Snowclone: Hollywood Style

Many of our snowclones are bad, but Hollywood Style offers a special blend of problems.

Hollywood Style means several different things (more on that later), but the general definition I get from it is: things that are portrayed differently in fiction from how they are in real life. Okay. I'm sure all of those are tropes. But don't an enormous proportion of our tropes fall under that definition? Including all our Artistic License tropes, all of our Did Not Do The Research tropes and a great many others besides?

More importantly, we shouldn't just define a trope as "the way Hollywood portrays this thing." We need to state what that way IS. Else we get tropes like Hollywood Light Bulb. (What is a Hollywood Light Bulb? Click to find out!)

And as the Hollywood Style page description states (in fact, the only thing that it states), these tropes aren't about American movies, or America in general, or movies in general. They're about media in general, like all our tropes, leaving "Hollywood" a poor adjective for them.

I suggest going through all the pages and recategorizing or renaming as necessary.

I see the index/snowclone presently covering these different, distinct concepts:

1) Comparatively X. (Hollywood Dateless, Hollywood Homely, Hollywood Nerd type II, Hollywood Old, Hollywood Pudgy) With these tropes, an element wouldn't qualify as X in real life, but it does in fiction because of how it compares with unrealistic media standards. This is what I originally thought Hollywood X to mean.

2) Exaggerated X or Stereotypical X (Hollywood Atheist, Hollywood Autism, Hollywood California, Hollywood Jehovah's Witness, Hollywood New England, Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis, Hollywood Nerd type I, Hollywood Nuns, Hollywood Tourette's, Hollywood Voodoo) With these tropes, the element would certainly qualify as X in real life, if it existed, but it would be an extreme example. These tropes are based on stereotypes and misconceptions to the point of inaccuracy. This is the complete opposite of "1." With many tropes, such as Hollywood Atheist, X has several stereotypes, and it's unclear to which "Hollywood X" refers. In some, including Hollywood Atheist again, the trope refers to more than one of these conflicting stereotypes, which shouldn't belong on the same page at all.

3) Did Not Do The Research On Subject X or Unrealistic Treatment Of X (Hollywood Costuming, Hollywood Evolution, Hollywood History, Hollywood Law, Hollywood Sailing, Hollywood Science, Hollywood Psych, Hollywood Sex, Hollywood Tactics) With these tropes, the media portray a broad topic in an inaccurate way, presumably using a variety of tropes. I do not think these are useful pages when they collect examples, but they work best as supertropes to DNDTR tropes. After all, not all media portray science (or geography, or law) the same incorrect way to the point where we can label a single portrayal as "the way Hollywood does it." Many of these names are also particularly ambiguous ("Hollywood Costuming" sounds like "costumes in movies" instead of "inaccurate costuming"; "Hollywood Economics" sounds something akin to "Hollywood Accounting."

4) DNDTR/unrealistic portrayal of specific element X (Hollywood CB, Hollywood Density, Hollywood Encryption, Hollywood Excorcism, Hollywood Fire, Hollywood Genetics, Hollywood Hacking, Hollywood Heart Attack, Hollywood Skydiving) These are narrower than "3" but have similar problems. Some may work as tropes, some may be supertropes. All could use descriptive names.

5) Specific DNDTR or Acceptable Breaks from Reality tropes (As Long as It Sounds Foreign, Hollywood Acid, Hollywood Chameleon, Hollywood Drowning, Hollywood Driving, Hollywood Giftwrap, Hollywood Healing, Hollywood Light Bulb, Hollywood Mirage. Hollywood Satanism, Hollywood Silencer, Hollywood Spelling, Hollywood Torches) These are all valid tropes, but we must assign each clear names rather than vague "Hollywood" ones.

6) List of items in category X that appear in media (Common Hollywood Sex Traits, Hollywood Board Games, , Hollywood Personality Disorders) Here, if it's an index, the "Hollywood" is just superfluous, right?

7) X as portrayed on screen (Hollywood Restraining Order) These aren't necessary inaccurate. They're just there.

8) Way Media Convey X (Hollywood Darkness, Hollywood Tone-Deaf) The alternative may be realistic but unclear.

9) Hollywood Business Tropes (Hollywood Accounting, Hollywood Hype Machine, Hollywood Thin) These tropes are actually about Hollywood - about the real-life media industry, not about fictional portrayal.

