Update: TVTropes Deletes All Rape Tropes

[Kahunaburger]

Also, I'm calling it now, "sexist/-ism" is officially the most over-used word on the Internet

To be over-used it needs to generally not apply to the thing it's describing. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

The pages appear to be back. Seems it was a temporary situation. Now, can someone explain why the front page of this site is full of articles on rape at the moment? Seriously, pace yourselves with the traumatizing subject matter, will you?

I think I'll take that advice. I just looked up the Slender Man Mythos and now I'm terrified of my own shadow. I know it's not true and that it's purely an internet phenomena, but it doesn't keep it from being so fucking creepy but so goddamn enticing to learn more about.

 

[maninahat]

The reason for donations not being considered, is that no where near enough people could donate to keep the site going. The site has so much traffic, the annual costs are in the thousands.

Whilst I think the approach has been draconian, it wouldn't have been done if it wasn't necessary. It's a shame to see that a better solution couldn't be reached - rape is a huge part of fiction and needs to be discussed.

 

[Malgorath]

The pages aren't actually gone. They are behind TVTropes' "Curtain". All you have to do is go to the page you are looking for, and if you aren't signed in I think it will give you a warning, but then you can access the pages. I checked with Rape as Drama and it's still there and appears untouched.

 

[Realitycrash]

The FUCK? As a troper and avid reader of TV-Tropes, I find this pants-on-head retarded.


Edit: Good, we are currently renaming the tropes instead of removing it. Let's hope it helps.

 

[John Funk]

In June alone, the videogame industry has seen controversy flare over the "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" Kickstarter [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117776-Hitman-Studio-Apologizes-For-Nun-Massacre] - with furor over booth babes and treatment of female journalists at E3 to boot.

I'm a bit curious as to why the escapist is defending Anita Sarkeesian so hard? You don't say describe the hitman trailer, or the Lara Croft thing, nor the booth babes or female journalists with a positive or negative context, but you throw in "disgusting reaction" just when mentioning Anita Sarkeesian's kickstarter. Why isn't it neutral like the other's why isn't it "the reaction to Anita Sarkeesian's...."? Or the reverse, the questionable Hitman trailer, the horrific treatment of Lara Croft, the mistreatment of female journalists?

I'm a bit miffed that the escapist has really taken a non neutral approach to Anita Sarkeesian. In the initial article it completely painted her as a victim. Yet there is still no mention of the fact that she spammed chan sites with her kickstarter in order to force that kind of reaction and to put controversy behind her project to get attention. Isn't news supposed to be neutral and report the whole story? I do not support what people said on her youtube page, but at the same time her actions aren't excusable either. The means do not justify the ends. It's a cheap tactic to get publicity, and she shouldn't be rewarded for choosing that route. There is absolutely no integrity in her means.

If I walk into a police station and say hey look the police are terrible people who oppress the citizen of the country and to prove it I'm going to punch out a cop. And then I act all shocked and hurt when the police draw their guns and slam my face into a wall. I then scream See! See! The police are evil, look what they're doing to me!

For context? People may have missed it when we first reported on it. The reaction was disgusting. There is no defending it. End of story.

 

[John Funk]

Why is the escapist so obsessed with rape today? Is it international forced entry day or something? Seriously there are three rape-realted escapist peices on the front page in one day. "The R word", "Jimquisition; murder vs. rape" and now this. My news feed is being raped with rape : |

Coincidence, really. We get a good article on the subject, we publish it. Jim, who decides what to do every week on his own, does his video on the subject, we publish it. This news breaks today, we report it.

And honestly, after the month the industry has had, it's not really surprising.

 

[GloatingSwine]

What happened to TVTropes man?

Nothing happened to it.

It always sucked (and I say this as someone who fell for it once). Here's the news: TV Tropes is, was, and always has been a waste of time, in the most literal sense. It is driven by an overweening desire to dissect and categorise but never actually analyse or understand. You will not, having read a TV Tropes entry on a work of fiction, come away with a deeper understanding of that fiction. If anything your attempt to understand will be hampered by the shallow categorisation of elements cut away from the whole and presented without context or any attempt to examine why they have been used, how they interact with other elements in the same fiction, how they affect the work as a whole, what they say about the author.

TV Tropes is not just the lite version of literary criticism, it's actually an anathema to critical understanding.

Tropes: Just Say No.

 

[RvLeshrac]

What? I thought this is what everyone was demanding. It wasn't, you say? Then what were you demanding?

