Western Animation vs. Films that happen to be Animated

Edit: Thrice ninja'd

edited 17th Mar '11 11:50:59 AM by Ironeye

I thought that the Animation Age Ghetto was there, among other things, to establish that TV Tropes does not believe that medium is important?

P Down- Animation Age Ghetto is about animation being considered just "for kids" and not a worthwhile medium in its own right. It doesn't have to do with how animation is catergorized.

The point of that page is that no medium implies a particular age for the audience. I don't see how age has anything to do with what we're discussing.

I think that separating animation out into its own category instead of letting it stand with live action films and tv is fundamentally rooted in an attitude that doesn't want to "soil" live action stuff by putting it in the same category as animation (or maybe it's the opposite prejudice, and you don't want your animation to get dirty by association with live action stuff).

It's not about value judgements at all. We don't separate those things to say that one category is "better" or "worse" than the other, we separate them to make it easier for people to find the examples they are looking for.

I don't know how many times we have to tell you this, but we describe stuff here. We don't tell people how they are supposed to categorize things, or think about media, or any of that. The Animation Age Ghetto is an observable phenomenon out there in the media-consuming world; hence we have an article on it.

edited 17th Mar '11 12:06:36 PM by Fighteer

If we're just trying to make things easy to find, how about we unilaterally accept alphabetical order by work title (or actor/creator title in the case of actor/creator tropes) instead of sorting by medium?

We separate the stuff out to make it easier to find, not because we want to exclude things.

How is this a hard concept? No one wants to mix Anime and Western Animation, except people with no interest in either

Why does that sound like a "moral" justification for segregation that would be provided in the 1960s?

...you have left me speechless. That was monumentally inappropriate, and I have a very high tolerance for inappropriateness.

P.Down, your post #33 really makes it sound like you're taking the position that we need to change the system we have now to something else. Anything else, as long as it's not what we use now.

We have a page on the Animation Age Ghetto because it exists and it affects works, not because we're trying to enforce it or because we're trying to abolish it. We are not going to completely revamp our categorization system in the pursuit of a crusade to get rid of the Animation Age Ghetto.

• Animation is separate from other media because it has tropes that are unique and distinct to it — things that can't be done with straight live-action.
• Film is divided into Live Action and Animated because while film as a medium has distinct trope families that it uses, Live Action and Animated films also have distinct trope families that they don't share.
• Animation is divided into 'Anime and Manga' and Western Animation because although they share some trope families in common as animation, there are others that they don't share due to the cultural differences between Japan and Western countries.
• Anime and Manga are lumped because many works exist in both and are tightly intertwined.
• Manga isn't lumped with Comic Books because of both the interconnectedness it shares with Anime and because of the cultural differences between it and Western Comic.

It's not a socio-political thing at all. It's a practical way to sort works so that someone doesn't have to read a whole long page to see if the example they're thinking of adding is there.

edited 17th Mar '11 12:25:09 PM by Madrugada

Isn't it rather arbitrary to divide things into mediums (No, mediums AND CULTURAL GROUPS, as of the separation of Anime and Manga) because they have "different trope families"? Couldn't you do that just as well with genres, like fantasy and romance and science fiction and comedy? That wouldn't make sense, but it would make just as much sense as division by medium.

Because its far more intuitive this way, and far less prone to people arguing over what goes where.

Out of curiosity, why do you think Anime and Western Animation, as well as Comics and Manga, should be lumped together?

There would be a lot more boundary cases; it's easier to have a genre-busting work than a medium-busting one.

Also, the current system has one major advantage: it's already being used. Any of your suggestions would mean spending literally thousands of person-hours of work on reclassifying everything, seemingly just to satisfy your personal sense of aesthetics.

edited 17th Mar '11 12:33:24 PM by Micah

It's not my sense of aesthetics, it's my sense of morals. I quite simply see the discrimination between an animated film drawn in Japan, an animated film drawn in America, and a live action film shot in America as being evil.

Wait, why?

We don't do moral judgments here. We don't refuse to list a trope because it's wrong and we aren't dividing the media categories according to some "moral scale" that you think you see.

I see my ideas as directly following from the ideas present in the Animation Age Ghetto article, which is officially supported by TV Tropes.

Animation Age Ghetto just says that the (incorrect) popular perception is that animation is only for children. That has nothing to do with Anime being separated from Western Animation separated from Live Action Film. Ponyo sits next to End Of Evangelion; Toy Story shares space with South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; The Wizard Of Oz is just above Sin City. In each of those three cases, the former film is appropriate for children, while the latter film is not, and we don't see a problem with that. Just because we have a category for animated films doesn't mean that we think that such films are only for children. That's like saying an anime category means with think anime is only porn, or a film category means we think film can't be art like everything in literature is. The act of using a category doesn't mean that we also agree with stereotypes of that category.

Ok, he's got to be trolling. Seriously.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the very concept of medium should be abolished, except for the purposes of:

• Some creators may be better at making certain mediums, so of course I understand if a creator specializes in a medium.
• Fourth wall breaking also, of course, depends on medium.

And no, I'm not trolling, I'm expressing my opinion on works.

edited 17th Mar '11 10:59:16 PM by PDown

So you simply want to completely rearrange the way that not only we here on the wiki classify creative works, you want to do away with it everywhere.

Yeah, Good luck with that. Crusade somewhere else.

Another point: TV Tropes having articles on things does not mean we officially support those things. Otherwise, Rape Tropes would take on a whole new level of creepy.

Once again, P Down, we are not in the business of enforcing morals on people. We describe what is, not prescribe what should be. If you can't get that into your head, you will become very unwelcome here.