Merge Proposed New Crowner 11/23/11: The Chick

I understand that The Chick is traditionally a role played by females, but males are also very popular for the role (especially in all-male casts). I don't see what's so unique about a non-female playing the role that it's actually worth soft-splitting the page for male examples.

Maybe it's to avoid all the male examples containing some variant of "In a rare male example of The Chick..."?

I'm more puzzled by the page being locked.

Looking at the history, maybe people kept adding pointless gunk? I don't really know.

Separating it between sex just encourages people to think male examples are rare. The name probably doesn't help, but we're sort of stuck with it at this point.

Its because The Chick pretty much is the Smurfette of a Five Mand Band. 'Female that's The Heart' might as well be the laconic.

It's because the traditional character is female and male versions tend to be slightly different anyway. The page is locked because people kept adding to the desciption to the point where it basically meant "Anything that doesn't fit the other Five-Man Band roles." It can be harder to identify the chick because male/female roles are not as stationary as they were 30 years ago, as in the list of common character traits there are some that are less likely when applied to a male character (romantic relationship with the hero, for example). Hell there is a group of tropers who for some reason believe the entire five man band is a Dead Horse Trope, that it isn't used anymore.

From what I've seen, The Chick is not neccesarily female. If there is a female, then due to The Smurfette Principle, they end up as The Chick. But The Chick itself is not overwhelmingly a female role.

It seems like this trope would be better suited to a gender-nuetral name that was a little more specific, as "the chick" can both be taken the wrong way and is really quite vague. something like "The Peacekeeper" might be a better-fitting name

The trope's pretty healthy, so it's going to be hard to rename it without doing a wick check and finding a significant amount of misuse.

Still, Redirects Are Free, so I don't see any harm in redirect farming.

Well, when you think about it, The Heart means the exact same thing and has a better name, why don't we officially make The Heart as the fifth member of the band and add all these examples to that role.

I believe I've said that, in its "classic" form, The Chick was more-or-less indistinguishable from The Smurfette Principle anyway. It's only the changing gender attitudes of the last decades that have created The Heart-type Chick as a character type.

I think Area of Effect can be linked properly. Possibly The Archer as well.

What?

When it's naming the type of character, you can link those pages. My original point was that I think we should slim the description down a lot more and offer something similar to the Five-Man Band page where you can list each of them separately.

According to Locked Pages, it was locked because of persistent attempts to make the article about feminism rather than the actual trope.

You're misusing Dead Horse Trope. A Dead Horse Trope is not a trope that isn't used anymore. That's Forgotten Trope. Dead Horse Trope is when subversions and parodies of a trope far outnumber straight examples.

Bump. Is there even a problem here?

Yes, but I think it's more an intrinsic one - how exactly is the "classic" form of The Chick different from The Smurfette Principle, anyway?

The Smurfette Principle isn't a character trope, it's that simple. It's a principle regarding pushing in a female character who is very girly to counterbalance the male characters. The Chick is usually that character, but as it has already been discussed the "very girly" personality type within The Chick has fallen in disfavor.

True, but I'd argue that so has The Chick itself - the better trope for most modern versions is The Heart.

I guess my basic question is, what is The Chick beyond "the girl"? A lot of the stuff on the page comes from more enlightened versions and is really about The Heart.

edited 8th Nov '11 10:47:26 PM by nrjxll

The Chick is yes, pretty much the heart or the voice of reason on the team.

I have two problems with this one. One is just the fact that the name leads tropers to believe it's synonymous with The Smurfette Principle when it really has nothing to do with gender. The Chick is not "the one woman on the team," though the two roles sometimes coincide. That's the other trope.

The other is the fact that we already have The Heart. There may be some subtle distinction between the two, but it's such a subtle distinction, such a small difference, that I wonder why it needs two tropes when we could just combine both and call it The Heart, which is really a more accurate and less misleading name than The Chick.

Like I've said, I think that the 'classic' Chick is "the one girl on the team". What's found under The Heart, I think, tends to be slightly newer.

However, you've pretty well summed up the problem I have here - The Chick seems to have no independent existence from those two tropes.

I would support a move to combine this trope with The Heart. As has been pointed out, the only real difference between the two seems to be that The Chick has an apparent female bias that is largely a Discredited Trope nowadays. The Heart seems to be the essence of the trope with regards to how it fits into a team dynamic; so, make that the trope, and in the new description make a note saying that the role used to be almost exclusively female, but now has a wide variety of male examples.

Add me to the "In support of a merge" argument. The Chick really is not that different than The Heart, and the title is misleading.

While I'd support a merge, I'd also note that if we keep one of these names, it's probably going to be The Chick:

The Heart's usage is vastly less impressive.

edited 19th Nov '11 1:35:31 PM by nrjxll

^ However, that's ceteris paribus, and with all due respect, cetera non sunt paria. A major complaint here is that The Chick gives the misleading impression that this is an Always Female trope. Whilst this may at one time have been the case, it's not any more. The Heart has the big plus of being gender-neutral, and is a lot more descriptive of what the trope actually is anyway.

Besides, if people can go around renaming tropes like Yangire because they don't like anime-speak, then there should be no problem going with The Heart here. And it's not like we can't have The Chick redirect to the new page.

edited 20th Nov '11 10:41:04 AM by Osric