Update: TVTropes Deletes All Rape Tropes

[Helmholtz Watson]

The nerd/geek community right now is in the middle of a phase of self-examination when it comes to the use of sexual violence as a storytelling device in media for one, and the treatment of women and female characters for another.

I see the deletion of these Rape Tropes articles as a plus point, the gaming community is in a state of self reflection at the minute after E3 and its probably for the best that the gamers formulate their own opinions on this hot topic instead of regugitatating a trope a 14 year old from Alaska wrote in their spare time.

Take some points from a trope yes, but think for yourself.

Can you tell me what happened at E3 with female reporters, I feel like I'm living under a rock or something.

It was the Lara Croft Rape scene in the trailer that seemed to have caused a stir, there's a anonymous article about it on this very site, my point was that normally people just regurgitate opinions of articles on Tropes or Wiki then back up their point with said wiki article.

Now people can think for themselves, for the 5 minutes at least until all the pages are cached and published somewhere else.

Also the rape scene probably made people who been attacked pretty uncomfortable.

What about female reporters? I didn't hear anything about that.

I don't know, did I say anything about female reporters?, I mean its understandable that some people were offended by it. Also people seem to be offended by one of the Devs making very silly remarks that the rape scene will make you want to protect Lara Croft... I'm dude, just don't say anything

To be fair he could have said anything and he would have been shot down because he's on the Dev Team, people go on the defensive claiming he's naturally biased (which is true but why the hell wouldn't he be?, its not like he's going to say, "you should skip half the game I made cos its a bit shit)

You didn't mention it, but it was brought up this week andd I felt like there was something that I was missing.

 

[DigitalSushi]

The nerd/geek community right now is in the middle of a phase of self-examination when it comes to the use of sexual violence as a storytelling device in media for one, and the treatment of women and female characters for another.

I see the deletion of these Rape Tropes articles as a plus point, the gaming community is in a state of self reflection at the minute after E3 and its probably for the best that the gamers formulate their own opinions on this hot topic instead of regugitatating a trope a 14 year old from Alaska wrote in their spare time.

Take some points from a trope yes, but think for yourself.

Can you tell me what happened at E3 with female reporters, I feel like I'm living under a rock or something.

It was the Lara Croft Rape scene in the trailer that seemed to have caused a stir, there's a anonymous article about it on this very site, my point was that normally people just regurgitate opinions of articles on Tropes or Wiki then back up their point with said wiki article.

Now people can think for themselves, for the 5 minutes at least until all the pages are cached and published somewhere else.

Also the rape scene probably made people who been attacked pretty uncomfortable.

What about female reporters? I didn't hear anything about that.

I don't know, did I say anything about female reporters?, I mean its understandable that some people were offended by it. Also people seem to be offended by one of the Devs making very silly remarks that the rape scene will make you want to protect Lara Croft... I'm dude, just don't say anything

To be fair he could have said anything and he would have been shot down because he's on the Dev Team, people go on the defensive claiming he's naturally biased (which is true but why the hell wouldn't he be?, its not like he's going to say, "you should skip half the game I made cos its a bit shit)

You didn't mention it, but it was brought up this week andd I felt like there was something that I was missing.

LOL, now I feel like I'm missing out on something, damn it Helm!

Like I said earlier, someone at E3 was bound to be offended by it, and journalists descend on E3 like a rash, so your bound to get at least one Female Journalist getting offended, its the law of averages at work.

 

[For.I.Am.Mad]

I find this whole thing hilarious. Everybodies having an existential meltdown over something that should be obvious and easy to understand.

 

[jaymiechan]

Like I said earlier, someone at E3 was bound to be offended by it, and journalists descend on E3 like a rash, so your bound to get at least one Female Journalist getting offended, its the law of averages at work.

You say that like it should be something only female journalists would get offended by, or just a small minority would, instead of it being something that EVERYONE should be offended by.

 

[Clarste]

Chagen was banned for posting child porn in the forums. I know this well, because I'm the one who reported him after unknowingly clicking on the unmarked link. And that was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He was an amusing chap, in a very particular sense, but I really can't blame Eddie for banning him.

