An honest conversation about Chairs: What is a Trope and how do we judge them?

Yeah, well, we've been over and over in the appearance cleanup topic how the simple fact of having a particular appearance is not a trope, no matter how much of a pattern may exist. I'm not sure why this is still even an argument.

edited 24th Aug '17 8:44:49 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That's why I called it a setting trope. It isn't as rare as you seem to claim. If I watched a hundred episodes or so of Dragon Ball, with this in mind, I'd probably find a few background characters with additional haircolours.

Huh... can't actually. Given the image◊ you've provided, I note the following non-brunette haircolours (numbering system starts top left for 1):

• Row 1, column 6 is currently in front of the class, magenta hair
• Row 3, column 2, dark blue hair
• Row 6, column 4, golden hair (which is still "natural", but stands out in the crowd)

Everyone else seems to have medium brown to black hair.

The meaning I read from this is "the protagonist (or soon to be important character) can be identified by their Distinctive Colouration". Here's another work to toss on that pile that doesn't involve unnatural haircolours:

• YuYu Hakusho:
  • Sarayashiki Junior High School has a blue gakuran mandated for the male students. Urameshi, the protagonist, wears a green one, instead.
  • Kuwabara (who spends early arcs fighting with Urameshi) is the only student at Sarayashiki Junior High School with red hair, which he wears in a pompadour.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

You Gotta Have Blue Hair is not an appearance trope. It is an impossibility trope that happens to concern appearances. It would not be tropable but for the impossibility aspects.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Then it should be renamed Impossible Hair Colors. The existing title is both non-indicative and actively misleading.

edited 24th Aug '17 8:49:35 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Having a yellow haired Japanese person not being a 'Hafu', aka biracial, is impossible. Yellow hair color fits for this in that case. It is especially blatantly odd in works where Phenotype Stereotype for westerners is in use on top of that.

And you don't see the blue, red, green, yellow and pink haired girls in it? Everyone else is a shade of brown/ black. Hence Distinctive Appearances.

Those with a world itself brings the pattern as a plot point like robots only have blue hair to distinguish from normal people would be a different trope than You Gotta Have Blue Hair which I mentioned earlier. I am all for a World Of Blue Hair type trope.

That really won't do anything except stop the potholing style of You Gotta Have Purple Hair, which is a plus though. I personally have never liked the name at all it makes it sound like it is only for blue hair.

I made the repair shop for Dye Hard here it could help sort some of these if opened.

edited 24th Aug '17 9:30:07 AM by Memers

No, I cannot tell from the image if a character is biracial or not. I didn't see anyone with pink or green hair in your image. If it helps, I have been tested to be colourblind.

Notice that my writeup for Bleach didn't contain any plot points. "Manga series that used distinctive colors on the covers to make characters stand out, even though they all had either dark or light hair in the actual black-and-white pictures" is part of the current trope definition. Contrast the current writeup on You Gotta Have Blue Hair with mine:

• Bleach runs the entire range from natural hair types, to implausible hair types to impossible hair types. The impossible hair types include:
  • Blue hair: Grimmjow, Mayuri
  • Green hair: Nel, Mashiro
  • Orange Hair: Ichigo, Orihime, Kazui.
  • Pink hair: Szayel, Yachiru, Hacchi,
  • Purple hair: Yoruichi (Anime only. In the manga, she has black hair.)
  • Red hair (impossible shades): Renji, Jinta
• Bleach adds bright haircolours to help make the character designs stand out on coloured pages. The main character, Ichigo, spent most of his school years getting picked on for having an unusual haircolour.

The current write-up lists "a thing that happens", whereas my writeup explains the general meaning of the pattern for that particular work. It functions for artists not being limited by the the normal range of human hair colours and early characterization. It doesn't use the hair colours to evoke a fantasy setting or any other plot points.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

As I said it what is currently there should be a subtrope of Distinctive Appearances. Those that are not have in universe explanations and patterns thus would be a different trope, which IMO should be split off.

