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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Regarding Trope Name Decay...
While not that every old-since-changed-name was really great the reason for the changes I think are fundamentally faulty. The drive to be accesible is besides the point. When I saw "Xanatos Gambit" initially I did not immediately recall Gargoyles. Gargoyles is fairly obscure as far as cartoons go. 90s cartoons are only well remembered to a fairly specific demographic and Gargoyles is far from the most prominent there even there. It is not an accessible title for a trope.
But it is a MASSIVELY cool title and makes you want to click on the link to read the description to find out just what a Xanatos Gambit is. Its the sort of thing that drives the site and is what made it so much fun. I used the past tense because its simply not as fun anymore with the drive to make trope accesible an obvious. There's nothing obvious or really descriptive about Chekov's Gun and Macguffin, and those tropes are professional jargon that predate the site by decades at least.
Now I'm not saying every change has been bad. Spikification is a good example of one that had numerous problems. For one thing Spike's case (while I'm not a big Buffy fan so I may be wrong) reminds me more of Villain Decay and Good Is Dumb then exemplifying the trope. However perhaps more importantly it was an awkward made up word, even when you clicked on it you didn't get that moment of dawning comprehension at its brilliance upon find out where it came from. It smelled like people wanting to related everything to Joss Whedon. However I'd be the first to say that that last reason would be a horrible cause to rename Big Damn Heroes.
Problem is I don't think that the majority of changes meet the standards for changing. Are your really telling me that "Artistic License X" is better then "You Fail X Forever" because I'll be the first to say the changed name reeks of Political Correctness Gone Mad. Oooh no we can't have a snarky title about horrendous science errors people might be offended. Except I'd say generally we are not. People have always known that writers cannot do science or otherwise ignore it. Artistic license just doesn't feel weighty enough for flying through a black hole to time travel. Artistic license is more like mysteriously never getting cut by glass while going through a window, possible but unlikely versus flat out impossible. And above all it just lacks the magic of something that grew organically from the site's development, as opposed to something that was calculated to be "better"
I could go on an on. Its not one sided but tvtropes has definitely experienced They Changed It Now It Sucks. I know I realized I would never quite enjoy the site as much as the day they changed the funny meme joke title of Boat Lights to the utterly bland and unmagical Mismatched Eyes. Boooorrrinng.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Yes, the concept is hardly just limited to Japan, but, so far, the Japanese term for it is the most succinct way of describing it without taking up a paragraph.
So...using a foreign word that requires you to find out what it means is more succinct than using an actual English word with the same connotations that people know of already?
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Originally Posted by
Soras Teva Gee
Are your really telling me that "Artistic License X" is better then "You Fail X Forever" because I'll be the first to say the changed name reeks of Political Correctness Gone Mad.
Personally I'd say I don't like either. The former is too forgiving, the latter is too snarky. I'd personally prefer one that just indicates it doesn't quite work with our scientific knowledge without passing judgment on whether it's acceptable in this case or not.
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Artistic license just doesn't feel weighty enough for flying through a black hole to time travel.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, we don't actually know what would happen if someone were to fly into a black hole. Based on that, I can't see how it would be "incorrect" to have it be time travel, alternate universes, or Sparkly Funtime Fairy Land. Considering all the other cases where authors can get science wrong, it seems odd to use this as your example.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Lord Seth
So...using a foreign word that requires you to find out what it means is more succinct than using an actual English word with the same connotations that people know of already?
What's wrong with not automatically knowing what something means? I daresay presenting the cultural elements undiluted, and encouraging intellectual curiosity among the visitors to that site, is by far the superior option.
I mean, god forbid - you might click on a link and learn something new. The horror!
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Lord Seth
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, we don't actually know what would happen if someone were to fly into a black hole. Based on that, I can't see how it would be "incorrect" to have it be time travel, alternate universes, or Sparkly Funtime Fairy Land. Considering all the other cases where authors can get science wrong, it seems odd to use this as your example.
What happens when you fly into a black hole is simple: at some point the gravitational differential over the length of your body exceeds the tensile strength of your flesh, blood and bone and you are gravitationally elongated to death. How exactly this happens is very complex (and unpleasant) material physics problem that I don't know how to solve, but it'll certainly happen.
edit: although you'd probably be unconscious by this point owing to said gravitational differential's unfortunate effect on your blood pressure.
(Technically of course a black hole could be small enough to not have a sufficiently steep gravity well for this to occur. However such a black hole would, I suspect without doing a lot tedious calculation, be so small one could not fall into it. Even should you come across a black hole of a size where you could approach it without being stretched to death, anything you put across the event horizon isn't coming back since it would have to be accelerated beyond lightspeed to escape. Also, since physical interaction travels at lightspeed, it strikes me as plausible that anything below the EV would essentially be severed, in which case falling through would be like having your body cut off at the point it passed the EV. Whether or not you'd feel it is an interesting question, because of course nerve signals travel slower than lightspeed and hence may not be able to reach your brain.)