So you're that Clarste?

Yeah, I know he was banned. And that was for NSFW Touhou drawings, was it not? It doesn't make me think any less of him, either way.

I have to be one of the most drama tolerant people out there when it comes to such antics. People such as Chagen are not annoying, bothersome, or outrageous, just sources of endless laughter and schadenfreude.

I'm not sure I want to know what "that Clarste" means.

Honestly, I've had laughs at his expense in the past, and it's not like I was trying to get him banned, I'm just not surprised that he was. Seems like reasonably bannable behavior. Not exactly the work of fascist moderation.

It does seem like a lot of this hubbub is coming from banned users. I won't say that all bans are deserved, but most of them seem like they are. Like the guy who kept adding rants praising North Korea to random articles.

 

[DigitalSushi]

Like I said earlier, someone at E3 was bound to be offended by it, and journalists descend on E3 like a rash, so your bound to get at least one Female Journalist getting offended, its the law of averages at work.

You say that like it should be something only female journalists would get offended by, or just a small minority would, instead of it being something that EVERYONE should be offended by.

Sorry [user]jaymiechan[/user] I didn't mean it to come out like I was saying only one female journalist got offended or would be offended by it, I'm just saying to Helm that while I don't know the story about Female Journalists getting really offended by it I'm not surprised that there was people offended.

Sorry about that Jaymiechan, just my poor English (not my first language) letting me down in explaining myself, although me using the example of one fem journo probably didn't help.

As for the game, maybe if Crystal Dynamics did a "No Russian" type thing where you can skip it that would be cool and might help with their handling of this issue, I played No Russian and being a pacifist I really really didn't like that level, the only person I shoot was a mercy kill on No Russian.

 

[GloatingSwine]

I'd argue that proper understanding isn't at all hampered by categorization. I'm a physicist, and physics is pretty much nothing but categorization.

There's pretty much no commonality between physics and literature though. Physics is expressed in the language of mathematics, and a thing once defined is fixed in meaning. The gravitational constant is always the gravitational constant no matter where it pops up. Something as apparently simple as rain in fiction might mean any one of a hundred things depending on the context.

You can't understand literature (used as broadly as possible to encompass all works of narrative communication no matter their form or quality) by categorising it because any given element might change radically depending on the presence or absence of other elements. Things don't stay in their neat little categories.

 

[jaymiechan]

As for the game, maybe if Crystal Dynamics did a "No Russian" type thing where you can skip it that would be cool and might help with their handling of this issue, I played No Russian and being a pacifist I really really didn't like that level, the only person I shoot was a mercy kill on No Russian.

Maybe so regarding the gameplay itself, but that still would not excuse Ron Rosenberg's quote, saying that rape is a character growth "evolution" thing. No way, no how. It's something that, even after a year of therapy to finally stop blaming yourself, you are still dealing with fallout years later.

Given this sort of thing, and then TVTropes removal of evidence of just how...damnably prevalent it is, it is repugnant.

 

[Timberwolf0924]

First Rape, next is Murder, then Adultry, Then Abortion..

this is all just censorship over a damn video game. Get over it those who are offended, rape happens.

It's a thing of life you're not going to change by hiding it.

Right now everyone is treating rape like a horribly burnt cousin, they never mention or show it because it's to horrible. And when they do show it, it's to support a cause that all lighters are dangerous.

I honestly don't see why it's such a tabboo subject.

Anyone else think Extra Credits would have a good thing to say about this..

 

[DigitalSushi]

As for the game, maybe if Crystal Dynamics did a "No Russian" type thing where you can skip it that would be cool and might help with their handling of this issue, I played No Russian and being a pacifist I really really didn't like that level, the only person I shoot was a mercy kill on No Russian.

Maybe so regarding the gameplay itself, but that still would not excuse Ron Rosenberg's quote, saying that rape is a character growth "evolution" thing. No way, no how. It's something that, even after a year of therapy to finally stop blaming yourself, you are still dealing with fallout years later.

Given this sort of thing, and then TVTropes removal of evidence of just how...damnably prevalent it is, it is repugnant.

