Everything's confusing with "EverythingsBetterWith" tropes NEW CROWNER 06/20/13: Everythings Better With Indexes

gra·tu·i·tous   [gruh-too-i-tuhs, -tyoo-] adjective

1. given, done, bestowed, or obtained without charge or payment; free; voluntary.
2. being without apparent reason, cause, or justification: a gratuitous insult.
3. Law . given without receiving any return value.

Using mink coats to create the impression of glamour isn't using them without any apparent reason, cause or justification. It is using them for a very specific reason, with very good justification, namely that mink coats and such are associated with glamour in Real Life (or at least used to be, now that values are changing)

We don't list Nice Hat on the index as a gratuitous use of hats, Staff of Authority as a gratitous use of staffs, or Requisite Royal Regalia as a gratuitous use of regalia.

Well then the proper term isn't gratuitous. It's that you could replace it with anything, but it wouldn't be as cool. It was decided in an old thread that the basic point of this index was from the line in the page quote. This is why there is a line for the tropes about how using them is better than not using them.

And if there isn't really a story justification, then glamour is gratuitous. It's just there to be pretty, which is the point of that trope and the feathers trope.

edited 10th Dec '11 11:43:05 AM by DragonQuestZ

I'm totally with Auxdarastrix on this part. Despite the snowclone base name or the index's current description, "X is better than not-X" is absolutely not grounds for grouping tropes. Of course creators who include X think doing so improves their work. That's why they include it - that's why they include anything!

If it contributes to the work by fulfilling a function (e.g. fur adds glamour) that doesn't make it Everything's Better With X. That makes it a trope.

Pretty in Mink fits because any example could replace it with any other fabric (and those that don't should be removed), the same as Everythings Better With Princesses could replace that position/title with another one, or how Instant Awesome, Just Add Ninja could replace the ninja would another kind of badass warrior.

No, a mink coat could not be replaced by sackcloth and still have the same effect as far as the desired visual look of the piece or the characterization. By your apparent standard, every single trope page should be on that index.

Princesses Prefer Pink is not listed as being Everythings Better With Pink. Badass Cape is not listed as Everythings Baddass With Capes, even when there are no practical reasons for a character to wear a cape. Animal-Eared Headband is not listed as Everythings Cuter With Animal Ears.

So why should Pretty in Mink be listed?

Well Every Girl Is Cuter With Hair Decs is listed, and in that case would involve and animal headband. As for pink colors, that's more a necessity due to cultural expectations (just as Fur and Loathing is based on beliefs against wearing fur).

As for Badass, perhaps it could fall under this.

EDIT: Oh, you wrote badass capes. Well I'm not sure about that one as a trope in particular. I'll need to look at that page again.

EDIT EDIT: Perhaps that could be listed here. Or it's just part of a superhero look, and would be more due to genre expectations.

edited 10th Dec '11 12:28:02 PM by DragonQuestZ

Every Girl Is Cuter With Hair Decs is up for rename, and if I have my way will be eventually be removed from this index and only be on more appropriate lists such as Costume Tropes and Personal Appearance Tropes.

"and if I have my way"

That is not a reason to remove a trope. This is about what is proper and logical, not getting your way (and I'm not denying I've been guilty of that elsewhere, in case anyone brings it up, but I admit I was wrong to do so).

And it doesn't matter if that is up for a rename. It still is basically that such decorations are better than without decorations.

edited 10th Dec '11 12:30:18 PM by DragonQuestZ

Okay, than let me rephrase it to "If there is a consensus for it, it will be removed from the Everything's Better With Indexes", which is a decision I will support because it isn't about "X is thrown in to a story just for the hell of it" but is about a specific costume trope being used for specific reasons.

edited 10th Dec '11 12:35:00 PM by Auxdarastrix

Yeah, Every Girl Is Cuter With Hair Decs is on the list... and we're voting to rename and remove it.

Everythings Better With does not mean "serves a similar function to analogous potential substitutes." If a talking monkey is a comic relief character who could just as well have been a hippo, that's not Everythings Better With Monkeys. If a stoner is a comic relief character and a visit to his apartment includes an unexplained hilarious shot of a monkey on the chandelier - that's Everythings Better With Monkeys.

