Our Monsters Are Different Snowclones

As typical for most snowclone families, Our Monsters Are Different is running into major problems:

• Most of them are actually sub-indices dressed up as tropes. This is causing various meanings that are taking over the pages.

• They end up turning into exhausting and confusing essays that are causing serious cases of natter, justifying edits and Zero Content Examples that constantly going to war about how a monster does or doesn't fit: "Monster Z from show Y is a much better example of this trope","No, monster Z is totally not an example! Because... . This is probably why Our Vampires Are Different headscratchers looks like a vampire forum thread because someone tried to prevent the natter from growing. Our Zombies Are Different HS looks like a zombie forum as well.

• Tropers are starting to grow weary of having to go through a marathon with their eyes reading the descriptions, and instead add shoehorned examples and X Just X.

Thoughts?

edited 5th Apr '12 12:54:27 PM by Oreochan

Take the ones that can reasonably be split into subtropes and split them?

I know that's what we're doing with Our Zombies Are Different. Our Vampires Are Different is another one that might be able to use that treatment, but there's so much bleeding between the various types that it would be hard. And we already did it with Our Werewolves Are Different.

How about maybe turning it into a useful notes to show how differently vampires are used in fiction and split the tropable types?

I kind of wonder just how many of these are all that different. Vampires, yes. Zombies, well, moreso these days. The others? Godawful snowclones. I'd be in favor of just a mass renaming effort for all of these, and completely abandon all of the names (while the two I mentioned could merit keeping their names, they encourage bad habits).

We did some research on that actually. Monster tropes with Different in the title are ten times more likely to have examples that aren't Zero Context Examples as tropes that don't use the snowclone. It greatly improves the quality of the pages. Why? We're not sure. We do know it's true though.

Removing the snowclone causes the general quality of the page and examples to decay. Thus it is a bad thing. No matter how silly the names are, they work really well.

edited 5th Apr '12 2:13:07 PM by shimaspawn

I think that "Different" works like a flag "Hey, say why it's different!"

Yes. Prompting people to add description is a good thing.

Shima is right, it could have been a whole lot worse. The names need to stay. The main problem is that some descriptions like Vampire are overly long and are basically essays and that some tropers use some of the points as grounds to judge whether an example is an example and might delete examples that are legit or seems to be at least which causes natter and edit wars.

The first time I noticed that this is a problem was when members of the family were kept getting reported on natter alert, when I look at the examples of at least two or three members and actually saw how excessively long Our Vampires Are Different description when it was linked in a forum game. I was motivated to raise this issue.

Smaller tropes are fine for the most part. Older tropes and larger tropes like vampire (which got split into subpages almost a year ago) that have actual headscratchers that are treated like threads are the ones that need help the most.

edited 5th Apr '12 2:42:27 PM by Oreochan

Ideally, if we really wanted to improve monster tropes, we'd add the snowclone to tropes that don't use it right now. I don't like the names. I think they sound silly. But I acknowledge that they work miles better than anything else we can come up with.

Yes, the 'Are Different' clearly inspires people to elaborate. The vampire one is a mess because vampire mythology is a mess.

A lot of these could use splitting.

A lot of them could use splitting. I don't think that the overlap matters. Examples can fit into multiple subtropes fine.

Yeah its like checkmarks for elements on a monster. People use what they like for a work.

Most "our different" ones should be indexes or supertropes.

One split off idea for Our Vampires Are Different, is the Almost Invincible Vampire. Another one is when they can't be detected or seen by mortal eyes except if you know the tell tale signs.

edited 5th Apr '12 4:11:12 PM by Oreochan

The second one is actually covered by several tropes like By the Eyes of the Blind and Invisible to Normals.

Ah, never mind then. I'll look for more.

Replacing some of the paragraphs on the main with just links to trope pages and putting the in-depth stuff on the Analysis tab might help some.

Yes, that works better. What do you think about the headscratchers though? I can't really see why we need them when we can just chat about them in trope talk as I don't think we need headscratchers for them anyway and they tend to attract Tropes Are Not Bad or Tropes Are Not Good arguements and complaining about the trope in general which leads to quite a few getting cut. But that's something for Wiki talk.

edited 5th Apr '12 9:45:29 PM by Oreochan

Alright, are there any other trope other Our Monsters Are Different tropes other than the vampire one, need to be split and turned to subindexs?

Bumping this, because I have to ask what goes if the snowclone our X'es are different is applied to non-monster tropes. The question is Our Judiciary System Is Different YKTTW, where Fast Eddie has demanded a non-snowclone name.

The thing about that trope, the way I understand it, is that it describes the trope very well, which normally isn't the standard for snowclones.

Err, I come to this thread to say that I enjoy the Our Monsters Are Different articles, essay-like descriptions included. If someone wants to get rid of the nice descriptions, I think they should go to Useful Notes rather than deleted.

edited 2nd Jun '12 9:44:48 PM by Anfauglith

Analysis might be better.

I've got nothing against the long descriptions, but Our Elves Are Better could possibly use a rename... the trope itself isn't about elves being better than anyone, it's just about types of elves. I mistakenly cut a legitimate use from a work page because the name had me confused.