Random nobody humans simply do not get You Gotta Have Blue Hair, always shades of brown or black. I have never seen a work where they use this for absolutely no reason, if they exist in numbers that is also potentially a trope.

Yellow hair in anime happens for 1 of 2 reasons Phenotype Stereotype or You Gotta Have Blue Hair, either way important. clearer?◊

edited 24th Aug '17 10:17:28 AM by Memers

Quick internet search...Who is this guy with blonde hair? Sure seems like a random nobody human to me. You Gotta Have Blue Hair does not require characters with unusual colours be important to the plot. Why are you telling me this? I gave the work's reasons in each example. That's what context is. "Nel's hair is green" is not a reason for the trope. The description of You Gotta Have Blue Hair mentions several different reasons for the trope; 'distinguishing the cast' is one, along with "the artist likes variety", "indicating a character's personality", and "marking one character as unique". The default trope is "impossible hair colour" and proper context would explain why those colours are used. Er, I never said blonde hair was meaningless in a Japanese work? (He said in a confused tone.) I'd contest that other blondes exist, and I had said that from a single image I couldn't tell what trope was in play. The image itself wasn't enough to determine if she had dyed her hair like a delinquent, was supposed to be a foreigner, or had an unnatural hair colour. Collecting narrative meaning from a single image is difficult, and that's why we have so few examples from the medium of Art.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

For Delinquent Hair the person is expected to have dyed to achieve the blonde look also if one is a Gyaru Girl you are expected to have dyed it. IE Kanji in Persona 4 and Ryujji in Persona 5 for Japanese Delinquent or Mimi in Digimon for Gyaru Girl.

It's part of the reason why I started the Dye Hard repair shop to move plot and character related examples off the trivia trope to a main trope

It's so prevalent that, for example, the M Cs of Boku Wa Tomodachi Ga Sukunai and Please Tell Me Galko Chan have natural blonde hair, because of their background, and get ostracized and stereotyped before people actually meet them.

In real life, many schools in Japan will make a person dye their hair brown if it is a natural blonde to prevent them from being any kind of an issue.

edited 24th Aug '17 3:07:11 PM by Memers

{{79}}: Good idea. Will this be discussed in the personal appearances tropes thread or you guess that create a new thread in the Trope Repair Shop is the best option?

Other thing, some time ago, happened a discussion in a thread, but considering that after some time the answer was silence and this thread is exactly about the nature of chairs, i am reposting the last five posts here:

"The gay stereotype tropes falling out of use or not, you can guess that this is sufficiently rare that if Straight Gay wasn't listed as a trope, listing aversions to them would be acceptable (as is the case with the "small, camouflaged and unobtrusive listening and tracking device" listed as an example of aversion to Incredibly Obvious Bug in the Averted Trope page)? And if not, would this mean that, if it were more common, a trope meaning "small, camouflaged and unobtrusive listening and tracking device" could be created? And if true, would this mean that "small, camouflaged and unobtrusive listening and tracking device" can receive its own trope page? ""

"That's so many if-statements that it's difficult to ascertain what you're trying to actually say. I honestly can't figure out what you're point is.

But if you're trying to analogously refer to incrediblyObviousBug in order to make a point about Straight Gay, I'd like to say that IOB is a completely different kind of trope. You're comparing apples to oranges if you're comparing a phlebotinum trope to a character trope."

"I suppose the question is: is it actually valid to consider "an aversion of a stereotype" a trope, even if such aversions were virtually unheard of in older works?

For example, if almost every media in the past portrays "anyone from a different country" as a Funny Foreigner, do we need to create a Non Funny Foreigner trope when the former starts falling out of use?"

"If aversions are almost unheard of, that's when it's actually interesting to list them. If they're common, there's little point to it. On the other hand, if they're almost unheard of, they're not really tropes on their own. "

"Beyond what Another Duck and Adept noted, I have one question: is the tropewortiness of a trope different merely because one is a character trope and the other is a phlebotinum trope?"

