Needs Help: Heavyworlder

So there definitely two tropes here: burly folks from large planets and lithe folks from small planets. Given that the latter is essentially an inversion that seems to have enough examples to merit a separate trope, would anyone object to it being split?

Tentatively opening.

The trope is that the heavier the gravity of your homeworld, the bigger and stronger you are, even after leaving your homeworld (which doesn't make much sense, for the reasons pointed out). I don't think it needs a split, because that would be kind of pointless. Maybe less focus on the inversion, or simply portray it as a sliding scale with "normal gravity is normal" in the center.

Yeah, i'd say that the trope is basically "the gravity of your home planet affects your build". I'd suggest renaming it to Heavyworlder/Lightworlder or Gravity Based Build or something rather than splitting it into separate tropes.

edited 5th Mar '16 6:57:54 AM by NativeJovian

Gravity Based Build makes more sense for the page, and we can actually cut down on the description to fit that concept. Some examples don't actually describe an effect on the character's build, so we'd want to mark them as Downplayed Trope since the gravity is still effecting the character's relative strength.

"Main/Heavyworlder found in: 250 articles, excluding discussions.

Since January 1, 2012 this article has brought 1,387 people to the wiki from non-search engine links."

That's too many wicks and too many inbounds for a casual rename. We need stronger arguments when a page seems to be working.

Heavyworlder and Lightworlder are the conventional names for the trope in science fiction. I'm not opposed to adding Lightworlder to the name as Native Jovian suggested, but Gravity Based Build? Not so much. For one thing, it doesn't always result in a character actually looking any different from a baseline example of the species (c.f. Torin Kerr in Confederation of Valor, whose home planet is noticeably higher-gravity than Earth, 1.2 gravities, but she's depicted in both text and cover art as an ordinary human).

Also, anybody got any actual misuse stats for this?

edited 6th Oct '16 2:52:11 PM by StarSword

Lightworlder is a redirect.

I agree with the point that the trope is about someone from an environment with different gravity, rather than specifically high or low gravity. As it is, those two variants are more like internal subtropes than one trope and an inverted variant.

On the other hand, splitting it in two still makes sense, considering how specific and easily categorised those two tropes are. It's not a subtle nor subjective difference. The two tropes also usually have different kinds of characterisation ideas attached to them, so they're not the same only reversed.

edited 7th Oct '16 4:07:33 PM by AnotherDuck

Yeah, splitting off Lightworlder into a separate trope seems quite reasonable. In fact, I get the impression that the only reason it wasn't split originally was that there may not have been enough Lightworlder examples for a separate page. (As it says, Lightworlder is a rarer trope.) But, of course, it's nicely soft-split already, so the actual split will be trivial. No sorting of examples required, because they're pre-sorted. And there are certainly enough examples now.

edited 7th Oct '16 7:44:30 PM by Xtifr

The only problem with splitting will be going through the Lightworlder examples that pothole to Heavyworlder. Besides that, a cut would better the page, since it makes it impossible to scroll to Lightworlders, try to open all the folders and end up in the middle of Heavyworlder examples.

250 wicks isn't hard to go through, especially since the majority won't need to be changed. And we even have a nice, already-separated list of most of the ones that will need fixing because of the existing soft split. If people are really lazy, it could take a week; if they're not, it could be done in a few hours.

(There's even a dozen already using the Lightworlder redirect.)

I am utterly confused by the second part of your post, starting with "a cut would better the page". Why would we cut this? Do you mean something other than send-it-to-the-cutlist? I'm honestly lost.

So, where do we sit? I don't think we have the sort of evidence that would justify a rename, but a split might well be reasonable. Do we need a crowner? And if so, would a single-prop with "split?" as the only question be acceptable?

Ok, since there was no response to my last post, I made a single-prop crowner. If it fails, then we can discuss other solutions (including doing nothing). Crowner is here. Shouting for hookup.

Hookup is go!

Bump for more votes.

This is starting to look like a consensus, so I went through the A's, and only found one wick that will need fixing. I think this'll be a piece of cake.

Ok, it's been a week, and we're at 10:1 in favor of the split. Ready to call?

Draft a sandbox, or just whip something up?

The existing description was already soft-split, as were the examples, so I've made Sandbox.Heavyworlder and Sandbox.Lightworlder using just what was already on the page. The only thing I added was mutual links between the pages.

What would be nice is another index for Lightworlder to complement the Muscular Index for Heavyworlder. Do we have a Index Of Wimps?

eta: since Lightworlder is an existing redirect, we can start fixing the wicks before we even finish working out what the new pages will look like.

edited 5th Nov '16 1:17:12 PM by Xtifr

We do have Skeletal Tropes, but that's not quite it.

Also made some minor edits, and I'm going to look through some wicks.

I'm into the D's already. :)

Figured, so I'm going from the bottom. I'm not very fast, though.

Which trope should humans who visit low-gravity planets be on? They're heavyworlder according to the rest of the planet, but currently that part of the description is on lightworlder.

Oh, tricky. I haven't hit one of those yet. I'd probably rephrase it to say that the natives are the lightworlders, but I suppose you could also say that the humans are the heavyworlders.

Just a few in the very bottom. I think all were Warlord of Mars, but I'm not sure. Won't take long to find them later.

Just found one on Flash Gordon. Decided to leave it as is, but I'll mention it here in case we decide to change these later.