Not Tropeworthy: Bacon Addiction

It's literally just a trope about bacon existing. The description doesn't exactly help matters, either.

Uh yeah. The current page isn't that good.

It could theoretically be salvaged to be about an actual addiction to bacon, but I believe we already have a trope for unusual addictions (though the name escapes me). I say cut it.

I could see a trope about the memetic addictiveness of bacon, but as it currently stands, this trope ain't it. A good 90% of the examples are just "a character eats bacon sometimes." Not sure if there are enough valid examples (or examples that could be rewritten to be valid) to make it tropeworthy.

This isn't even the only "foods sit on plates" trope. Blessed Are The Cheesemakers (which has a not-yet-opened TRS discussion) and Satiating Sandwich (which is largely my fault) have similarly questionable status.

On the other hand, BACON!!!

"Bacon being the supreme food" is a trope, though.

Seems like that's what it's going for, but failing. I'd say it's tropeable, especially with the memetic popularity of bacon at the moment (it's up there with penguins and mustaches in terms of popularity with the younger crowd).

Dunno, but I think it's on the same line of thinking as Inherently Funny Fruit (formerly Everything's Better With Eggplants)

Yeah, there is a trope about bacon being awesome food above all else, which is what a bunch of examples are about, but the description is just trivia at best, not a trope.

Yup, this is definitely a trope—just do a google search for "i love bacon"—but the definition needs reworking and the examples need pruning.

It's a meme. I'm not sure that means it's a trope. Not all memes are tropes. Some are just memes.

Yes, I think "meme" might be the best word to describe it, but perhaps not so much in the "internet meme" sense as in the original sense of "meme": a self-replicating idea that bacon is so awesome that Everything Is Better With Bacon (just have a look at all the unlikely bacon-flavored and -scented products out there).

But for it to be a trope it has to fill some narrative purpose. Do we have a lot of stories where bacon furthers the story by serving a role of memetic awesomeness? Or is it more on the lines of "bacon is awesome so let's add some bacon to make the story even more awesome"? Or, even worse, "Bacon is awesome. This story contains bacon. Therefore, this story is awesome"?

edited 4th Feb '15 2:16:45 AM by GnomeTitan

The only thing that I can get from the examples is "bacon is common in fiction".

Yep and really that isnt a trope.

I could see a Gratuitous Bacon or Bacon Obsession trope but not this.

The former would be stuff like Dragon Fable, Bacon is one of the Elements and it saves the world.

The latter would be stuff like Garfield or Beggan Strips in the they LOVE bacon.

edited 4th Feb '15 2:23:30 AM by Memers

It's still tropeworthy in that it's Garnishing the Story.

Of course misuse shall be purged with fire and description shall be made clearer.

I think we've been over this before, but I don't think anything that garnishes the story is a trope. In that case, "There is X in this story" would be a trope for all X, because you can *always* argue that the author put X in the story to add some garnish.

If it's just in the story it's not a trope. If it's pointed out as something awesome or as favourite food, there's a point to it.

Garnishing the story is a tricky concept, since it's often not about anything obvious. The use of greebles is a good example. That's a trope. One we've not listed, but it's a trope.

Just because you can always argue that the author put X in the story to add some garnish doesn't make it not a trope either. It's a non-argument.

I'm arguing the invalidity of the argument "X garnishes the story, hence it's a trope". Yes, it could still be a trope, but it doesn't follow from the fact that it's garnishing.

In other words, the fact that the bacon is there to garnish the story doesn't necessarily make it a trope. As you point out, it doesn't make it *not* a trope either. We need to now *how* it's used to garnish the story.

To be a little more specific (and this has no doubt been said before, but I think it bears repeating):

I'm writing a story in which the hero has breakfast before going out to slay the dragon. This seems a bit bland, so to add flavour I mention that the hero has bacon and eggs. This is, IMO, garnishing the story - it adds flavour and detail for the enjoyment of the reader.

However, again IMO, unless the bacon has any narrative significance, I'm not using a bacon trope. If it's "just garnish" it's not a trope.

Conversely, if using "breakfasting on bacon" for garnishing makes it a trope, then it logically follows that there should be tropes for eating cereal, or toast, or cold pizza, for breakfast. That would make literally *everything* a trope, since anything can be used for garnishing the story. That way lies madness.

edited 4th Feb '15 6:35:56 AM by GnomeTitan

Tropes are patterns. If it's just using some object that can easily be replacable with another with absolutely no difference it's probably not a pattern and thus not a trope.

In this case, bacon doesn't have the same meaning as, say, ham or hamburgers or hamsters. There are more specific connotations to it than just something that adds to the story just by being there. Of course, it also has to be used in that way, so just having it appearing doesn't count. Having bacon for breakfast isn't the same as having bacon, sandwiches with bacon, and bacon-rolled carrots for breakfast. Or someone saluting bacon as the godliest of foods. It's about lifting bacon a step (or preferably, many steps) above everything else.

Or at least, that's what it should be.

Bump.

I'm confused, so this trope is about a particular person thinking bacon is the supreme food right?

Cause some of what I'm reading makes it sound like this trope is just when bacon is treated as the greatest food by everybody in a work.

If it's the former why can't it just be scrapped and examples remade to fit in as a character's Trademark Favorite Food

I think this trope is supposed to be where works themselves treat bacon as something awesome. Like say the How I Met Your Mother episode Ted eats bacon for the first time, they give bacon a Holy Backlight and the others even make a Glance At The Fourth Wall when Ted says he probably won't like bacon, before eating an entire tray.

I get the feeling that this trope is aiming to be broad about how bacon is awesome... and then it Went Horribly Wrong.

Yeah, but going back to my post before. This should be 2 tropes Gratuitous Bacon, includes things like Holy Backlight bacon. And the second trope would be Bacon Obsession, which would be a subtrope of Trademark Favorite Food