Not a trope: A Date With Rosie Palms

Masturbation is not a trope.

The article's intro lists a number of tropes, including parents-think-the-kid's-masturbating-but-he's-not, masturbation-indicates-frustration, lonely-military-masturbate and fanservice. But People Masturbate On And Off Chairs is not a trope.

We could nuke the examples, if people really want an Unusual Euphemism for potholes. Or we could make this an index for subtropes.

PS - any tips on how to reply to a thread in this forum? "Add a post" always just brings me to a blank page.

Replying to Deboss - No, I don't want to quote. I just want to add new posts to an existing thread, as you're all doing to this one.

edited 13th Mar '11 10:24:43 AM by Routerie

If by "add a reply" you mean quote, you can't. Fast Eddie doesn't like quote buttons so all entries will be based on timestamps. You can use a double bracketted "quoteblock" and "/quoteblock" to block something off.

Masturbation is a trope and how a work handles it is a trope.

Fight smart, not fair.

Masturbation is textbook People Sit On Chairs. BUT. How it's depicted in media does have a whole lot of tropes. Even whether it is depicted or not can be a trope because it's such a private matter, and unlike depicting people sitting on chairs, always impacts a work. Seconding that we make this into an index and split the examples into proper tropes.

• Mistaken for Masturbating ("parents-think-the-kid's-masturbating-but-he's-not")
• Masturbators Are Frustrated ("masturbation-indicates-frustration")
• Masturbators Are Losers (who can't get a girlfriend)
• Masturbation As Fanservice (mostly a porn trope, does appear in tamer "cheesecake" photos too)
• Masturbation Is Bad For You (makes you go blind, makes you weak and doughy, makes you gay, etc.)
• Masturbation Is Naughty (disturbed, perverted, something you should grow out of etc.)
• Masturbation Is Good For You (lets you relieve pressure or frustration, is safer than sex with partner, is not as big a sin as sex with partner (pre-marriage?), is natural and all ok etc.)
• Masturbating With Buddies (a group of boys watching a porn film together and casually masturbating, for instance)

to list a few potential tropes.

edited 13th Mar '11 8:54:49 AM by peccantis

Also good.

Fight smart, not fair.

Added above, you meant like that?

Yes.

Fight smart, not fair.

"Masturbation is textbook People Sit On Chairs."

Wrong. That phrase means "shown in a work with no purpose", not "this happens in Real Life". Can you point to me any examples that have a no purpose masturbation?

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Snicker.

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

Which kind of gets to what I mean, it's usually shown for comic reasons, which is covered by Rule of Funny.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

It's possible that masturbation is used in works with certain purposes, but the current page doesn't describe that. It lists a bunch of things why it might be used, but in the end, it's just a List Of All Characters Who Masturbate.

In this form, it's about as useful as List Of All One Eyed Characters, or List Of All Coughing Characters.

what I meant by masturbation being PSOC. The current page doesn't give any set meaning for what masturbation in media means, or rather, gives a list that should be split into individual pages.

You can chose any trope and break it down into a million subtropes if you're creative enough. People Sit On Chairs isn't "It happens all the time in real life" but "It carries no narrative significance." Sitting on chairs, walking through a door, breathing... things that simply happen is what the trope is about. But Cool Chair, Cool Gate, Vader's labored breathing... those are tropes because it explains why we should pay attention.

To the trope at hand, I can just point to the Seinfeld episode "The Bet" where they challenge each other to see how long they can go without... gratifying themselves, calling it "Master of My Domain." An entire episode built around the use of that trope.

Now if you think we should break it down into subtropes, that might be appropriate (I'm not a big fan of those kinds of tropes, but we have a million "booby tropes" so I guess we can go here). But I don't see the trope as being broken, misused or excessively long so there isn't a big problem with keeping them all in one trope.

Well the description should be fixed, for one thing, but since there is a purpose, even if not always the same, I agree this should be a Super-Trope.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

That things appear in fiction doesn't make a trope either. There has to be a collision of events to form a pattern that we can see passed from one work to another or as a case of parallel evolution. When the laconic is one word, it's not a trope.

I did not claim appearing in fiction was all that made it a trope. So could you not make a strawman of my points. I stated that every use has some purpose. But since they are different, that makes this more a Super-Trope of the various purposes.

And if the laconic is one word, that usually means it was written wrong, not that there is something wrong with the trope itself.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

I'm not making a strawman, I just assumed "every use has some purpose" was implicit. Still doesn't count. Each individual fictional element is done on purpose but tropes are patterns.

I noticed a while earlier that Portnoy's Complaint somehow wound up in three different subsections.

That's probably part of the reason soft splits aren't as common as hard splits. People end up checking only the section they think it should be in but without a clear enough line that guarantees everybody will be thinking of the same section. Alternatively, people think it could go into all sections so they put it in all sections which undermines the point of a split.

Well if there are common enough reasons, but split up, that just means this would still be an index of the various reasons, which would still make their own tropes.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Anything that's made into a joke and/or a plot point a couple of times is a trope. Merely happening (ie someone sits on a chair) is not enough, but when directly being used by a writer or director for a joke or plot point (which has evidently happened plenty of times) that's when it becomes a trope.

This kind of reminds of the Paintball Episode discussion some time ago. But as an example, if the trope was simply about seeing a container of paintballs then it doesn't mean anything and serves no purpose except as a random set dressing (which we sort of have a trope for anyway, Cow Tools). Actually playing paintball involves all sorts of scenarios that serve a narrative purpose: Serious Business, bully aggression/retribution, battlefield humor, Shell Shocked Senior, etc. This is basically the same thing with A Date With Rosie Palms.

But yeah, they do have different purposes. One Sub-Trope could be:

• I'll Be in My Bunk. It's currently a redirect, but we could make it into a trope where a character finds something so hot, the show makes it as clear as possible that character is, well you know.
  • Name comes from the moment in Firefly where Jayne sees that High-Class Call Girl Inara has a lady for a client, and he says this before leaving.
  • In Friends, Rachael and Monica lose their apartment in a bet with Chandler and Joey, but finally get it back when they agree to kiss for a minute. The two guys then go into their rooms as soon as that is over.
  • Blatantly in the comic Captain SNES, Alex, in a side story, is told Marle and other characters are kidnapped, and she tells him she will do anything if he rescues them. He runs into the bathroom, thinking about the things she would do with him.

edited 13th Mar '11 7:53:31 PM by DragonQuestZ

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

^ I'm in support of a split, if everyone thinks it's necessary. I'm opposed to the idea it isn't a trope at all, which is what the OP and others have claimed.

Which is why this isn't a trope by itself. Masturbation does not, in and of itself, have a single or very few inherent meanings to it, it's touched upon in numerous ways for comedic, dramatic and pornographic purposes. The number of ways it is used (and number of legitimate tropes) is enough to form an index, which is what A Date With Rosie Palms should be.

"Thorough preparation must lead to success. Neglect nothing."

I was agreeing with that.

I'm on the internet. My arguments are invalid.

Can we drop the PSOC vs not PSOC thing because everyone seems to agree with a splitwork? Let's start some YKTT Ws and get this going.