Needs Help: Action Girl

"Needs Help" does not even begin to cover this one.

As pointed out in the ZCEs on character pages Wiki Talk thread, (discussion starts here), this trope appears to have decayed down to "girl who fights", which is very much People Sit On Chairs. I did a quick wick check, and confirmed it appears to be a massive ZCE magnet, typically with no explanation whatsoever to go with the examples.

In the above discussion, one of the mods said the ideal definition would be something along the line of a girl fighting in a setting or genre where it would not be expected. That is one possible option, although I'm sure there are others (including just firing up our friend the chainsaw and cutting away). Either way, this is going to be a big project, due to this page having over ten thousand wicks to go over for fixing.

Shall we begin?

First course of action?

Well, I can do a more thorough wick check if people need more evidence...which is probably a good idea, so I'll tackle that.

After that, it's just deciding what we want to do here, via discussion consensus or crowner. I provided two possible solutions in the OP, but I'm sure other people will come up with more.

That's a good start. One of the main uses I see when someone uses the Action Girl trope is "Female Badass", sometimes while also listing said character with the regular Badass trope.

edited 16th Aug '14 6:07:43 PM by VeryMelon

Yeah.

In a way, the decay of Action Girl is a welcome sign of a decline in a very sexist attitude: that the only reason to have a female in the ensemble cast of an action-oriented work is to give the guys someone to rescue.

It's not that old, as tropes go — the earliest widespread use of the Action Girl (defined as "a female character who is capable of physically defending herself or others, who is willing and able to take action in an effective manner against threats or opponents" really only dates back to about the 60's.

Before that there were a couple of well-known examples (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; Red Sonja; and of course, Wonder Woman) but most females in superhero comics were still as likely to be window dressing or second-tier combatants as they were to actually be able to go toe-to-toe with a villain. In literature, the Action Girl came and went, but mostly stayed in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Red Sonya again; Patricia Savage of the Doc Savage books (although she was largely an informed Action Girl — she was usually saved before she had a chance to take care of the problem herself); Clarissa Kennison of the Lensman universe)until the 70's or so. In Film, she started showing up with some degree of regularity also in the 70's, in films like Coffy and Foxy Brown.

I think what we may have here is, like Five-Man Band, a trope that is on its way to dying out. In this case, that's a good thing; it means that a damaging stereotype is dying out as well.

If this is the case, I think the best thing to do is to rewrite the definition to make the requirements more stringent, especially the "in a work or genre where she is not expected to be physically capable or a fighter, considering when it was created" part.

edited 15th Aug '14 4:12:51 PM by Madrugada

I think simply replacing The Chick with The Heart as a part of the Five-Man Band might go towards making it less of a sexist trope.

After all, The Heart at times is just used as "Guy version of The Chick".

What if we expanded The Heart and moved The Chick to mean "Token female member of Five-Man Band" and attach it to Smurfette Principle?

1) This thread is not about Five-Man Band.

2) We don't want to make Five-Man Band more inclusive. Tropes die sometimes. That's one of them that largely did.

edited 15th Aug '14 4:19:28 PM by Madrugada

My wick check is complete, and the details are here.

Final result, out of 40 pages checked, is that 24 of them have ZCEs, 5 have contextless potholes, one was unclear, and one case of definite misuse. Ten of those pages did use the trope correctly, at least going by the simple definition of "girl who fights". (In case you're wondering about the math, one page managed to have both correct examples and a ZCE. Go figure.)

There's plenty of anime or anime inspired series where the default is for women to be combatants, for combatants to be women, or plainly gender indifferent in combat. Battle Harem series, Lyrical Nanoha, Dog Days, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Touhou, Claymore, female reinterpretations of old tales, Moe Anthropomorphism series with ships, guns, etc. And more.

Those shouldn't count? It certainly seems redundant to list any specific characters in those series. At most a note of just "most of them" would cover it, with descriptions of why. Within series like that, the trope doesn't exist. In comparison to other works, it may, however.

We have World of Action Girls for series where it's clear part of the point is to have every girl be an uber-badass. That trope is only at about a hundred wicks; it's being vastly underused, and can help soak up some of the redundancy. RWBY, for example, probably doesn't need individual girls listed as Action Girls in the same way that they don't need to be listed as human.

Didn't know we actually had a World of Action Girls trope. (It might help if it had a slightly less clunky name.)

