Cleaning & Reorganizing Weaponry Tropes:

Just because Competitive Balance is a messy trope, doesn't mean there are no tropes between them and weaponries. How many axe-users you've seen that are Fragile Speedster? And how many axe-users are Mighty Glacier? I'll bet the latter vastly outnumbers the former.

Not every weapon need to have a correlation to a Competitive Balance trope (for example, spear's depiction is all over the place), but it's certainly there for some weapons.

Oh, and about Caltrops, I think the trope should be at least Caltrops To To Hinder Pursuer.

edited 20th Nov '14 2:54:35 AM by TrueShadow1

Caltrops being used to delay pursuers is an actual trope rather than just caltrops existing which is chairs.

Isn't that sort of like using a sword to cut people with?

The sword is the default weapon for everyone in media thus Too Common To Trope, even Heroes Prefer Swords is too common to trope thus list aversions and such only.

edited 20th Nov '14 10:32:19 AM by Memers

Swords are only the default in medieval works. Modern works tend to favour guns and knives as default.

No Trope Is Too Common.

Not the same as People Sit On Chairs.

This is true, no trope is too common, but being common also doesn't make something a trope. Sitting on chairs is common, but that doesn't mean it's a trope.

I say it has something to do with how it attract the audience's attention. A normal chair doesn't attract any attention. A throne does. Eating Bread For Breakfast isn't a trope because it's a normal occurence for the audience. Now, if in Real Life bread became a super rare and expensive food that only the really wealthy can afford, then Eating Bread For Breakfast can become a trope used to indicate the character's wealthiness.

Caltrops aren't something you usually see in everyday life, so it will usually attention from the audience when it's used, therefore there's something tropeworthy about it.

which means it's the Improvised Weapon tropes that are not tropable?

How is that not tropable...?

I am wondering, too.

108 said:

"Caltrops aren't something you usually see in everyday life, so it will usually attention from the audience when it's used, therefore there's something tropeworthy about it."

Improvised Weapon is about things you commonly see in everyday life, used as weapons. Does that make it not tropable? Or is my logic weird?

Yes, your logic is weird.

"If A then B" does not imply "If Not A then Not B".

You don't see them used as weapon in everyday life.

The entire point of Improvised Weapon is that a chair is People Sit On Chairs until that one moment when it becomes Chairman of the Brawl.

Given that we aren't all carrying weapons around in real life, I'd say it is a trope whenever weapons appear in fiction. That said, in certain works it's Too Common To Trope, so... yeah. I don't think we should get rid of all the weapon tropes though as different weapons (especially if it's a character's favorite or most used weapon) do say a lot about what type of tactics a character prefers and therefore helps define what type of character they are.

IE: We don't see a lot of slow, muscular characters who are Dual Wielding Knife Nuts. We do see a lot of those same characters using sword and shield combos (why can't i find a trope for the sword/shield combo?). That's a trope right there...

Do we have a category called "Common In Combination" or "Uncommon For The Genre" or something?

I've actually wondered this for a while now, because context is important. For example, a Fight Scene would be chair-sitting in a Superhero work. But, not so much in a Documentary.

Likewise, Heroes Prefer Swords is common to the point of tears in Speculative Fiction, but almost unheard of in a Heist Film.

We have Unexpected Genre Change, but it's not quite the same thing it seems.

edited 24th Nov '14 10:26:44 AM by KingZeal

we have a ykttw for sword and shield.

It's hard to deny there are patterns in the weapons that are common in fictional settings. Swords, axes, and bows show up all the time, but you hardly ever see anyone with a kukri or a glaive. Is there symbolism behind it, or is it just a matter of a convention? Either way, there's a trope there.

The idea behind Garnishing the Story is that there are thousands of specific decisions made in crafting a story, verbal, non-verbal, character, prop, setting, clothing, writing style, color schemes, etc. These are not accidents, the film crew didn't show up one day and record life as it was happening. The writer certainly didn't do it by accident, it had to get on paper somehow. Even documentaries go to great lengths to craft and shape the story and images we are seeing. We could easily come up with a long list of reasons why each choice was made, but the reasons why are not the trope. The trope is the choice, how it is used is the examples.

"A character takes an ax and wields it in a fight" is a trope, we don't have to ask how the ax compliments the personality of the user to suddenly make it valid. The creative powers that be made a conscious choice to have the character use the ax instead of having them, say, Whip It Good or Batter Up!. It's a specific and distinct action. It's not an open invitation to put any appearance of something as an example, as we are still concerned about the "how." How does it add to the story?

Any attempt to clean up of the weapon tropes needs to keep that in mind, because combing through every trope and spitballing random ideas on the why to create subtropes is doomed to failure.

edited 1st Dec '14 2:29:27 AM by KJMackley

KJ, that's the exact opposite of what Garnishing the Story is. Garnishing the Story says that most of the time things like weapons aren't tropes, but that certain patterns of things emerge over media where a specific trope keeps being played out with a specific prop.

Garnishing the Story is not object = trope. It is trope + object = subtrope.

edited 1st Dec '14 12:18:43 PM by shimaspawn

The exact opposite of Garnishing the Story is literally nothing. Nothing is added to the story. As it says right in the page, you can have fighter jets just appear but adding in a Fighter-Launching Sequence makes it more exciting.

Likewise, a character uses an ax. They probably don't have to use an ax, but it makes the fight more exciting.

The Appearance Tropes Cleanup thread would beg to differ on the claim that "trope = choice." Tropes Are Tools, a means to achieve an end. They have to have a purpose to them, not just be the result of "I needed to give him some sort of weapon, so I went 'Eeny Meeny Miney Moe' and my finger landed on 'axe.'" You need to identify what the many appearances of axes in media have in common in order to establish a pattern and give the trope direction. If axes lend themselves to a different style of combat than that of swords, you need to identify exactly what that style is before you can call it a trope.

edited 1st Dec '14 3:19:53 PM by MrL1193

I'd like to move to add Kukris Are Kool to the list. It's not terrible, but it is pretty bad, and wicks to it are no exception; I stumbled upon "Ajay wields a kukri for use in close combat" on the page for Far Cry 4.

^^ A trope is a choice either intentionally or unintentionally. We, as the audience, cannot know which is which (without Word of God, but many still apply Death of the Author on that). By forcing all tropes to fit into a manufactured pattern it is saying that the wiki and the tropers is what gives the tropes their meaning. It's a self-defeating mindset.

Every single element of every single story is there by the choice of the author, but not all of them are tropes. It takes something more to establish a trope—namely, a pattern of usage.

Note that we have separate tropes for Cool Chair, Chair Reveal, and many other chair-related tropes. Have we identified every possible use for a chair? Probably not. Does that mean we've "limited" the possible uses for a chair by only listing these specific ones? No, it just means that we haven't identified all the chair tropes yet.

edited 1st Dec '14 4:10:41 PM by MrL1193