I actually mentioned to Helm that one of the Devs said something really fucking stupid in defending the rape scene, so we're actually on the same page here.

Also welcome to the site!.

 

[GloatingSwine]

TV Tropes has been going off the deep end for a while now. This is the nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned.

Rape in real-life is wrong, disgusting, and a crime.
Rape in fiction is fantasy.

Is it really that hard to see?

It's arguable at this point that if rape is your fantasy you are part of the problem, and should probably hand back your balls until you can be trusted with them again...

However, rape in fiction is a complicated thing. Whether it is justified in its presence is determined by how it is included and why.

To go with the currently publicised example of Tomb Raider, the reason that game should not include the attempted rape scene is twofold.

First because the reasons the producers have given for including it are absolutely inappropriate. Their assumption is that a presumed male gamer will be incapable of projecting themselves as Lara, and so they intend for the player to want to "protect" her instead. This is, naturally, a massively sexist approach to writing a female character and writing for a male audience and does no favours to anyone. No-one comes out of that looking good or feeling good.

Second because it is part of a trend which extends far and wide beyond gaming that if a Bad Thing happens to a character to push them into extreme action or an extreme change of character, and that character happens to be female, the Bad Thing will incredibly frequently be rape or attempted rape. This does not, naturally, happen to male characters even nearly as frequently. Once again, it's a sexist way to write a female character. As soon as the character has a vagina there is no need to expend further effort writing an interesting and unique scenario for them, you can just throw some rape in there and have done with it. I guarantee you that when the inevitable Uncharted prequel comes out Nathan Drake will not be shown to kill his first man because he was about to be the unwilling star in an amateur remake of Deliverance.

The writers of Tomb Raider have signalled with this scene that they don't think their male audience can connect with a female character adequately, and that they're not going to really try to make her a uniquely strong character with a unique backstory. Hell, even Samus' PTSD in Other M was better than this, at least it was something unique to her that flowed from her backstory (even if the entire rest of her portrayal was dire claptrap).

 

[Xangi]

Absolutely disgusting. They should be ashamed of themselves. Freedom of speech overrides some petty offense at a topic one may find undesirable.

TV Tropes has been going off the deep end for a while now. This is the nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned.

Rape in real-life is wrong, disgusting, and a crime.
Rape in fiction is fantasy.

Is it really that hard to see?

It's arguable at this point that if rape is your fantasy you are part of the problem, and should probably hand back your balls until you can be trusted with them again...

However, rape in fiction is a complicated thing. Whether it is justified in its presence is determined by how it is included and why.

To go with the currently publicised example of Tomb Raider, the reason that game should not include the attempted rape scene is twofold.

First because the reasons the producers have given for including it are absolutely inappropriate. Their assumption is that a presumed male gamer will be incapable of projecting themselves as Lara, and so they intend for the player to want to "protect" her instead. This is, naturally, a massively sexist approach to writing a female character and writing for a male audience and does no favours to anyone. No-one comes out of that looking good or feeling good.

Second because it is part of a trend which extends far and wide beyond gaming that if a Bad Thing happens to a character to push them into extreme action or an extreme change of character, and that character happens to be female, the Bad Thing will incredibly frequently be rape or attempted rape. This does not, naturally, happen to male characters even nearly as frequently. Once again, it's a sexist way to write a female character. As soon as the character has a vagina there is no need to expend further effort writing an interesting and unique scenario for them, you can just throw some rape in there and have done with it. I guarantee you that when the inevitable Uncharted prequel comes out Nathan Drake will not be shown to kill his first man because he was about to be the unwilling star in an amateur remake of Deliverance.

The writers of Tomb Raider have signalled with this scene that they don't think their male audience can connect with a female character adequately, and that they're not going to really try to make her a uniquely strong character with a unique backstory. Hell, even Samus' PTSD in Other M was better than this, at least it was something unique to her that flowed from her backstory (even if the entire rest of her portrayal was dire claptrap).

The argument here though, is not whether rape in fantasy is acceptable, but whether the documentation of its existence should be censored. If you think that saying something exists and providing examples of it is unacceptable, well, you're kind of just flat out wrong.

