Talk:Paper-Thin Disguise/Real Life

This was the justification to remove the Shaun King example and, honestly, I fail to see the logic. A disguise is to pretend to be something you are not. Shaun King was a white guy pretending to be a mixed-race guy. How does that not fit the definition of diaguise?

Your definition of disguise doesn't match the dictionary definitions.

Merrian-Webster says a disguise is something one wears. Both Merrian-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary say a disguise is used to pretend to be somebody one isn't, not something.

Precisely that - Shaun King wasn't pretending to be a specific person, or really anybody other than Shaun King, inasmuch as he was lying about details of his ethnicity.

May be a cross-language issue. Because in portuguese is definitely some-thing you aren't, and in ten years reading, writing, watching and hearing english, I've never seen never once before this day use the word in a way it meant somebody and only somebody. I presume nobody can pretend to be a door, since a door is a thing.

One can pretend to be a door, but that's a different word in English: camouflage.

"Something" =/= "a physical thing" in this context - I'm not inclined to use strict dictionary definitions like Rob is, but for me it's the distinction between fudging one aspect of your identity and manufacturing a new identity entirely. I believe that Shaun King's case is closer to, if not outright the former.

Another aspect of it is the "Paper-Thin" part of the trope: A disguise that worked at the time it was used may seem "paper thin" in hindsight, and a casual scan of the page reveals some of the examples fall afoul of this line of post-hoc reasoning, including the one I removed - race is a funny thing, especially in America, and in the case of Shaun it was ambiguous enough that people didn't question it for a while (and right-wingers black or otherwise were far from the only ones to question it).

Several of the other examples need to go under this logic. Marilyn Monroe only changed her posture to be "Not Marilyn Monore". Pretending to be an object or plant isn't someBODY. I say it should stay.

Agreed - @Looney Toons had already removed entries that were examples of voice acting instead of disguises.

I'd prefer to move them to more appropriate pages, but they do (in my opinion) need to go.

I did say as much, and some of these other examples would strike me as debatable even if we kept the one I removed.

On that note, if the outcome of this discussion is to re-add Shaun King as an example, I suggest it be rewritten as well - the original smacked too much of having an ax to grind.

While we are on the subject, Racheal Dolezal is another party who qualifies under similar logic. Admittedly, one can argue she put a bit more effort into her version of this trope and only now seems paper thin now the truth is out.

Gave the page another read while contemplating the discussion, and...

• This is actually very understandable, and surprisingly easy to pull off in Real Life. It's called Change Blindness. Here's a video showing a 'magic trick' where the back of the cards change color and so does the table, the background, and the shirts of both participants.

This sentence alone near the beginning kinda calls the entire measure of what is or isn't an example that qualifies for this page into question, doesn't it?

As far as the specific example being discussed, I came to the conclusion that I'd be fine with restoring it, but in a form that focuses more generally on "race-faking" as a phenomenon and mentions King and Dolezal as high-profile examples. I wanted to see if everyone else in the discussion would agree to that or something similar before moving forward with the actual edit, though.

Are there examples of "race faking" is fiction? (I recall one edition of the Paranoia tabletop game said that a player character being a member of a particular group was like trying to pass for white at a KKK meeting, so there's at least one example of it as a conversed trope.) If there are at least a dozen fictional examples, then perhaps it should be a trope of its own.

More than certain I could find that many given a couple of days.

...And now I think of it further, how many of these aren't just examples of Hidden in Plain Sight?