Opening.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I don't think look really needs to be a required factor in it. Role, skills, fighting style, goals, looks, opposing group dynamics etc all just stack up into an evil counterpart.
The description not says that the similarity must be physical.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
umm English please?
And really if it MUST be physical then you will never stop the 'misuse' because that is not what the name means at all. Might as well rename it to evil duplicate or something.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Based on the main page trope list alone, we're looking for an Evil Is Opposite trope, to supertrope pages like Evil Twin (evil biological twin), Evil Knockoff (intentionally created evil duplicate), and Criminal Doppelgänger (Identical Stranger running from the law), where the requirement is "evil foil" instead of "evil version of character X".
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.Based in the description(and the name), this is ""evil version of character X"".
You Give Me Fever
Yeah no, you can't claim Solip Schism is wrong when the opening line of the trope description proves Solip right. It says looks like the protagonist and has similar abilities.
As for it, I'm fine with simply removing the examples that don't look like the protagonist. Now this is going to wreak havoc on pages about improvised media, such as the large majority of professional wrestling examples not involving masks, but so be it. Every form of media doesn't make heavy use of every trope.
That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes
Well I propose a trope transplant, rename and clean up this one while creating a trope to cover the what the term is used for. In this case it would basically be a supertrope to the current one covering role, skills, fighting style, goals, looks, mirrored opposing group dynamics and so on.
With 5000+ wicks?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
With that wick check in the OP probably half of those 5000 wicks are misuse thinking this is the supertrope I proposed.
"Look" not means only " physical similarity". A person can look nice or can look menacing, by example, or can look dumb or intelligent.
I really don't feel "looks menacing" is enough to say a character "looks like" another character, unless they are using the same visual cues to achieve that. For example, if they both had Supernatural Gold Eyes and one was an evil foil of the other, then I'd say that meets the criteria. It needs to be some kind of deliberate visual cue that they are intended to be compared, but it also needs to be obviously deliberate or overt. Like, if they're both fat, that's sufficient. If they both have brown eyes and brown hair, that probably needs some extra cue because the combination is so common, unless they're in a setting where everyone has exotic hair colors.
All of that said, I'm going to copy-paste something I posted in LAF that is relevant:
The way I see it, there are three potential things going on here.
- An evil or antagonistic character who looks exactly, or very very similar to, a protagonist. There may be superficial differences, but no more. If they have more than a Palette Swap or a single small defining trait like a scar or an aura or a different hair color, it doesn't count. Evil Twin, full stop. Such as Nega Scott/Scott, or the antagonist of the Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC.
- An evil or antagonistic character who has visual cues to make it clear that they are meant to be compared to the protagonist, but does not actually look exactly like them. Such as Wario/Mario, who dress similarly, have moustaches, and are both overweight (in most representations, anyway; Mario seems to be losing weight recently, but he's still got a pudgy face) but nevertheless are very distinct in appearance. This is more or less what Evil Counterpart's description says, although you could easily interpret "looks like" to mean it's actually the above, and thus a duplicate of Evil Twin. I seriously doubt that was intended, which is why I think the trope description should just be nudged a bit, into...
- An evil or antagonistic Foil to a protagonist who may or may not look anything like them. Such as The Doctor/The Master. This is how Evil Counterpart is being used, and it's what I think the description should change to reflect.
My suggestion is that we tweak Evil Counterpart's description to not require looks, but would acoomodate looks, into something that would be along the lines of Evil Foil. I don't think a name change is required, though. Evil Counterpart is broad enough that it could cover it.
Then if we want something that falls between them (e.g., Evil Twin looks exactly or mostly the same, Evil Counterpart may or may not look the same) into something like the middle bullet I posted above, we could YKTTW (or find, if it's already here) something like an Evil Foil who requires some visual cues, but should not look identical to the protagonist.
This would require pretty much no change to the existing examples (though, being a character trope, it's full of ZCEs.)
edited 16th Jan '15 8:32:23 AM by SolipSchism
I'm fine with just changing the description to suit the non-look-exclusive version of the trope.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."A foil is not necessarily a counterpart- compare Conan with his arch-enemy Thoth-Amon, by example.
I just noticed that I put all the links in my list using slashes, so you can't see the namespace by hovering over them. Would it be helpful if I swapped those out for periods so you can see the namespaces, or is everyone okay with just hovering/clicking?
They are alphabetized including namespaces, so there are character sheets at the beginning and WMG at the end, and so on. However, the actual trope pages aren't sorted by namespace, just by the trope name. Could potentially be confusing.
A Foil is a character meant to be contrasted with another character's qualities in order to highlight those qualities and draw attention to them. That's all. The contrast can be physical, mental, thematic, it can be in terms of their actions, their situations, their taste in clothes. It's just a character that contrasts with another. Appearance does not, in itself, factor into the word "foil". Nothing specifically factors into it, as there are a ton of ways to play it. When I was originally looking for an Evil Foil trope I was looking for a Foil that happened to be evil. The page that I'm suggesting we create above (which should be the ABSOLUTE LAST PRIORITY for this thread since it is not necessary in order to fix EC), I'm not suggesting we call it Evil Foil. I'm not suggesting any name for it because I don't really think it's necessary, and even if it does become necessary, it should be our bottom priority until then.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:12:26 AM by SolipSchism
A foil is 'a character who contrasts with another character in order to highlight particular qualities of the other character'. So good vs evil in this case. That does not make a true counterpart though, they have to have enough commonalities to be adequately measured such as what I mentioned earlier 'role, skills, fighting style, goals, looks, opposing group dynamics and so on.'
