Follow TV Tropes

Following

Misused: The Chick

Go To

Kaosubaloo Kaosubaloo from Canadia Since: Aug, 2009
Kaosubaloo
#1: Jul 26th 2015 at 1:37:47 PM

Summary: There are multiple conflicting definitions of The Chick throughout the wiki which has led to substantial misuse.

Details: There is significant misuse for this trope.

The trope, as defined on the page is essentially The Heart for women. It notes that sometimes men can apply to it and its worth being noted that The Heart is in fact gender neutral. The rest of the trope's description reads as pretty much the same thing as The Heart, with the only additional distinction being to note that when used in the context of the The Five-Man Band the Chick is always a woman.

I would argue that the above is not enough to distinguish The Chick from The Heart. However, this description is not representative of the majority of the examples it should describe. This is where the real issue lies

Many of the examples of The Chick found throughout the wiki can be summed up as The Heart + The Load, or The Heart + Non-Action Guy. Or sometimes just The Load + Woman. Obviously, the definition varies in use, but the overall theme seem to be a non-action character who is put into danger or otherwise depicted as less action-competent than the other characters. The character is not necessarily less competent than the others, but often finds themselves being less likely to actually use that competence, while also being more likely to undertake stereotypically female roles and to be the damsel of an adventure.

There is a third distinct definition for the trope which is defined in Five-Man Band. This description states that the character must be a woman or it doesn't count. The role is here described as a peacekeeper intended to balance out the other characters' aggression.

Finally, there is one last use case: When someone is the token woman in a work, they are often labeled as The Chick. Looking over the examples listed on the page itself, I struggle to see what distinguishes Leia, the page image, from Luke in terms of this trope aside from her gender. Princess Peach is certainly a Damsel in Distress, but her entry emphasizes solely her femininity. Katara is neither The Heart, nor a Damsel in Distress nor a Non-Action Guy. Yet she is on this list while her brother, who actually fills most of these roles, is not. I find this use particularly problematic as being a woman is not a trope.

Solutions: These 4 definitions are wildly different from one another and leads to significant misuse and confusion about the trope. To deal with these issues, I propose one of two possible solutions:

Solution 1: Remove the trope and replace instances of it with its component parts. The Heart is already gender-neutral and in addition to The Load and Non-Action Guy is its own tropes which can be listed for a given character without needing a special trope to haphazardly combine them. As for Five-Man Band, it can just make special note of its conditional use of The Heart where The Chick currently is; something it is already effectively doing with The Chick anyway.

Solution 2: Of the definitions I have provided, there is an argument to be made for the second and third definitions are being their own distinct tropes. The third argument is related entirely to Five-Man Band and so is probably best being left to a discussion of that trope, which leaves the using the second definition to replace the current one. As this description is not at this time formally defined, such a definition will first need to be made. Once we've settled on that definition, we'll need to rework the description to match it and clean up all of the examples throughout the wiki to ensure that they reflect it.

No matter what solution we land on, significant cleaning of examples is going to be necessary. Having said that, I can see arguments for either solution and am unsure which is better in this case. Discussion should be had about which solution to take and, in the later case, how to go about implementing it.

edited 26th Jul '15 1:39:39 PM by Kaosubaloo

Guess who, it's Kaosubaloo!
Add Post

Total posts: 1
Top