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

Sure, make it.

Late reply, but the crowner has been switched.

Not to fond of giving only one alt name choice for these. Some might vote against something more because they don't like a new name more than they think the current name works.

I mean "Glamorous Jewelry"? I'm voting against that until a better name comes up, one that actually seems like something actually stated about jewlery (That still fits the trope).

edited 21st Dec '11 12:55:27 PM by DragonQuestZ

I think that's okay as long as people point out in this thread why they don't like the names (as you just did).

"Why is there a zombie here" should be changed because it's a line-of-dialog title.

I don't see the drama in "drama lava". Also, we have so many Lava Tropes already (many of which are considered subtropes of Everything's Cooler) that I think the best way to go is to merge it with the existing lava index.

Not sure about the lava one, but for the Zombie one, Non Apocalyptic Zombie?

Thanks for the crowner switch!

Like I said in the crowner description, feel free to add additional name choices. I'm unsatisfied with some of the current options too.

What is the trope Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry about right now? It seems do be about jewelry being purely decorative. As opposed to jewelry showing that someones rich or as a macguffin or whatever. You know - People Wearing Jewelry To Be Glamorous.

Drama Lava was supposed to be Dramatic Lava except, well, with a rhyme. We don't have another trope for "the lava is added to be cool." But maybe we don't need one.

(Also we need to do something about Rule of Cool trope decay. It's almost as bad as Rule of Cute, except Rule of Cute was apparently broken from the beginning. Rule of Cool does not mean "done for the sake of being cool, or appealing to the audience's love of cool things." It means "this defies logic, but audiences forgive it because it's cool." So if the villain has a lava room in his mansion, that may be Rule of Cool. But if the movie stages its climax beneath an erupting volcano, that may be irrelevant to the plot but it's not Rule of Cool.)

edited 21st Dec '11 4:08:49 PM by Routerie

A character wanting to look glamorous is PSOC? You're misusing that. Having such a need cannot be without purpose.

You seem to be thinking glamour in that way is without purpose. That is wrong.

I don't know if the proper tack to take on Everything's Deader with Zombies is to present an expectation of Zombie Apocalypse. Zombie Apocalypse is just a popular mutation of the zombie trope; it's not the norm of all zombie stories to turn into worldwide zombie plague epidemics.

Otherwise, I'm glad this is moving forward.

Yeah, not PSOC. It's... what's the phrase I'm looking for? Redundant, obvious, happens in real life?

If a character is portrayed as glamorous, we could note that. But we needn't make to make a separate page for their being portrayed as glamorous with jewelry, because that's plain what jewelry's for, even outside stories. It's like a character yawning to show they're bored. That's not a storytelling convention, it's just something that happens in life.

What else do we have? Out Of Nowhere Zombie? Misplaced Zombie? Or is this futile, and it should be a page for any monster inserted into an inappropriate setting?

Jewelry isn't always used for that though. And happening in real life is NOT an argument against a trope. Ever heard of Truth in Television?

edited 21st Dec '11 8:08:57 PM by DragonQuestZ

Yes, of course tropes can happen in real life too, but some things happen in real life and fiction without being at all notable.

How about Computer Used For Work for instance. Computers aren't just used for work - people play games on them, read news etc. And if someone works on their computer on a show, that's not PSOC unless it's set in an office - they're trying to show us that the character is working even though he's at home, which can have all kinds of implications depending on the situation. All the same, we shouldn't make a page for it because, well, yeah, computers are used for work all the time, so so what? Instead, we'd have tropes for The Workaholic or whatever, and we can note there "expect her to be tapping away at the computer long after putting the kids to bed".

That argument seems to be against truth in television tropes in general. Try an argument against jewelry specifically.

And the computer thing isn't valid here, since it assumes that "a real life thing CAN be put in a work for no reason, therefore any real life thing that I choose must be for no reason".

It doesn't work that way.

BTW, if you think the Jewelry trope covers every single time jewelry appears, it doesn't. It just covers times when it's prominent in some way.

I was giving an example of a real-life occurrence that's Not A Trope for the same reason as Glamorous Jewelry. In contrast, look at the Truth in Television tropes. Abandoned hospital. Abdicating the throne. Rare blood type. Abnormal ammo. Above the influence. They are all things that exist but notably depart fro the norm. But flashing around your jewelry because it's sparkly and people like jewelry? Yeah, that's what jewelry's for.

As with the computer example, we could note the snobby or shallow or golddigger person who shows of the jewelry, but we shouldn't focus on the jewelry itself. Else we get pages like the one we have now, which lists these as examples:

• In Love Potion #9, Sandra Bullock is offered a diamond necklace by an Italian car magnate. At first she refuses, but when she finds out that his company is the one that made her piece-of-crap car, she takes it from him.
• The "Affair of the Necklace" was a historical scandal where a con artist stole an extremely expensive diamond necklace, and tricked the jeweler into thinking Marie Antoinette was buying it.
• The Jennifer Lopez song "Jenny From the Block" has the line "Don't be fooled by these rocks", although the video and her lifestyle did make the line seem empty.
• Diamonds are a weapon in Dead Rising, although not very effective at first.
• The Final Fantasy series has Accessories/Relics which could increase stats of the user.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has Scions, a group of accessories which the wearer can summon Espers which appear from Final Fantasy XII.
• In an episode of Goldie Gold And Action Jack, Goldie uses her pearl necklace as an impromptu seal on a magic spirit after the old seal was broken.
• As the name implies, Princess Gwenevere And The Jewel Riders used them for loads of things, from MacGuffins to Transformation Trinkets.

