"Peer Review"

This is just something that I've been coming across lately in a lot of trope discussions and TRS threads. Basically when discussing the definition of a trope others will do a direct quote from the description and use that as proof of what the trope is supposed to be.

My response is typically that the wiki is not "Peer Reviewed," as while there is a review system in place any editor can create a new trope and modify an existing trope with ease. Any given line from the description could have been added just last week, and even if in the original ykttw it could have easily been overlooked as a poor choice of words. That's simply the nature of wiki's.

In general I try to make a distinction between the trope and the description we give it. The trope (if solid) exists in many different forms and can be utilized however the artist sees fit. The descriptions we try to give tropes are often flawed because we are trying to describe in simple terms what can be very complex concepts and most of us do not have an aggressive academic background.

I'm not exactly looking for a 'ruling,' but I'm curious what the troper community thinks about this idea in general. The closest I can find in administrivia is that the examples are the priority and are what speaks for the trope, the descriptions should simply lead to that.

My own idea is that the description of a trope is, well, the description of that trope and that quoting from it is fine. Now, at times you are quoting from a bit that is poorly written and then you may be told "No, that part is wrong".

I think it's really something you have to decide on a case-by-case basis. Knowing the description is useful, especially if it has been there a while; it can serve as a quick shorthand for how people probably see the trope. Unless something is severely broken, the trope description should already reflect how it is used.

Unfortunately TRS often looks at stuff that is severely broken, so if you want to really understand what a trope is you have to do the hard work of going through all the examples and inbounds, looking into whether it's a pre-existing term, etc. Still, I think it's reasonable to assume as a default starting point that the description is accurate and reflects how people see and use the trope.

That is, if someone references the trope description under the assumption that it reflects how the trope is used, and you disagree, I think the burden of proving that that description doesn't reflect the trope's usage generally falls on you. You can't just say "descriptions are sometimes flawed", you have to actually show that that one in particular doesn't reflect usage by doing a survey of the examples or wicks.

On the other hand, of course, if someone has already shown that the trope description doesn't reflect how the trope is used — that is, if someone has already shown misuse in the thread — obviously it's meaningless to point at the trope description as proof of how it should be, since everyone already knows the description and use of the trope don't match up at that point; the description doesn't magically get any extra weight in discussions over eg. whether to change the description or to try and change how people are using it.

Even in that case, though, that's only the starting point for discussions — it's not an automatic "go with the examples." Sometimes the description defines a pre-existing term. Sometimes the description is a coherent description of a real trope, while the examples and usage are all over the wall or are based on a misinterpretation of the trope name that isn't really tropeable. Sometimes both the description and the usage reflect valid different tropes, etc.

edited 28th Sep '14 7:54:17 PM by Aquillion

Apart from what Aquillon said, a description should hopefully have a structure that reflects the usage of the trope. Something said about the trope in the first sentence of the description is hopefully more pertinent in all cases of the trope than something said in the middle of the third paragraph.

It's also possible to check the page history, if a given part of the description was added recently. Not perfect, but then no method is perfect here.

Another thing I've noted is that there exist two different ways to approach troping. One can be said to be "outside-in", or perhaps taxonomically using formal language. It focuses on creating a list of shared characteristics between the examples, and also on the relation between tropes. It's the "classic" way to approach tropes here, and a concept like Tropes Are Flexible fits neatly within this framework. Used badly, it leads to Example as a Thesis.

However, I've found that at least I prefer another approach, working "inside-out". There the focus is on finding the most central element of the trope, which must be present in all examples in some way or another. I believe this way of troping is harder to do.

In reality, most tropes here show a mixture between the two ways. The list of characteristics will include the most central element(s), and any good trope description will include a discussion about common use cases or implications.

But finding a single sentence that tries to encapsulate the trope is more likely in the "inside-out" case, since it has that as an explicit goal of its process.

Certainly it is a case-by-case basis, as not all descriptions are equal in quality. It's mostly just a concept that makes perfect sense to me but others don't seem to be aware of. A good deal of discussion in trope talk, trope repair shop and sometimes ykttw tends to end up about semantics of word choice.

For example in a Flanderization repair shop someone quoted the opening line of "taking a single trait" and using the word "single" as evidence that the character had to be reduced to a single trait. I had to explain that if the sentence said "taking a trait" and omitted the word "single" the context would be virtually identical (in addition to the logical problem that very, very few characters are literally reduced to a single trait).

And right now we are having a trope talk thread about if Arc Villain is a subtrope of Big Bad, because the description for the trope uses Big Bad as a reference point. Several people, including myself, argue that Big Bad is often reduced to "primary villain of the story" when it is much more complicated than that, and as such Arc Villain was potholing to Big Bad improperly.