literally destroy worlds to fit this trope.
For actual world-destroying tropes, see Why You Should Destroy The Planet Earth.
There are several unmarked spoilers ahead! You have been warned.
Note: This trope is no longer considered YMMV, because not all examples here need to be sympathetic to the audience.

Can somebody please tell me how Gendo Ikari fits the bolded part? I don't get it-....wait, what's that last thing?

quote:

Note: This trope is no longer considered YMMV, because not all examples here need to be sympathetic to the audience.

....But...wait.

The entire reason why the Woobie subsets even exist is because the audience is supposed to sympathize with them. Isn't it? Isn't that what it's supposed to mean? Why does this get special treatment? Why should Gendo be considered a Woobie at all? Why doesn't this website follow its own goddamn asinine rules? I'm not even angry, just severely confused.

Bonus:

quote:

Yandere: For Yui.

Yandere. He's Yandere for Yui. Not obsessive. Not Japanese enough. Gotta be Yandere. I don't even know where the hell they get this, unless they're going by Yui dying and Gendo planning to bring about instrumentality so he can be with her again. And if that's the case, that's not...quite the word they're looking for.

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Adnachiel posted:

Speaking of unneeded fanfic pages...
That's... that's some prime TV Tropes right there, I tell you what.

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

Adnachiel posted:

Most of those pages are the result of people going "I want more people to read my fanfic, and TV Tropes isn't going to stop me from advertising it because of its notability clause. So..."

Same thing with self published stuff. I once knew a guy who bragged about inserting as many tropes from the site as possible into his work so he could advertise it in as many trope pages as possible.

I don't think that plan really worked out for him though.

(He was also the sort of guy who watched terrible fanservicey anime because he was bored with regular stories after reading TVTropes and realizing that nothing is original or whatever, so make of that what you will)

BaDandy
Apr 3, 2013

"This taste...

is the taste of a liar!"

quote:

Alternative Character Interpretation: Invoked by the author. The fic runs on the idea that the very first fictional Lolita (Dolores Haze) was a real person that died and became some kind of goddess/overseer of the Toon World, after her soul was cleansed, to represent the Lolicon phenomemon... On the same note, Humbert is bleached into being a hero for supossedly turning his sexual love into the fatherly kind, and shooting the 'villain' who was trying to, you know... make his daughter star a porn film.

Does anything on there say why something like this was kept or is it just...man, I dunno. I can't even say anything witty about this.

They totally got rid of the creepy porn stuff, you guys!

DStecks
Feb 6, 2012

Srice posted:

Same thing with self published stuff. I once knew a guy who bragged about inserting as many tropes from the site as possible into his work so he could advertise it in as many trope pages as possible.

I don't think that plan really worked out for him though.

Wait... he actually altered his work so he could pad it with tropes? Did it not occur to him that he could simply fudge examples of tropes that are kind of what happens in his work, you know, like about 80% of trope examples?

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

DStecks posted:

Wait... he actually altered his work so he could pad it with tropes? Did it not occur to him that he could simply fudge examples of tropes that are kind of what happens in his work, you know, like about 80% of trope examples?

Not so much altered as much as he looked up trope pages while he wrote so he could fit those into the story.

...I'm not sure which is worse, honestly.

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Adnachiel
Oct 21, 2012

BaDandy posted:

Does anything on there say why something like this was kept or is it just...man, I dunno. I can't even say anything witty about this.

Here's the discussion thread. The general consensus appeared to be that the guy who wrote it/created the page is an idiot who doesn't know what the word "lolicon" really means, and that it was okay to keep because there is no actual porn or fanservice.

  • Locked thread