The confusion's understandable since the name suggests something else entirely. And that's why MOST of the pages in the index are misfiled or broken, and even the good ones need a huge cleanup.

Edit: Was it not clear in the crowner that renaming marks the pages as misfiled and fit for removal from the index?

edited 10th Dec '11 12:39:56 PM by Routerie

"Everythings Better With does not mean "serves a similar function to analogous potential substitutes."

That's not quite what I mean. It could also leave something out entirely, like your hypothetical shot I'm quoting below. It doesn't need to be in a work, but it's better for it.

"If a stoner is a comic relief character and a visit to his apartment includes an unexplained hilarious shot of a monkey on the chandelier - that's Everything's Better with Monkeys."

Well that instance of Monkeys falls under both Rule of Funny and this, which is also why things can fall under other Rule of Index tropes and still fall under this.

Speaking of, Everythings Better With Monkeys seems to be the oldest example of this naming pattern I can find. It was named for this page on Superdickory.com

Well I would say that's one to keep that way, since it has a solid trope namer.

I don't know about "solid trope namer." That original Superdickery cataloged the many bizarre monkey stories that appeared in silver age comic books. Many of those stories aren't examples of the Gratuitous Monkey trope.

Okay, has a trope namer in the form of that page, while other page names are snowclones of it.

Err... yes, that's how we got the snowclones. That's not a reason for keeping them as they are.

We should talk about this now because I think the next step (before cuts, if we're moving from least to most drastic) will be renaming the "correct" Everything's Better With X tropes.

Everythings Better With is a very poor name. It's counter-intuitive and produced more misuse than correct use. It sounds like — and the current description actually says it is! — "X improves things". That's neither these tropes or any trope.

One way to clarify them would be to rename them to Gratuitous X (Gratuitous Monkey, Gratuitous Cow) as someone suggested in this recently closed thread. I see some problems with this. "Gratuitous" has many meanings. And if the monkey or whatever truly is completely gratuitous (serves no purpose in the work), it's not a trope at all. In the example I mentioned above, for instance, the monkey is gratuitous to the plot, but it still serves a purpose — it's funny, and it's funny because of its very randomness.

Monkeys Are Always Funny would therefore be a better name ('MAD Magazine'' had a feature named this.) Random Funny Monkey would be better still, or even just Random Monkey - the former name would include, say, a wisecracking lead monkey character.

Random Funny X / Random X would form a better snowclone base overall, but we'd do better to discuss each trope individually. Chickens, cows, llamas and platypi are all funny, but in different ways. The monkey will randomly swing into the scene. The chicken is more of a funny prop - a funny chicken and a rubber chicken are kind of used interchangeably, which is why I suggested we call this Stock Funny Chicken.

Cow may get a lot of its humor from its size, which is why it's funny walking through a hallway, on a roof or flying through the air. Perhaps Funny Unwieldy Cow?

Silly Funny Llama? Weird Funny Platypus?

Whatever name we settle on will exclude most current examples, and that's a good thing. We need to find the actual tropes and tighten the definitions. Tropes Are Flexible means that, if necessary, one trope could cover any Random Funny Animal but one trope should not cover all monkeys.

edited 11th Dec '11 10:44:24 AM by Routerie

I'm actually fine with "Gratuitous Monkeys" and would probably prefer that to the longer variations mentioned above.

I just want to throw out a quick comment now about one issue, though hopeful we won't be making any decisions on retaining or not retaining these without a specific thread: I'm inclined to think that things like Cute Kitten, Precious Puppy, Adorable Bunny etc. should be considered trope (if not an Everything Better With X trope), not People Sit On Chairs. I don't see how authors including things in order to be cute or heartwarming should be any less tropable than authors including stuff to be cool, funny, scary, etc.

" I don't see how authors including things in order to be cute or heartwarming should be any less tropable than authors including stuff to be cool, funny, scary, etc."

Actually we have Rule of Cute and Rule of Romantic. But the tropes about kittens and puppies are a bit more than that. It's that they are thrown into a work when the focus is not on them (like on packages of products for people).