While on that subject, if we do narrow the definition of Action Girl, we probably will have to rename it. Action Girl is a really generic term, and generic trope names never lend themselves well to a more specialized trope.

I didn't know it either (thought we just had World of Badass). Still doesn't cover the gender-indifferent examples, though.

I don't think a rename is going to work, due to it having reached critical mass.

edited 15th Aug '14 6:42:32 PM by AnotherDuck

I think we're at the point where it doesn't make a difference what we choose to do, because it's going to be a humongous amount of work anyway. If my wick check is representative, we're likely going to have delete over half of the existing wicks, while cleaning up the rest.

It's looking like a few months minimum of work either way, so let's try to make sure we do the best job possible.

So the consensus is that Action Girl refers to a character that happens to be a female badass, in a world where that's not the norm?

In a work or genre where it's not the norm. For heroines of Harlequin-type romance novels, a female character who is not helpless is not the norm, even if the novel is set in the modern day where a female is not expected to be helpless.

{{9}}I guess that People Sit In Chairs was misused in the pothole- People Sit In Chairs are things that aren't storytelling conventions at all- and the description outright says: "It doesn't matter how commonly it occurs".

edited 15th Aug '14 8:17:32 PM by MagBas

The ZCE problem is an issue. If the title had 'warrior' in it that might help fix the problem since, 'not just "any girl with a fight scene" can be considered an Action Girl. An Action Girl is usually Badass, and routinely and reliably gets in on the combat. And what's more, she wins.'

That's not about how common it is, but how significant it is. If it's an everyday thing with no point in itself, it's not a trope, and that's what I was referring to. It may be a trope relative to other works, but that comment was specifically within the work, as a character trope, relative to other characters.

^^ She doesn't have to be a warrior. She doesn't have to fight all the time, she doesn't have to have fighting as her jib or profession. She simply has to be able to take care of herself, even if it comes down to physically defending herself.

Maybe not warrior but there should be a title that makes it sound like it's more than "girl who could fight." One example listed says, "Trained in martial arts, and goes hunting. Just for food though."

Previous TRS threads.

My thoughts from the first of those threads.

So three years ago people decided to turn it into an exampleless supertrope, changed the definition to fit that, and then never actually did anything with the examples? They just left it to just pick up bad examples and wicks left, right, and center since then?

I think I can safely say that what they were trying for in that second TRS thread is not salvageable. Hell, I'm not sure anything about this trope is salvageable, given that.

This trope has 13000+ inbounds. So if "not salvageable" means "cut" that is not going to work.

Honestly, I think that the prevalence of ZCE speaks more about the archetype being so well-known. I see that well-known terms with fairly self-explanatory names tend to attract ZCE because people there think even less about adding context.

Also, I am somewhat dubious about the notion to restrict this trope in its meaning. "Person who does fighting in a work" is almost always plot- and story-relevant and can't be People Sit on Chairs. Now you can make a claim that it's The Same, but More Specific to a gender neutral version of the trope (I am not 100% certain that Badass is that trope) as well as the claim that in certain genres it's an Omnipresent Trope and should not have examples - I'll think about it.

To be fair, I was a little tired when I wrote that post, so it probably could have been phrased better.

Still, it seems you didn't read through the past TRS threads like I did, so my point stands. An exampleless supertrope with an extremely broad definition shouldn't be allowed to masquerade as a regular trope, yet this one has been doing that for three years, and picked up all the bad baggage that comes with it. We're looking at a horribly botched and incomplete TRS job, and now we get to clean it up.

Given that, I'm loathe to keep Action Girl as the name of a trope, and I'm loathe to attach it to a trope as a redirect. I'd say that our best move here is to convert the page into a fanspeak term page with no examples, clear out all the wicks, and then take any more specific or more relevant new tropes through YKTTW under new names.

A supertrope is still a trope and I am not seeing the problem with that. And even looking through the past topics, I am not seeing good arguments for cutting the examples, either. Now the ZCE is certainly a problem but not so that it'd warrant such a drastic fix as cutting examples.

I also looked at some usages on Google and methinks that we are dealing with the problem of this name having several meanings attached to it - the one mentioned by Madrugada up but also a couple of definitions whose common denominator is really "woman who can put up a credible fight".

edited 16th Aug '14 6:31:18 AM by SeptimusHeap