 

[GloatingSwine]

The argument here though, is not whether rape in fantasy is acceptable, but whether the documentation of its existence should be censored. If you think that saying something exists and providing examples of it is unacceptable, well, you're kind of just flat out wrong.

See previous arguments about the negative worth of TV Tropes as a whole.

"Here is a list of some rape" is stupid for reasons quite other than that its tendency to turn into "Here's my favourite list of bad fanfiction and hentai fap matter".

 

[Xangi]

The argument here though, is not whether rape in fantasy is acceptable, but whether the documentation of its existence should be censored. If you think that saying something exists and providing examples of it is unacceptable, well, you're kind of just flat out wrong.

See previous arguments about the negative worth of TV Tropes as a whole.

"Here is a list of some rape" is stupid for reasons quite other than that its tendency to turn into "Here's my favourite list of bad fanfiction and hentai fap matter".

Yes, the removal of the fanfiction I agree with, mainly because that's not the purpose of the site, but the removal of entire pages full of normal content is ridiculous.

 

[Epona]

No one will argue that rape isn't awful

Except those who make and laugh at prison rape jokes.

 

[him over there]

Absolutely disgusting. They should be ashamed of themselves. Freedom of speech overrides some petty offense at a topic one may find undesirable.

TV Tropes has been going off the deep end for a while now. This is the nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned.

Rape in real-life is wrong, disgusting, and a crime.
Rape in fiction is fantasy.

Is it really that hard to see?

It's arguable at this point that if rape is your fantasy you are part of the problem, and should probably hand back your balls until you can be trusted with them again...

However, rape in fiction is a complicated thing. Whether it is justified in its presence is determined by how it is included and why.

To go with the currently publicised example of Tomb Raider, the reason that game should not include the attempted rape scene is twofold.

First because the reasons the producers have given for including it are absolutely inappropriate. Their assumption is that a presumed male gamer will be incapable of projecting themselves as Lara, and so they intend for the player to want to "protect" her instead. This is, naturally, a massively sexist approach to writing a female character and writing for a male audience and does no favours to anyone. No-one comes out of that looking good or feeling good.

Second because it is part of a trend which extends far and wide beyond gaming that if a Bad Thing happens to a character to push them into extreme action or an extreme change of character, and that character happens to be female, the Bad Thing will incredibly frequently be rape or attempted rape. This does not, naturally, happen to male characters even nearly as frequently. Once again, it's a sexist way to write a female character. As soon as the character has a vagina there is no need to expend further effort writing an interesting and unique scenario for them, you can just throw some rape in there and have done with it. I guarantee you that when the inevitable Uncharted prequel comes out Nathan Drake will not be shown to kill his first man because he was about to be the unwilling star in an amateur remake of Deliverance.

The writers of Tomb Raider have signalled with this scene that they don't think their male audience can connect with a female character adequately, and that they're not going to really try to make her a uniquely strong character with a unique backstory. Hell, even Samus' PTSD in Other M was better than this, at least it was something unique to her that flowed from her backstory (even if the entire rest of her portrayal was dire claptrap).

The argument here though, is not whether rape in fantasy is acceptable, but whether the documentation of its existence should be censored. If you think that saying something exists and providing examples of it is unacceptable, well, you're kind of just flat out wrong.

Like I said before, google didn't make them cut it because "rape is bad guise!". They made them cut it because tvtropes is having a mssive image problem right now because of its userbase. The combination of no notability and no negativity has created a horrible hugbox community where horrible people are protected from being ostracised because of "Free speech". The site has had all kinds of festering evil in it, people who have told open white supremacists "dude that's fucked up" have been banned while the racist gets off scot free. They have a fetish thread that has over 300k posts and is constantly on the front page. It is full of rape apologists and fetishists. Naturally this leaks onto the main wiki. Combine this with tropers blatant anti-intellectualism that keeps the trope pages from being about analysis and renders them merely lists of times a thing happens and you have pages that serve as nothing more than a directory for their favourite rape fetish works with a dubious disclaimer at the beginning.