...

Oh, you were demanding the removal of the content you disagreed with? So then why isn't Google entitled to the same?

...

Oh, they're not entitled to demand that sites remove content they find disagreeable because you didn't disagree with it? Tough. Fucking. Shit.

This is exactly what happens when you start demanding that legal speech and expression is silenced. Google is protecting themselves from the people who might start boycotting services or writing that Google is "encouraging a culture of rape" because they allow ads on these pages.

The pages will go back up. When they do go back up, you're going to have people who edit them to be *genuinely* offensive pages. If you want people to stop saying something, you need to engage them in debate and discourse, not just duct-tape their mouths shut.

 

[GloatingSwine]

That's not how TV Tropes works. I haven't read any of the tropes in question(wait. no, I do think I actually read Mind Rape at some point in time), but the entry itself explains what the trope is and gives comparison and contrast to other related tropes. The examples are just that: examples. If you want context, you go find one of the examples and read/watch/play it for yourself so you can see how the example fits within a larger work. That's what context means.

Real works of criticism account for and explain the context alongside the element being specifically examined, because you cannot understand an element of a fiction without its context because it loses all meaning.

(Another problem with TV Tropes, the tendency to categorise and then try to explain the whole category in incredibly broad terms leads people into thinking that a particular literary device will mean a particular thing, which it won't necessarily do when examined in its proper context)

 

[WanderingFool]

Well, that explains why "Mind Rape" was gone. But really, I dont see why TVTrope articles about dealing with rape in fiction and such were deleted in the first place. It seems like nothing more than a knee jerk reaction to... something... Seriously, is there some massive international Rape awareness thing going on that I missed the memo on?

 

[I.Muir]

Money talks
Seems kind of ignorant to deem any discussion of the rape in fiction as the same thing as promoting rape
I had hoped that it would be a little while before google started to burn books (metaphorically)
Tell me if they start goosestepping

 

[RvLeshrac]

When the editors start to go into exacting and loving detail about how a person was raped, it gets more than a little creepy.

I have no idea where people get the whole creepy vibe, from. Looking at the actual trope pages, all the examples are described in an almost clinical manner or at the very least, describing it within the context of the example.

"This seems to be the backstory of Hawkeye of the Young Avengers. She was assaulted and strongly hinted to have been sexually molested while walking home one night. She decided to deal with the trauma by taking up a bow and arrow and fencing, dressing up in purple, and beating up aliens and criminals. Her therapist approves." ~ Rape As Backstory Page, Comics.

"There is one Hentai short where a woman is attacked by a gang of tentacle monsters that tear off her clothes and begin to rape her. They stop when they realize she isn't screaming and complain that if she enjoys it they'll be fired as they have quotas to meet." ~ Black Comedy Rape, Anime and Manga (The page is still up for some reason)

"In Water for Elephants there's a creepy scene where two prostitutes get the main character drunk and start to take off his pants and start forcing him to have sex with them. He then passes out and when he wakes up, they have shaved his genitals and made him look like a clown. They don't come out and say that they raped him, but it's IMPLIED. How disturbing that scene was." ~ Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, Literature.

To some people, the audacity that you'd even *MENTION* a subject is offensive.

These are the people that freak right the fuck out when they see Bob Saget, Gilbert Gottfried, or Sarah Silverman doing stand-up.

 

[Frission]

TV Tropes is a pretty creepy cesspit and they're incapable of dealing with rape or anything like that in a sensitive way.

I don't get those who are whining "but free speech!"

 

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, no, provocation is very much a factor. See, I can't prove my claim of Tigers attacking for no reason by running up to a Tiger and smacking it a bite and screaming "SEE, SEE!" just before it bites into my neck, that's not how that works. What happened is that she manipulated the shit out of people and you my friend are still falling for it. Did she get undeserved abuse (the undeserved part depends on who you are asking I'll admit)? Sure. Was she looking for trouble? Yep.

On the other hand, the fact that this reaction could be so trivially provoked rather reinforces many of her points, don't you think?

If you know that people are going to respond in a particular shameful way, and your intent is to publicly shame them, making them actually do the shameful thing in public is a good way to start, no?

 

[MegaManOfNumbers]

So wait:

Google thought trope pages on rape was bad but was completely fine with trope pages on murder and torture?

I'm fairly certain there are creeps out there that get off on killing people.

Geez, is Google run by Americans or something?