Really a Useful Note: Shiritori

Page Shirotori is a description of a game.

Most of the examples are simply when the characters happen to be playing the game, which has the same narrative significance as "playing darts" or "Tic Tac Toe". It's a People Sit On Chairs thing; most of the time Shiritori itself has no real significance and the writers just happened to pick this game instead of poker, or connect four, or really any other thing.

The rest of the examples are when Shiritori is used as a mechanic mainly to help kids with vocabulary (that's what the game was invented for anyway) but that's like saying Grandma's Footsteps / Red Light Green Light is a trope because the game inspired the Weeping Angels.

It's a word game that comes up in really random times. It is completely untranslatable to the point where it ends up being completely nonsensical or replaced altogether.

The trope seems fine to me, the description could be chopped a bit of the actual rules though.

It might be a different story if it was a trope on anime's fascination with Old Maid card game but this is quite different.

edited 12th Jul '16 12:45:36 AM by Memers

This is absolutely, definitely, unequivocally not a trope. It is closer to a work, as it is a game. In order to be a trope, it has to be used in a certain way. Simply referencing something qualifies as a shout out, and is not a trope.

I would support a move to useful notes, but I would prefer a move to trivia, because it is still interesting to know when a work references this game.

Well when they play this in anime and manga they are almost always two people using it to kill time and/or show of how a person is distracted via only coming up with words that go along with whatever they are thinking about.

A vast majority of the time the viewers only get the tail end of it when someone loses or it begins without anyone saying anything and a western watcher has no freaken idea what the hell they are doing.

Really its akin to how every single anime if there is a trip and a hotel room they are playing Old Maid in the hotel room, nowadays leading to this moment◊.

edited 17th Jul '16 6:59:12 AM by Memers

Is there any chance that you are identifying uses of Shiritori to actually be the japanese equivalent of Something That Begins with "Boring"?

Actually yeah, most of the uses are akin to that. The dub examples on that page I believe were originally this in the original Japanese.

There are a few more serious examples out there for an otherwise pointless game but yeah.

edited 17th Jul '16 7:43:44 AM by Memers

It does seem like Something That Begins with "Boring".

I remember seeing this in... Puchim@s? for the first time. It made sense to me. Could they be merged, perhaps? I think it could remain a sister trope though. It has a pretty good explanation and even just skimming I see a lot of examples about it being used to pass the time.

From what I know about Shiritori and similar games, it IS a child's game first, an acquired habit later.

From the example on the page, it can be classified into several form of usages:

1. Something That Begins with "Boring"-like usage. e.g.: most of them

2. Mundane Made Awesome / Plot usage. e.g.:

• The titular club plays this in the Beach Episode of Genshiken, and it swiftly derails into a fight because Madarame refuses to refer to a Gundam character (Sayla Mass) without the suffix "-san".
  • Shiritori WITH GUNDAM!
• In ×××HOLiC, Shiritori is revealed as a method for warding off evil spirits, but only after Watanuki is "tricked" into playing it while being chased by said evil spirits, making this a sort of reverse Chekhov's Gun example.
• No Game No Life has materialization shiratori, where any word said materializes if it isn't there. If it is already there, then it disappears.
• One episode of Chronicles of the Going Home Club has a very intense game between Sakura and Natsuki.
• Various gadgets of Anime/Doraemon are based Shiritori, such as しりとり変身卵 shiritori henshin tamago allowing a user to change into various objects through the game (for example,ねこ neko Cat->こいkoi Koi Fish->イドido Well->ドラえもんdoraemon).
  • There's also the しりとりテレポーテーション shiritori terepōtēshon which teleports the player to various locations instead of changing forms.
• In the final episode of Planetes, Hachimaki proposes to Tanabe ("Kekkon shiou") during a Shiritori game. She accepts ("Un!"), losing the game in the process.
• In Futari wa Pretty Cure, Nagisa and Mepple end up playing shiritori while hiding from the goon squad on a subway station after the villains manage to separate them from Honoka. Due to Mepple's Verbal Tic ("mepo") Nagisa has to come up with words that start with "po", until Mepple tells her that "ho" is okay too. Of course, the only word Nagisa can think of is "Honoka"... which leads to major ass-kicking.

Maybe a sister trope of Something That Begins with "Boring"? Or merged into it, with Shiritori as a Japanese variant.

edited 19th Sep '16 9:41:14 PM by NoxCaelis

We don't need more Japanese variants of tropes, please and thank you.

It's a completely different game from stuff like I Spy covered by Something That Begins with "Boring". It is a different but quite related trope, merging them would only massively bloat the trope since you have to explain what the game is in addition to the fact that it's impossible to translate and sometimes we only catch the end in works making it completely nonsensical to anyone who does not understand Japanese in depth.

A lot of translations will just keep it in sometimes without any notes, others will completely replace it with something else. Both times are notable tropes and different from the Something trope, they also tend to affect subsequent scenes differently.

