The Grand Unified Appearance Trope Clean-up:

I agreed with those points. In my experience, Funny Afro has the same sort of misuse and ZCE as all other appearance tropes.

Yeah, there are also shows where the character with the afro doesn't really stand out as having a particularly odd hairstyle because many other characters have weird hairstyles. I guess Funny Afro doesn't apply when the character with the afro comes from a series full of Anime Hair.

Not really, even those with anime hair will treat an Afro as being funny, like the pompadour it’s a funny foreign thing.

Does it count if something gets stuck in the character's afro? Or if he uses it as Hammerspace Hair.

Unlike some other appearance tropes, I think this one is actually valid with its current definition. But the definition should be improved to explain how this is used, as there's definitely misuse right now. Some different ways afros are used in comedy:

• In anime, to signify the Funny Foreigner
• Often part of the Non-Ironic Clown getup
• In Korean comedy (game shows etc), often the Wacky Guy has a perm
• Parodies of Afro Asskicker
• Sometimes a trait of the Butt-Monkey or Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. Here the hair signifies the Disco Dan or Hollywood Nerd, as '70s Hair (in the United States, perhaps until recently) is considered unstylish. Perhaps to avoid Values Dissonance, this is far more likely to apply to a caucasian character who sports a 'Jewfro'.

Not sure about the last one- it's important to distinguish between "extremely silly character who has an afro" and "character in a work with humor who has an afro" and I worry the distinction might be lost.

I got Hot Scoop down to 58 so its almost done. I will try to finish off tomorrow when I get off work

edited 19th Mar '18 10:00:46 PM by MacronNotes

Dghcrh: Yeah for sure. There's a joke being made there i.e. afros are so large/so dense that things can get lost in there/can be used to hold things

Memers: Agreed, it's fairly context specific. Like in some anime, a character with an afro is constantly the butt of jokes specifically BECAUSE of their afro. Whereas in others, and I'll keep referring to Uvogin in Hunter x Hunter because it's the example that sticks out the most to me, there was maybe a 3 panel shot of him with an afro standing in the background, and he was tagged with this trope.

naturalironist: I don't disagree with your examples, in fact I think what you are doing is EXACTLY what needs to be done on the page/for crosswicked examples: indicate that this is a comedic trope that is done intentionally by the creator of a work (be they a writer or a comedian using themselves as their medium).

As written (and a lot of the character pages with this trope shows this lack of clarity), it isn't clear that there needs to be an intention of doing this for comedic effect. Which is why any character/person with an afro, including disco singers and groups who def weren't using an afro for comedic effect (it just was the style of the time), got tagged with this trope.

I also think there should be a discussion how—and your examples speak to this—this trope is WAY more prevalent outside of the West (particularly in East Asia), and is kind of a retired trope in the US specifically. And when it is done on variety shows in Korea and Japan by non-black comedians, it should be noted that it's also usually associated with unironic Blackface.

edited 21st Mar '18 5:02:26 AM by amathieu13

Hot Scoop has been reduced to 3 wicks. The only problem is that the wick on The Cerberus News characters page can't be removed because the page is locked.

edited 21st Mar '18 7:31:54 AM by Dghcrh

I got these pages and redirected it.

What trope do folks want to deal with next? Last year we considered Windows To The Soul (merge into Meaningful Appearance?), Personal Appearance Tropes (merger into Meaningful Appearance) and Creepy Blue Eyes (merge into another trope), are there other candidate jobs?

I would like to tackle Windows To The Soul again but it looks like current talk is about Funny Afro. So I guess. We can do that?

edited 21st Mar '18 8:20:14 AM by MacronNotes

I would say that Windows To The Soul is a subtrope to meaningful appearance and is specific enough for that. Some of the other more flimsy specific color tropes I think can be merged into it, although specific subtropes like Elemental Eye Colors are good enough to stand on their own.

edited 21st Mar '18 4:48:21 PM by Memers

I agree that the individual eye color trope pages are awful. They try to assign all these disparate meanings to eye color and make a trope out of it. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the examples from these pages are either shoehorning or ZCE.