Yeah, we can make proper tropes out of them. I thought I saw some PSOC accusations for an Adorable Bunnies YKTTW (but now that I look closer, I can't find an Adorable Bunnies YKTTW entry at all.)

There's a good argument that Cute Kittens Cute Puppies Cute Bunnies are all the same trope. Do we have the general adorable animals or adorable baby animals trope? The debate rages on regarding whether such supposed subtropes deserve their own pages.

More importantly though, we should take care regarding what a Cute Kitten etc page should cover. Should it cover, as you say, all cases where authors include kittens to be cute? Maybe. But if so, it should not cover cases where characters talk about how cute kittens are. Or where a kitten appears, one character fawns over it and another gets annoyed. These are not cases where the author is trying to make the story cute or appealing to the audience weakness for cute things.

This is why breaking examples down by animal isn't the most meaningful way of organizing them. It can lead to lists of cute kittens, cute dogs and cute penguins without regard to each appearance's actual purpose. More useful would be tropes like Cuteness Fanservice, Defeated By Cuteness or Immune To Cuteness, where each trope can include any animal.

Rule of Cute is actually the misnamed Cuteness Tropes index, not a trope page. Based on the other Rule Of tropes, "Rule of Cute" should mean, "breaks willing suspension of disbelief, but audiences accept it because it's so cute." We don't have examples of that, and its unclear whether any such trope exists.

edited 11th Dec '11 11:20:34 AM by Routerie

We could do a trope transplant for rule of cute, once TRS is clear to make a thread.

I've decided to hold off on Adorable Bunny until I see the fate of the kitten and puppy tropes. BTW, the cute kitten, puppy and bunny tropes have been doing pretty well on inbounds, which to me suggests that the marketing value of the pages is something worth preserving as separate pages. Rule of Cute (bad name, I know) is something that can work to TV Tropes's advantage as much as any other form of media.

I wonder if it would be an idea to have separate lists with "Anything Featuring X" either as subpages to the more specialized tropes or as pages in their own right. Because many people simply seems to mistake the tropes for being such lists or actually wish for such lists, since they are interested in the given thing. For some people it is more interesting, that there is a bunny, girls with guns or trains, than whether they play a role or not. So perhaps it would be better to give room for such lists. Simply seperating the common use of a thing from the interesting, just like it is already done with YMMV, quotes and such.

And before anyone scream People Sit On Chairs - I am not asking for any list featuring anything, lists like "Anything Featuring Chairs" are out of the question. Instead it should mainly be there, where there already are more specialized tropes, to example "Anything Featuring Penguins" in addition to Everythings Better With Penguins (or what the new name of this trope happens to be). But no, works like The Lion King which feature a lot of different animals should not have links to the every single possible animal-list but just a single one to a supertrope, to example named "Anything Featuring The Whole Zoological Garden".

And yes, I am fully aware that several tropers can't see the need for such lists. But I also know, that there are people who are interested in such lists. And for them it would perhaps be better to move the "uninteresting" examples to seperate lists, where they are not in the way, instead of just plain deleting them. Also, I am not so sure, that rename of the specialized tropes would prevent people for mistaking for such lists and/or use them as such in lack of better.

Sounds like a Trivia page. I would not be opposed to the idea. After all, as you say, there does seem to be a demand for a "Anything with Penguins in it" style pages, else they would not exist and gain so many examples. I get how many of us more "serious" tropers are making the argument that tropes should reflect particular uses of animals rather than just the presence of animals, which is why I support trying to turn most of our Everything's Better With X pages into specific Animal Stereotypes pages, especially when their title and description already reflect a specific stereotype, such as Wicked Weasels.

But I guess if we also created some Trivia pages for this sort of thing, it might satisfy that demand while letting tropes pages be more focused.

PS: Anticipating the deletion or revamping of many of these pages, I've been saving many of the pages I find interesting to my computer so that I would have them for my own reference.

edited 12th Dec '11 5:24:51 AM by Auxdarastrix

Also, the plural of index is "indices," not "indexes."