Not Tropeworthy (Alt Names Crowner 3 March 2019): Fragile Flower

Fragile Flower is effectively The Same, but More for Shrinking Violet. Heck, on the "playing with" sections for both pages, Fragile Flower is listed as an exaggerated Shrinking Violet, while Shrinking Violet is listed as a downplayed Fragile Flower. Shouldn't our rules about The Same, But More prohibit Fragile Flower from existing?

Shrinking Violet is also a much larger page. How much larger? Well... The page for Fragile Flower is about the size of... one of the twelve subpages for specific mediums in Shrinking Violet.

Not helping matters is the large amount of no-context examples there are for Shrinking Violet; I counted them all up and there's a total of, say, 19-22 of them out of the hundred-or-so actual examples, 4 of them being the opening examples. If you want to know how I got that number, here's my tally.

• 9 in Anime (maybe 10 depending on the one for Nazuna in Hidamari Sketch, the trope's image supplier)
• 1 in Film, purely relying on a quote and isn't even seemingly attatched to a character.
• 1 in Literature (maybe 2 if you include the entry regarding Those That Wake's sequel, which isn't even mentioned by name in the article; just as "Those That Wake's sequel")
• 5 in Live-Action TV
• 1 in Theatre. Out of 1 examples for Threatre.
• 1 in Video Games. This is also for a Game Mod of a game, not the core game.
• Maybe 1 in Web Comics, depending on if you count the Blindsprings example.
• 1 in Web Original.
• 1 in Western Animation.

Again, I ask—do we really need this page? Anything on it, you could say is an exaggerated version of the Shrinking Violet trope, and this trope is not only much smaller in size, but isn't even meeting our standards of writing anyhow.

edited 9th Jan '18 2:40:02 PM by Camwood

Merge.

Merge.

Health sure is versatile. It's possible to be both light-headed and dim-witted. At the same time, no less.

Merge.

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

I've always seen Fragile Flower be used for sensitive characters while Shrinking Violet is for shy ones. There's overlap between the two but not all sensitive characters are shy, and vice versa.

Agreed. Emotional/sensitive != shy. I think of Fragile Flower as the crying equivalent of Hair-Trigger Temper, someone who is pushed to tears at the drop of a hat.

That said, the page definitely has some issues. There are definitely a lot of ZC Es, and the image definitely looks more like Shrinking Violet.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

The confusion maybe stems from the fact that there's overlap in most cases of true Fragile Flowers, to the point that Shrinking Violet is almost a requirement for a character to be a Fragile Flower, especially in anime. The only real example I could think of of the top of my head for a character that's a Fragile Flower but not a Shrinking Violet was Spongebob.

It's a very subtle distinction, but I think it's worth keeping both of them. The description for Fragile Flower maybe just needs to be more clear that it often goes hand-in-hand with Shrinking Violet, but Fragile Flower's much more about the sensitivity/prone to crying trait while Shrinking Violet is more about shyness.

edited 28th Mar '18 1:31:11 AM by YourIdeas

Should Fragile Flower be a subtrope of Shrinking Violet?

edited 28th Mar '18 8:35:31 AM by Lymantria

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!

They're definitely different. The problem is the names and images are too similar, and both descriptions are overly gender specific, leading to far more overlap than is neccesary. I say rename Fragile Flower Crybaby, put a male crying as the image, and rewrite the description to be more gender neutral. Shrinking Violet should also be renamed to something a lot clearer, like Painfully Shy

edited 28th Mar '18 9:08:19 AM by VarangianBard

I would say no, I can think of several examples of characters so emotionally sensitive to be Fragile Flower that are not a Shrinking Violet such as Izumi Takanashi in Working who is an Ill Girl and heavily The Eeyore but not shy at all, in fact she hits the Brutal Honesty head hard and often. Especially vulnerable when she is in It's All About Me and the kids who care for her are growing up and the fact that she sees everything in romance tropes since she is a romance novelist.

Also characters with an Ambiguous Innocence can be a Fragile Flower once that innocence starts to crack, in dark works they will hit that crack with a sledge hammer hard and often to the point where she might turn into a Broken Bird.

Or just plain childish like Usagi at the start of Sailor Moon who's breaking down crying is a once an episode thing till her character development kicks in.

Going to say no on the rename to Crybaby since this also a preexisting term for it and there is a movie named Crybaby.

edited 28th Mar '18 9:03:11 AM by Memers

Crybaby is far more established a term than fragile flower, albeit with different connotations. More importantly, it's much more gender neutral, which i think is key here. Fragile Flower is too feminine.

edited 28th Mar '18 9:15:39 AM by VarangianBard

It has very different connotations and many of which have nothing to do with the trope or the character type. Also there is a movie with the name.

I dont think it needs to be gender neutral at all as well, this is a Mostly Female Trope. The most of the male examples are kids that haven't hit puberty or might as well be girls Ukes. At most I can see a more male oriented redirect.

edited 28th Mar '18 9:23:53 AM by Memers

Its not just gender neutrality though. Fragile Flower has shyness connotations that Crybaby doesn't, which leads to excessive overlap with Shrinking Violet.

Merge, but make a new trope for emotional/sensitive characters?

I used to plug my deviantart here but turns out the link was too long.

I support previous suggestion to rename to Crybaby and give a less female re-write.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

That name is really going to drag the trope down with its pejorative meaning.

Is Prone to Tears an acceptable name?

Where there's life, there's hope.

Prone to Tears isn't bad.

Oissu!

Fragile Flower is also a pejorative, mocking the person for being emotionally fragile.

---

I like the rename/rewrite to Prone to Tears.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I can get behind this.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

Agreed, that's not a bad name.

If anyone wants to change the image, as has been suggested previously, take it to Image Pickin when this thread concludes.

Edited by Lymantria on Sep 24th 2018 at 7:46:35 AM

Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!

We had weak consensus for a rename to Prone to Tears. Do we need a crowner?

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"