Quite a few of those would need better context, iirc a few were just killing time walking home then serious business started which is the interesting part hence why they are focused on. The last one is definitely this as they were passing the time till she got triggered via word play that got her thinking about what she was trying to not think about.

That remaining ones are more word play tricks involving specifically how the game works, which is a related trope.

edited 20th Sep '16 1:26:33 AM by Memers

Wouldn't that come under Cultural Translation or Woolseyism?

I'm thinking about the Shiritori itself now though. By the examples, it seems we only have few of them to tell that this game have a narrative significance. Unless being used to set up scenes is a narrative significance, like done in Planetes or Genshiken.

As a child's game ingrained in Japanese culture, I think it is like Nursery Rhyme or Parlor Games, which have their own pages. Shiritori can do with better context, and/or better description though.

Then again, as Parlor Games said, "Nowadays, it's either a Discredited Trope used to show how boring or geeky the people playing are, or it's used as an actual Plot Device."

edited 20th Sep '16 6:34:57 PM by NoxCaelis

thing is, Shiritori definitely isn't discredited.

Maybe we should merge it into a subsection of Parlor Games instead. As noted by Nox Caelis for many examples there is nothing significant with Shiritori itself other than the fact that writers chose it. They could've gone with Simon Says or I Spy and it really wouldn't make much narrative difference.

Just add a note that the game is also used as education to help kids learn vocabulary.

edited 22nd Sep '16 2:49:59 AM by BreadBull

Maybe the only distinction is that it IS a Japanese Trope. Parlor Games have a lot of things under its wing, but Japanese media uses mostly Shiritori and almost nothing else. No Simon Says, no I Spy, no Spin the Bottle. I don't know, though, if this merit a page or makes it belong to Parlor Games.

That's largely because as far as I know Shiritori is the only parlor game in Japan. There may be others but I've not heard of any.

It doesn't really fit with what is currently on parlor games, I mean not at all. Not to mention that that page is really long and would double because you gotta explain what Shiritori is and how its played since it does not work in English in any way.

edited 22nd Sep '16 11:24:17 AM by Memers

Shiritori is a Japanese word game played by 2 or more people. Players take turns coming up with words beginning with the final syllable of the previous word with the game ending if the word ends in 'N' since there are no words in Japanese beginning with the "N" syllable. Words may not be repeated. In China it is known as 接龍 jiēlóng or 文字接龍 wénzì jiēlóng while in Korea it is known as 끝말잇기 kkeutmal-isgi. Shiritori is also played in many other countries, although since most languages encode phonemes instead of syllables the "syllable rule" is replaced with a "letter rule" (ie the next word has to begin with the last letter of the previous word), and eliminating the "N rule". A common English variant is "Alphabet," where they think up words in alphabetical order (i.e.: "Apple," "board," "cart," etc until Z).

Long-ish, but not significantly longer than any other entry on the Parlor Games page.

edited 23rd Sep '16 3:34:01 AM by BreadBull

So, any consensus what should we do to this subject? I think now it's between:

• Combine it with Parlor Games and move all example there, given better context
• Make it a Useful Notes
• Leave its classification as a trope be
  • Parlor Games' sister trope optional
  • Cutting "Killing Time" Example optional
• Cut it

I now think that Shiritori, like DAN004 said, is not really discredited, as current Anime and Manga still use it (Media in the examples of Shiritori tends to be younger then the ones in Parlor Games), and the Cultural Translation between Parlor Games and Shiritori and similar children games (like in Kami-sama no Iu Toori) is not easy. That is, Shiritori and the likes are used only by children (think high school at the oldest) or to denote childishness (like lampshaded in Seitokai Yakuindomo, as the characters are in high school). Other than that, they are really bored, which comes into Something That Begins with "Boring" territory.

Some Japanese shows (sometimes game shows) also use shiritori, so it's not exactly a childish game, although the ones usually playing them are indeed kids or teens.

I mean childishness as in playfulness, which I guess cover game/variety shows. I almost never seen Shiritori in another context of usage, barring Kami-sama no Iu Toori where it is used for Deadly Games purpose.

And it's a traditional child games, so... yeah. that's what I meant by childish.

edited 24th Sep '16 7:27:24 PM by NoxCaelis

So, anything we want to do to this page? I'm thinking between keeping it alive with better description and context to examples or merge it into Parlor Games.

In favor of a description rework and add context on how the game is played in media in Japan.

As well as adding Something That Begins with "Boring" and Most Common Card Game tropes as it's almost always Shiritori and Old Maid in media with Karuta being the very traditional outliner game.

Edit: the card game trope linked needs some rework for old maid and Japan... [1]◊

edited 1st Oct '16 2:52:00 AM by Memers

Had a look at the page. More than half the total examples are Anime and Manga, which means this is almost unique to Japanese media. There's potentially a trope in there, IF it is used to indicate a Western-oriented character's appreciation or Japanese culture, but even then it would still only be a specific detail of a larger trope which I'll call Japanophile for argument's sake.

I'm leaning towards Not A Trope. Agreeing with the OP that this should be moved to Useful Notes with the option for Trivia pages.