Google isn't bailing because of rape, they're bailing because tvtropes is full of people who have warped their own wiki and are borderline advocating rape and rules lawyering the fact that their rape fetish fan fiction has a plot therefore it isn't a depraved piece of shit. They simply don't want to associate themselves wit that.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

It's arguable at this point that if rape is your fantasy you are part of the problem, and should probably hand back your balls until you can be trusted with them again...

However, rape in fiction is a complicated thing. Whether it is justified in its presence is determined by how it is included and why.

Fantasy does not always mean "personal fantasy" get a grip.
Fiction is narrative of imaginary events, fantasy is a imagination and thoughts (ie. fiction is fantasy written down). If you think it's only acceptable to write about rape via some criteria then you're bordering on censorship.

And I hope you're not implying that all people with rape fetishes are a danger to society.

 

[Frission]

Like I said before, google didn't make them cut it because "rape is bad guise!". They made them cut it because tvtropes is having a mssive image problem right now because of its userbase. The combination of no notability and no negativity has created a horrible hugbox community where horrible people are protected from being ostracised because of "Free speech". The site has had all kinds of festering evil in it, people who have told open white supremacists "dude that's fucked up" have been banned while the racist gets off scot free. They have a fetish thread that has over 300k posts and is constantly on the front page. It is full of rape apologists and fetishists. Naturally this leaks onto the main wiki. Combine this with tropers blatant anti-intellectualism that keeps the trope pages from being about analysis and renders them merely lists of times a thing happens and you have pages that serve as nothing more than a directory for their favourite rape fetish works with a dubious disclaimer at the beginning.

Google isn't bailing because of rape, they're bailing because tvtropes is full of people who have warped their own wiki and are borderline advocating rape and rules lawyering the fact that their rape fetish fan fiction has a plot therefore it isn't a depraved piece of shit. They simply don't want to associate themselves wit that.

The thread has been answered. The site may have once been great, and it's not automatically obvious how terrible it is, but you only have to look in the forums.

 

[Tratchet]

I'd argue that proper understanding isn't at all hampered by categorization. I'm a physicist, and physics is pretty much nothing but categorization.

There's pretty much no commonality between physics and literature though. Physics is expressed in the language of mathematics, and a thing once defined is fixed in meaning. The gravitational constant is always the gravitational constant no matter where it pops up. Something as apparently simple as rain in fiction might mean any one of a hundred things depending on the context.

You can't understand literature (used as broadly as possible to encompass all works of narrative communication no matter their form or quality) by categorising it because any given element might change radically depending on the presence or absence of other elements. Things don't stay in their neat little categories.

While the laws in physics are fixed, their use can vary wildly, and that was my point, but maybe it was a bad example.
Sorry to just give a ton of metaphors, but a better example might be food. A good meal comes from many different parts, just like a story, and these parts are extremely dependent on each other. Peanut butter tastes great with jelly, not so good with salmon (probably). Maybe most importantly, what tastes good is subjective, just like which stories are well written.

If a cook tried to throw anything that he remotely liked into a meal without a thought about how the parts fit together it'd be a mess. However, this doesn't mean that the cook shouldn't know how the individual food tastes. If he focuses on just the whole picture then it'd be very hard to try anything new. In the same way, if a writer understands the individual components of a story he can better understand how the story will fit together, and he can hopefully approach the story with some originality in how these components are used. Keep in mind, I'm approaching this from more of a writing aid than a way to understand literature. I fully agree that a laundry list of tropes in a piece of literature doesn't help one to understand it as a whole better.

Also, what do you think about things like deus ex machina, in media res, red herrings, and Chekhov's gun, just to name a few. All of these are components that can shift and change wildly in their use and purpose between stories, but all of these terms have been in use long before TV tropes. Is it bad that we acknowledge these, even though they change from story to story? Or what about extremely broad things, like character archetypes, plot structures and genres? These very much categorize fiction, but are they harmful?

Again, I'm not really defending TV Tropes, which I admit has issues. I'm saying that understanding the components that make up fiction is not inherently bad.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

If you read the forums, you could see where former members who jumped ship like myself got their reasoning.

EDIT.

I thought I recognized that username. Blitzwing, weren't you banned from the Tvtropes forums a while ago? Certainly explains a few things.