Is this the same as Voyage and Return?: Down The Rabbit Hole

Is Down the Rabbit Hole our page for the Voyage and Return story archetype?

The trope page calls it a kind of Voyage and Return, but reading carefully, all the specific features that might seperate it from Voyage And Return are described as optional. Thus, the examples are not all female, don't all feature crawling through tunnels or falling through holes, don't all feature subconscious mind or underworld imagery, and so on.

Basically, it really sounds like this trope wants to be Kate Winter's 'Girls Underground' archetype, but stops just short of defining how that archetype differs from Voyage and Return.

If it really is just Voyage and Return, we should probably be calling it by its established name.

edited 23rd Jun '11 6:05:13 PM by Bailey

You said it yourself: it's a kind of voyage and return.

Okay, but what kind? The current description doesn't really spell out what actually makes a 'voyage and return' story this trope. It mentions special features (female protagonists, tunnels as entryways, the fantasy world being a Dark World) but since none of those are mandatory, what's the defining thing?

'Voyage and return' already includes a young and vaguely unsatisfied hero being transported to a strange magic land, mastering its logic, and returning home wiser and more mature.

edited 23rd Jun '11 6:52:31 PM by Bailey

Down the Rabbit Hole was already in need of other kinds of repair, so keep that in mind as we discuss this. It's a vaguely defined lump of tropes, many of which are optional, but the parts appear together with enough frequency to suggest that "Down the Rabbit Hole", "Girls Underground", or whatever we might call it is something recognizable on its own, distinct from the broader notion of Voyage and Return to which it might belong.

In the original YKTTW, Down the Rabbit Hole was more or less the same thing as Girls Underground, but I wasn't aware of that site at the time. Since then, the trope page broadened and diluted with works that at best only alluded to Alice In Wonderland or featured a Fantasy Wormhole. Letting it all lump was easier than splitting, so I didn't bring it up until earlier this year.

If Down the Rabbit Hole were split, I'm leaning toward renaming the original concept to something like Girls Underground (though I've wanted to respectfully avoid ripping off Kate Winter's excellent work), relaunching Down the Rabbit Hole as an alt title for Fantasy Wormhole, and putting the Alice allusions wherever it is they belong. However, I'm still hesitant to do so without support. Do you think that would take care of the other issue of similarity to Voyage and Return?

edited 24th Jun '11 10:29:26 AM by AdellePleven

That seems entirely reasonable.

Name-wise, we should perhaps put it to the hivemind, but I think using the term Winters coined is a perfectly respectful choice. We already have Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which is Nathan Rabin's term, we just credit him in the article.

Incidentally, after giving it some thought, I'm beginning to suspect the main difference between the standard Voyage and Return plotline and the Girls Underground archetype is that the "dreamlike" fantasyland in the latter can be described as representative or evocative of the subconscious mind. Men journey outward, women journey inward, I guess.

But to answer your question, yes, I think we could resolve the problem if we split off Down the Rabbit Hole and perhaps made a few slight tweaks to the new Girls Underground trope; I could actually write up and YKTTW Voyage and Return at some point, if that helps anything.

edited 24th Jun '11 6:42:32 PM by Bailey

Awesomeness. A full trope page for Voyage And Return might be nice to compare and contrast with, and the inward nature of the Girls Underground journey is an apt insight. Meanwhile, I hope we can get at least one more vote in support of the change. I'm also not really sure how to launch a split trope in this situation; I don't want to trip over any policies I'm unaware of. However, none of that should affect Voyage And Return, which ought to be a YKTTW whenever you're ready.

No objections from anyone? Then I'll move ahead with my part of the repair.

None from me, anyway.

Not sure exactly when I'll have Voyage and Return up on YKTTW... I'm still playing with a description. In the mean time, if you want to compare, the google books preview for Booker's Seven Basic Plots has most, if not all, of the Voyage and Return chapter beginning on page 87.

Notice he includes obvious Girls Underground stories like Alice in Wonderland, but also outward journies, and even stories where people are turned into animals and experience the world differently for a while. Definitely broad. And interesting.

edited 1st Jul '11 6:31:08 PM by Bailey

I have an objection. I took a look at 'Voyage and Return' and it sounded like the Hero's Journey. It has a solid start, a middle ground, and a thrilling climax, with the point of which being character development. The trope namer for this trope, Alice in Wonderland, has none of that. She wanders from one werid event to the next and even the climax is strange. There is no character development.

The definition states that this is a 'variant of the Hero's Journey'. In other tropes a subtrope like Welcome to the Real World and Trapped in Another World. The defining feature of this trope is the weridness like the trope namer and involving some physical door way like a rabbit hole. Bonus points for referencing Alice but that is what should be optional.

Girls Underground is too limiting a name. Not all of the examples involve girls and many of them don't involve the underground. Down the Rabbit Hole is pre-existing and has a trope named after it 'Up the Real Rabbit Hole', describing the tendency to call otherworlds fake because according to this trope they often are.

I suppose I need to figure out how to have this put to an actual vote now. I'm not great at this sort of administrative thing.

The defining feature of the current trope wasn't supposed to be the physical doorway, but it made sense to include that information at the time. Down the Rabbit Hole was meant to express a certain vague type of loosely structured plot and the lump of tropes common to it. Maybe it isn't strictly a variant of The Heroes Journey or the pending Voyage And Return. I could see it either way, and I'll defer to the majority. There is, however, certainly character development, in that most of the heroines at least learn something about themselves and their relation to the world.

As for the name of the trope, being a pre-existing term may be a knock against "Down the Rabbit Hole", because in the common parlance, it's just another way of saying "You've now entered the Twilight Zone," which could easily be its own trope. I don't agree that "Girls Underground" is a limiting term in any way, but the meaning implied isn't immediately obvious, which isn't desirable in a trope name either. I'm still open to other suggestions, but I'm now confident that a rename is called for.

I think what you guys are thinking of is what's known as a Portal Fantasy. A character is suddenly transported into another world, or sees "beyond the veil", that their world has a whole underground aspect completely separated from the world they knew. This includes tropes like Trapped in Another World, Down the Rabbit Hole, this Girls Underground thing, and sometimes The Masquerade (if they are sufficiently separate to the point that you have take some sort of transportation or crossing to enter into the other aspect of life).

edited 18th Aug '11 6:26:30 PM by NoirGrimoir