Any opinion about them?

edited 25th Aug '17 12:47:34 PM by MagBas

That's a lot of stuff to inquire about. I'll boil it down to basic principles:

• The absence of a trope is not usually interesting or notable unless the use of the trope is so pervasive or omnipresent that not using it becomes interesting for that fact alone.
• A trope is usually in one state or the other: not omnipresent enough to care about aversions, or omnipresent enough that you only list aversions.
• Omnipresence can be genre-dependent. One doesn't usually need to note the use of Space Is Noisy in a science fiction movie, because it's ubiquitous within the genre. However, if a fantasy work pops into space and plays the trope straight, it's interesting enough to be worth an example.
• If a particular form of Playing with a Trope becomes popular or memetic enough to form a pattern all its own, then it can grow into a distinct trope. This includes aversions, but what really matters is the conscious intent (or subconscious mimicry) of the creators of the work.

On to specifics... Funny Foreigner is a trope because of how blatantly obvious it is in usage, even if it's ubiquitous in works from certain periods. As it has grown out of use, it has not been replaced by a Realistically Portrayed Foreigner trope, because that would imply that this is somehow an intentional pattern, rather than simply being the lack of a past pattern — in this case, stereotyping.

Straight Gay is a trope because there are, to this day, many different kinds of portrayals of LGBTQ individuals in works, and all of them carry some kind of narrative weight. Originally, as it says in the description, Straight Gay was intended as a subversion of the usual gay stereotypes, so that straight characters could be confused when their attempts to flirt with the characters failed, among other reasons.

edited 25th Aug '17 12:56:22 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hmm... then the aversions to gay stereotypes are considered a trope because they were originally used as surprise factor... but, and currently? Based on their description of Realistically Portrayed Foreigner, the reason for this to not be a trope is because this is not an intentional pattern, but actually the lack of a past pattern.

A trope does not have to currently be in use to be valid. That said, if it has become a Forgotten Trope, then current examples should probably not be listed. As one case of this, I just watched Alien: Covenant, which rather surprised me by portraying a gay male relationship without any fanfare whatsoever. It was exactly as natural as a heterosexual relationship would be, and did not involve sex at all, nor any gay stereotyping, nor the slightest hint that it was anything other than perfectly normal.

And no, I don't mean the scene where Michael Fassbender kisses himself.

What I mean by this is that Gay People Are Treated Completely Normally isn't really a trope, any more than Black People Are Completely Integrated or Women Are Completely Equal To Men And Thats Fine With Everyone.

edited 25th Aug '17 7:52:39 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Okay, thanks. Do you think that this should be mentioned in the description of Straight Gay?

edited 27th Aug '17 3:54:24 PM by MagBas

Wait. Blue hair is supposed to be impossible? It may not occur naturally, but I know lots of people IRL who regularly rock their blue/green/purple/whatever hair.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

And that is Dye Hard, which needs some fixing whenever the repair shop gets opened, characters in You Gotta Have Blue Hair have natural impossible hair colors.

For example one of these characters dyes their hair but for the other 30 it's all natural

edited 27th Aug '17 6:19:00 PM by Memers

Although that does run into the prove-a-negative issue: most of the time characters won't just outright say their blue/pink/green hair is their natural color, so you can't really prove they don't dye it.

Though if their eyebrows match, it's a pretty good guess.

It depends on the culture.

For the Japanese dyeing is taboo as all heck. Dyeing your hair in works is the trait of a rebel or super trendy and the like it is not something a normal person is supposed to ever do, hence why Japanese Delinquents will dye their hair blonde and Gyaru Girl it's blonde or pink. If they are not rebelling there is just not going to be any dyeing involved unless they are dyeing their hair brown or black to fit in.

It basically ends up being 'natural unless otherwise noted' as fitting in at all cost is cultural standard.

An example being Setsuna in Negima who dyes her white hair black for fear of discrimination since she is an albino. Yet in the same work Ako hates her icy blue hair as it makes her standout too much and standing out is bad.

Edit: this is also why I opened the Dye Hard repair shop but it hasn't been opened yet... after a week.

edited 31st Aug '17 5:01:54 AM by Memers