How is this a trope?: Hollywood Thin

Okay, I can see how Hollywood Pudgy is a trope because of how it can also be depicted in the stories themselves.

But this? This is just a whole page of bawwwing about how actresses are too thin. Which I agree, they are. But how is that a trope, exactly?

edited 2nd Mar '11 9:58:07 PM by SleetWintergreen

Is your avatar supposed to be ironic?

Hollywood Thin is basically how Hollywood promotes anorexia. Is very much a trope seeing some of the extreme examples out there. Tropes Are Not Good.

Animated version is Noodle People.

edited 2nd Mar '11 11:45:53 PM by Raso

Heh, the avatar's a happy coincidence.

The thing is, look at other appearance tropes of this nature, ie Hollywood Pudgy, Baby Got Back, Buxom Is Better and so on. Now look at Hollywood Thin. No fictional examples, no examples of it being used as a plot point, no audience reactions, it's just a page of complaining about how skinny people suck.

At the very least I think it should be one of those "no examples" tropes.

Are there any fictional examples or examples of it being used as a plot point?

I tweaked it to remove the bitching. Reads like a trope, now.

Thanks. I still don't think it's a trope, but at least it has less of a "written by an angry fat girl" feel to it now.

I think the name is weird. The Hollywood snow clones have one key feature: they are fake. Hollywood Pudgy is not really pudgy. Hollywood Science is not really science. A Hollywood Atheist does not act like a real atheist acts. A Hollywood Homely person is not really homely (ugly). A Hollywood Nerd doesn't act like a real nerd. Hollywood Voodoo doesn't work like Voodoo, etc.

But a Hollywood Thin person is really thin. This needs a rename.

I am pretty sure this isnt intened to be a snowclone it's a preexisting term being from So Cal I have heard this term a lot.

It's not that it's fake, it's that it's the Theme Park Version. So Hollywood Thin->ridiculously thin, makes some sense. But it's not great.

Hollywood Thin could be used for the "glamorous" thinness that exists only thanks to Photoshop. I.e. images of very skinny people are prettified to hide not-so-appealing side effects of skinniness, such as eye bags, sticking collar or hip bones and spines, grills of ribs in the decolleté etc. Read the story. OR images of already rather skinny people who are skinnified to proportions where they would weight tens of pounds less. That's 5 pounds off just one arm◊.

"Hollywood Thin" brings to mind something that is enough to be thin in Hollywood, i.e. Up To Eleven.

edited 7th Mar '11 3:19:42 AM by peccantis

google image results for "Hollywood Thin" yeah its a pre-existing term. gross.

There might be something here about being unrealistically skinny as per the art style (I'm wondering why Olive Ole isn't on the list already), being artificially made to look skinnier than you already are (the Faith Hill photoshop) and possibly real life issues with anorexia among actresses (and not just "she's too skinny" tabloid observations) but as a supposed "opposite" to Hollywood Pudgy I'm really not seeing it.

The examples are going in every direction, I have no idea what Hulk Hogan is doing there. The male examples themselves are iffy anyway cause Sylvester Stallone and Vin Diesel are both considered muscular men but you put them next to a bodybuilder like Arnold Schwarzenegger and there is a big difference. Any indication that "bigger muscles doesn't make you more powerful" would go under Muscles Are Meaningless anyway.

edited 7th Mar '11 11:20:35 AM by KJMackley

The animated version is Noodle People I believe.

I can understand how "most everyone in fiction is much thinner than the Real Life average" is a trope, but I hate the name and want to change it. It looks exactly the same as the rest of the Hollywood Style family of snowclone names, but it doesn't follow the same rule where "Hollywood" means "inaccurate portrayal of". Hollywood Thin doesn't mean "not really thin", it means "genuinely thin but presented as average". When I first came across the trope I assumed it was the mirror image of Hollywood Pudgy, where a character was called skinny (whether as a compliment or an insult) even though everyone else in the cast, or at least the person describing them as such, was roughly the same size. We should call it something like Thin Is In or Thin Is Normal, to keep the Hollywood Style usage consistent. We could even call it Hollywood Average Size, since that's a lot closer to how we use the Hollywood X family of names. Just because Hollywood Thin is an existing term doesn't mean it's the best name to use for it on this wiki.

Considering the ubiquity of this trope, what's the point of having a standard examples section? We'd just end up listing every mainstream live-action production in the last few decades. It should be like other extremely common tropes and only list aversions, subversions and other ways of playing with the trope (I don't know how that would work for this one), Lampshade Hanging, and really egregrious cases.

I'm on the fence about whether animated examples belong. Noodle People is very closely related, but that's supposed to describe a specific style where the characters have elongated limbs and often also elongated torsos on top of being thin. It seems reasonable to include animated examples if they aren't as stretched-out as Noodle People.

edited 30th Mar '11 6:35:24 AM by Cameoflage

Perhaps the example section would be better served as aversions only. Works where anyone who isn't Hollywood Thin isn't treated as Hollywood Pudgy.

That said, I'm not sure how a drawn character can be Hollywood Thin, and not a Noodle Person as the tropes are defined by the same base body type.

edited 30th Mar '11 6:53:12 AM by shimaspawn

Yeah, the name needs changing even if the trope stays. It's the opposite of what's implied by e.g. Hollywood Pudgy or Hollywood Homely.

Like I said in my last post, Noodle People isn't just "really thin animated character". It's when the character has very long (and thin) limbs and generally also a long torso, like they've been stretched. An animated/drawn character could be Hollywood Thin but not a Noodle Person if they have normal-length arms and legs.

edited 31st Mar '11 4:34:57 AM by Cameoflage

Agreed.

Actually, I'll amend that a bit. I'd also consider it an example of Noodle People if the art style features characters whose limbs are of proportional length but so thin that they still have the length-to-width ratio of a typical piece of spaghetti. Like that trope's description says, one step up from stick people. But that's not compatible with live-action or realistically-drawn human beings, even anorexic ones - there wouldn't be enough room for the bone in an arm or leg that thin, never mind muscles and so forth - so it doesn't overlap with this trope.

Most of the stretched-out type of Noodle People would also count as Hollywood Thin, if they're drawn semi-realistically rather than super-stylized and cartoonish.

edited 31st Mar '11 4:50:39 AM by Cameoflage

Maybe this trope wasn't such a good idea, I'm really sorry I didn't do it right. I'm really not sure how to do it right, though. If anyone knows how to, though, I'd really love em for it.

One possible action would be to Merge this with Hollywood Pudgy, and rename it Hollywood Weight. We would then list both tropes as the different Flavors of the main Trope.

Also if you have a better idea for the name, go right ahead.

edited 24th May '11 12:42:09 PM by pokedude10

Like [1]◊? I wonder if thats worthy of another repair shop since the actual counterpart to Puni Plush (what your talking about) and the "One step up from stick figures" the page describes (And picture) are quite different.

edited 24th May '11 8:41:38 PM by Raso

I'm sorry but what is the trope here? I don't see what so note worthy about a thin woman being treated as attractive, healthy, or normal. Bodytype isn't a reliable indication of the healthiness of an individual and being thin isn't an abnormality. So what's going on here?

It isnt so much that they are "healthy" and such its the fact that they are so skinny that its borderline Anorexic and its more likely to be unhealthy to be that thin and the fact that Hollywood pushes this in various ways.