What to do about Ballet

I don't know how to word this, since this is my first time bringing up a trope here on Trope Talk, but...

I would like to put forth a few suggestions on what can be done with the trope currently known as Ballet. What can we the people of TV Tropes do about it? There are three options that I know of as of writing:

• Keep it as is and create a subtrope or so;
• Expansion; or
• Put the works that aren't ballets into a new trope.

I'd like to hear your input on this.

4) Move it to Useful Notes. That's what it's written as.

Right, well, the reason why I brought it up here is because a fellow troper, kjnoren, suggested splitting the article in two: a "ballet as media" article, and a "ballet as a trope" article. As you just said, something's got to go to the Useful Notes namespace, and the "ballet as media" article, which I propose retain the name Ballet (and for which I've already created a Sandbox), looks to be a perfect fit for Useful Notes. But what to do about the "ballet as a trope" article? For example, do we keep the original name for that one, or do we give it a new name?

edited 19th Dec '13 8:23:24 PM by ryanasaurus0077

Ballet in and of itself is not a trope. What about it gives it narrative significance? If it's that people go to the ballet for some reason or other, then the trope is Going To The Ballet.

edited 19th Dec '13 8:41:45 PM by Fighteer

Or liking Ballet as a sign of culture/wealth, or various tropes heavily used in ballet. But "ballet" itself isn't a trope. The fact that it's in the Main namespace is a holdover from before we started seriously encouraging the use of the other namespaces, and pretty much every page was made in Main.

Currently, there's a YKTTW called "Ballet Episode". We're trying to get that to the point where it's a usable trope. "Ballet Episode" is a temporary title until what time a scope is decided upon. The same troper, kjnoren, suggested three options as far as that's concerned:

1. The presence of ballet in a work, as training, rehearsal, or performance (Dancing The Ballet or similar)
2. Ballet is used for characterisation or character conflict of type X (like Ballet Of Girliness or Dreams Of Ballet)
3. Trying out to dance or train ballet (the current laconic)

At the moment, I'm split between Door #1 and Door #3, and I'm considering making Door #2 its own separate trope.

Noticed that the current Ballet runs triple duty:

Useful Notes on Ballet, an index over ballets, and a list (also as an index) over works that have ballet as a topic.

Given that we seem to have work pages on some ballets, I would rather keep the Ballet page as a genre/medium page and thus in Main/.

That's a good point. It can serve proper duty in Main as an index, but a detailed discussion of the art form still belongs in Useful Notes, and tropes about ballet should have distinct titles.

edited 20th Dec '13 7:11:47 AM by Fighteer

I can name one ballet trope instantly: Dainty Little Ballet.

It's to ballet what Clean Pretty Reliable is to CPR. Plus the added value of being made of r/cringepics when the shoes come off.

Remember that, while many tropes are based on people's assumptions and misunderstandings about the differences between media depictions of things and real life, for it to actually be a trope, there must be some kind of significance to it.

I don't doubt that real ballet and ballet depicted in films may be different, but for the purposes of a trope, the differences have to actually matter in some way. One of the reasons why we have so many Reality Is Unrealistic and Hollywood [X] tropes is that people who assume that reality works like it does in the movies may be very disappointed and/or very badly injured to find out otherwise.

If a movie gets a swallow and a lark mixed up, only a serious bird watcher would know or care. That's not a trope, it's trivia.

edited 20th Dec '13 8:52:39 AM by Fighteer

It's worth noting that while there is a good argument to be made that any "media portrayal is different from Real Life" is a trope (in the sense of "media convention" - it can exist only as a media convention), we have a couple of supertropes (Artistic License, The Coconut Effect and the like) that cover much of the reasons/storytelling intent. For it to be a separate trope, it would require some specific purpose - in the sense of a subtrope/supertrope.

Right now, Ballet does not talk about tropes used in them much.

edited 20th Dec '13 9:20:32 AM by SeptimusHeap

I should have added this, but if we have Ballet as a media category, then obviously we'd want to identify any tropes that are specific to that medium as well as general tropes. Ballet tends to be very obscure to the general public, so there may be a wealth of tropes waiting to be mined from it that we simply haven't looked for yet.

Edit: Hmm, seems that ballets that have work articles are being put in Theatre/. That's perfect, then. We have an index of theater tropes; most if not all of them should apply.

edited 20th Dec '13 11:38:17 AM by Fighteer

If it's all right with you (and I've been led to believe it is), I'm going to soon create a sandbox for Ballet Tropes, which will include at least a few existing tropes as well as quite a few possibilities for ballet-related tropes in this prototype stage.

edited 20th Dec '13 1:01:25 PM by ryanasaurus0077

Seems fine to me.

Sandbox created. Any other potential tropes relating to ballet that need to be added to the sandbox?

"Ballet means Tutus" maybe?

Added.

Don't know if this might be a trope, but pictures like these [1]◊,[2],[3],[4]◊ seem to be a thing.

Performing/training ballet outside/in pubic places, using handrails as barres and so on. It does at least make artsy photos, and sometimes it doesn't◊.

edited 21st Dec '13 5:06:21 AM by m8e

Doing barre exercises in public (and/or) using non-standard items as barres does seem to be a thing.

Maybe "Ballet Is All First Position"?

edited 21st Dec '13 7:36:32 AM by Madrugada

Added. And I'll be sure to use one of those photos as the page image.

It would help if you added brief descriptions of what the proposed new tropes are. For example, is Dainty Little Ballet the way that ballerinas are often treated as fragile delicate little flowers of femininity despite ballet being at least as physically taxing as many contact sports or is it something else?

Point taken (no pun intended).

For "ballet as a sign of culture or wealth" I just want to propose something like Ballet Burgeois. (Assuming I have my spelling correct.)

Given that definition, I'd suggest Dainty Little Ballerinas (or Dainty Little Ballet Dancers) rather than Dainty Little Ballet. Ballet Dancers would also cover the way the male ballet dancers are often shown as slight, delicate guys.