Wick cleanup (new crowner 4/18/17): Infant Immortality

Going to categorize this as "Needs Help". Infant Immortality either covers more than one trope, or a trope and a non-trope. The chief concept is "Innocent characters cannot die"; children and babies are the most obvious group, but it also covers pets like dogs, as well as mentally disabled people. Which means the title is not quite illustrative, but I don't think that's the main problem here, especially without real misuse in the wicks.

Two thirds of the page (there's more on the medium subpages) is filled with "aversions" and "partial aversions". The third category runs afoul of the Playing with a Trope rules about partial aversions or partial subversions not being a real thing; I don't know if Downplayed Trope can even be applied to this trope. I see the trope as "Innocents cannot die", not "No innocents die". It's a subtle distinction, but not merely semantics: the former points to the reason behind the trope's existence (audience sensibilities), the latter is just a mere accounting that leads to the "This child died, but his friend didn't"-type examples being confused for a 'partial aversion'. One example that defies the trope is enough to qualify as an aversion/inversion.

The big issue is the 'regular' aversions section. I do think it's a tropeable concept, which especially features in works situated farther on the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism to show how dire a situation is (for instance, showing a horrible disaster or war where innocent characters do die). I would call this an inversion rather than an aversion, though. Some examples seem to overlap more with Would Hurt a Child, which is where villains demonstrate how completely amoral they are by not discriminating a la Never Hurt an Innocent and its subtropes. Other examples go more into Anyone Can Die territory, although that's more general than just "innocent characters can die"; it's where no one is safe, not even main characters.

So the options appear to be cutting any and all "aversions" if it's not a trope in itself, moving them to related tropes such as Would Hurt a Child or Anyone Can Die, or splitting that part off into a new trope.

edited 7th Feb '16 7:54:52 AM by Morgenthaler

Opening this.

This sort of thing is why I generally dislike tropes that present themselves as a hard-and-fast-no-exceptions rule, like "writers will never kill babies". It just begs for people to include aversions on the example list, which we don't really want.

Anyway, here's what I would suggest. We're going to have to clean up the description (which is rather long and rambling), the examples, and the wicks pretty much no matter what. I'd also say that the inclusion of things like pets and whatnot is Missing Supertrope Syndrome, so we should also make something like Innocent Immortality as a supertrope that includes the examples based on things other than youth.

The trope also should list what counts as Infant Immortality, what the cut-off age is.

At least in the literature section, there are more aversions than actual examples. This seems to defy the purpose of the whole thing.

Aversions should only be mentioned if they're in works where you would expect this trope to apply. (Like, say, romance novels). The Bible? Not a work of fiction, though the writers may have embellished it. You totally expect babies and other innocents to die in the Bible.

Same applies for dark n gritty fantasy - nobody expects Infant Immortality in works that set out to be as dark and brutal as possible.

I don't see the point in listing averted examples. Move them to more applicable tropes.

x3 I'd say 16 years old should probably be the cutoff point.

Nah, 5-6 years old IMO be the real cut off for this trope. Anything younger than that tends to be a huge plot point and usually caused by parents.

I honestly don't see the issue with having meta tropes like this about what doesn't happen in a story that leads to only Aversions being listed.

I'd say younger is better in terms of a cutoff for this; around five or six is when people (well, characters in fiction, if not people in real life) stop being completely helpless and start being able to act on their own, at least a little. A seven or eight year old you'd expect to at least try to run and escape and/or get help if something happened, whereas younger than that can be forgiven for standing around and crying instead of even trying to save themselves. Anything older than that I'd say would be lumped into the proposed Innocent Immortality supertrope.

Of course, the name might be part of the problem, given that we also have tropes about actual immortals (like Immortality Immorality, for example), so it's easy to confuse Infant Immortality for infants that literally cannot die, rather than just works where they won't be killed. Something like Infant Immortality Clause might be clearer.

^^ I'm not so sure about that. There are entire genres (disaster, war, horror, Darker and Edgier works) that routinely avert the trope, making it a trope in its own right (possibly Anyone Can Die if not a subtrope thereof). Between removing all straight use or splitting off aversions, I think I'd opt for the latter.

^ It does look like there has been some example drift. The description, after all, specifically mentions "babies and young children" as groups that are typically immortal on the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality.

Since we'll have to completely rewrite this anyway, I'll support a rename to Infant Immortality Clause.

edited 20th Mar '16 5:03:55 AM by Morgenthaler

I wouldn't support cutting ALL straight examples, but I could see adding a note to the description saying that only the most notable examples, in which a story goes out of its way to avoid depicting the deaths of young children even when logically young children should be dying, should be listed (e.g. in Final Fantasy VI, in the town of Mobliz all of the adults above the age of 16 die "to protect the children," but what they're protecting them from is an earthquake; there should be no reasonable way for it to kill ALL of the adults while sparing ALL of the children, or in Fallout 3 and Skyrim all children are literally flagged as unkillable by the game engine).

I could also support splitting off notable aversions / subversions into a No Infant Immortality Clause trope as a subtrope of Anyone Can Die, for works that go out of their way to depict the deaths of young children to show just how dark and gritty their world is.

