God-Mayor of Sim-Kind
[[Main/Badass Mi gusta this idea.]]
edited 22nd Sep '15 1:46:09 PM by RabidTanker
Answer no master, never the slave Carry your dreams down into the grave Every heart, like every soul, equal to break
Moved this to Wiki Talk where it actually belongs.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I think this rule has more in common with "no general examples" than it does with PSOC.
A number of different things get proposed as tropes.
- "Events in a narrative" is what we call People Sit On Chairs. To be truthful, everything is "Events in a narrative". It should be more common than it is for YKTTW drafts to contain an idea about "I saw this happen in three works, that makes a trope, right?"
- "Reactions to a work" is how we identify YMMV, because while many creators intend a reaction, well, the audience's reactions vary, and they don't always get the response they expect.
- "Narrative shorthand for a meaning" is what we define as a Trope. If a narrative shorthand is used for many different meanings, it may work as an Index, but it won't have meaning by itself. That's the "too general" proposal that you're making. A Hero is a narrative shorthand that is too general for a specific meaning to help much; we want the Sub-Trope examples instead.
Honestly, the issue is self-correcting. If no one understands the trope it will likely not be launched.
The problem isn't when nobody understands the trope, it's when everyone understands the trope — except they don't understand it the same way.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Just to make sure the issue is this. A trope is worded so vaguely that it covers just about everything even vaguely related and gets any mildly related cast offs.
The fix for tropes like this is to make them more specific in such a way they are still useful but actually define something relevant. If that can't be done they likely aren't a trope/People Sitting On Chairs.
edited 3rd Oct '15 1:41:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
There are already lots of admonitions to make trope definitions specific. I don't understand how making that an "official rule" would make a difference, or how it'd be defined anyway. (Kind of funny that the suggestion to mitigate a problem about vague trope definitions is a vague rule.)
Becky: Who are you? The Mysterious Stranger: An angel. Huck: What's your name? The Mysterious Stranger: Satan.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
That and overly vague tropes should be taken to TRS for repair if their overly vague nature leads to misuse in general or is not really clear. I am very certain that has happened on at least a few occasions. I can't recall which ones off the top of my head but I remember seeing something like that in the TRS in the past.
Who watches the watchmen?
The imaginative Christian Asperger
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
We just need to define what's vague and what's not. This is a proposal after all, not a draft for the rule itself.
No, the other one.
I think this is a rule for the sake of having a rule.
Check out my fanfiction!
The imaginative Christian Asperger
It's not. I've seen at least one moderator attempting to use a "mod hat" for a YKTTW discussion because it was a bit too vague, and even I've seen the same moderator used a non-existent pothole to "Too Vague To Trope". As far as I know, that moderator was acting in consent with the other moderators of this site, especially since she stated those decisions were collectively decided by them and her.
I proposed this rule to make it easier in the future for them to get across what they mean by the tropes in question being "too vague".
Basically an extension of People Sit On Chairs. It's a trope that's so vague, it could be interpreted as many different things, including things that are just simply random occurances.
An example is a trope about savviness in general. While characters acting savvy could be a trope in of itself, it's so vague, any instances of characters showing any sort of intelligence would fall under this trope, including examples that would normally be decried as Chairs, examples where the character isn't using savvy knowledge in-context but it's added anyway because the troper thought it was clever, etc.
This trope isn't related to "No Trope Is Too Common" in any way. This rule is meant to curve tropes that may be seem as tropes at first glance, but is technically so broad, even coincidences are added as examples. "Too Vague To Trope" is intended to help clarify what others mean when they decry seeming tropes as "being too broad to be a trope" (Heck, I've even seen a mod trying to pothole to "Too Vague To Trope"). No Trope Is Too Common talks about meaningful tropes that gets decried as Chairs simply because it occurs too often.
edited 26th Aug '15 6:29:22 AM by KarjamP