Spoiler: angry Tez noises This is off-topic for this thread because I don't read Cosmere fanfic, but I've seen it more than once in fandom and it makes me SO MAD. Kaladin is one of the most honest and spot-on depictions of depression I've ever seen in fiction, including some of the ugly, complicated parts that seem weird and unsympathetic to people who haven't been there- the distortions of thinking, the irrational lashing out at people around you, the doublethink where you know logically that something isn't true but your emotional brain is convinced it is, the trouble accepting and believing when things are better, the backsliding, and the terror at the knowledge that you could backslide and you're hanging on by the skin of your teeth. He's certainly the only one I've seen with that level of honesty and accuracy whose portrayal and arc don't center around that depression. And then I see that someone has gone and added "Wangst" to his TVtropes character page because he catastrophizes perceived failures into "maybe I suck at this and everyone would be happier without me" and his brainweasels are fighting with his rational brain about whether it's safe to trust someone who's mostly done good by him but has made some mistakes that hit Kal square in the unhealed trauma, and I want to kick them.
This made me think that, not STRICTLY SPEAKING a fanfiction gripe, but with how much they misunderstand plots and characters, it might as well be: I hate TV Tropes because of this, most people here just put their often kinda shitty interpretations of the characters and plot as if they were fact.
I spent a lot of time on TVtropes in high school, and yeah, that's absolutely common, and I know I was guilty of it. I no longer want to put in the time and energy to edit the damn thing, but if I cared as much as I used to I'd probably go deleting entries left and right (two more I remember off the top of my head: 1. "Stay in the Kitchen" is listed on the page for my favorite video game because at one point the protag tries to leave behind two of the female party members... who are an important political figure and a nine-year-old child, and he never brings up gender and makes no attempt to do the same to another female party member who's a professional soldier, and 2. Final Fantasy IV is not a deconstruction of games where you get given a bunch of quests by a king).
Oh my god TVtropes. Some day I want to have the unjustified self confidence of a TVtropes editor. Like the one who seriously put that TF2's Scout obviously has anxiety and mild autism. Like, dude. I'd be interested in hearing why you think that, but don't say it's just goddamned common sense. it's the insistence on stuffing shit into rigid categories. Leads to shitty, shallow interpretations of media and characters and a general obnoxious feel of multiple people presenting their own interpretations as 100% unbiased facts.
*laughs 'cause i remember having that exact kind of confidence, like, nine years ago, when i was twelve and edited tvtropes*
The only TVTropes pages I ever visit are the Nightmare Fuel category, usually when I'm looking for new music. The rest of it always seems to encapsulate everything I hate about male-dominated fandom spaces. (Not that every TVTropes editor is male, or that men shouldn't participate in fandom, or anything of the sort. Just, those men who are TVTropes editors are Doin It Rong.) (There's a Venn diagram to be made there, I think.) (Also I am sleep-deprived and slightly ill, so may not be wordsing very well. Ignore me.)
There was a good post on my dash that was something like "TVTropes as a tool for critical analysis of media is absolute shit but it's great for when I want to know every TV show that's ever had a monkey in it" which I think is pretty apt. I still dig through it for fanfic recs, and sometimes if I've watched something that doesn't neatly fit into a searchable category, I go digging through it for other shows too. God, I used to waste hours of my life on there in school though. Wikidiving at its most dangerous!
tbh I find the trope pages to be relatively useful just because they put names to general tendencies and trends. I... usually am not in complete agreement with the works that get referenced on the trope pages or the pages of certain works, but that's what analysing and interpreting things does, it's never fully objective.
I sometimes look stuff I hear about up on there because it often gives a better sense of the tone and style of a work than a more objective description, and it's given me some pretty useful terms. But yeah, I can't really spend too much time there anymore without getting annoyed.
