Thread:Forum:Trope Talk/Cleaning up of questionable tropes/reply (4)

Okay, I'll evaluate some of your suggestions.

"* Dead Little Sister: Dead relatives in shows happens, therefore it's not even a good example of a trope itself."

Yeah, so that would be pretty much the definition of a trope right there -- a common pattern used across media to serve a specific role in a story -- in this case, to build characterization.

"*Deconstruction and it's subtropes: Even though not all shows are presenting their topics positively, not only is the word (read Jacques Derrida's definition of it) used wrongly, it's also used to shoehorn bad examples in articles."

Agreed in principle that it's used incorrectly a lot of the time, but you shouldn't rely on some guy's definition of it (which you didn't even link to). The meaning of language can change over time, so these concepts are not fixed. Even if they were, this website has a lot of jargon that overrides the common meanings of words (much like the social justice community has a nonstandard definition of "gender"). Not saying that's good or bad; it just is.

"* Sassy Black Woman: There's no need for a stereotype about African-American women being snarky and all."

Agreed that there's no need for it, but it is a character archetype used in fiction, and should be studied.

"*Good Is Not Nice: It doesn't matter if a hero from a certain show is nice or not. It would take an entire wiki to list down who's mean and who's not."

I just happen to know of such a wiki. ಠ_ಠ

You seem to have missed the point of this wiki entirely. We want to analyze works of fiction and patterns within them as they are, now as how we want the world to be. And then list the commonalities between these works.

I'm going to just shoot this whole thing down by knocking down the suggestion's premise (sorry). The tropes that we cover aren't really up to us. They're about what is present in popular culture. We could limit what could be discussed, but that violates our strong belief in academic freedom and aversion to censorship.