Trope Description Improvement Drive

The problem, at least for me, is that I have no idea what is meant by "Tasty Recipes" and there seems to be no readily apparent difference between the subgenres that fall under "Basic Ingredients" and those that fall under "Tasty Recipes".

If someone can figure out what the difference is, it would be nice to have an explanation on the page. Otherwise, I think a simple alphabetical listing would be more apropos.

Renamed the "Crossovers with other genres" to "Culinary Fusion" to fit with the theme.

I can see the thought behind the three categories, though there is a sliding scale between Basic Ingridients and Tasty Recipes.

The theme doesn't make sense. It's trying to be witty and being unclear as to what is meant by something like "Tasty Recipes." I'm not sure there's a reason for the split and what does Speculative Fiction have to do with food anyway?

The food is a metaphor. While I am going to listen to objections against the soft split, I don't see any lack of clarity.

Metaphor for what?

What makes Urban Fantasy a "Basic Ingredient" and Steampunk a "Tasty Recipe"

It may be "Concise and Witty" but it is failing "Clear" by a large margin.

A basic ingredient of Speculative Fiction? A tasty recipe for a Speculative Fiction story? That is my logic.

You aren't answering the question. You are repeating back the terms that I've already said I don't understand without any elaboration.

What is a "Tasty Recipe" for Speculative Fiction and what makes something a Tasty Recipe and not a Basic Ingredient?

Hmm ... to be honest, I would like to see the soft split either justified or removed. No further comment on the other thing - I feel it's clear.

"I feel it's clear."

Clearly it isn't clear to lexicon and me, so please enlighten.

edited 16th Nov '13 7:26:49 AM by Catbert

A cooking recipe describes how to create a particular food item. A "recipe" here describes how a particular Speculative Fiction item can be created. This is my thought process, at least.

Except that none of the pages are a "How To" for writing Speculative Fiction. They are describe subgenres of Speculative Fiction, and there is no clear reasoning given as to why one subgenre would be considered an ingredient while another subgenre would be a recipe.

Unless a justification can be found an spelled out on the page in clear way, we should probably ditch the soft split.

edited 16th Nov '13 8:08:34 AM by Catbert

Looking at the page, I think the soft-split is between the "staples" of speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, and horror) and the other subgenres that fall under it, such as alternate history, steampunk, etc. However, I'm really not sure that there's a compelling reason to split the subgenres like that; they're all part of speculative fiction, it's just that some are more common/well known than others.

And I agree with Catbert that if the soft-split of the first two sections is kept, then the current headings are definitely less than clear about what the sections actually are.

I would leave the third section separate, as that's clearly "crossover" genres, that is, subgenres which partly fall under spec fiction and partly under other genres.

The recipe is the combination of the ingredients. Tropes are ingredients. Stories are produced by using the recipes.

Seriously, are you guys just kidding? I'm a little embarrassed to be explaining this.

Most of the "ingredients" are actually genres/types of stories and not really tropes per se, while some of the "recipes" are tropes and not story types.

edited 16th Nov '13 1:48:58 PM by MarqFJA

See, that would make sense if the "Basic Ingredients" part was tropes, while the "Tasty Recipes" was genres—which is what I actually expected to find the first time I looked at the page. But they're both listing genres (with the exception of a few tropes/settings which are in the "recipe" section). Hence the confusion. (And Speculative Fiction Tropes is its own page.)

edited 16th Nov '13 2:04:11 PM by Nocturna

I'm with Nocturna on this one.

Also, someone needs to have a look at the description on Camp Follower (which, like the last page I brought up, is more focused on the Trope Namer and less on the trope itself).

Just correct the filing of things that aren't filed correctly.

Edited to add: Okay, I looked at it after a long time and see what had gone wrong. Somebody tried to make it into a classification system with both categories and tropes in the same list. Like all "indented" indexes, it was doomed to fail because it was too complex/subjective.

I parsed it down to a list of sub-genres. The Speculative Fiction Tropes index lists the individual tropes just fine.

edited 16th Nov '13 6:49:34 PM by FastEddie

Ugh, Conservation of Ninjutsu's description looks bloated. How much of it do you think can be chucked in Analysis and how much should be axed?

Hmm ... I always thought that these Laws and Formulas tropes have long descriptions because the main trope is encompassed in the formula.

Looks okay to me. Not all write ups are just a blurb and out.

I know, but I think we have a guideline of sorts that recommends trying to not go too much beyond one screen's worth of text.

Your screen, or mine? Laptop or phone? Just making the point that a screen length is pretty variable, and arbitrary as all get-out, anyway.

I dunno, I just remember either you or someone else on the staff saying something to this effect, probably with a rough screen size that apparently corresponded to a measured "average" for TV Tropers users.

The only thing like that I recall is that the actual definition of the trope shouldn't be pushed down off the first screen by things that aren't "actual definition of the trope" like analysis or background or an exposition on the trope in Real Life or a couple of paragraphs on the Trope Namer or things like that.

The various Laws generally tend to be kind of complicated to explain fully.

The other thing that I hold myself to when writing trope descriptions is that the first sentence should contain a definition of the trope.