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Yes, I copied the article in full. I want all of it on my blog. No, I didn't put in readmores, because I want all of my followers to see this even if they don't feel like clicking on links (I often don't when scrolling through my dash).
Those Tvtropes articles about rape which are oh so problematic... I still use the names of those tropes in discussion. Female On Male Abuse Is Funny (ok not rape when I last discussed it but actually pretty much the same trope), Rape Is Love, Black Comedy Rape (was still there when I looked)... those are all real things. Tvtropes doesn't /invent/ tropes, it classifies what is already there, and when this classification turns up something "icky"
it is a fucking responsibility of the wiki to make this "icky" article long, detailed, and linked on the front page (with content warnings, of course) BECAUSE IT IS SOMETHING THAT NEEDS TO BE DISCUSSED, not fucking silenced. There is no "sexism is gross therefore we will delete all sexism-related tropes from the wiki" policy, thank god.
Deleting trope articles about something doesn't make it disappear, it just makes it invisible, which is to say, it makes it normalized. What Tvtropes does is open the readers' eyes to things they before consumed unconditionally and unreflectively, make them conscious of what fiction and non-fiction does to their mind and how it interacts with it. RAPE TROPES NEED THIS VERY MUCH. Even if the wiki itself won't contain explicit condemnation, most people, when they see an index named "Rape Is Okay", will be capable of passing moral judgement just by name association. Giving these things names they truly deserve is important, and yes, it should be a mission of the wiki. There is no analogue of it that I know of, so it all falls on its shoulders to bear.
It's horrifying that it's hard to actually blame the wiki / its admins for this censoring. They are dependant on Google, commonly known in some circles as "corporation of evil" (you are welcome ^^), for actual continuation of existence of the wiki; that's what large corporations do to the market. And once we go into Google and its policies, waters become even more muddy. All in all, it looks like "it's just how this system works".
Except the system is designed by people, and people have power to change it and tweak it to suit their needs. There is such thing as _an_exception_ - there is even such phrasing as "exception that proves the rule". Look at Tvtropes, understand what they do, make an exception. This one time, when the policy is going to do the exact opposite than what it is designed for - making world less rape-y and more safe - just make an explicit exception.
But it isn't in Google's mission statement to watch out for wikis and enable them to do what they do in our running-on-information world to make it better, is it?