Consequently, Windows To The Soul is also a mess as it's definition leans heavily on the individual eye tropes. As it's currently written, there's also some serious overlap with Elemental Eye Colors; Even the page image for Windows To The Soul is technically Elemental Eye Colors. While I do think it's a trope, I don't think listing the individual eye color meanings are helping it.

edited 21st Mar '18 5:43:13 PM by malias

But can we keep some of the individual eye colours like Red Eyes, Take Warning, Supernatural Gold Eyes, Purple Eyes and Gray Eyes? The first one (character with red eyes is evil and/or dangerous) and the second one (character with yellow or gold eyes have supernatural powers of some sort) are okay as they are.

Purple Eyes should probably get a rename too make it clear it's supposed to be only about a character that is special somehow (or merge into either Purple Is Powerful or Supernatural Is Purple if there' no other alternative).

Gray Eyes has a lot of definitions and I usually don't see it being misused and added to characters who just happen to have the eye colour, but like the Blue Eyes tropes, it should probably be split into several tropes depending on what type the character fits (or in the case when the character fits the innocent type, it can be a redirect to Innocent Blue Eyes named Innocent Gray Eyes, especially when the gray eyes look bluish or tealish).

There are some specific themes with eye colors at least in anime that I think should be included in Windows To The Soul but not as subtropes.

• Purple is mysterious, magical, playful and is a sign that they are important since it’s very very rarely used on a minor characters being such an unnatural eye color. Usually not villainous but rather trolly.
• Yellow are cunning and clever, usually have some kind of to cat or fox motif. [1] Turquoise is the other cat and fox color if they have blonde hair.
• Brown/Gray heavy emphasis on “normal” or “ordinary” characters, not really trope worthy unless they are seriously pushing The Generic Guy.
• Red is demonic, yokai, monster, or otherworldly. Not always a ‘take warning’ thing though as not all demonic origins are bad. IE Fallen Angel Flonne in Disgaea who got red eyes when she ‘fell’ from being a normal angel yet she is the same old Love Freak.

edited 22nd Mar '18 6:24:10 AM by Memers

Yes, those two tropes definitely lean on each other. Windows To The Soul is basically an index already, so I'm thinking it should be an official index or merged into one if we already have a "meaningful eye color" or whatever index. Elemental Eye Colors looks more like it can stand on its own.

I guess we are working on Windows To The Soul then? Not sure I think it merits being turned into an index though. If its kept, it needs to be renamed because it and Windows of the Soul have ridiculously similar names. Speaking of Windows of the Soul, it's about reading emotion from people's eyes and isn't specifically about eye color, so its sort of a "meaningful eye trope". Its trope page says Windows To The Soul is more about power or personality than emotion but maybe we can just be merged into a "meaningful eye trope with a small section going into eye color?

edited 25th Mar '18 11:26:07 AM by MacronNotes

I am minded myself that Windows To The Soul may merit a merge into Meaningful Appearance, since it's the eye-specific subtrope thereof. And maybe the basepage should be disambiguated between Meaningful Appearance and Windows of the Soul given the overly similar names.

Windows of the Soul is all about showing or telling the emotion in the person’s eyes, usually in prose.

That’s pretty unrelated to Windows To The Soul where the color of their eyes have been crafted to show elements of personality, heritage, elemental power and other things.

I am 2500% against just merging into ‘meaningful appearances’ in no way should it be just a dumping ground for fully valid and meaningful character design tropes. The only thing it is is the supertrope to this one.

A character design is just as important as anything else in a character.

edited 25th Mar '18 11:38:04 AM by Memers

I'm so confuse because of the similar names.

The names are way too similar yeah, at least 1 name needs to go IMO.

I think we had agreed on at least that much last time this was brought up way back.

BTW, can we at least add Hot Blooded Sideburns to the to-do list (preferably with a link to the brief initial discussion starting here)? I was intending to respond to the last few replies on that topic, but got distracted by real life several times over the past couple of months, and it's not that urgent of an issue so it could wait on the backburner for now.

well the "windows to the soul" saying is closer to Windows of the Soul than the trope of the same name.

[...]

Okay, between Windows of the Soul and Windows To The Soul, we definitely need one of them renamed. I'm familiar with an idiom that goes "eyes are the windows to the soul", with the meaning that you can learn things about the character from looking into their eyes. Posessed Eyes Take Warning would be a subtrope to that idiom.

For Windows of the Soul, how about Emotions Through The Eyes.