Misused: Never A Self-Made Woman

I feel like a lot of the entries for the main Never a Self-Made Woman page are shoehorned. If I'm reading the trope description right, it's meant for when a female character's accomplishments are defined by her relationship with a male character or characters. That it's not for every instance in which a female character received help from men in the past, but only for ones in which the male relationship is emphasized. Therefore works in which the woman was introduced first as competent, and backstory shows that she received training from her father in her past would not count unless the narrative emphasized the only reason she is competent is because of him.

There was a previous thread on TRS dedicated to cleaning this page up and making it less easy to be misused, containing lengthy case-by-case analyses of whether each of the examples counted or not, but I'm having trouble finding it in the archives.

I think if the trope definition was modified to be more clear about the boundaries for when this trope does and doesn't apply, this kind of problem would be less common. As it is the trope definition feels too broad, and it doesn't help that the description points out the trope is more common than it might seem at first, without pointing out when it's not there.

edited 2nd Jul '16 9:37:40 PM by AlleyOop

We need more than anecdotal evidence to justify a TRS thread. Closing.