an example of that that makes sense to me is accidentally autistic characters. like, i can believe in a character being canonically autistic without it actually being intentional, but not so much in a character being canonically queer or ooc without it being intentional. 'cause, like, it isn't that hard to write an autistic person without knowing you're writing one, autistic people have existed for forever and only got labeled relatively recently. but the other kinds of minorities feel more like... being labeled is a more inherent part of their existence, happens quicker. i dunno.
I mean, that description technically applies to a lot of queer people, too. But I know what you meant.
yeah. 'cause like, even if the label "queer" is recent, people have been able to distinguish romantic/sexual relationships with the same sex from romantic/sexual relationships with a different sex forever, and so wouldn't accidentally end up writing the former the same way they could accidentally write an autistic person. and with race, even though the paradigm has changed over the centuries, people have always been able to tell the difference, at least to a general extent, between different heritages and locations. like, no one would think england was china, or that coming from an english background was exactly the same as coming from a chinese one. so, like, the paradigms might change but there always was a paradigm and fairly easy ways to identify the essential facts underneath the changing paradigms.
Counterpoint: I've seen straight dude authors accidentally write female viewpoints characters hella bi because they won't stop waxing lyrical about how hot other women are. :::PPP Personally, I'd suggest that the distinction is more that being autistic often shapes the entire structure of someone's personality in a way that's pretty obvious even to people who don't know the word "autistic," or who associate it with an inaccurate stereotype? It's a lot easier to meet someone and realize they're spergly in five minutes of idle conversation about neutral topics than to do the same with sexuality and gender identity, and therefore it's a lot easier for someone to pick up on those same things and file them away as a Type Of Person That Exists and then write them in the same way they do other types of People Who Exist, without realizing that this particular Type Of Person is an autistic person.
yeah, that definitely is a thing that happens, but... i hesitate to call it accidentally making them queer. i don't know why, maybe 'cause it feels like part of the queer experience is missing there, maybe 'cause if i told them a character that did that was queer and got believed i'd feel like shit afterwards. (like, for all temple and biff's relationship in red vs blue has parallels with church and tex's, it is not confirmed [one-sided] romantic and so i can't really call temple Gay Murder Church, even though i kinda wanna. raises the expectations too high.) and yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I know it's not quite the same thing, but I've definitely seen authors accidentally put in enormous amounts of homoerotic sexual tension/subtext, is my point. :::PPP Again, I think it comes down to that it's possible to write someone obviously autistic based on random details that the author may not even recognize as autistic traits, whereas the details needed to confirm queerness are pretty specific.
Tvtropes is home to a fucking infuriating section of fandom where people feel free to put up their bullshit interpretations of media as 100% cannon fact. Exhibit A) the TFA tvtropes wiki calling Kylo Ren the first Star Wars villain to use a lightsaber to deliberately inflict pain. Like. Please. Exhibit B is the TF2 wiki diagnosing the Scout with Asperger syndrome.
I look back with a certain amount of embarrassment at my TVtropes-addicted teenage self, because I definitely did both that and accepting a whole lot of other editors' headcanons-presented-as-fact at face value as canon. Looking back at the wiki now, it is hella obvious to me that there's about a 50% chance any given example is heavily skewed by someone's personal interpretation and biases and is anywhere from "misleadingly phrased" to "flatly untrue." A recentish example that stuck in my mind was when I happened to be on "Deconstructed Trope" for reasons I no longer remember, and saw an example claiming that Final Fantasy IV deconstructs the fact that in many early RPGs you get all your story objectives from a king. There's just... so many ways that's wrong.
...Actually, you know what, I'm making that a fandom gripe. TVtropes fandom collectively not knowing what their own jargon means. So many things listed as "deconstructions" that are "Thing, but grimdark and people die gorily" or "something tangentially/superficially resembles Thing and is portrayed non-positively." Or "subversions" that are actually "not played in exactly the way the editor expected, but still following the trope."
Like, I probably shouldn't be complaining, because that mislabeling on TVtropes is how I got into my favorite anime, but it's not a deconstruction. It focuses on realism in certain areas of its storytelling, is fairly dark, and has a whole lot of people die, but it's not making points about other works of fiction or forms of storytelling. It's a remix of a number of concepts that have a lot to do with a few different genres, but it's not a response to them. It's just something that borrows some ideas and spins them in a way that happens to be heavy on superpowers being used for maximum lethal efficiency and fights ending in under ten seconds.
TV Tropes is great as a list of things that happened in works of fiction, and I particularly enjoy the gameplay related tropes, but they are not good at analysis. The Nightmare Fuel page for Dragonball Z Abridged includes the time Sonic the Hedgehog couldn't turn into Super Sonic because Cell stole the Chaos Emeralds, and that's peak TV Tropes for me now. The Headscratchers page has a couple of "Why does Krillin, as the strongest human, not simply kill the other humans?" as well.
The Nightmare Fuel pages are notoriously hilarious. Get enough people adding single things that are scary to them for whatever reason (but aren't to the majority of other people) presenting their scariness as objective fact, and you end up with a page that looks like the wiki hivemind is absolutely terrified of everything.
has anyone responded to that with "if you were the strongest human, would you simply kill the other humans?" yet
I once saw, on a manga tvtropes page, a line going 'Character X jokingly calls character Y a siscon, to get a rise out of him, in spite of his own relationship with his sister.' Character X and his sister are never presented as having anything more than a loving sibling relationship. It's pretty much entirely nonsexual. There are OTHER characters who creep on the sister because this particular manga tends to be a garbage pile, but Character X and his sister are one of a very few good things in it (and also are literally the only reason i keep up with that manga. it's so awful. but i love those two.) (i'm so tired) (and also neither the canon nor the fandom will give me the 'character X and his sister readjust to normal life after all the shit they went through' story that i want and i am deeply annoyed by this.)
an update on the You Will Find Out red vs blue fanvid love the way you lie, to be exact i still don't understand why the vidder felt like they had to make it a guessing game, though
Also, TVTropes pet peeve: the insistence that Pearl's love for Rose was unrequited, even though Rebecca Sugar outright said it wasn't. Like, obviously their relationship wasn't as deep as Pearl thought it was, but it wasn't unrequited.
I think the place did do fairly well at identifying recurring elements in fiction but fans spent so much time shoehorning their favorites into every category they could, good fit or bad.
Or fans posting their weird and/or wrong interpretations of things as fact. e.g. I seem to recall a screenshot being passed around from the Utena page that said that "Akio is as much a victim as everyone else."
