Is this really a trope?: Bi The Way

I agree with this.

Neither of those things are tropes.

Are you also advocating for the removal of Straight Gay then? Because I don't think you'll get a lot of support for that.

Sure, of the infinitely many ways to depict a character why would I need a trope telling me the few that weren't used?

Because, in this case in particular, aversions are just as noteworthy, or even moreso, as when those tropes are played straight. We are not yet in a world where the media treats Straight Gay, or Bi The Way, as the norm, and thus it is still treated as something special and noteworthy in and of itself when it is done.

I disagree. If the aversions where so noteworthy then there wouldn't be any need to create pages that solely exist is to avert other tropes. Non-stereotypical depictions of bisexuals and Gay men may not be the norm but there not so rare that need their own page.

A trope need not be rare. However common or uncommon Straight Gay or Bi The Way may be, it's still a trope as it goes against what many audiences expect. Also, because it is not the norm, it is noteworthy enough that there are people who are interested in knowing what works exist that have these types of characters.

However, the question here is still "is there any evidence that Bi The Way has been subject to Trope Decay?" I haven't seen anyone prove that yet, and with the description, Playing With, Laconic, and a good number of wicks supporting the definition of "unstereotypical bi person" I would like to see that before we go redefining the trope. I highly doubt these tropes will be cut-list anyway, given their health.

Neither of us are in any position of to know what the audience expects from a work and while there may be people interested in a those types of characters, this wiki is still about tropes. Straight Gay and Bi The Way are not tropes, least to me, because their sole existence is simply that they are aversions of other tropes. They're "tropes" about not doing tropes.

edited 2nd May '11 3:15:44 PM by captainpat

That is unnecessarily pedantic. If we went by your suggestion, Flamboyant Gay would be renamed All Gays Are Flamboyant, and the Straight Gay examples would be slotted under a huge "aversions" section. Ignoring the fact that this would likely break the page and have to be split into subpages (please don't do a wordcount, I'm exaggerating), the entire trope would be extremely insulting. Hell, I don't even like the name for Space Is Cold since it implies that space is actually, you know, cold, rather than the other way around. But then, Space can't log onto T Vtropes and yell at us for getting things wrong.

If Bi The Way is the bisexuality equivalent of Straight Gay (which I'm fine with, as a definition), it could probably do with a bit of tidying up, because at the moment there's a bit of example overlap with other bisexuality tropes (like, for example, Zevran and Leliana from Dragon Age Origins appear on both Bi The Way and Anything That Moves... I'm sure there's other examples, that's just one I notice off the top of my head). If that were cleared up, that might go a ways towards fixing this problem of it looking like "a character is bisexual" and not the intended interpretation "a character is unremarkably bisexual".

(And yes, I know that I've essentially just pointed out some bad examples and then left them there; the problem with some of the duplicate examples, though, is that I'm not 100% sure where they should go. I'm just pretty sure they shouldn't be on both pages.)

edited 2nd May '11 5:29:54 PM by Duckay

The problem with those two examples is that it's both. Which they are depends on the gender of The Warden.

I'm not sure I would entirely agree with that. Whether the Warden is male or female, Zevran (for instance) is unrelentingly flirtatious with both men and women, both in game and in his backstory. But this is getting offtrack. (As well as, I concede, highlighting that there's a lot of room for interpretation.)

edited 2nd May '11 5:36:33 PM by Duckay

I think we can nail it down to these three requirements:

1: Character shows interest in one sex.

2: Character then shows interest in the other sex.

3: The other characters are surprised.

The Menage A 3 pic is perfect; he wasn't hiding it, he just didn't think of it as a big deal. And I didn't play through Leliana's and Zehvran's plots enough to be sure, but I don't think they would count as Bi The Way under this definition. Bioware has been leaning towards "Everyone Is Bi unless explicitly stated otherwise."

x5 I never suggested a rename of any trope. My issue is that I don't think that a trope that is simply an aversion to other tropes is actually a trope.

I used to think that we should restrict it to surprising revelations of being bi, but Grakor 456's posts convinced me, that if being revealed as bi is something relatively surprising, and a trope on it's own, then the act of writers writing characters as simply being bi, can be a trope on it's own right as well.

edited 3rd May '11 5:53:07 AM by EternalSeptember

I'm not really understanding what you're getting at.

The YKTTW seems to support the notion that this was originally the bi equivalent of Straight Gay.

The last post of the YKTTW, though, is Some Guy praising the title for getting across "how random the revelation is", when the closest thing other than the title I can see for how he could have gotten that impression is a comment on an example not fitting the trope. Then again, I can't see any way to read the title where that revelation wasn't at least kept in the back of mind, so I'd ask pawsplay what he was thinking as well, and wonder why no one in the YKTTW had any problems with it either. (Then again, I coined the SPOON acronym...)

edited 3rd May '11 9:40:10 PM by MorganWick

The thing about Straight Gay is that it's a conscious reaction to other gay stereotypes. There's a trend of being "too straight." Bi The Way isn't, since there really aren't stereotypes, other than the two very specific traits we have and a few subcultures that aren't specific to bisexuals.

I've always understood this trope to be "character mentions bisexuality in a very casual way in the middle of a conversation."

How about the fact that people not only spent the first page debating it, they still can't all agree on what it means even after reading the YKTTW?

And as Twin Bird says, how many strong stereotypes about bisexuals are there? There's not really much there to avert.

edited 5th May '11 9:19:36 PM by ChairsMagoo

I don't know where you're from, but it's a very real and common (if unfair and untrue) stereotype that bisexuals are sex-crazy and don't know what they want. They also tend to get lumped in with homosexuals with some camp stereotypes and the like.

Also, the YKTTW is actually rather unambiguous regarding the meaning, if you read it. It was clearly spelled out by the trope creator that this trope was intended as the bisexual equivalent of Straight Gay. The only reason there's any question is the name, but it seems that Bi The Way was chosen over Straight Bisexual simply because it sounded better.

Bump.

Is everyone okay with the trope as is, or should we get a crowner?

I think something needs to be done about it, not sure what. The usage I've seen is very inconsistent.

I see it both as an equivalent to Straight Gay and as a counterpoint to Depraved Bisexual.

The thing is, I don't think most of the examples are conscious of those stereotypes (No Bisexuals is the one they might be conscious of), whereas most of the examples of Straight Gay are backlash or its aftermath. Thus one comes off as an examination of a Cyclic Trope, whereas the other just feels somewhere between marginalizing and congratulatory.