Not Tropeworthy: Hot Mom

I'm not seeing it. One side thinks this is definitely not a trope, and the other side thinks this is a trope, it's just not being used properly. Those two tropes you mention could be made without changing anything with Hot Mom.

If there's an actual trope you think can be made from Hot Mom then it needs to be more than tangentially related to it.

How is this different from any other Attraction Trope? "Attractive + What The Person Is" is most of them.

Attraction Tropes is an index, first and foremost. Also, see the discussion about mothers not being usually as attractive as non-mothers.

There's a ton of stuff we need to deal with in Attraction Tropes, but let's do one thing at a time.

I get that mothers on-screen look better than mothers in real life, but as we've established, almost all women on screen look better than their real-life equivalent. Pick an popular actress, cast her as a mother (or lawyer, or doctor, or cop, or psychic), and boom, you're extremely likely to have an example of a hot mom (or hot lawyer, or hot doctor, or hot psychic).

But if we're talking about examples like Lorelai Gilmore, then yes, there's more to it than "hot," so let's hammer that out.

I'm glad, by the way, that someone offered her as a model example rather than, say, Gloria from the page image. That character is very much hot and is a mother, but there's no trope there. She's part of a May–December Romance - every plot or scene about her being hot would play out the exact same way if she weren't a mom but were just her husbands hot second wife.

The truth is that there are going to be a lot of overlap with a lot of other tropes, especially Ugly Guy, Hot Wife. It doesn't negate the validity of this trope, it's just a matter of understanding how it is used.

I can just repeat that I think we only need to clean up the misuse — mostly I'd delete Zero Context Examples, move dubious to the work's discussion page and make sure all examples on Hot Mom have a good write-up.

I agree there might be overlapping tropes, but in no way I think Hot Mom should be cut or made into a redirect or disambiguation.

If you think there are more tropes in it, then feel free to start YKTTW drafts. I usually contribute in the discussion there quite substantially if I find the new concept intriguing. But I don't think this TRS discussion will help to shape up new tropes.

I think this is a clear example of the pages of "character with <some trait> that <some troper> finds sexy", and this is a group of pages we've been trying to get rid of for a long time. This is because it has been shown repeatedly in the past that everything is found sexy by someone on the internet.

So I think this page is beyond saving, and it has a title that directly encourages people to list "characters you personally find sexy". So we should get rid of it.

That was the fate of fetish fuel audience reaction, right? However, I think this is a different case. This is not getting ceepy and not every mom on screen is a Hot Mom. The worst problem is shoehorning, Zero Context Examples and in some cases gushing.

I'll set up the page action crowner soon, ok? I think most people in the discussion think the page and the trope is a problem, but we have different opinions what to with it.

"This is not getting ceepy and not every mom on screen is a Hot Mom"

Not every mom on screen has Red Hair, but is being a Red Headed Mother relevent?

Maybe some mothers are Fiery Red Heads, but the fact that they are mothers is irrelevant to the trope.

Not only should we be moving away from tropes based on subjective judgments of Hot, but like other appearance tropes we should only be documenting stuff that actually means something.

While TV Tropes has long been guilty of simply creating longs lists of characters that are Hot, or have Blue Eyes, or have Green Eyes or whatever, I think the practice has been discredited by now.

Redheaded Hero is a valid trope. As is Innocent Blue Eyes or Creepy Blue Eyes. How is your comment relevant to Hot Mom?

Hot Mom = mom in fiction that is attractive which is relevant for the story somehow. How is this not a trope?

edited 23rd Sep '13 5:17:14 AM by XFllo

Only if the definition can remain that way, and not simply used/thrown around when a troper sees a mother type character and thinks "She's hot"

...Innocent Blue Eyes or Creepy Blue Eyes. How is your comment relevant to Hot Mom?"

Yes, those two are tropes, in which Blue Eyes has a specific meaning.

Blue Eyes isn't a trope, but an index of tropes. Simply having Blue Eyes isn't a trope. Nor do we attempt to list under one trope every example of a character with blue eyes where the blue eyes has meaning, because experience has shown that it just becomes a list of character with blue eyes that may or may not have meaning.

Like wise, being a mother while being hot is not a trope. It has no meaning.

Hot Mom = mom in fiction that is attractive which is relevant for the story somehow. How is this not a trope?

