Unclear Description: Its All About Me

While looking over the main page for It's All About Me, I noticed that it sounds a bit too similar to the separate trope of Pride. According to the Laconic subpage, the trope refers to characters who display '' " extreme or ultimate self-centeredness". Conversely, there is only one paragraph in the main description page which indicates that It's All About Me is a Selfishness Trope as opposed to a Prideful Trope and even that one does not go into much detail about what specific traits a character needs to qualify.

Ordinarily, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, as it stands, the descriptions for The Narcissist and The Sociopath as well as the character pages for a variety of TV shows go into more detail about what It's All About Me than its own page. Under these circumstances, It's All About Me could run the risk of having as many definitions as there are references to it.

Consequently, I was thinking it be best for the community to flesh out what kinds of behaviors are covered by It's All About Me and how they differ from those covered by Pride. However, given how widely used this trope is, I decided to bring it up for discussion rather than run the risk of starting an edit war. Thanks!

edited 22nd Jan '17 9:17:18 AM by Doldrum27831

Opening and clocking.

For one, selfishness doesn't necessarily have to be born from pride. "Pride" is about thinking of oneself as high, better than anyone else, or having something that's better than anything else. Selfishness is thinking of yourself as no. 1 priority, not necessarily saying that you're greater than other people.

As a starting point, it might help to list some traits a character must have in order to qualify. Here is a working list I've been preparing.

• consistent prioritization of one's desires and feelings at others' expense
• a refusal to take responsibility or accept fault for the consequences of one's actions
• an unwillingness to consider views that diverge from one's own
• a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement to privileged treatment not available to others

Just to clarify, this is intended to be used as a list of a some traits that must be manifested in order for a character to qualify. A character need not display ALL of them for the trope to apply.

That sounds reasonable.

In light of how few posts this thread has received, I'm guessing that this was probably the wrong place to bring this issue up. Would it be more appropriate to raise this issue in the Trope Page's Discussion section?

Thanks!

I don't think it'll be good considering we're talking about definitions. We might need to see if some examples don't fit, and this is the good place to talk about it.

"Definition needs work" is typically one of the hardest sorts of repairs to push through, since someone needs to write a better definition. Suggesting new names is easy. Sorting wicks is grunt work which can take a while, but doesn't require a lot of thought, usually, so it's not actually hard. Merely tedious. Writing up a coherent description of a trope, though, is surprisingly hard (apparently).

Your best bet is to write up a draft that covers the points you want covered. If your description changes the definition, then you need to do it through The Repair Shop, to confirm the changes are kosher. If it doesn't change the definition, then you don't technically need TRS, but you do need buy-in from something like the Description Improvement thread.

In this case, I think it's borderline, but I think you did the right thing by bringing it to repair shop. But that also means we may have to take a look at the examples, to see if the current description has been leading to misuse or other problems.