Unclear Description: Basilisk And Cockatrice

cockatrice (n.) :

late 14c., from Old French cocatriz, altered (by influence of coq) from Late Latin *calcatrix, from Latin calcare "to tread" (from calx (1) "heel;" see calcaneus), as translation of Greek ikhneumon, literally "tracker, tracer."

In classical writings, an Egyptian animal of some sort, the mortal enemy of the crocodile, which it tracks down and kills. This vague sense became hopelessly confused in the Christian West, and in England the word ended up applied to the equivalent of the basilisk. A serpent hatched from a cock's egg, it was fabled to kill by its glance and could be slain only by tricking it into seeing its own reflection. Belief in them persisted even among the educated because the word was used in the KJV several times to translate a Hebrew word for "serpent." In heraldry, a beast half cock, half serpent.

basilisk(n.) :

1300, from Latin basiliscus, from Greek basiliskos "little king," diminutive of basileus "king" (see Basil); said by Pliny to have been so called because of a crest or spot on its head resembling a crown.

The basilisk has since the fourteenth century been confused with the Cockatrice, and the subject is now a complicated one. [T.H. White, "The Bestiary. A Book of Beasts," 1954] Its breath and glance were said to be fatal.

They're the same creature effectively, and have been since the 1400s. What you call it depends on whether you want a name from the Greek filtered through Latin, or from Greek, filtered through Latin and French.

edited 5th Mar '17 1:16:04 AM by Madrugada

That doesn't really matter NOW though, they are entirely different creatures in most works and are featured together.

IE Harry Potter has a Basilisk featured in one book and features a Cockatrice in the next. Final Fantasy, SMT, Atelier Series, and a bunch of others do it too.

In the exact same way I might add, the Basilisk is pure serpent and the Cockatrice is the bird.

edited 5th Mar '17 3:01:23 AM by Memers

We don't need a page for every single fantasy creatures in existence, and the number of examples and wicks we currently have on those creatures doesn't justify the split.

I think it's like the Youkai page. It's a collection of various kinds of youkai, and the ones with more examples get their own pages. And youkai are far more diverse than these two.

Do Basilisk and Cockatrice serve the same narrative function or have similar roles even when the work in question makes a distinction between them? It seems to me like the answer is yes, and isn't that what a trope is? An element in the work that serves a purpose beside its sole existence.

They also come from the same folklore origin and remain interchangeable names for the same thing while being slightly different creatures at other times. They also don't have enough examples to warrant a split. Tropes Are Flexible, so for the first reason cited I'm for keeping them in one trope and rewriting the description to be more clear about the shared origin and he similarities/differences.

edited 5th Mar '17 2:12:02 PM by Derkhan

In any case, even if the myopic claim that contemporary works always make them separate creatures were correct (and it absolutely is not), that still doesn't help. We don't just catalog contemporary works. We catalog works of any era!

(Although, just to make those claims even more unhelpful, even works which list them as two separate creatures don't always agree on which critter has which subset of traits.)

If we split this, then we have nowhere to put examples which treat them as two names for the same creature. If we don't split it, then works which list them as two separate creatures can simply mention both.

So, the status quo works for all cases; the proposed split doesn't. Therefore, we should stick with the status quo. QED.

Do we need a crowner for consensus, or are we in agreement now?

14 individuals have posted in the thread.

Of that 14, two, Ghilz and Memers believe the page should be split, on the unsupported assertion that most new works treat them as different creatures

The other 12 do not think it should be split, with reasons ranging from "Historically they were two different names for the same basic creature"; " Some modern works treat them as different, not "many" and not "most" "; "There are not enough examples to make split pages start off healthy"; "Some modern works may treat them as different, but we don't trope only modern works"; "Even in works that do treat them as different, there is not complete agreement about which one is which, or if they even differ visually"; "Dictionary definitions which support that they are used interchangeably"; "Even if they are different creatures, we have pages for groups of related creatures that have minor differences, such as "Youkai" "; and "If we split this, then we have nowhere to put examples which treat them as two names for the same creature. If we don't split it, then works which list them as two separate creatures can simply mention both. "

2 to 12. That's a 6:1 ratio in favor of keeping the page as one.

I'd say that's a strong consensus.

edited 3rd Apr '17 9:37:32 AM by Madrugada

Make that 13 for "don't split".

That would be the only reason to do a crowner; to put paid to any claim that "the lurkers support a split".

To forestall that, I just looked at all the TRS thread open that have crowners. There are 11 of them. 2 have fewer than 10 votes total on any option. Only one, (The Dragon), has more than 17 votes on any option (it has 35). The other 8 all have between 13 and 17 votes cast on any single option. We have 15 votes accounted for in this thread. That puts the number of people who have expressed an opinion squarely in the middle of the "typical" number of votes cast on a crowner in TRS. There is no reason to believe that there's substantial number of people (there would have to be at least 24 additional votes for splitting to reach a 2:1 ratio in favor of splitting) who have not commented but would vote.

I stand by my earlier statement: we have a consensus, there is no need for a crowner.

edited 3rd Apr '17 10:48:42 AM by Madrugada

So thread can be closed?

Actually closing...