Nemesis
I agree; this is basically a 'big breasts as story-significant attribute' supertrope. If you can't really refer to a trope without specifying which subtype it is, it's a good sign it needs them split off.
A brighter future for a darker age.
someone
So, just split, then?
something
Type 3 is weird. It should about a character express indifference about her breasts, not about the subject of a character's breasts never being brought up.
I think a split would be good for this. It's starting to turn into fans making a big deal about big breasts. Three I agree should be about a character actually making a comment. Not just a character's rack never coming up.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Do we have a trope about a character that doesn't realize how attractive she is to other characters, because I'd have type 5 merge into that.
Innocent Fan Service Girl is the closest I can think of.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
I think a trio of Fanservice Girl tropes can work to merge examples into:
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: For the clueless ones.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: For the flaunting type.
- Reluctant Fanservice Girl: For those who're, well, reluctant and those of the Blessed With Suckers type.
This is essentially just the breast-focused version of those tropes.
That leaves the one which actually fits the name.
The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.
Innocent Fan Service Girl sounds like type 5 from its name, but it's really about nudity, so it would be a poor fit to lump type 5 in with Innocent Fan Service Girl. This applies equally to all the fanservice girl tropes, which would need to have their definitions expanded to include examples from this trope.
Actually, type 3 fits the name of this trope worst of all the types. Type 3 fits best if you assume that "big deal" is being used ironically, as in not really a big deal at all. That's such a common usage of the phrase "big deal" that I think works well for type 3, and that's only considering the character herself. Other characters still have strong reactions, not indifference. For all the other types, the big deal is straight-forward, not ironic at all, which I think is for the best. Trope names should mean what they say, not the opposite of what they say in an ironic way.
Each of the types is a variant on a single clear concept. They are also each usually clearly distinct and rarely overlapping, but I don't think that makes them good candidates for their own tropes. This trope is about a story involving strong reactions to big breasts, and I think that is clearly one trope, not five. Don't let the fact that we've identified five different types of reaction mislead you into thinking that this is more than one trope.
edited 2nd Feb '12 5:19:22 PM by Lilwik
Hammer of the Pervs
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I more or less agree with your assessment.
I've thought this needed to be hard split ever since it was soft split. Most soft splits end up being more confusing, instead of making things more clear as intended.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.
Even so, this soft split is not confusing. I think the soft split is a great way to organize the examples of this trope. It is certainly better than mixing all the examples together at random.
It is confusing. Especially with numerical labels, because that encourages people to explain their examples using the type label alone, which is bad form and useless to anyone who doesn't have them memorized.
But more importantly, Big Breasts Big Deal is not a trope. It's an ugly mishmash of several tropes. A supertrope is still a trope, and therefore needs to be based on a valid, tropable concept. There is no core idea holding these subcategories together outside of "<character X> has big breasts, and they happen to have an opinion on them." That concept alone isn't tropable. Hell, type 3 isn't even a reaction. It's a non-reaction. So it essentially boils down to "<character X> has large boobs."
edited 2nd Feb '12 8:44:59 PM by MyTimingIsOff
I see the Awesomeness.
I'd say that "[character reaction] to [circumstance]" qualifies as a trope, but that it would work better without examples on it.
Fight smart, not fair.
I seriously doubt there is an issue of people being encouraged to explain their examples with only a number alone. I haven't been keeping track of it, but I expect that all the examples that currently include a number are from a time before the page was organized with each type in its own folder. Now including the number in the example description is redundant, and an example with nothing but a number seems silly. Don't take the existence of just-a-type-number examples to be evidence that new just-a-number examples are being created or encouraged. They're just waiting for someone to fix them.
I'm willing to concede that perhaps this isn't worthy of being called a trope, but let's not misrepresent the concept that is supposedly the trope of this page. It's not "<character X> has big breasts, and they happen to have an opinion on them." The concept is that large breasts are present in a story and reacted to in-universe, that they are important to the characters. What the characters happen to think of large breasts is really just a detail, and dividing this one trope into micro-tropes based on each and every different opinion would not make this concept any more of a trope.
At most it might stand to be two tropes, in parallel to A-Cup Angst and Petite Pride. I don't think that's worth doing, but I'd be willing to abstain from expressing an opinion in a vote about doing that. Dividing it into any more tropes than that is just going too far.
I agree - this is not a trope. It is a collection of different things, some of which are tropes, without being their supertrope. We really need a policy of lumps like this. Something like People Notably Sitting On Chairs.
On the other hand, the way you described it is basically how a lot of examples go. It's a character reaction trope, not a style trope.
Overall, though, many examples lack context, and really should be rewritten.
