Automatic Misuse: Humans Are White

This was renamed from Least Common Skin Tone.

Unfortunately, this rename wasn't thought out properly. "Least Common Skin Tone" is typically used to describe characters who are not white. The rename means that you now have "Humans Are White" plastered on a whole bunch of characters who are all not white.

It's as if you renamed Only Sane Man to "Mostly Insane Men". There would now be a bunch of sane men incorrectly described as "Mostly Insane Men".

(reads trope name)

Spit Take

What. Can we cut this now, or do we have to rename it?

Cut it? Why?

The important thing to do is first decide one thing.
1) Is this a trope about like one black guy in the universe, when everyone else is white?
2) Is this a trope about when everyone in the universe is white, except for like one black guy?

Yes, those are pretty much the same, but they are at different angles.

edited 14th Jul '11 6:40:24 AM by MangaManiac

Wow, it looks like the renamers overlooked something. This is a similar problem that some of the renames suggestions The Trope That Was Formally Nakama has.

The reason it was renamed was because most of the examples were misuse. It's supposed to be about humanity in the future is white, but people were using it for humanity right now is white. I do think it needed better cleanup than just changing the name and calling it a day, though.

So automatic misuse because it was already misused?

The rename was to distinguish from Monochrome Casting. Just remove the wrong examples.

Sorry, I was one of the people who fixed the wicks after the rename. I apologize for not totally dealing with all of the misuse. I was unfamiliar with many of the works in question.

I think the problem is that Least Common Skintone was being used to talk about characters who either were alien races (which seems to be outside the bounds of this trope), casts which were mainly white with only a couple token characters, and was used on character pages for Token Minority characters. I think the latter use is what this topic is about and from what I can tell, those examples should just be cut.

I am reasonably sure that Humans Are White refers to the cast of characters in a show in general and thus should not be on trope lists for individual characters. Your Mileage May Vary on that though.

edited 14th Jul '11 4:09:50 PM by LouieW

and : Right. The issue with the original name, if I remember correctly, was that it seemed like it was referring specifically to the "visible minority" human characters in sci-fi/fantasy works, when really, the trope was supposed to be about how weird it was that everyone else (and usually most if not all of the main cast) was Caucasian. It was described as the fantastic version of Monochrome Casting, which is also about the whole work as opposed to individual characters.

So yes, Humans Are White should be removed from all character pages.