Too much junk?: Narrative Devices

First off, Narrative Devices is one of the largest indices on the site.

Second off, I think it's too generic. There's little to connect, say, Bathroom Stall Graffiti with Battle Royale With Cheese. Many of the tropes belong, or already are on, other indices. I think it needs some serious cleanup, consisting of:

1. Identifying other indices which are actually subcategories of Narrative Devices but are not currently listed as such;
2. Adding these indices to the Narrative Devices page;
3. Removing from Narrative Devices any page which is also on a sub-index.

Possible contenders include Apocalyptic Index, Hocus Tropus, Steal This Index, Action/Adventure Tropes, etc. Feedback welcome.

Aren't all tropes narrative devices?

Technically, probably, yes. That's awkward.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Why is it a problem? Narrative Devices is a top level index, like Character Archetypes.

Indexes are sorting tools. The fact that one index may contain a bunch of other, more precisely defined indexes doesn't mean the first one is useless or redundant.

edited 16th May '11 10:30:56 AM by Madrugada

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

The problem is that Narrative Devices does not contain enough sub-indices. There are a few but most tropes in its domain are directly listed in Narrative Devices. There are just about eight hundred tropes in there. An index of that size ceases to be useful.

I'm not saying to nuke all the "leaf" tropes from the index, but we should be seriously cutting down what's there when there is a more precise index that can be used to display them instead.

edited 16th May '11 11:11:24 AM by Cidolfas

Sorry, I misunderstood your "too generic" comment to mean "The Narrative Devices Index covers too much stuff" rather than "People are putting stuff in the Narrative Devices Index without also putting them in the more precise sub-index they also fit in."

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

Er... no, sorry, I'm not being clear. ^^;

My view is that if something fits in a sub-index, it shouldn't also be on the main index. For example, if something belongs on Bisexuality Tropes, which is itself a sub-index of Gender and Sexuality Tropes, it shouldn't also be listed on Gender and Sexuality Tropes. It kind of kills the whole point of having sub-indexes, which is to assist in better organization.

I don't think that's entirely true, but I would believe that a trope shouldn't appear on both an index and its subindex for the same reason.

So, for example, it makes sense to list Never the Selves Shall Meet on both Time Travel Tropes (because it's commonly a result of time travel) and Speculative Fiction Tropes (because it also happens as a result of non-time-travel-related spec-fic devices like cloning and alternate universes). Time-Travelers Are Spies, on the other hand, is a speculative fiction trope because it involves time travel by definition, so there's no need to index it on Speculative Fiction Tropes as well.

edited 16th May '11 1:00:13 PM by Micah

132 is the rudest number.

Right. But generally speaking the sub-indices are direct "children" of Narrative Devices, and so it's rare that something should appear on both of them. If a sub-index isn't a direct "child" it shouldn't be there IMO.

Indexing, by it's very nature, gets messy to do. An index that only works for people who already are familiar with all the various subcategories and know which one to look in for something is no use at all to the people who don't.

For instance, take a cookbook — it's usually going to be indexed by type of finished dish, so "Breads" is a subindex, and so are "Cakes". But something like "Pumpkin Bread" could be properly classified as either one — it's called a bread, but it's made like a cake. So most cookbooks don't simply index by type, they also index each individual recipe by name — you'll find an entry for "Pumpkin bread" under "Pumpkin Bread" as well as under the sub-categories "Breads" and "Cakes".

edited 16th May '11 2:37:50 PM by Madrugada

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

I interpret that brief description as referring solely to tropes with the principal purpose of establishing and moving a plot or narrative.

Which is fine. You have your MacGuffins, your Plot Coupons, and your Chekhov's Gun (which, strangely, is completely absent from this entire index about things that move stories forward and set up sequences)—all of which specifically play a role in both creating and advancing the actual story itself. Great.

But now what is Frothy Mugs of Water doing on this index? Where in that trope's description does it even mention that this has a specific purpose of moving a story forward or organizing scenes or sequence? How does Sammy's Glass Eye do this? Or Tap on the Head?

It would certainly appear that an index designed specifically to catalog "conventions for setting up a narrative structure" as become a strange collection of "any kind of convention at all". This is looking to be a pretty unwieldy page, if I say so myself.

edited 16th May '11 5:09:36 PM by SeanMurrayI

About the issue of finding tropes when you "don't know which index"... thing is, burying the trope in a list of hundreds is nearly as bad! Also, finding stuff on the site is exactly what the search bar is for, as we've long since passed the point where you could just scan pages by eye. Amen to moving stuff to sub-indexes, and also for clearing out non-narrative tropes — most character tropes, device and magic tropes, landscape/world tropes, and so on.