"Relevent somehow", even if that was a an accurate discription of all 2000+ uses of the trope on this wiki (it isn't) is hardly a recipe for a coherant, meaningful trope. When we tried to have a page defined as "Blue Eyes that mean something" or "Rabbits that mean something" or "Dolphins that have one of a dozen different characterists" the result was a disaster.

We fixed them by breaking up the "relevent somehow" pages and instead created tropes defined by specific ways that they were relevent.

You started bringing up new tropes and comparing them to this one. If you plan such a big change as cutting a trope or splitting it in several, consensus is needed. Also, I think the tone of your message is unnecessarily confrontational. That's all I have to say about that.

I think the comparison to Blue Eyes is pretty charitable, but it's accurate. Even if we ignore all the problems we've had with tropes cataloging attractive characters, we're left with, at best, a list of mothers who are attractive. So what? What is the meaning? Where is the trope? Let's find those cases where it does mean something (e.g. Flirty Parent) and make a page out of that.

I'm hoping to get something like like consensus in the discussion, because we all know how the poll will go. Of course people don't want to cut/fix Hot Mom. They love that sort of page. That's the problem.

edited 23rd Sep '13 7:56:32 AM by AmyGdala

What is the meaning? Where is the trope?

It's roughly "Mothers are portrayed as attractive, even if the effects of child-having would usually take a toll on their appearance".

I think you are exagerating the toll that being a mother can take on appearance vs. being any other middle age to older woman. I also think that the difference the average attractiveness of mothers in fiction and Real Life mothers is no more than the differences between women who are not mothers.

"Mothers who are attractive to anyone else at all", even In-Universe, simply is not unrealistic, nor is it invariabley notable. Lots of mothers in Real Life are attractive to someone, as can be evidenced by the Real Life section this used to have, and all the troper drool over actresses that are mothers in Real Life that the page accumulated. Not to mention all the people with one kid or more, who still manage to have a romantic and/or sexual relations. If everyone suddenly became a repulsive hag after the first kid, how do so many people end up with second kids? And third kids?

But even if we were to define this as "Fictional mothers who are more attractive that is realistic for mothers" what scale can we use to determine that? It there some standard of body measurements, for example?

And even ignoring that "Hot" or "Attractive" is subjective...

Can we automatically exclude every mother played by an actress that is a mother in Real Life? I would think that we would have too, because if a mother is being played by someone with a mother's body, you can hardly claim it isn't a realistic depiction of mothers.

Catbert has been arguing this quite well. I don't think there's anything to justify a trope called Hot Mom. The best argument for this trope that we've seen is that moms are commonly expected to not be attractive—well, why? And who says? Sofia Vergara is in the page image for Hot Mom. She is attractive whether or not she's playing a mom.

The scale we can use to determine attractive is if another character says that she's attractive. This isn't just "mother who isn't unattractive." It's one who's "mistaken for her children's cute big-sister," or Cool Big Sis. I don't think the current picture is good actually. She should look more like a mature teenager.

I'd totally support a Mistaken For Sibling page, solely about parents. But that doesn't justify a Hot Mom page.

The page image is a good example of why the trope doesn't work. That character is undeniably portrayed as hot, and she has a 14-year-old son. (The actress is undeniably portrayed as hot as well — by the media — and in real life, she has a 22-year-old son.) But she's never lusted for by younger men. She never has any love interest beyond her older husband. Every "hot" plot point would play out the same way if she were just her husband's hot second wife and not a mother. Meanwhile, the other main mother in that series has had her own fanservice scenes, not because "hot mom" is an important part of her character but because she's a Hollywood actress, so she's probably attractive, and the show exploits that.

Seconded. Unless I see something concrete and more detailed than 'relevant somehow' I say we cut this 'trope'.

Thirded.

I support Hot Mom and Hot Dad being turned into redirects for an Index-Only of Hot Parents. Not a super trope, because it isn't a trope, but an index.

That would preserve inbounds, and give people a way to search for the many tropes that can be used for the PSOC of "attractive adults with children".

To be fair, I consider Hot Parents no more pageworthy than Hot Mom/Hot Dad.

This.

An example-free index would be better than a normal page, but that doesn't mean it deserves a page at all. But now that you've brought up Hot Dad - does anyone think that's more tropeworthy than Hot Mom? Based on the discussion so far, it should be even less tropeworthy, since the inverst (Harried Dad) isn't much of a trope.