Yeah I've had to swear off looking at some pages because they Interpreted Character Wrong (though it didn't help the source media itself couldn't make up its mind...)
a lot of tvtropes makes me super uncomfortable like, some trope pages feel weirdly, idk, sleazy? I'm not sure how to explain it
When I was on it, there was definitely a pretty decent amount of ""nice guy""-type attitudes on display in a lot of places, and a certain degree of smarmy know-it-all-hood (because you could post whatever random opinion as fact and the odds that someone would call you out for being wrong, delete it, or even edit it for tone were pretty low). I'm not sure how much the wiki culture has or has not changed since then.
They had to nuke Troper Tales in part because of how masturbatory it was getting- the TT page for "Dogged Nice Guy" was nightmarish.
Once I saw someone make an entry for 'wasted a perfectly good plot' that, and I have no way of proving this but I'm certain I'm correct, was basically a sales pitch for a very popular AU fanfic. To the point where I'm pretty sure it's just that person complaining that the fanfic isn't the real canon.
The other R, I think. And it's something that's a fairly widely considered canon-ish in the fandom, but I don't know if it's been officially confirmed?
Yeah, Rigel had ultrabpdwhirl, so presumably bpdwhirl already belonged to someone else. As far as I'm aware, it's just fanon, but very popular fanon. There's pretty obvious brainweird of some kind, but bpd never seemed quite right to me (he doesn't read to me like he does black/white thinking or splitting or FPs and doesn't seem to have any rejection issues), so I don't mind people headcanoning it, but it bugs me to heck and back when people act like it's been officially confirmed. They have labeled another character as being adhd and have a special transformers-specific body dysmorphic disorder thing, plus one character was recently #triggered and another is a therapist. And there are glorious piles of quote-unquote coding throughout the cast. But I do appreciate that the writers very rarely go ahead and attach specific labels to characters. And back on topic, I know someone brought up it bugging them when characters suddenly had a full, sensitive understanding of sexuality/gender, complete with all the latest jargon, even when it's very out of character. I agree, and I also hate the similar thing you sometimes see for mental health. It's usually not framed quite the same way, and I don't see it so often as I used to, but when a story derails for a person to lay out their entire mental health everything, or worse, to have someone else explain to them what condition they definitely have, just... I can't. There are ways to do this nicely, in a way that fits the story, or the detailed breaking-it-down will fit into a smaller, emotionally tighter story, but I think the ones that hecked it up bad probably stuck with me more :p But so many of these, I'm just left grumping because it would have been nice (and so much more interesting!) to see these things conveyed through dialogue and actions instead. (note: brainbent does do the label thing but is the best example I've ever seen of making it fit and having it enrich the plot) Spoiler: me me ME ME ME I'm writing a story right now where the two people involved met in a chatroom that was explicitly about 'coping', and where one told the other (in significant detail) about the incident that traumatized him enough that he has legit triggers now. And you couldn't drag me to labels or jargon for love or money, I don't want to call it a trigger, I want to convey the impact of 'trigger' through what he says and how his partner saw him act, reconciling that with memories of things he's said in the past. There are some stories where labeling fits, but staying away if you can just! Feels so much more fun! ...to be fair, I think this may not be as much of a thing these days, because I'm blanking on any jarring fics like this that I've read in the last few years (one exception: ray's psychopathic psychotic drift fic, just remembered that existed). I don't know if was just more of a problem in the past, whether it's down to my reading spoons evaporating, or if it just helps I've been wallowing in alien cultures for the last couple years. Semi-related side note: I was listening to some podcasters talk about how people do fake-crying wrong, and how like, if you're on a talk show talking about how you were totally afraid for your wife's safety and break down sobbing, you... You don't want to throw yourself into the crying, that'll ring false. You want to act like you're trying your hardest to hold it back and not break down, or if you crack, you want to push past it as fast as possible. There's a comparison somewhere in there for how to believably write mental health issues in a plot that doesn't revolve around mental health. (disclaimer: overgeneralizing, agghh @-@ I've seen the thing done well and written enjoyably, I just remember so many stories where it was super painful to read)
