Not Thriving: A Crack In The Ice

This trope, after five months, is not doing well. It only has 13 wicks and 2 inbounds, despite the fact that I've seen this more than that (not that I can name any specific examples). The only thing is I don't know what should be done to fix this.

Wow. I thought this was some silly metaphor or obscure reference again, but turns out this trope is literally about cracks in the ice.

Well, that's good. I suppose this has few examples because it's pretty rare. I'm not convinced there's a problem here.

If there is no problem to repair, then it's not a repair shop case. I think special efforts or trope talk would be the place to go if you simply want more wicks.

Needs Redirects

crevasse?

While the name is not complety wrong, it sounds like ice cracking under someone standing on a frozen body of water. And the page quote seems to be about this and not the trope.

This has that "fresh from YKTTW by someone too eager to launch" feel to it. The description is shorter than the quote, several of the examples are quotes. The description itself seems to be trying to talk about how it should happen. Also, the name sounds more specific than it is. The trope, from what I can tell, is a subtrope of Buried Alive that occurs in arctic environments and can include falling under frozen lakes and what not.

It involves falling into a crevasse. How else do you want me to put it?

If the trope is supposed to be "someone unexpectedly falls down a crevasse [in snow or ice]", then the title is too broad. A Crack in the Ice sounds like it should be about the frozen-lake ice cracking scenario. But I'm not surprised that it's not more heavily wicked, because the "falling into a crevasse" plot point is really not that common. Specialized tropes like this are never going to have hundreds of wicks.

I agree, the current name is misleading and sounds like the part where you're walking across a frozen lake and it starts all cracking up.

FWIW, the usage check. The numbers are far too small to draw any reasonable conclusions, but:

Correct:

• Digger
• Literal Cliffhanger
• Realm Of The Elderlings
• The Day After Tomorrow
• The Thing
• Tintin

Unclear:

• Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity (alleged subtrope)
• Rope Bridge: "a snow bridge works on the same principle"
• Wally And Osborne

Misused:

• Ice Age: "The herd is walking on an ice field when a lava flow opens up beneath them, leaving only a thin bridge getting thinner by the minute."

Zero Context Example:

• Due South: "in the finale"
• Maximum Ride: "in the fourth book"
• The Wall: song title "The Thin Ice"

Lists and indexes

• Pages Needing Wicks
• The Ground Beneath Our Feet
• These Tropes Were Frozen Today

edited 21st Mar '12 10:52:52 AM by Stratadrake

If my memory of the Climbing the Cliffs of Insanity is correct, then it's not a subtrope. Now, in the event of this trope happening, you could use that other trope, but that doesn't make it a subtrope, just a trope buddy.

Should we have a crowner on whether we should send this back to YKTTW to collect examples and get a better name?

I think sending it to YKTTW sounds like a reasonable option.

The name might need changing, but is the low use a problem? It doesn't strike me as a massively common trope, seeing how it's restricted to primarily adventure stories that take place in ice-bound environments.

Many adventure series do have one or two episodes set in a cold climate, and if that is, the chance of this scene happening is relatively high.

@ Doktor: I listed what I felt was wrong with the trope here. Do you disagree with any of those points?

edited 24th Mar '12 3:58:31 PM by Deboss

Fair enough.

I also think it would be best to expand it to any crevice that a character gets trapped in. Being in snow/ice doesn't really change much beyond the chance of freezing to death, which is just a nature challenge.

Agree with this. I've read a couple of books where characters fall into natural caves and the like. (Falling through a crevasse in a glacier may be more likely, but you're right that it's basically the same story.)

I think there was a recent film that entailed it, 128 hours or something. It was based on a true story or something.

One main problem here is that the description's two sentences are really about two different tropes.

The example for The Wall isn't about literal ice - it's using thin ice as a metaphor. That's not even remotely ambiguous; the song explicitly says "the thin ice of modern life".

That also makes it a much more interesting example than the trope page itself. Using cracked ice symbolically is a lot more worthy of analysis than "Yep, here's a list of things in which there was ice and then it cracked".

I Thought It Meant (based on the title.) that X was on the ice and it started to crack causing problems or having X run away from the spreading crack that is following him.

Not falling into An Ice Hole that is covered by snow or such.

edited 20th Apr '12 1:53:46 AM by Raso

Clocking as inactive.

Locking up.