Yep. If it's a cake and a bread, it should belong in both the "cake" and "bread" sections. What it should not be is under "Food".

If the list includes "Building Material", Books", "Food" and "Toys", why shouldn't it be under "Food"?

Indexing isn't purely linear.

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

It shouldn't be under Food because one can see that Food includes the sub-categories "Cake" and "Bread". If one looks under either of those categories one will still find "Pumpkin Bread", so there's no need to clutter up "Food" with that entry.

By that logic, the page "Tropes" should include every trope in the site. At that point the list becomes pointlessly large.

I think the issue here is that people are not using indexes to search for tropes. That's what the search bar is for. Indexes are used to categorize tropes. And since we have hierarchical categories, tropes should be in the lowest level possible in the hierarchy.

We don't know how many people use the indexes to search for tropes.

I know that I do; when someone asks, "Don't we have a trope for [X]?", I head to the indexes. That knowledge biases me in favor of building them to be helpful in searching — it's how I use them. If you don't use them that way, then your practice tends to bias you against building them that way.

But saying "I don't, therefore no one does" and "I do, therefore everyone does" are both shortsighted and dangerous.

edited 17th May '11 11:10:04 AM by Madrugada

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

"Helpful in searching" would seem to be impaired by lists that are too long to read through without getting bleary-eyed. Swiping Cidolfas's example, it's not a huge imposition to go from "Food" to "bread" (or "cake"), en route to Pumpkin Bread. Indeed, that's a lot easier than picking it out from a list which also includes everything from Devilled Eggs to Angel-hair Pasta — especially if the recipe turns out to be an optional variant of Zucchini Bread!

Clarifying that "especially": ... so that searching for "Pumpkin Bread" doesn't necessarily work.

That is, the point of indexes isn't just to get everything listed, it's also to split up the lists, narrowing the field enough that people can actually look through the list... and possibly check out a few candidates for the trope they're looking for.

Made a crowner. Can we hook it and get some more feedback here?

OK, I think I have a decent mandate to go forward with the cleanup. But Sean Murray I had a good point - many of the tropes listed on Narrative Devices are actually plot tropes, not narrative tropes. I will also start moving these to Plots as well. And then maybe I can get started with sub-categorizing those as well, because it's almost as big - 684 tropes!

NB: My own definition of the difference between plot and narrative is that narrative is general - either in that it forms the basis for the movement of the plot, or that it describes a higher concept of plot movement - and does not describe one particular event or setup. So for example:

• Aliens Are Bastards: narrative trope; it is the underlying basis for the events and settings in a work.
• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: plot trope; a particular event (even if a long one) in a work.
• Arc Words: narrative trope; they are a way to move the plot forward.
• A Fool for a Client: plot trope; it's an event in the plot (client represents himself).

I guess the basic idea is that narrative is the category while plot is the example. Sound good?

edited 24th May '11 7:18:33 AM by Cidolfas

Sounds workable.

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

FYI, having just done the A's, instead of 29 tropes I've identified just 7 that can actually be called "narrative". I have a feeling that the vast majority of tropes on this index simply do not belong.

That was not my point at all. My point was that there are tropes on the list that aren't specifically related to the plot or narrative.

Frothy Mugs of Water, Sammy's Glass Eye, Tap on the Head, and several others are neither narrative nor plot tropes; they're just tropes, and their existence or lack thereof in narrative works have no influence on the actual nature of shaping a narrative or story structure itself.

I'd also point out that "plot" and "narrative" are synonyms. Plot Device = Narrative Device (grammatically speaking, anyway*

), and either term could be used to define "tropes that move the story forward or organize a scene or sequence."

edited 24th May '11 12:23:53 PM by SeanMurrayI

Yep, I'm noticing a lot of those as well, and weeding them out too. I'm using Notepad for now, deleting tropes that are obviously not plot/narrative, and those that are already covered by existing Plot, Narrative and sub-indexes, and making notes for those that I'm not sure about.

Sociology Tropes at YKTTW

edit// Sociology Tropes has been launched.

edited 23rd Jul '11 6:23:48 PM by peccantis