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What if you don't want to give out the names of your characters?

Smoking Crow posted:

Also, be sure to give possible titles for the next TvTropes thread, TvTropes, The Sixth Sense.

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"Anyone know if there's any way to treat a burned stomach lining?"

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"What's the password?"
"Open this loving door!"
"...Alright, you're good. Sorry about that."

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"The government at least managed to keep the riverboats running. If the right business folk bribed the right government folk, sometimes they'd even run on time."

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"I looked back at Leon, but he was looking away. He wasn’t looking at another girl, but it was still enough to trigger my inner Polynesian tribal fire god of tiki rage. I NEEDED TO BE APPEASED."
-Narration from my (rather ignorant) yandere protagonist
"I imagined toked up teen addicts faced similar situations when they accidentally invited their dealer over to a party. Except in this case, the dealer was acting way nicer to the person he wasn’t selling to and also had teleportation powers and a magical pool cue and I was the one who tried to give him drugs because I loved him."
-Narration from the same protagonist after finding out who her crush really is and then being brought home to her mother by him

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Ithaqua explaining to Loki why he prefer eating people in his natural form.
"The Wind Walker kept his eyes on The Trickster God while he nibbled the skin off of the human finger he was eating, tearing a piece of marinated flesh off and swallowing as he continued, "I prefer my natural from, because it's so much easier to eat people like that. There's no issue with having to keep up with pointless table manners or having to use utensils. I don't even have to chew, I can just swallow them alive. There's no risk of choking on a femur, much less being wary of choking on a knuckle bone."

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Getting into my characters' heads and figuring out what they would do in any given situation.

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Getting out of the pre-production phase and actually start writing the damned thing.

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Aye-yai-yai. Where do I begin?
1. Deep, deep depression.
2. Procrastination.
3. Mental masturbation to fantasies of universal acceptance.
4. Concerns about storytelling ability.

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1. 'Borrowing' (intentionally or unintentionally) elements from history/other works.
2. Procrastination. I find it near impossible to get started.
3. Laziness in justifying disclosure of information. I have kings giving highly classified pieces of information to peasants they've just met, because I'm too lazy to have trust build up.
4. Trying to write things visually. I watch a movie or something and think 'I want something like this' (see point 1.), but it doesn't work on paper.

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Plots. I can come up with settings, people, religions, magic systems, geology, technology and the like forever, but then I can't figure out how to make them do anything. As a result, I keep winding up with pinball protagonists who aren't particularly engaging and aren't trying to accomplish anything worth doing.

made of bees posted:

Did he just not respond when you told him about the account thing? I'd think as paranoid as he is about SA he'd double-check that poo poo was secure even if he thought you were lying.

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Ok guys I've come up with the basic ideas for a cyberpunk-ish world and am trying to fill in the gaps but there are a few things I'm not sure about.
There is no need for me to give you a full history of the setting but I'll give a quick description of how it is now so you can see how everything fits together.
Humans live in giant walled cities connected by a network of trains (and for the very wealthy aircraft) however each city is self sufficient and most people never leave their city. While in the future the setting is still reminiscent of modern society. The structure of society has changed but people still have similar values and technology while advanced isn't technology still fills a similar role as it does today. Think 20-30 years in the future with regards to technology- technology can still do the same basic things just better. There are a number of megacorporations which have presence the majority of the cities. Although they all cover a wide range of industries they have different strengths and weakness. They wield a lot of power but they aren't in control and have to follow the laws of the city (although their influence allows a little bending). Other factions within the city are the police (who are strict and oppressive in their attempt to reduce the high crime rate but aren't truly bad) and rebel/crime groups who want to alter the power balance.
My problems:
I want the megacorps to not only fight economically but to also have violent clashes between teams of enforcers (and sometimes the police), however they are still bound by the law of the city. I can't think of a way for them to get away with regularly committing violent attacks, especially against the police. I can't think of a reason why the average person who is aware of these fights (although they may not have seen one themselves) would tolerate the behaviour.
On a similar note what reasons could the megacorps have to create and train groups of soldiers and send them out against each other. Many corps use modified humans (with bionics or bioengineering) so they would be expensive to create.
How can I portray the police as a dangerous force to reckon with and keep them from appearing evil? They are strict and willing to resort to serious violence but in end their motives good (more or less).
To make the other aspects work how oppressed should I make the normal people? Life should be hard with few opportunities but I don't want the whole population perpetually miserable.