Edit: Although the more I think about it, the more I think that latter might be too close to Would Hurt a Child. Well, that's a question for YKTTW I suppose.

edited 20th Mar '16 11:41:04 AM by HighCrate

Bump! So to move this forward, I've made a crowner with the various options we've discussed to see which ones carry support from the hivemind. They are the following:

• Move aversions of Infant Immortality to a new trope.
• Cut all aversions of Infant Immortality.
• Make Infant Immortality an Aversions-only trope.
• Create a Super-Trope for “innocent characters don’t die”, make Infant Immortality a subtrope to that for children only.
• Create a cutoff age for the trope so teenagers and older children don’t apply, something like 6 or 11 years old.
• Rename Infant Immortality to Infant Immortality Clause.

Crowner is hooked.

IMO the cutoff age suggested in the crowner should be 12. Oldest you can be without being a teenager (and still be "innocent").

The crowner options are not mutual exclusive, right? Meaning, we could decide to add a cut-off age and only list aversion and also add "clause" to the trope name etc.?

edited 8th Apr '16 11:07:02 AM by eroock

I think that saying this needs to involve something where the adults are dying frequently. There needs to be a level of violence where you'd expect children to die alongside the adults. No children dying in a Slice of Life school series where the worst injury is a scraped knee is not this trope.

I also don't like a hard limit on ages because a) younger kids are often played by older actors which leads to b) it can be nigh impossible to figure out how old kids are supposed to be in a lot of works.

edited 8th Apr '16 1:18:35 PM by shimaspawn

About the aversions , as mentioned by Fighteer in the discussion in Ask The Tropers named "trope aversions": "What Gnome T Itan said is correct: either a trope is omnipresent or it is not; omnipresent tropes only list aversions and non-omnipresent tropes only list examples. Exceptions should be exceedingly rare. "

edited 9th Apr '16 3:36:03 PM by MagBas

I think there's solid reasoning behind keeping both on this page, but only when it's a proven example of either group: A major child character and/or group of children demonstrate age-related plot immortality within a work; or the concept is somehow blatantly subverted/averted/eviscerated in a "statement of purpose" kind of way. It's pretty straightforward, even if it's very much a know-it-when-you-see-it situation.

All right, here are the problems with calling the crowner:

1) The leading option is vague, and it's not easy to implement. Most works don't actually give ages for characters and often younger characters are played by slightly older actors, or in animated or CG works it can be hard to tell from the animation styles how old anyone is. How are we going to stop the constant pedantic arguments that this is going to cause on if a character is young enough or not?

2) Nothing else has consensus. The only rule anyone can agree on is arbitrary and hard to enforce and does nothing to fix the issues with this trope.

edited 21st Apr '16 10:39:31 AM by shimaspawn

Why don't we rephrase the trope? As Jovian pointed out in the second post, the problem is that the trope is phrased like a hard-and-fast rule. We don't list examples for basic literary rules. The Protagonist does not have a list of examples. Neither does The Climax. Instead, we trope the ways those rules are bent, broken, or otherwise played with such as Villain Protagonist or the Hero Antagonist.

Because we present it as an absolute, it creates the assumption that there's no reason to list examples where it's true because every Work is an example, except when it's not. This creates the impression that it's the Aversions that are notable instead.

By removing bits like

and instead rewriting it to put the emphasis on children miraculously surviving in a Work where adults are dying by the score should help stem the flood of Aversions.

To be clear:

1. Tim and Lex in Jurassic Park are an example. The dinosaurs eat plenty of people, but they make it out of all kinds of situations unscathed.
2. Hawkeye's kids in Age of Ultron are not an example. Sure, they don't die, but neither do most of the adults. They're never even put into a situation where death would be on the table.
3. Piggy in Lord of the Flies is not an example. He dies because this is a book/movie where children can die. Technically an Aversion, but the book also averts Red Eyes, Take Warning, An Ice Person, and Explosions in Space. The absence of a trope is rarely notable.

In short, if we want people to stop flooding the trope with Aversions, we need to make clear in the description that it's notable when the trope occurs, not when it doesn't.

EDIT: For the record, I'm also against the cutoff age. In addition to not solving the problem at all and the unclear representation of many ages, there are instances of teenage characters getting Infant Immortality armor. In Jurassic Park, Lex is 13 but the film considers her one of the kids.

If anything, she's treated with even more delicate Kid's Gloves than her little brother. Tim gets fried by an electric fence and spends the rest of the movie with bandaged hands and a limp while the worst that happens to Lex is being sneezed on by an apatasaurus.

edited 21st Apr '16 12:46:48 PM by TobiasDrake

Infant Immortality is listed in Tropes in Aggregate- things that are considered tropes and not People Sit On Chairs simply because of their unrealistically high frequency in fiction.

edited 22nd Apr '16 5:04:23 AM by MagBas

I like that definition of it. It makes it clearer what we're talking about.

I don't think it should be. It's both a) not as ubiquitous as it once was and b) it makes people think that any work where kids don't die is this trope.

^ & ^^^ Thirded.

And fourthed. "Infant Immortality if and only if many adult characters die but younger characters don't."