Take Junya Inose in Gundam Build Fighters Try. He uses the same fighting style as the main character, Sekai, is also using a suit built by a former champion with the same special system the MC has but he is as close to evil as the series has gotten. While Sekai is more about fighting just for the fight and nice to a fault, Junya is all about destroying his opponents in the most brutal way possible with a verbal beatdown to any opponent including 10 year olds.
They look nothing alike, their suits have similarities but not an insane amount
◊. But Junya is very clearly an Evil Counterpart to Sekai.
This one was in the wick check btw.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:15:04 AM by Memers
So in other words, a Counterpart is what you get when a Foil has an unusually high number of similarities or meaningful differences from the protagonist. (When I say "meaningful differences", I mean the kind of differences that make someone a foil. Like Alice the angel wears a black suit, Bob the demon wears a white suit. Totally different colors, but they're obviously meant to be contrasted.) Rack up enough of those similarities/meaningful differences and a Foil can become a Counterpart.
Filthy casual
Is this anything like the concept of yin yang, then? Though not light/dark necessarily, but good/evil?
(Annoyed grunt)
To be honest, I did see a few examples that were explicitly not a good/evil relationship, but rather a nice/mean one. And a few in the wick check that didn't even say that much, they were more along the lines of "Not really evil, but..." or "Depending on your definition of 'evil'..."
I'd say yin yang might be closer to the core idea than "good/evil", unless we opted to excise examples that aren't good/evil, which I'd be down for. It's not really the focus of this thread, though.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:18:36 AM by SolipSchism
Yes very much so. Those similarities can be really anything as long as it is played up in the work itself including looks. The Evil Counterpart will almost always fight with or have some kind of competition with the Good Counterpart in some part of the story.
I think that depends on the tone of the work itself, they do need a lot of 'not good tropes' that directly conflict with the hero.
I could see a Well-Intentioned Extremist vs The Goody Two Shoes Hero Counterpart sister trope though. These wont always fight but work kinda parallel and usually not together by choice.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:31:40 AM by Memers
I can see that. I feel like part of the problem with good/evil might be that people feel a need to add "For a given definition of evil" to cases where the bad guy isn't a Complete Monster. We get it—for anyone who doesn't attribute their morals to all of humanity, like a reasonable, secular agnostic, there's no such thing as evil. There's insane, there's cruel, there's all sort of things, but there's no good and evil. We get it. But in terms of a narrative, there is evil, and it generally gets attributed to the antagonist. That's really all that needs to be said there—if the antagonist is a counterpart to a protagonist, they probably fit the spirit of the trope, regardless of any given person's definition of "evil".
But again: Tangent.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:32:20 AM by SolipSchism
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I did see a few examples that were explicitly not a good/evil relationship, but rather a nice/mean one.
—-> That can still be considered misuse. We don't have to change the trope to accommodate all uses. Slightly unrelated, I can verify that some of the wicks you marked wrong are valid examples, but like many Personal Appearance Tropes, tropers left out the context. The misuse may be less than assumed.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:41:18 AM by crazysamaritan
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
There are not as many antagonists are truly Evil Counterpart as you would think, The Rival Evil Counterpart however is decently common.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:41:44 AM by Memers
On your first point, I fully agree.
On the subject of "marked wrong", I didn't mark any of them wrong. I either marked them as "mentions appearance" and thus correctly provides context that fits the description as written, or "does not mention appearance" and thus does not correctly provide context that fits the description as written. I don't think I encountered any example that didn't provide the context but I was familiar enough to know they fit, but if I had, I would have marked them as not fitting despite the example being legitimate. This includes both ZCEs and examples that provide decent context but didn't mention appearance.
This is because I was not analyzing the works. I was analyzing the examples. As written, any examples marked as "does not mention appearance" do not fit the description of the trope as written. (The "as written" here applies to both the trope and the example—As the example is written, it does not fit the trope as the description is written.)
No no, I'm not saying all antagonists are Evil Counterpart to the protags. I'm just saying that if an antag is a counterpart (for our earlier definition of counterpart—what you get when you take a Foil Up To Eleven) to a protag, it probably qualifies as an Evil Counterpart. The only exception that comes to mind would be if you had a Villain Protagonist.
edited 16th Jan '15 9:45:15 AM by SolipSchism
Recreating a locked thread. I talked at some length with Septimus about this over PM to be sure I can justify my concerns before re-posting this.
Basically, Evil Counterpart's description explicitly states in the very first sentence that an Evil Counterpart must look like the protagonist to be an example, yet tons of the examples make no mention whatsoever of this. At worst, the characters don't resemble each other; at best, they do and the example just isn't explaining how they fit the trope, since that is part of the trope.
Alternately, maybe the definition of the trope has just shifted over time and the description just needs to be tweaked to accomodate this. I'm not eager to try to clean 5276 wicks, especially considering that the trope it seems to have decayed into is still a legitimate trope (and, dare I say, more appropriate to the trope's name). Tweaking the description so that it actually reflects the examples would be much easier.
To confirm my concerns, I did a wick check based on the square root rule: I rounded up to 73 wicks, randomly selected, and here's what I found. Statistics at the bottom.
Note: I only counted ZCEs that were actually a ZCE in an Evil Counterpart example write-up. If it was, say, a ZCE of Ambiguously Evil that happened to contain a Pot Hole to Evil Counterpart, I didn't count it as a ZCE.
This is all copied out of a spreadsheet, so hopefully I've done the formatting right. Here goes nothing:
There you have it.
Some statistics based on the above:
As mentioned in the previous thread, my suggestion is to tweak the description of the trope to remove the stipulation that the characters resemble each other, since the overwhelming majority of examples don't bother to mention it, and I can see a few examples from works I'm familiar with that I know don't fit that requirement.
So, uh... Yeah. There it is.
edited 15th Jan '15 2:58:57 PM by SolipSchism