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I have a story in draft form which is historical fantasy focusing on a conflict similar to the ones in all those books and movies where the hero joins the French Foreign Legion and finds himself digging trenches and fighting hostile natives in the middle of the desert. So, not exactly "Lawrence of Arabia". More like Beau Geste.
My protagonist's a native in a fantasy North African country (think Algeria or Morocco) and my plan is that as well as fighting legionnaires he's going to come up against legendary creatures such as rocs and ghuls from the Arabian Nights. And of course, there's the flying carpets, beautiful female dancers (and maybe some male dancers- why are all fictional Arab court dancers women?), powerful kings (or local sheikhs), sorcerors and magical flying wooden horses- and genuinely magical living horses.
Anyone have suggestions on how to flesh this setting out? For example, might flying carpets and magical, genetically modified (and wooden) flying horses (guerrillas) compete with steam-powered (through solar power)dirigibles and guns and other weapons powered by elemental magic? (colonial military forces)

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Blackfire, KC means "doing to prevent magic from sensing them", not "physically doing". And this brings up an important point in these threads: people ought to know everything that's relevant. You are not in control here, you are part of a larger whole. In order to write properly, people need to know how everything works. Can you imagine trying to talk about symbolism in Heart of Darkness without knowing anything about it?
Furthermore, without explicit justifications, people run the risk of using what they claim are valid reasons to get around stuff they technically shouldn't. There's nothing to stop somebody from pulling an Everything-Proof Shield from out of their rear end and forcing people to accept it because there's a good reason for it in their work.
Which it kind of feels like you're doing here. "Yes, there's a legitimate reason the Core's anti-magic didn't affect Tanis's technically-not magic, and yes, there's a legitimate reason Alice can't feel Valerion's technically-not magic. But, no, you can't hear it. It's a secret."

TheWorldIsSquare posted:

I'm from BTL, and while no one really cares if you make fun of us, calling us pedophiles isn't a place you want to go. We aren't, which is plain to see if if you take a cursory glance around our website or our rules ("We have no tolerance for pedoshit. None. Get it away. If you have pedophilic thoughts, get off the Internet and get some help. We hope you succeed and wish you luck, but we can't help you."), and the last time sperglords like Volume tried to "collect evidence" to prove we were pedos you guys ended up accusing someone who had actually been molested as a child. Just a heads up.

Smoking Crow posted:

2) If you used to be/are a troper DO NOT TELL US ABOUT IT.
No one cares. No one cares how much of a good idea TvTropes is. No one cares how good it used to be. We don't care if you were/are "one of the good ones." If are a troper, don't try to "befriend the goons" to try to get us to stop making fun of you. Join SA if you want, just don't make this a huge ex-troper circlejerk.

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I (like many people) want to write my own original story. Except that my idea re-uses many characters of a recursive fanfiction that I once wrote. Mainly: the original family structure is mostly the same. The protagonist and conflicts change, the setting is completely different (well, it still on earth, but the supernatural changes). I don’t know if I should try to distance myself from that? I don’t think that story is ever going to be published, but I sort want to write it as if it was…

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I've rewritten fanfiction with non-original characters with just changed names and personality tweaks and thus far nobody's noticed. I say go for it.

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If it's your own original character to begin with, you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

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Hey I took some fancharacters and gave them a universe after stripping all ties from the characters of that canon. Since then they've grown to where they're hardly recognizable as the fancharacters they were.
I don't see a problem.

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My current batch of characters started as part of a Pokemon fanfic. The canon human characters and other aspects of the world, such as gyms and evil teams, barely existed as it was, so it wasn't too hard to transform their more mundane 'mons into pets and get rid of the rest. The constructed world I had built was drifting further and further away from the source material, so my characters were practically begging to break away.
So, no, reiterating what everyone else before me has said, it isn't a bad idea at all and should be perfectly doable.

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Eventually, this accretion of fan-born details and mutations turns into things that "everybody knows" about the series. Those new to or unfamiliar with the original material are frequently confused into believing that it obviously must be canon if so many people mention it, even "facts" of the Epileptic Trees variety. This is especially the case with series that have long runs and which gloss over details which are unimportant to the plot but are of interest to the fans and the fan writers.

One famous example of this is the anime Ranma 1/2, released well before the Internet became ubiquitous and when many fans had no easy access to the original source material. All manner of details (including the explanation of Akane's mallet as either a ki attack or as residing in a hyperdimensional pocket, her Flanderization into a "psychobitch", her lethal cooking (rather than being just bad), and the names and fates of the many missing mothers) were never touched on in the show but became standardized in Ranma fan fiction over the course of approximately a decade. The process was accelerated and exacerbated by the appearance of fanfiction written by people who had never actually seen the show itself and whose only exposure to Ranma was other fanfiction.

Another famous example is the Harry Potter fanfic The Draco Trilogy, which was apparently so widely read that details such as Blaise Zabini being female and Ginny's name being Virginia were taken to be canon, although they were both refuted by later books.