10) Tropes about the fictional portrayal of Hollywood (Horrible Hollywood, Writers Suck)

11) Stereotype Indexes (Hollywood Atlas, Hollywood Dress Code)

edited 26th Jun '12 1:36:06 PM by Routerie

Several of the tropes you mentioned should have their own threads here, for reasons other than you said.

The big problem here is that Hollywood as a prefix is used a lot outside of the wiki. It's a Small Reference Pools phenomenon where Hollywood = cinematography, and cinematography = pop culture. But for our purposes, we need to be stricter. We should restrict it to articles that are either specific to Hollywood or which definitely started there. (Hollywood California for one.)

The DNDTR and Acceptable Breaks articles should be moved to Artistic License.

Some of the stereotypes could be prefixed "Straw" instead, which is already a redirect for Hollywood Atheist, but for some like Hollywood Jehovah's Witness we need to get a snowclone-able title for "intentionally exaggerated and caricatured for comedy".

For the likes of Hollywood Pudgy, we could have "Pudgy For The Cast".

For your number 6, "X As Portrayed On Screen" could do. Better titles are welcome.

A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.

And yes, some need new titles on an individual basis.

A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.

Agreed (with the general ones - category 3) Probably an improvement, but "straw" is itself a commonly-misused snowclone. I don't think any of the tropes in that category besides Hollywood Atheist qualify as strawmen, and I'm not so sure that Hollywood Atheist does either. Yeah, or something to that tune.

And for the tropes in category 5, I imagine descriptive new names. Super Corrosive Acid, Perfect Cameleon, Frantic Drowning, Talking To The Passenger, EZ Open Gift Box, No Healing Needed, Photo Floods, Oasis Mirage, Evil Satanists, Silencer Fwip, Unspoken Spelling Guarentee, Convenient Torch - or better versions of names like those.

edited 24th Jun '12 3:00:22 PM by Routerie

I think the technical term for Hollywood Light Bulb is "Aquarium Lighting" (not sure). Hollywood Driving could be "Not looking at the road". Hollywood Healing could be "No Lasting Injuries". Perfect or Convenient ("X Just As We Need Them") could do for many others. You are better at finding names than I am (or YKTTW was).

A blog that gets updated on a geological timescale.

• Hollywood Driving has Missing Supertrope Syndrome; either expand that to all Distracted Driving or make a supertrope about that

• Hollywood Sailing might get merged

• Hollywood Light Bulb is Not Thriving

• Should I start threads on these, since these have others problems this thread isn't about?

edited 24th Jun '12 5:11:13 PM by spacemarine50

I like most of the Hollywood tropes. As mentioned, "Hollywood" is used outside the wiki as a term for "inaccurate portrayal in media of", which should be a point in its favor.

I would go with just renaming items 6-9 (except Hollywood Accounting since that is a preexisting term).

And Hollywood Science already is a supertrope.

Yeah, obviously people like them. That's how snowclones spread. But we can do better. We could have made tropes called Hollywood CPR, Hollywood Lava, Hollywood Archery, Hollywood Water, Hollywood Experiments, Hollywood Records, Hollywood Electrocution and Hollywood Glass, but we instead named them CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable, Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid, No "Arc" in "Archery", Water Is Air, No Control Group, Vinyl Shatters, Harmless Electrocution and Soft Glass - and we're better off for it.

Yeah, that's good. (Spacemarine suggests separate threads for the other tropes you mentioned.)

Sure, if the queue can handle them.

edited 25th Jun '12 2:02:24 AM by Routerie

I've been looking at the Holly Wood X pages than also have equivalent Artistic License X counterparts.

It looks like Hollywood Atlas is not the same as Artstic License Geograpy. Rather, it is an index of geographic stereotypes. (Rename to Geographic Stereotypes?) Hollywood History is an index of all historical eras, accuracy irrelevant.

Hollywood Law looks good for merging with Artistic License – Law - it even directs readers to the latter page for examples. The others look good for a rename to Artistic License.

edited 25th Jun '12 1:28:58 PM by Routerie

More Artistic License snowclones? No thank you.

And their purpose is basically "Did Not Do The Research with examples". Throwing tropes into them is unnecessary neoteny.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Artistic License pages are bad. I would cut them all. But it's worse to have that same content one pages with different, ambiguous names.

