Memes not Pageworthy?

Administrivia.Not A Trope says that Meme pages are not worthy enough to get any kind of pages, yet the entire wiki still has tons of them. Given the interest that the troper community had seen on talking about memes, shouldn't it be moved into the Not tropes, but still notable category?

edited 15th Jul '17 8:49:36 PM by Wuz

TV Tropes is predominantly about narrative art, it's not about cataloging all art forms or methods of communication (internet or otherwise). Memes, in and of themselves, are not a trope. Even disregarding how fleeting their popularity can be, an individual meme simply does not amount to much. The focus of TV Tropes is on the examples you can acquire from the trope, not simply pointing out that something existed. It's why we don't have pages for the Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michaelangelo's Pieta, but we do have Mona Lisa Smile and Pietà Plagiarism. Their use in narrative art is what makes them a trope.

So what do we do with it now? What about all the memetic subexamples like Memetic Badass?

edited 16th Jul '17 12:42:17 AM by Wuz

It's not that we don't trope art, but more that it's just hard to trope something that's so brief. Yes, a thousand words and all that, but it's still just one image.

I find memes to generally be more works than tropes, kind of like jokes, but "meme" isn't very specific to what it is, since it varies from ways to do stuff to lists to images to typesa of images and so on.

Actually, we do trope art and there doesn't seem to be much reason not to trope the Mona Lisa or the Pieta other than nobody has committed to it yet. Also, what Duck said: it's just difficult.

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Memes-as-tropes: The presence of a meme in a work is almost certainly meaningless to the story or a vain attempt by the writer(s) to appeal to a younger audience (20-somethings or otherwise). The only "memes" I can think of that might have significance would be the Guy Fawkes mask or the troll face image being used by "hackers" or "Anonymous archetypes." But even then, that would be part of a character trope, not the whole of their own tropes.

I originally misread the OP and thought this was about memes-as-works, and — this might go into why we shouldn't create pages for memes-as-tropes — there is the issue of memes being fleeting, but there's the added problem of memes being too rapidly generated. That is, memes are not "stable"; by the time we'd create a page for a given meme, it'd probably be an old meme, and then by the time somebody cleans up the page it'd probably be a dead meme. A third problem would be that the pages would be relatively stub-like. There's only so much you can say about a meme unless you're going to research it, which is a bit much to ask of tropers, I think.

Know Your Meme does quite a good job of cataloging the memes themselves. Far better than we could do. There's no reason to spend our time and effort duplicating their work, and doing it less well.

I just feel like that removing memes altogether ruins the site's spirits like There Is No Such Thing As Notability.

edited 16th Jul '17 9:05:13 PM by Wuz

That only applies to actual work pages.

It isn't for tropes, trivia, YMMV, etc. It's just solely for works. This is our answer to "your fanfic isn't the most popular" situations. As long as it isn't a forbidden kind of work(torture porn, for instance), it's fine to have a work page for.

Meaningless to the story isn't what People Sit On Chairs is about. It's about them being meaningless to the audience. Tropes are about relaying information to the audience, and if that's nothing more than a cheap joke, it still counts.

Memes as works I compared to jokes (and they generally are a subcategory of jokes). Jokes are works, very short (sometimes just a single line) works, but still works. However, they have the same problem as artworks tend to have: They're too short to have more than stub-length tropable content.

Memes as tropes would be something akin to Alice Allusion. Essentially a part of a work (or sometimes an entire work) used as a trope to send a message. A proper example of that would be if a work deliberately used a meme for such a purpose. Something appearing in a work that's later declared a meme isn't that, though.

edited 17th Jul '17 12:54:19 AM by AnotherDuck

If something in a work becomes a meme I think that is worthy of at least a YMMV entry, if a work later references said meme that is Ascended Meme.

If a work references a meme unrelated to the work that should also be a trope too. IE Bakemonogatari doing the reaction guys◊.

It depends on how you define a "meme" — if you go by meme theory in a broad sense, all tropes are memes by definition, since a meme is a unit of cultural information transmitted through oral, written, or visual media.

When most people think of memes in a modern cultural context, they think of things like "The cake is a lie" and image macros of cats with stupid captions. That's an infinitesimal subset of what memes actually are and cheapens the concept into pointlessness, but since we have to deal with it, that kind of meme is absolutely not a trope.

Rather, we capture memes spawned by works in tropes like Memetic Mutation, Forced Meme, Ascended Meme, and so on. Documenting every single meme in discrete articles is: a) pointless, as they are evanescent; b) a recipe for madness as we'd be pumping out articles way too fast for any sort of reasonable quality control; c) frequently a violation of our rules about tropes being lines of dialogue or references to specific works; d) already done better by other websites.

edited 17th Jul '17 1:14:39 PM by Fighteer

TV Tropes is ultimately a wiki, and not an encyclopedia or database. The intention is to be able to move smoothly from one page to the other without interruption. There have been discussions on similar lines as to the benefit of creator pages, both studios and individuals, and the end result was reiterating the importance of the Wiki Walk. Useful Notes pages are similar, they exist primarily as a reference point to any works that may reference, be inspired or otherwise connected to the subject matter. While officially There Is No Such Thing As Notability, meaning you can make a trope page for any work of art, without enough tropes it is a stagnant page that serves no benefit to the wiki at large.

I don't see a salient difference with what you're saying People Sitting On Chairs is, but that's not the topic of this thread.

But by memes-as-works I meant something more like Weegeepedia (which I didn't discover until after my comment). Note that 100% of edits to that works page were done by raguigi. From 2014 to this very month. While this page seems to subvert my point, it's the fact that there's only one person devoted to this meme that strengthens my point.

Also, by memes-as-tropes, I was talking about the general modern usage of something akin to a joke. Alice Allusion isn't really a meme in that sense. I also wasn't talking about Santa being present in a work, which would be a "meme" but in a sense other than the general usage.

edited 17th Jul '17 7:15:03 PM by WaterBlap

I also would like to say, that in my honest opinion, I do not believe that Know Your Meme is a good alternative to TV Tropes in terms of documentation. Few other sites document works to such a detail as TV Tropes, and its wiki structure makes it easy for fandom users to regularly add in new memes to talk about regarding a work. KYM does not have such a benefit, and due to one reason or another, had been stagnating in terms of documenting fandom-specific memes. This is my honest opinion.

I do not consider memes to be tropes, but I do consider them to be notable.

edited 20th Aug '17 11:04:50 PM by Wuz

Another consideration with memes is that they tend to be overused. That's a different concern than having pages on them, but having a page on a meme sometimes encourages people to shoehorn them everywhere as happened with Candle Jack in the past.