It's not surprising that fans of some shows occasionally pen FAQs solely to reduce the accumulation of fanon in this way.

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Justin and Alex in Wizards of Waverly Place - the point where the pairing used to have a separate Incest Yay page, until it was sent here.

Quite common in recent Kamen Rider series. Especially Kamen Rider Kiva and its many bathing scenes. However, "Kivacest" typically refers not to Wataru and Otoya despite their epic Time Travel-enabled bath scene (with back scrubbing!) but to Wataru and Taiga, who turns out to be his brother.

The majority of the Supernatural fandom, known as Wincest shippers, see this between Sam and Dean Winchester.
It has died down a bit since Castiel showed up, though.

Maple Leaf posted:

After knowing what the internet's done to it, is it okay to just wear a fedora? Like, say you need to be somewhere, and you're in a rush, and it's raining out... you just throw on a pair of shoes, a jacket, and the first hat off a rack, and it happens to be a fedora. Can you wear it in a situation like that without immediately being pinned as a troper/neckbeard/'from the internet'? Or should we just burn all the fedoras and save ourselves the trouble?

COBRARocky posted:

Fuego Fish posted:

I could tear into this with critique, but "show don't tell, you incompetent shitstain" would cover most of the problems.

WickedHate posted:

This loving website.

Apple Tree posted:

Why the change, do you know?

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January 12, 2008: Catastrophic hardware failure strikes the Wiki, resetting all articles back to mid-October. There was great lamenting and scrambling by editors to save articles from Google's and Yahoo's caches.
This is their story.

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Follows is a list of those brave souls who freely contributed their work prior to The Great Crash of 2008. This is our attempt to identify those who may not be already properly credited with their hard work contributing to the first two-and-a-half years of the wiki's existence.

JackMackerel posted:

Nate Spidgewood continues his weird-rear end campaign.


And this guy is 18. I'm reminded of Jim Profit.

Geokinesis posted:

Is he making these 'surveys' up or has he got a very strange version of the Sims?

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:

This wiki is a black hole of crazy. I can't stop being pulled in.

This is followed by a list of tiers of increasing "vileness", which gets amazing toward the end.


I guess we've found the one Troper who doesn't like deconstruction.

Antivehicular posted:

My assumption is that the guy is just working with the materials he has available, albeit in a childlike way; the LotR parody in particular reminds me of the dumb videos kids will make using toys as "actors." What confuses me is that sometimes he seems to be considering these objects as actual anthropomorphized objects -- the bike thing talking about paint and rusting and his general weird commitment to talking about "the lifestyle of sentient bikes" -- and sometimes he writes stories where the characters could just be humans, and indeed it would be way less nonsensical. Christ, weren't those sex stats from his goddamn stationery story? How the hell does a pen have anal sex?

(Please don't answer that question.)

Jay O posted:

Hate to change gears from Dozerfleet for a second as...well, he is clearly the fount that keeps on founting, but I have a dilemma. I'm a (very) minor internet personality who's had a page on TV Tropes for a long time, created and updated by weird fanboys, and recently, I've just had enough of it and the drama and the weirdos. I'm a person who creates internet content, I'm not a TV show or a videogame, and I'm about finished with people bitching about every little thing I say and do, even personal details, on this crappy site. What's the quickest way, do you think, to get it removed? Is there some mod I ask about it, or with how poorly TV Tropes is designed, can I just find a way to rip it out myself?

tl;dr How do you eradicate a TV Tropes page that doesn't need to exist?

MrAristocrates posted:

Also, Reading that thread is just reminding me how hard it is to go on the TV Tropes forum because of all the goddamn hotlinks. Every single thing they talk about needs to be a trope. It's awful.

Metal Loaf posted:

Keep in mind that Fast Eddie is supposed to have said, "Constructive criticism is saying what's good about a work," and even if he didn't there's more than enough people on his site who seem to agree with the sentiment.

a travelling HEGEL posted:

Late to this, but what do they think is wrong with Last Airbender? It's a great kid's show.

JackMackerel posted:

I thought Obscurus or the Chick were the most slobbered over? JesuOtaku always seemed under the radar.

I think she's irritating when it comes to not shutting up about fandoms/work she dislikes (even if the work isn't that good, because MOS kinda sucked and RWBY sucks a little more than that. "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an rear end in a top hat" sort of deal) and the dumb Korra thing smelled of trying to piss people off, and I fully expect the 'but the fanbase is terrible and deserves it' sort of rationalization. Yeah, yeah, I know, people on Twitter make me want to jump off a cliff, too. The annoying back-and-forth she does on Twitter with some scorned fan that would be avoided with hitting the block button until your mouse breaks

She had a couple of defenders in TV Tropes who were trying to clear away anything negative by claiming wiki rules against creators (read: ~negativity not allowed~) but I guess that counts for nothing against angry nerds? Either way, the entire thing is dumb and people are dumb.

fake edit: yes i know she posts here woo go me "blunt opinion"


The latest one, if I recall, which... was a simple limerick that only got negative in the last few lines. And FE was acting like Yahtzee personally came there to poo poo on his wiki when he cleaned the page up.