And at least (some) Artistic License pages have the disclaimer that people must not list them as tropes on work pages. Hollywood X pages have no such warning, leading to increased use.

edited 26th Jun '12 6:27:23 AM by Routerie

Crower's up.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Downvoted all of them. Artistic License – Indexes is a list of research failures with the purpose of collecting examples for subtropes.

Hollywood X is about the pattern of (mis)representation of these things. It doesn't necessarily reflect a research failure.

And we don't need to expand another snowclone family.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Some Hollywood X tropes are about patterns of misrepresentation. Others are broad lists of inaccuracies that should collect examples through subtropes. Still others have some other definition. This crowner only concerns the second category ("3" in my first post).

For example, look at Hollywood Science. Its first line is "Research is hard.") It is a list of subtropes, many of which are themselves Artistic License tropes. (It also contains examples. We should remove them because there is no single pattern of scientific misrepresentation across all media or even all of Hollywood; there is instead a series of tropes).

If you would like to cut any or all of these pages, that's fine, but labeling them as Hollywood X is not a solution.

edited 26th Jun '12 9:38:54 AM by Routerie

First, Artistic License Science is a misleading name. It sounds like a trope about the scientific method. Not at all what we are going here.

Also, Hollywood Science an existing term.

edited 26th Jun '12 9:42:29 AM by SeptimusHeap

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I... don't understand you. "Artistic License - Science" sounds like "taking artistic license with the subject of science." That is what Hollywood Science is. "Artistic License - X" means nothing else on this wiki, while Hollywood X means half a dozen other things.

Edit: If Hollywood Science is an outside term, that's a good argument for keeping the current name.

edited 26th Jun '12 9:45:07 AM by Routerie

Keep you links straight. Artistic License is something else altogether.

No, I am not going to agree with this rename. Artistic License Science sounds way to ambiguous.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Are you arguing against our general Artistic License – Indexes? Or are you claiming there's any difference between, for example, Hollywood Economics and Artistic License – Law?

Hollywood Law and Artistic License – Law look like something different to me. The former is a pattern, the latter an exampleless index.

Also, for the record:

• Artistic License and Artistic License – Indexes are something completely different. Dunno why we need that.
• Artistic License – Indexes subitems don't get the banner because it was tied to the YouFail URL. So it's OK to wick to them.

Finally, Hollywood Science has a Wikipedia page

edited 26th Jun '12 10:18:58 AM by SeptimusHeap

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

You're right that Hollywood Law tries to sell itself as a pattern. But that doesn't work. No single pattern defines the way fiction (or film, or Hollywood) portrays the law.

Look at the intro. Does it describe what this alleged pattern is? No.

It begins by talking generally about legal situations that defy fact for the sake of the narrative (i.e. Artistic License – Law). Then it mentions a possible consequence of the errors - a Broken Aesop. Then it mentions a different consequence of the errors - the CSI Effect. Finally, it mentions that if a story explicitly justifies the departure from reality, it doesn't qualify as this trope.

But what is this trope/pattern? The page doesn't say - other than "inaccuracies related to law." As a result, examples cover just about any inaccuracy related to the law. That's the very sort of broad, tropeless example list that the Artistic License pages ban because such errors should go into specific tropes or nowhere at all.

That's the very sort of broad, tropeless example list that the Artistic License pages ban because such errors should go into specific tropes or nowhere at all.

• Please link to Artistic License – Indexes rather than Artistic License as they are different things.
• From a reading of the You Fail Forever threads I thought that the point of all the AL pages was to collect examples so that they could easily be collected for YKTTW purposes.

edited 26th Jun '12 10:50:09 AM by SeptimusHeap

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

This seems like a really awful idea. If you want a specific trope renaimed, make a thread and make a case for it.

I'm downvoting everything because we should be having actual discussions about these renames, not just doing a single huge crowner from the start.

But I don't want a specific trope renamed. I want to fix the Hollywood X family, and that is a multi-step process. For the first step, I chose to look at RJ Savoy's suggestion of changing the "Hollywood X = inaccuracies related to the subject of X" tropes to Artistic License tropes. We could discuss that as a single proposition, but we have instead opened all the tropes up for separate votes.

edited 26th Jun '12 12:30:17 PM by Routerie

I think we should hang on to Hollywood Pudgy, at the very least, because it really is very similar to Hollywood Homely. Actually they might be similar enough for a merge, but maybe that's an entirely different discussion.