Character-named tropes.

Looking at old TLPs, I saw that Jacob Marley Apparel was originally proposed as Fashionable Ghosts. Is that too ambiguous?

If it was something like Ghosts In Modern Fashion for greatest clarity, that might be good?

Edited by Malady on Jan 16th 2020 at 3:20:03 AM

That's the opposite of Jacob Marley Apparel. As is calling ghosts fashionable.

Edited by Tabs on Jan 16th 2020 at 8:59:34 AM

The whole idea is that the ghosts are wearing what they wore when they died; it doesn't matter if the clothes are modern or fashionable.

So I think we more or less agree that most of those should be renamed. Importantly, not all — it was mentioned that The Scrappy is not going anywhere.

Should we start a Long-Term Projects thread to work on those one by one, to collect suggestions, vote and swap names if the change is approved?

No, let's focus on cleaning up actual problems first. The Trope Repair Shop still has a decent backlog.

And, if there's no sign of an actual problem to fix, why bother changing the name? I know the grandfather clause can be a bit annoying, but if the names aren't hurting anything, I say we keep them.

Exactly. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a long-standing policy, especially when it's not always clear what makes names work.

Obviously there are plenty of character-named tropes that are serious problems, and obviously they should be fixed. But that does not logically lead to "therefore, rename all character-named tropes wholesale."

The Quisling is a character-named trope. General Ripper is a character-named trope. These are doing fine, compared to The Libby, which was not, and thus was renamed to Alpha Bitch.

Yeah, that's one I'm glad was renamed, simply because I have never seen Sabrina the Teenage Witch. What I have seen, however, is The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, which has a character named Libby who is not an Alpha Bitch. She is Number Two to Cindy, but I don't think she is an Alpha Bitch, either.

Me and my 2000-born brain.

The acid test of a character-named trope is whether it is recognized in its fundamental meaning:

• independently of our treatment
• among the general populace, not merely a specific audience
• over a substantial period of time

In a nutshell, "Is it reasonable to expect a casual onlooker to know what the trope means from the name alone?" You can usually measure this by how much the trope is misused.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 28th 2020 at 2:31:54 PM

Peggy Sue is an obscure reference and sounds a lot like a Mary Sue reference, but it's also a popularly used trope.

Yeah, I haven't heard of that movie outside of this TVT page and even had times where I forgot what the trope was - the trope description even has to point out several times how it's not a type of Mary Sue and admits it can cause confusion.

That is a terrible, terrible name.

638 wicks but 32259 inbounds ... is there some confusion with Mary Sue?

Not helping is that Avengers: Endgame has an example also involving a Peggy.

Yeah, let's throw out that name.

Is it causing problems? Because it's a common term in fanfic circles that seems to be doing perfectly fine. Someone can do a wick check if they think there's an actual problem.

(it also does have some correlation to Mary Sue, but that's more of a symptom of it being a trope popular in Wish-Fulfillment than anything about the trope itself)

Didn't we go through this a couple years ago in TRS? It's not even our own term to begin with.