Wut?: Female Success Is Family

This name feels really forced. (If you don't believe me, guess what it means right now without clicking the link.)

I know this used to mean something slightly more intuitive, but I'm not sure what happened to that trope. I suspect it got moved to something else, and then the name was used for this trope without much thought.

Oh, and the meaning? Women can only achieve success through nepotism! Certainly not my first intuition.

EDIT: Oh, and upon a cursory examination of the wicks, I'm getting all kinds of subtly different definitions. The Smurfette Principle seems to think it's "females are a type of deviation who exist only in relation to males." Rape Is Love uses a definition that's suspiciously similar to the old version of the trope. Leechblock just triggered so I can't get any more but there were some other pretty weird ones out there.

edited 4th May '11 5:17:08 PM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Laconic: "No matter who she is and what she does, the men around her will always be more important."

It's not about nepotism, the idea is that the only important thing a woman does is raise a family. As in the only Female Success is Family.

Show signs of misuse and maybe it can get a rename.

A Man Behind Her?

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

That's the opposite.

It's an inversion of the phrase "Every great man has a great woman behind him" This trope is about the opposite of this phrase.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

Personally I've hated this trope since I found it and I support cutting it and sending it back to YKTTW until we get a decent description, or just cutting it entirely. I think it is a poorly written, worse used, non-trope, every example there feels forced. I hate it more than all the Harry Potter named tropes put together.

This trope is not about the opposite. It's about that phrase itself. Every great woman has a great man in front of her.

Hmm.. That's a point.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

Female Success is Family found in: 134 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 264 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Little bit too late to cut it.

Discar,

I am not sure if I agree with that description of the trope. I thought the idea of the trope was that female characters only are mentioned in relation to male characters or are only successful because of them. The following excerpt from the trope description is what gave me that impression.

I think the current name is decent. I guess it would be ideal to have a name that is broader and mentions male characters in general rather than just family members, but I cannot really think of one at the moment and I do not believe the name is bad enough to warrant a rename without a good deal of misuse.

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

The only rational explanation for that number of hits is that a women's magazine somewhere has linked to it. It's difficult to account to 264 hits otherwise.

And how do we make the leap from 'women can only succeed with male help' to 'success for women means raising a family?'

"Success for a woman means raising a family" is what it used to mean, but if you read the description it's definitely not what it means now.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

This trope was never about that. In the YKTTW stage it was the exact same trope. This isn't Trope Decay, the trope was poorly named to begin with.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

Black Humor, "success for a female character means having a family" is Family Versus Career and Career Versus Man.

This one, as Rhyme Beat said, has been "It's just that whenever her background is brought up, a man in her family is always prominent in it as a predecessor or as key to her success. One can argue that to get to a point where she is, one needs help, but that's not the problem here. The problem is that her helpers are Always Male and more often than not they serve a protective role and are more powerful than her, making her an heiress or an apprentice rather than someone who has already earned the position for herself. ... What sets these women apart from other heroines with a prominent family is mainly the treatment of them; No matter how much they have achieved, they're still first and foremost daughters, sisters and wives to great men to the audience and the other characters. " since it was YKTTW'd in 2009.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I keep seeing this one used to mean "for a woman, success means getting married and having children," but what I get from the trope description is that it's supposed to mean "if a woman is successful, it's directly because of a male family member."

Going just by the trope name, it's easy to reach the first interpretation, which suggests that it could probably do with either a rename for clarification or a redefinition of the trope.

edited 5th May '11 8:28:12 AM by JoieDeCombat

This trope name has bugged me for a while, too, especially because, even when it's used correctly, it seems to get used subjectively in regards to characters that someone thought didn't get a fair treatment.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Female Success Depends On Family?

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

It seems we needs some clearing up here: when I first wrote the YKTTW, the intent was what can be seen in the laconic version: that female characters rarely are independent characters, she has to be anchored to a male character at some point. The original working title was Importance Relatives To The Relatives, which would be a bit clearer. The name has been the biggest problem to begin with, since that seems to be the source of the notion that this has to do with lifestyle, which would be a tangent, but not the main message. And then we add to the problems that the trope is rather blurry to begin with, and that description isn't exactly my strong point.

My suggestion would be a name change, and then maybe splitting it if we can find elements here that doesn't fit with the core of it.

I would split off the "To be a successful female you must have a family" trope that I always thought this was. As a counter point to The Working Woman (pretty sure that not the trope name but something close to it.) Christmas Cake and Office Lady.

edited 5th May '11 10:21:16 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

Would Women Are Satellite Characters be a good change?

(And I swear the last time I saw this trope, the description was pretty clear that it meant "women can only achieve success through having a family [as opposed to having a career or whatever]")

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

I Like tha concept, but I think that title would be twisting the Satellite Character trope, which goes much deeper than this one.

Femminine Sattelite? (A joke considering the gender of the moon in most cultures)

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

Male Anchor? IDK.

"Feminine Satellite" sounds great and focuses on the heart of the trope: when I first read it I thought immediately of Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four (sister to one, later married to another) and The Wasp from the Avengers (Henry Pym's girlfriend/wife). Then there are characters like She Hulk (Bruce Banner's cousin) and Namoretta (Namor's cousin,) who get dragged into the story through their kinship later—they may be independent characters in their own right, but their ties to their male counterparts are spelled out in their names. The second part of the trope—the idea that female achievement depends on male support—feels like a separate trope, however. The basis of the trope seems to me to be the observation that often female characters are in the story in the first place (whatever their actual role) because of a personal relationship with a male in the story. The tie may be romantic, kinship, or professional, but it's there.

Gah, we're dealing with like three different tropes here.

Female Success is Family should be used for the "a woman is only considered a success if she raises a family" version.

That leaves "every great woman has a great man in front of her" (the intent) and "a woman only attains success because of a male relative" (what the description seems to be aiming at).

The former should be Overshadowed By The Men or Bob And Bobs Wife or something. I'm not sure the latter is tropable, since it's basically a specific case of nepotism that I'm not sure we could say anything interesting about.