If you mean what happens to matter when put into a black hole, that is unknown. Space does strange things I'd need to be in a very different Ph.D. program to understand when the curvature goes essentially infinite.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Lord Seth
So...using a foreign word that requires you to find out what it means is more succinct than using an actual English word with the same connotations that people know of already?Personally I'd say I don't like either. The former is too forgiving, the latter is too snarky. I'd personally prefer one that just indicates it doesn't quite work with our scientific knowledge without passing judgment on whether it's acceptable in this case or not.
I'd be open to having taken a third option with the like of "X Does Not Work That Way" expanded in meaning.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, we don't actually know what would happen if someone were to fly into a black hole. Based on that, I can't see how it would be "incorrect" to have it be time travel, alternate universes, or Sparkly Funtime Fairy Land. Considering all the other cases where authors can get science wrong, it seems odd to use this as your example.
Well almost by definition you can't fly through a black hole, which is more of a problem then the time travel aspect. Gravity crushing you and time dilation makes even entering one rather weird.
And it was an particular references to Abrams!Trek because where "black hole" seems to just be tacked on to a completely different anomaly in the name of being vaguely familar to an (assumed) ignorant audience as opposed to coming up with a Technobabble term for its particular Negative Space Wedgie.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Mauve Shirt
So, the other day I was discussing something with a friend, I don't remember what exactly, some bit of media. I used the term "lampshading", he glared at me like I was some sort of pathetic thing and said "TV Tropes." So what? First of all, hanging a lampshade is a real thing, I could have learned that phrase from Wikipedia. "But you did learn it from TV Tropes." Again, so what?
Does anyone else react this way when someone references a trope or something they learned on that website in a real life conversation? Why?
Aside from people who want to be snobs who look down on anyone who admits to using the internet recreationally, no, not really. I notice far more people taking TV tropes too seriously and trying to use it and memes to form a sort of newspeak in order to exclude others than people who set out to try to be elitists and scorn the entire thing.
Short case, this person is not actually a friend if he treats you like that, more than likely.
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Yes, the concept is hardly just limited to Japan, but, so far, the Japanese term for it is the most succinct way of describing it without taking up a paragraph.
Which, incidentally, is what the trope description is for.
Well, hey now, there's a very succinct, convenient word for them that's readily understood by any English speaker. It's just also a swear word more often than not.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Psyren
If you recall, I started this whole back and forth by agreeing with you. You responded by arguing with me. (Seriously.)
I responded disagreeing with you because you added something to the discussion that I disagreed with.
I agreed with you on Yamato Nadeshiko not being translatable. I do not at all and will never agree with you that nakama isn't.
See? It's possible to agree on some topics and disagree on others!
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Technobabble can be done well.
After all, if you got someone, even an educated someone, from the mid-19th century and talked to them about "splitting the atom" and "programming a computer" the former would be a contradiction in terms, atoms thought to being being, and literally meaning, "indivisible" and the latter making no sense either as a computer was a profession and and program was only a noun.
Well done technobabble can give the impression of jargon concerning laws and applications that are not of our own world.
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Originally Posted by Lord Seth
So...using a foreign word that requires you to find out what it means is more succinct than using an actual English word with the same connotations that people know of already?
What word though? 'Housewife' is a more general trope, practically "People use Chairs" level, while 'Yamato Nadeshiko' is more about about a certain set of ideals and their use in characterization. T
aking a word from a foreign language for a concept that already exists but doesn't have a single term has a long history in English.
For an extremely obvious example, we could say "Pleasure from another's discomfort", but schadenfreude works as well.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
I typed in the Swedish equivalent of the only true happiness (skadeglädje, as described above) into a dictionary and got "malicious pleasure (glee), schadenfreude ". The first seem to fit quite well, while the second sound German to the point it is almost Swedish.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Elder Tsofu
I typed in the Swedish equivalent of the only true happiness (skadeglädje, as described above) into a dictionary and got "malicious pleasure (glee), schadenfreude ". The first seem to fit quite well, while the second sound German to the point it is almost Swedish.
We got the word from German, I am sure. Remember that 50% of out language is medieval German.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Yuki Akuma
While not trying to argue the point (I think the rename was a good thing), I find it amusing that you were trying to replace a Japanese word with a French one.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
What?
Comrade is English.
First use in English: 16th century. Originally from French and Spanish.
This is what English does. It takes words from other languages and mutates them. This doesn't make them less English.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Yuki: I'm not saying I disagree. English is definitely a big stealer of words and such.
I just found it amusing- not saying it makes you any less right.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Yuki Akuma
See? It's possible to agree on some topics and disagree on others!
Yet when I do it, I'm "skimming your posts" or whatever nonsense you said. This subdiscussion has run its course though.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Yuki Akuma
What?
Comrade is English.
First use in English: 16th century. Originally from French and Spanish.
This is what English does. It takes words from other languages and mutates them. This doesn't make them less English.
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Originally Posted by
Shadow of the Sun
Yuki: I'm not saying I disagree. English is definitely a big stealer of words and such.
I just found it amusing- not saying it makes you any less right.
We are the Anglophones, lower your shields and surrender your vocabulary(and tea). Your linguistic and culinary distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Arminius
We are the Anglophones, lower your shields and surrender your vocabulary(and tea). Your linguistic and culinary distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.
