Needs Help: Last Starfighter

During a wick cleaning of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine I stumbled on a trope page that needed a lot of help, Last Starfighter. It's an older trope (first edit in the page history is in September 2010) so it's not a YKTTW Crash Rescue thing, but I could swear I saw this same trope elsewhere in addition to all its other problems.

I did a major cleanup (sorted and folderized, namespaced, formatted, added a ZCE note and commented out what I couldn't fix myself, and moved the second page quote to Quotes), but it's still got issues with Trope-Namer Syndrome and it may duplicate another trope.

Thoughts? (For the moment, I'm turning Main.The Last Starfighter into a disambig between them to catch mislinks.)

I'll do some crosswicking, but other than that it seems fine at the first glance.

If it's a duplicate trope, you might want to cite the trope it's a duplicate to.

I'm not actually sure about the duplicate part. It's more of an "I know I've seen this before" feeling.

One I'm thinking about is It's Up to You.

edited 5th Apr '13 7:31:02 AM by StarSword

It's Up to You (everything has to be done by the Hero) seems to be the supertrope to The Last Starfighter (the Hero must alone battle the entire enemy horde).

Doesn't seem like a duplicate to me.

edited 7th Apr '13 10:24:51 AM by Sackett

The Same But More Specific of It's Up to You. I vouch to merge.

Honestly, I can't disagree with EPM on this.

No, its The Same But More Specific of The Only One.

It's Up to You is where the player in a video game has do do everything because he's the player.

As I understand it, It's Up to You is the videogame equivalent (that is, media-specific subtrope) of The Only One. Arguably, we should rename that to "The Only One / Video Games".

And yes, I agree with merging this page. The video game examples should go on It's Up to You, the non-video game examples on The Only One.

edited 12th Apr '13 5:59:56 AM by Spark9

Not quite. The Only One is the only one who can do something (either because they're alone or because everyone else is useless). When It's Up to You, the player is the only one who will do something (because the game would be boring if NP Cs did everything for you). Thus the NP Cs, even if they're just as competent and badass as the player, will just follow along and support you.

Of course, the Player Character is often also The Only One. In which case it probably shouldn't be listed in It's Up to You, because It's Up to You is kinda chairs if there's nobody else around.

Bump.

By my reading, everybody in this thread agrees that this page should be merged somewhere, we just don't agree on where exactly. I propose that the video game examples should go on It's Up to You, the non-video game examples on The Only One.

The difference is that It's Up to You is a game mechanics trope and The Only One is a narrative trope. Games can include either, neither, or both, but other media can't include It's Up to You since it's a game-specific trope. Most of the Last Starfighter examples seem to be The Only One rather than It's Up to You.

As an aside, It's Up to You is a needlessly confusing trope name; Its Up To The Player or Its Always Up To The Player would be much, much better.

Yes. And Last Starfighter appears to be a mixture of both.

The description, yeah, but basically all the examples are The Only One, not It's Up to You.

Sounds like there's a pretty clear consensus to merge this with The Only One. The name should probably redirect to the work, not the trope.

I'll work on it.

Did ^, except for a ghost wick and a locked page.

edited 11th May '13 2:40:02 PM by SeptimusHeap