Name discussion: Motherly Scientist

After being introduced to this trope with the image picking thread created earlier today, I gotta ask: Why Motherly Scientist? Why is Fatherly Scientist a redirect?

Is it simply because most of the examples happen to be female over male? Wouldn't a gender-neutral Parental Scientist work best?

edited 16th Jan '11 5:52:24 PM by DRCEQ

Parental seems more cold and distant. And motherly catches a nurturing aspect that fatherly does not. Fathers are more tied to authority and support that loving behavior.

Motherly has connotations attached to it that help get the trope across, I guess.

There should be a note in the description somewhere mentioning that it's not Always Female.

I do agree that Motherly is more associated with.. well, caring and all that. I don't like the trope description trying to shoehorn it into almost Always Female though.

Exactly, it's about the connotations of the words, not just the gender of them. Parental has the wrong connotation. As has been said before, parental is stern, cold, and distant. Motherly is warm and loving, and kissing your booboos.

If gender doesn't matter add Fatherly Scientist and remove any references to Always Female.

There's a mention that it's almost always female and the examples back that up. But it does say almost. It does tend to be primarily a trope associated with women. The redirect is all ready there.

edited 16th Jan '11 7:28:08 PM by shimaspawn

An Always Female trope can still have rare male examples.

We have various redirects like Ill Boy, Emotionless Boy, and Innocent Fanservice Boy.

The only truly Always Female tropes are those that require phisically being a female, like the ones related to boobs, lesbianism, or female dressing pieces, and those that's gender flip would be automatically a different trope (like Action Girl is the Action Hero), but this doesn't stop us from categoriizing the tropes themselves as Always Female, and note that male examples are rare variations.

No, I think Always Female does (or should) mean, yes, really, ALWAYS Female, with the only slight exception sometimes being people who used to be male or look female, as noted in the description.

I don't think Motherly Scientist (and, probably, several other tropes - Evil Redhead is one I notice) should be on the Always Female index.

edited 17th Jan '11 12:27:11 PM by suedenim

We aren't going to have any tropes at all on that index then. With the amount of subverting gender roles that happens today the concept of always using one gender for a role is dying.

The vast majority of the Always Female tropes truly are Always Female, though.

I find that when Always Female tropes allow for "rare male examples," the "rare male examples," though not a majority, tend to make up a good deal of the list. I believe at one point I looked through Shrinking Violet and found that about a third of them were male.

The trope page? Now it doesn't seem near that bad.

I guess it's because Shrinking Violet is such a generic characterization for women, that rare male examples seem to be more noteworthy. If there are that many examples, it could probably get a different page.

If there are no issues left to discuss, can the TRS tag be removed from the article?