The Internet misuses, abuses, and overuses everything.
Here's how I see it:
Type 1 and Type 2 do not need to be separate from one another, those two can be made into the trope "character has big breasts and does not approve."
I feel the same way about Type 3 that captainpat and shimaspawn do.
Type 4 is essentially the opposite of the first two types. That can be made into the trope "character is proud of their large breasts."
Type 5 has no business even being exclusively about breasts, this should be worked into trope about characters being ignorant to the fact that people are drooling over them. Innocent Fanservice Girl does not cover this, that trope is merely about characters with no nudity taboo (The name is kind of misleading).
edited 3rd Feb '12 2:17:50 PM by MyTimingIsOff
I like this proposal.
Zzzzzzzzzz
I like it too. Seems like relatively clear distinctions to make.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
<Big Breasts Big Deal's original launcher here>
That seems acceptable to me. I just want to note that if Type 1 and 2 are merged into one trope, describing the character's reaction as "does not approve" can be misleading; a better description would be "is embarrassed/uncomfortable about and/or outright hates her buxomness". But that's for another discussion.
Regarding Type 3... Originally, I had concieved of it as "the character opinion of her own bustiness is 'Buxom Is Better'", but with how the current Buxom Is Better had been redefined, I'm not sure if that still holds. What do you think?
edited 3rd Feb '12 2:28:00 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Hammer of the Pervs
Nah, it still works. Buxom Is Better is that a bustier woman is more attractive, so if the woman is aware of her large breast being attractive then that trope is in effect.
"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.
I agree that the distinction between type 1 and type 2 is pretty subtle compared to the other types. They could be merged into a single type, and if this trope is to be split into multiple tropes then they should both go to the same trope, a parallel trope to A-Cup Angst.
Type 4 could be its own trope, a parallel trope to Petite Pride, and a relative of Buxom Is Better. Type 4 is about the character being proud of her figure, while Buxom Is Better is about large breasts actually being more attractive. One would expect all cases of Type 4 to also be Buxom Is Better, but it wouldn't be technically necessary. It would be interesting to see a list of examples that have Type 4 without Buxom Is Better. And of course there are bound to be many cases of Buxom Is Better without Type 4.
Type 3 and Type 5 seem to go together. The distinction is clear but in some works it might be impossible to tell which applies. They are separate from the other types because they only make sense in the context of a story that draws attention to their breasts. For types 1,2,4, the character herself is making note of her breasts, but for type 3 and 5, it only works if other characters make note of her breasts and she explicitly fails to note them. In this way, types 3 and 5 are inversions of types 1,2,4. For this reason, types 3 and 5 might work well as their own trope. Perhaps Big Breasts Big Deal could be limited to types 3 and 5 (using the ironic meaning of "big deal") while the other types get moved to other tropes that aren't subtropes of the newly restricted Big Breasts Big Deal. Instead of subtropes, they would actually be inversions.
edited 3rd Feb '12 7:02:33 PM by Lilwik
Types 3 and 5 are not mergeable, mainly because of what I said in my last post: Type 5 has no business even being solely about breasts. It isn't even written breast-specific in it's current form. It should not be lumped in with any breast trope.
You can say that type 5 has no business being solely about breasts, but surely you cannot deny that examples of type 5 can be grouped according to those that involve breasts and those that do not. In some works it might be ambiguous, but in any where breast size is noticed you could clearly say that it is a case of type 5 being about breasts.
It is only natural that the actual examples listed on this page are almost exclusively of that sort. Surely there is no reason that those breast related examples of type 5 could not be merged into a combined type 3 and 5 trope. Even if you don't admit that type 5 is being merged in with type 3, all examples of type 5 would surely have a place in the list of examples because of how closely connected the two types are, and the fact that all the examples that we currently have are breast-related.
I agree - type 5 should not be stuffed into a "breasts are good" trope. Move its examples to Innocent Fanservice Girl and Distracted by the Sexy.
Type 3 shouldn't either. It's about attractiveness, which includes breasts but which includes other things as well in precisely the same way.
AND type 4! It's about flaunting your sexuality and attractive body. From a trope point of view, what do we care if its your breasts or your legs?
Only the first two, which are pretty similar, seem particular to breasts.
First of all, this trope is going to require cleanup involving the 5 different types. Type Labels Are Not Examples, so we need to fix that.
Also, this seems less like a trope than it does like several different tropes clumped together. I'm a lumper, and even I think this is overdoing it. These are very different reactions to having large breasts, and the name doesn't even fit any of the types except the third one.
edited 2nd Feb '12 3:13:30 PM by MyTimingIsOff