Darn tootin'!
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
averagejoe
Your mom has long carbon-hydrogen chains.
Oh god, not the mods too.
Anyway, on a [somewhat] tangent, a discussion less serious and more slightly sarcastic rants about Tvtropes. Tvtropes fought back by saying it is a forum filled with trolls and stuck up somethingorothers. Please do not let this thread devolve into that.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Hazzardevil
Anyway, on a [somewhat] tangent, a discussion less serious and more slightly sarcastic rants about Tvtropes. Tvtropes fought back by saying it is a forum filled with trolls and stuck up somethingorothers. Please do not let this thread devolve into that.
So you're saying don't discuss TV Tropes or they'll create a page dedicated to character assassination? :smallconfused:
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Coidzor
So you're saying don't discuss TV Tropes or they'll create a page dedicated to character assassination? :smallconfused:
If you diss them and tick off the top moderators personally like Something Awful did then this isn't too far off the mark (although they're more likely to lock or delete your page). The mods really hate that place at the moment; there was a kerfuffle over the Lets Play page due to its strong SA references.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Trazoi
If you diss them and tick off the top moderators personally like Something Awful did then this isn't too far off the mark (although they're more likely to lock or delete your page). The mods really hate that place at the moment; there was a kerfuffle over the Lets Play page due to its strong SA references.
Oh the internet, that now I have to worry about people with too much time and vitriol on their hands coming after me for observing that the internet is being the internet again. :smallsigh:
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Psyren
What's wrong with not automatically knowing what something means?
You're creating a strawman. What I'm saying is that there's no need to stretch into another language if you can express the same thing in your own language just as simply.
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Originally Posted by
Shadow of the Sun
While not trying to argue the point (I think the rename was a good thing), I find it amusing that you were trying to replace a Japanese word with a French one.
"Comrade" is a thoroughly English term. You can't even say that it's the same as a French word, because the associated French word is camerade. It's like saying that "computadora" isn't a Spanish word because it has its roots in other languages.
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
What word though? 'Housewife' is a more general trope, practically "People use Chairs" level, while 'Yamato Nadeshiko' is more about about a certain set of ideals and their use in characterization.
I was referring to Nakama.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Coidzor
Oh the internet, that now I have to worry about people with too much time and vitriol on their hands coming after me for observing that the internet is being the internet again. :smallsigh:
I had to re-read that several times to figure out which actors are TV Tropes, Something Awful, me, or you. I think it works in almost every combination. :smallwink:
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Lord Seth
I was referring to Nakama.
Ah. My mistake.
Well, Comrade in this sense has unfortunately been diluted by its use as a universal honorific under certain governmental systems in my opinion.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
It's been used like that since 1884, and yet people still recognise the other non-diluted meaning.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Ah. My mistake.
Well, Comrade in this sense has unfortunately been diluted by its use as a universal honorific under certain governmental systems in my opinion.
I'd say that's true, also I'm not sure if in actual use is quite... right to get what nakama is trying. Then again I don't speak Japanese so I'd have to wonder how much of this idea is just anime fans putting on airs since 99% of them don't speak Japanese either.
If I'd been changing I'd probably have gone with "The Party" or maybe "The Crew" for the trope myself.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Ah. My mistake.
Well, Comrade in this sense has unfortunately been diluted by its use as a universal honorific under certain governmental systems in my opinion.
Has it really been, though? I didn't even know the association until I read Animal Farm. The term might not be used that much, but, in my experience at least, it's lost a significant amount of the stigma that supposedly was attached to it.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Soras Teva Gee
I'd say that's true, also I'm not sure if in actual use is quite... right to get what nakama is trying. Then again I don't speak Japanese so I'd have to wonder how much of this idea is just anime fans putting on airs since 99% of them don't speak Japanese either.
I don't speak Japanese either so I'm curious about this too. Is it actually a connontantion of the word in Japanese culture or is it just from its use in one work (One Piece?)?
Otherwise you could go with the Aussie and call them true mates, although the rest of the world would think that's a shipping trope.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Yuki Akuma
It's been used like that since 1884, and yet people still recognise the other non-diluted meaning.
Recognize, perhaps, but if someone called you their comrade, would you immediately think they considered you family in all but blood? That might make a good trope title, as awkward as it is: In All But Blood.
The famous St. Crispin's Day speech is an attempt to evoke that feeling.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Ah. My mistake.
Well, Comrade in this sense has unfortunately been diluted by its use as a universal honorific under certain governmental systems in my opinion.
In fact the word comrade (more specifically the Russian word Tovarishch which translates as comrade) was used as that honorific precisely because of the sense we are talking about. The first uses of comrade in the context that became honorific were in fact using the word in the "family in all but blood" context. Then it was used so universally that it lost some meaning, but it's original use in that context was only because it had that meaning to begin with.
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Re: The controversial topic of TV Tropes
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Originally Posted by
Ravens_cry
Ah. My mistake.
Well, Comrade in this sense has unfortunately been diluted by its use as a universal honorific under certain governmental systems in my opinion.
... and nakama is often used from co-workers or sport team members. Why doesn't that dilute the Japanese term?