Unclear Description: C List Fodder

Exactly - at its origin, this is a trope about the tendency of characters who die in comic book Crisis Crossovers to be your secondary characters from secondary titles, never your Batmen and Spidermen-types. In my view, that's distinct from, if maybe a subtrope to, the more general "minor characters always die" trope.

I'm just using the term Shared Universe as the easiest catch-all term things like the Star Wars Expanded Universe that operate very similarly to superhero comics - including the use of this trope - but aren't.

I guess that's fair.

If that's what we decide, we'll need to get rid of a lot of examples.

No. Look at the wayback page I linked. There's nothing there about crossovers or shared universes or anything like that! Here's the complete description:

See, nothing about crossovers, and even the killing them part is only listed as the cynic's view.

The trope is (or was): when things get really messy, send in the second-tier, because the first-tier needs to follow Status Quo Is God.

This trope involves the cold realization that big-time comic books enjoy events

"big-time comic book events" doesn't leave much for interpretation.

"Big-time" modifies comic books, not events.

You've got me there.

In fact, I'm confused. What is the original trope supposed to be? Is it "when there's a comic-book event that's supposed to change the status quo, it will mostly involve C-listers"?

I think so, more or less. That original certainly isn't going to win any awards for clear writing, though, is it? :)

Well, what do you expect from that era of TV Tropes?

Regardless, that's still different from the "minor characters are the ones who die" idea.

so, should we try to revert it back to what it used to be?

I'm not sure. Certainly "fodder" does suggest it has to do with death.

Bump.

The problem with the original version is that it dates to a time when we were just starting to broaden our horizons beyond television, expanding a medium at a time based on what the tropers we had were interested in; some Comic Books here, some Video Games there, a little Professional Wrestling somewhere else. (You can see evidence of that approach in the sidebar of that version.)

As we expanded into each medium, we added all of that medium's common tropes, and many of those tropes ended up suffering the fate many supposedly "medium-specific" tropes have: they reflect the Fan Myopia of the people who added them. (I suspect a lot of "medium-specific" tropes with this problem date to this era.)

So we have this trope, which was overly narrowly defined to be specific to "big-time [superhero] comic books" and was defined in such a way as to be specific to the situation in which it's found there. Now, we could keep it or even narrow it to be as specific as that version implies, or we could adopt the perception that has led to its broadening and define it as, as my previous post put it, "it's always the [more] minor characters" that die whenever a story needs/wants to kill an actual character as opposed to a Red Shirt. To me, that's tropable and separable from Mauve Shirt, albeit a "trope in aggregate" (which is always fun), and I'm not sure it's so separable from the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality. If it is, that just leaves the question of whether this trope is a viable subtrope or not.

By the way, I'm going to take xtifr's side on this: it's not the shared universe aspect of comic books that leads to this trope. Look at the "events" on that old version: though Decimation can be seen as simply a part of the larger House of M crossover, in the context in which the page talks about it it can be seen as an event local to the X-Men, not a crossover involving larger franchises. Hell, even at that early date Shortpacked was on the page - admittedly as a lampshading/parody, but an indicative one nonetheless.

So you think this should be the general "minor supporting characters die instead of the important characters." That's currently what most of the examples are, and it fits the name, so I don't have a problem with that. I do think that the original trope (which doesn't even seem to require death) could be tropeable, but we'd have to start it from scratch in YKTTW, and give it a name without the word "fodder" in it, but we can deal with that later (or never).

So, who else is in favor of broadening the description to fit the usage?

I'm not. Morgan Wick's arguments about genre/medium Fan Myopia and poor early trope write-ups make sense, but I genuinely believe there's a specific phenomenon here that we'd be losing if we expanded the trope to fit the misuse. This post sums up how I see it pretty well - there's a difference between the sort of "minor" characters involved in comic book "events" and standard minor characters.

We can keep it under this name or create it as a separate trope, but I'm pretty sure this idea is a distinct trope - more distinct then the misuse, in fact - and should not be thrown away simply because the original write-up was bad.

We don't have to lose that trope, we'd just have to create it again under a new name.

Clocking as inactive.

Adding a link to Back for the Dead to the description since, regardless of the Crossover or not-Crossover issue, it's plain enough to see this as a Sub-Trope of BFtD.

Clock is long expired with minimal activity.