REAL TALK:

Djeser posted:

Almost two weeks into November and we've hardly talked about tropers' novels-in-progress? For shame.


NaNoWriMo: "If they did it more quietly it would be a bit more quiet"

oh boy oh boy this story is ~quirky~

Now we know where all that hard work worldbuilding goes!

They were amazed by the view, which had trees with some mountains behind it.

"Wow, amazing find, Delta." - No eight year old ever

I'm just going to start skipping around.

It's a good thing I'm still interested in hearing about your dull and cliche monkeycheese Fantasy Kitchen Sink Troperrific Lampshade Sale worldbuilding.

I was seriously just pulling this one for the dialogue, but I got a bonus, more lovely worldbuilding!

They went through various landscapes, from Final Fantasy 5 to Final Fantasy 6.

This is after the part where all the girls get high and joke about masturbating. YOUNG ADULT AUDIENCE!!!

No joke for about the last twenty pages it seems like they're just getting high and/or horny

This is setting off some warning bells but I'm sure I'm just expecting the worst.

"You know what would be great?" said an actual girl who was hot, "Making out with a hot girl." Another girl who was also real said, "Yeah, though we're not lesbians." "Of course," the girl said while taking off her top for the kissing. "If we were then we couldn't have sex with men." The second girl took off her bra and did it really slow so it was sexy. "Girls should make out all of the time, because it's a double standard that everyone benefits from." They started to push their tongues together. "Checkmate, feminism!" the second girl moaned in lust and pleasure for her dream man while touching her chest and tongue all over the first girl.

Well Manicured Man posted:

Why are you trying so hard to be boring?

Fuego Fish posted:

Oh, well, that's somehow even stupider. At least magic phasing bullets, while a severely terrible idea, would be interesting as a kind of secret assassin's tool. But turning gunfights into steampunk paintball matches? That's just kind of sad.

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Lead smuggling is very serious business, after all, with big consenquences for those who the law, or for that matter, the smugglers themselves...

DStecks posted:

What.

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A character on the novel he's writing: "I'd say I'm about 90% done. All I have to do is come up with a plot, setting, and characters."

made of bees posted:

Yeah, I get why it's such a popular scenario, but even starting with the premise of the Nazis winning the war means you've pretty much abandoned any attempt at realism, so you might as well just do whatever you want with it. On that note, an "alt history" story I really liked is the novela Thor Meets Captain America, which is not a Marvel comic, but a response to a challenge to write the most realistic scenario in which the Nazis win. How do they do it? They summon the Norse gods to fight the war for them by using the Holocaust as mass human sacrifice.

Arcsquad12 posted:

So I just discovered that TvTropes didn't even come up with the stupid Nightmare Fuel name. They just stole it from old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and drove the loving joke into the ground. I shouldn't even be surprised at this point.

Fiat Banking Nazi posted:

I think I knew this at some point, but what the hell does the exclamation point mean in that title? I keep interpreting it as a click consonant.

Anais Nun posted:

This thread leapt out at me for so many reasons.

The OP is by an idiot who doesn't realise that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is a stupid self-help book which has no foundation in gender studies or reality and was in fact written to make the author rich.

Then the second post quotes arch-feminist G.R.R. Martin - "I've always considered women to be people."

And it pretty much goes downhill from there.

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That's a very good question and one that strikes a chord with me...as well as arouses certain other feelings when people—male or female—claim that one gender is inherently bad at writing another. Women will have a better insight into certain aspects of their own gender, just as men will have better insights into certain aspects. But I think George RR. Martin (the creator of A Song of Ice and Fire among other things) said it best. "I've always considered women to be people". The same goes for men. Just write how a character would react in a certain situation—the typical Hysterical Woman can be there, but there can also be a hysterical, emotional man, while the woman remains cold and stoic. And any number of variations along the way. Characters are characters; they are like real human beings, defined by their upbringing, experiences, memories, training, and a myriad of other factors. These things define us and our behavior as much as our genders, if not more. I hope that helped; sorry I went on such a long rant, but as I said, this is one of the few issues that will drag out a long speech from me.

HMS Boromir posted:

To be fair, that episode of Excel Saga was trying to be creepy and gross as poo poo and succeeded. It's pretty awful even if you're not a lord who's actually totally down with 6 year olds sporting G-cups.