The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 16:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)
... that Alice of Friday the 13th (1980) became a catalyst for the slasher film trope of unexpectedly killing off the main surviving protagonist in the sequel? Source: Jowett, Lorna (2018). Joss Whedon Vs. the Horror Tradition, The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78-673541-6.
Overall: @The Baudelaire Fortune: Looks great! I made a few copyedits to the article and some tweaks to the wording of the hook, though it remains essentially the same. If any of my changes seem iffy to you, let me know and we can make further changes as necessary. Here's a quick summary of my changes and reasoning:
I changed "the catalyst" to "a catalyst", reflecting the claims from the article/source that Alice was a significant inspiration for this new trope, but not necessarily the sole inspiration.
I added the word "unexpectedly" to signal that the killing off of such a character is intended to take the audience by surprise. This is worth clarifying for the sake of a general reader who may be passingly familiar with horror film and assume something along the lines of: "well, I thought anyone and everyone gets senselessly hacked to death in those violent movies!" Perhaps that's the case, so it's good to underscore that certain characters are (or were) expected to be "safe" for purposes of conventional narrative continuity, and Alice's death subverted that expectation and influenced others to follow suit. "Now no one is safe", "this is a game-changer", "they pulled the rug out from under us", etc.
I changed "main character" to "main surviving protagonist" for clarification—arguably Jason is the "main character" of Friday the 13th, especially in popular memory, but this should also clarify the broader context of the trope even outside the original Friday the 13th context, since in other series it might be more obvious that the original film's "main character" is someone other than its survivor.
I cut out the phrase "of the first film", which I think was already implied anyway, and is now reinforced by the addition of the word "surviving".
I changed "the subsequent sequel" to simply "the sequel" for the hook, though I appreciate that this phrasing is not inherently redundant; I kept the word "subsequent" in place within the article itself. I think for purposes of a snappy hook, "the sequel" suffices to convey "the next (or the 2nd) movie in the series", i.e., not a later third or fifteenth sequel down the road. That said, I get that the word "subsequent" emphasizes this point and is OK to use in the encyclopedic article itself—the additional emphasis is very likely warranted, given the well-known fecundity of slasher film sequels.
All in all this is a fun DYK and a nice article. Again, feel free to ping me if there's an issue with any of my changes, but otherwise everything should be good to go. —blz 2049➠ ❏ 02:35, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
@The Baudelaire Fortune: Looks great! I made a few copyedits to the article and some tweaks to the wording of the hook, though it remains essentially the same. If any of my changes seem iffy to you, let me know and we can make further changes as necessary. Here's a quick summary of my changes and reasoning: