Naturalironist / Tropers

No longer active on TV Tropes.

Old bio

Here because, despite my claims to the contrary, I guess I really did love high school English class. In real life I am a paleontologist. I'm interested in entry-pimping lesser-known works and helping improve appearance and Music Tropes. I am most often found in the Trope Repair Shop and the left side of the forums.

One of the last remaining with FORKS leanings.

Very gradually splitting off works by Daniel Pinkwater to their own pages.

Troping philosophy: I believe that there is an optimal trope description length: 3-5 paragraphs, 300-500 words. Too short and you can't tell what the trope's about, too long and readers don't read it (and tend to misuse it).

Stuff here I've done

Works pages:

Tropes launched (incomplete)

Movie-Making Index
Balcony Wooing Scene (took over draft)
Kids Driving Cars (wrote description, took over and launched).
Judgement of the Dead
Korean Wave
Creepy Jazz Music (heavily involved in construction). Provided page image.
Smart Jerk and Nice Moron (took over draft)
Toilet Horror (took over draft)
Artsy Beret
Science Hero's Babe Assistant
Martial Arts for Mundane Purposes (supplied description, eventually launched)
Princess Protagonist
Gratuitous Princess
"I Hate" Song (took over draft)
Folk Punk
Drop-In Landlord
Food as Characterization
Sitcom Tropes
Landline Eavesdropping
French Accordion (adopted)
Abortion Fallout Drama
Emasculated Cuckold
A Side Order of Romance
Female Rockers Play Bass

Repair Shop (incomplete)

Re-written/wrote the description for :

Two Decades Behind
Knight of Cerebus
Set Behind the Scenes
Funny Afro
Demographically Inappropriate Humor
Animated Shock Comedy - rewrote description
Down on the Farm - rewrote description
Jail Bait Taboo - provided description

Some of my favorite pages on the wiki (not tropes, just overall page quality):

Pet-Peeve Trope

Tropes that tend to have problems:

Appearance Tropes: Attract ZC Es
Ensemble Tropes: People tend to ignore any of the actual personality requirements and just pick examples based on the number of characters, regardless of whether they fit
Settings: A lot of these pages are underused and written like useful notes where they just describe something that exists in real life.
Villains: People really like to gush about villains and shoehorn tropes for them. Not sure why.

Sliding scale of likelihood of Meaningful Appearance

Literature: Books don't need to tell you anything about what a character looks like. If they do, it's almost certainly important.
Fan Fiction: Similar to literature, although fanfic writers do love Self-Fanservice and Costume Porn, making meaning slightly less likely.
Comic Books: A highly visual medium with little text and a tendency towards Black-and-White Morality (traditionally), so using visual shorthands for characterization is common.
Anime and Manga: The medium is prone to Adaptation Dye-Job and You Gotta Have Blue Hair, with character appearances chosen to give characters unique looks despite Only Six Faces. But the medium is also characterized by a high degree of creative control over characters appearances, heightening the likelihood that appearance and characterization and linked. The number of anime-specific appearance+characterization tropes (Shy Blue-Haired Girl, Cherry Blossom Girl, etc) suggests that You Gotta Have Blue Hair can be used meaningfully. However, due to Mukokuseki character appearances are often not literal in-universe, and so be careful about any tropes that rely on a difference between the real world and fiction.
Webcomics: Similar to Comic Books and Anime, although the wide range of styles in webcomics, including the Stick-Figure Comic, often means that certain appearance tropes are not possible and colors may simply exist to provide contrast.
Western Animation: A mixed bag. Anime-type usage sometimes appears, particularly in higher-budget full-length (Disneyesque) films and modern CGI or anime-influenced productions. However, a long history of Limited Animation, particularly in The Dark Age of Animation, led to a convention of character designs being chosen for visual distinctiveness rather than meaning (see Pie-Eyed, White Gloves). Add that to a historical focus on Funny Animals and older cartoons being in black and white, and you get a tendency towards non-meaningful or aesthetics-driven character appearances.
Live-Action Film and TV: While filmmakers do work to create a visual look that may tie to the script, they have many limitations. Characters' appearances are largely determined by actors' appearances, which due to Ability over Appearance may differ from the script. Additionally, the bold color contrasts seen in animated media often don't work in live-action. That said, appearance tropes relating to costuming, makeup, and color saturation are often meaningful for characterization.
Video Games: Meaningful Appearance may show up in series with an iconic protagonist or a small cast of recurring characters. However, several features of the medium conspire against appearance being used meaningfully:
- Older games had graphics too poor to provide much detail on characters appearances. Colors are likely to have been chosen for color contrast.
- Cut scenes and different types of sprites may modify minor details of character appearances such as eye color, body type, etc.
- Some games don't focus much on characterization, making the "meaningful" aspect difficult. Tropes such as Heroic Mime and first person perspective make the protagonist's personality and/or appearance difficult to glean.
- Many games feature customizable or randomly chosen character appearance that necessarily isn't linked to characterization.
Music: Musicians often choose their visual look carefully. But some don't, and musicians' appearances are just what they happen to look like! And even if chosen carefully, musicians' appearances are often just to look cool or different, not convey specific things about characterization. Trope the real people in bands' appearances with caution. Music Videos are a different story. A highly concise and deliberate visual medium, appearance is often all you get for characters in a music video, rocketing them up to just above the Live Action Film rung.

Tropers / Naturalironist

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