Oh, and I didn't just pick a few bad examples from a mostly-good page. Those are more than a third of the all the examples on the page.

Those aren't bad examples. They are all jewelry featured prominently.

Are you trolling?

When you criticized Glamorous Jewelry as a name, I assumed you thought it too broad, while the actual trope was more nuanced. But you actually thought it too narrow? That we should instead have a trope just for Jewelry, any Jewelry, so long as it's prominent?

That's not even People Sitting On Chairs. That's just plain Chairs.

The prominence is because of the glamour. And I objected to the name because it didn't really fit as a term about jewelry.

Also, we have Cool Chair for when a chair is prominent in a work.

<mod chicken>

Routerie, please don't throw accusations of trolling around so lightly.

DQZ, perhaps you'd like to explain your reasoning here? I must say I am a little confused, given that those examples Routerie listed don't seem to be about glamour.

</mod chicken>

IMO, one can make a case for "jewellery is glamorous" being a trope in a sense that "people sit on chairs" and "computers are used for work" aren't, in that only the former is an instance of an object functioning as a signifier due to cultural nuance, as opposed to an object being put to purely practical use.

edited 23rd Dec '11 3:36:17 AM by BobbyG

That actually is the point of this trope. The cultural association with glamour means works draw attention to it when they wouldn't draw attention to standard office equipment.

As for another name, how about Sparkling Jewelry, since it's at least an adjective that's actually used to describe jewelry.

The Everything's Funkier with Disco alt name suggestion Present Day Disco Sequence might not work because several of the examples on the page are flashbacks to the 70s, unless we want to cut those examples for not fitting the trope. Personally, I think they fit, if the flashback or the inclusion of disco in the flashback is included just for the hell of it. How about we name the page Gratuitous Disco Sequence?

The "Everything's Worse With" tropes seem like they were trying to merge the "Everythings Better With" style of naming and associated randomness, with the It Got Worse scenario. Thus It Got Worse, now there's Bees/Bears/Wolves/Sharks. Thus they shouldn't need to be renamed, just cleaned up so that that meaning is clear in the description and the examples. Laconics for those trope should probably be rewritten to "It Got Worse, now there's X."

Anything's Awesome With Announcers actually does get used occassionally in Everything's Better With Indexes format, in Widget Series as announcers that randomly show up and interact with the characters. So we there might be a Widget Announcer trope in there somewhere, or maybe not, I'm not really sure.

edited 28th Dec '11 10:31:00 AM by Glixinator

The problem with Everything's Cooler With Lava is that even though it refers to "cool" in the "epic" sense, it's still awkward using a word whose other meaning is a contrast to "warm" when it's pretty obvious that things get warmer with lava.

I think a rename for it is in order, though I don't think Dramatic Lava is the best alternative.

Wait. We're just changing the "everything's better with X" snowclone to "(adjective) (noun)", which is becoming another snowclone, and worse, gives no more of qualifier about the trope than the old name.

But for the trope itself, the way it's written is as a Super-Trope for lava in general, which doesn't necessarily fit this index anyway. A proper trope would be lave involved when it seemingly has no place other than it makes something more awesome (like, say, lava armor). The trope, as it is, is no that.

Crowner: "Some of the new pages up for rename do not cover a trope... In these cases, we'll try to name the page after the trope we could best make from the current examples."

That's not what we're actually doing with these crowners, though: we're mostly just cutting the words "everything" and "with" out of titles. Renaming Everything's Messier With Pigs to Messy Pig, for instance, did nothing to fix the conceptual messiness of the trope, which is soft-split into two opposing categories.

Yeah, these new names are just slapdash, and don't really help qualify these tropes.

Also, we need a new name and definition for this index itself. I actually propose we rework this into a Super-Trope, which would be redefined as a rule, stating: "Including a certain element in a work makes that work better (whether cooler, funnier, cuter, glamorous, etc.) simply by the element being there".

It would be a counterpart to Rule of Index, but in this case, it would be fore things that don't (usually) break the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. It's just that adding them is felt by the creators to improve the work. Thus something like Fighter-Launching Sequence. It's not unrealistic at all, but it's included a lot just because it's cool. Thus a work with fighter planes/spaceships is even better just by virtue of including that trope.

edited 2nd Jan '12 11:07:53 AM by DragonQuestZ

[[Adjective]] [[Noun]] isn't a snowclone, it is a basic building block of language.

What we are doing is trying to come up with names that clearly demonstrate which aspect of an animal/thing that the trope is about, rather than just being a list of things with lava, a list of things with bears, etc.

BTW: I think "Dangerous" sounds better than "Threatening", and "Bears are Bad News" actually sounds better than "Threatening Bear" or "Dangerous Bear".

edited 2nd Jan '12 1:39:44 PM by Auxdarastrix