How exactly is TwoGirlsToATeam a trope?

The first paragraph in Two Girls to a Team notes its significance due to the existence of The Smurfette Principle - but why is having two girls on a team any more significant than having two minorities on a team following the Token Minority being the norm? It doesn't signify any sort of story convention - the examples essentially come down to a list of works with two girls in the main cast, when there may be any number of unrelated reasons for it.

Edited by AGuy on Jan 8th 2021 at 2:12:50 PM

I'm just.. a guy....

While I can't speak for whoever made the page, here's my interpretation:

The trope is "supposed" to be for when a work tries to avoid The Smurfette Principle by including two girls, but fails at actually developing either of them as characters. For example, instead of giving either girl a character arc or personality, the work would just split the stereotypical "girl plots" between the two of them.

As for the current examples, I think they should only qualify if both female characters feel underdeveloped compared to the male characters. Meaning that almost every example should be cut because there's Zero Context given. An example should prove that the girls lack character development, or that they would both be the Smurfette if the other girl wasn't there.

Token Minority should have a version of this trope too. Or this trope could be expanded to every instance where an author has multiple "Token X" characters but doesn't develop any of them.

What you said makes sense, and I agree with your proposal. It's probably going to sit on the back burner awhile, though, considering how many tropes need work.

I'm just.. a guy....

Feel free to whip up a wick check for it, though. That'll help things move faster.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

^I'll get to it once I'm home on my computer in a few hours.

I'm just.. a guy....

And remember, you can always stop by the Wick Check Project thread for help and/or advice.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Initial wick count done on work spaces (or example pages for work spaces) leading up to Comic Books:

Examples analyzed: 53

No elaboration besides noting two females, or noting a group: 21

Notes that there are "only" two females, but nothing else besides sometimes total size of team: 17

Inversion: 7

Notes there being two females at some point or in some group, and notes inversions/aversions in the same work: 3

Notes that a female leaves the team when another is joining the team: 1

Nothing besides the trope name: 1

Elaborates on limited participation of women: 1

Note about lone female in-universe being happy when another woman joins team: 1

Trope directly lampshaded in-universe: 1

I can do a more thorough wick count if required, but I think it's pretty clear here that there is rarely anything to these listings besides "group has two female characters" (or "group has two male characters"). Removing the examples that don't just note the number of characters of a certain sex in a particular team, you're left with 4 examples out of 53, or less than 10%.

Edited by AGuy on Jan 11th 2021 at 12:46:02 PM

I'm just.. a guy....

Where'd you do the wick check exactly? Is there a sandbox for it? We sort of need to see the wicks to be able to make judgements about them.

It also sounds like you just went right down the list. Checks are supposed to be as random as possible. Typically you'd be jumping all over the place.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Also, you don't need to do all the wicks, you need to do 50 randomly selected wicks.

Believe it or not, I was under the impression that we needed *every* wick checked eventually for a wick check. I was planning to get to them all over the course of a few days, but I figured my initial findings were worth posting since I was going to do the work in batches. I'll try to do a random selection of 50 wicks, then.

So if I understand this, I'm to get 50 random wicks, copy and paste them all in a comment in the sandbox, and post the conclusion here. Is that correct?

I'm just.. a guy....

That's about it, yeah.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

For the record, I haven't forgotten about this; I'm just a bit busy right now. I'll get back to this when I have some more time, probably either tomorrow or Saturday.

I'm just.. a guy....

Wick check done. Wicks posted in sandbox. Unfortunately, I messed this up a little bit, doing this while exhausted - while I did use a random number generator, I lost count somewhere, so the selections don't match up perfectly with the numbers later on. I analyzed 50 pages; a few had multiple wicks, but there was only one where I felt the context was different enough to warrant noting each wick down separately. These numbers are a little short of the total number of wicks I have in the sandbox; I'll go through them all again when I'm better rested and see what I failed to note down. Quotations marks aren't meant to be condescending, but a note on where I felt verbage might have been relevant.

• Related trope: 1
• "Only" two females: 5
• Specifies females being significantly outnumbered: 2
• Notes there was one female until another was added: 7
• Notes lone female character being unsatisfied until another joins the team: 3
• Mentions there are two females: 22
• Notes that the two females receive more focus than the rest of the crew: 1
• Gender inversion: 3
• Mentions a female being added to the cast, no other context: 1
• Notes a delay in how long it took for another team in the series to have two females: 1
• Notes character development of the two females: 1
• Notes the gender disparity being due to the nature of the setting: 1
• Notes teams typically having "one to two" females: 1
• Notes one of the two females is relatively neglected by the narrative: 1
• Pothole to "only other female": 1
• Notes the trope as a subversion of The Smurfette Principle due to a Gender Reveal: 1
• Total: 52

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Two examples were from work pages related to Pokemon playthroughs, noting the gender makeup of the player's team (which was picked randomly by the rules of one playthrough, and effectively randomly by the nature of another) - that is, it was impossible for there to have been any narrative significance to the gender split.

Overall, I think it's clear enough that the trope is usually just used to note that a work has two female characters in the main cast - the lines with such are marked in bold, and comprise ~61.5% of wicks. The lines in italics, comprising ~15.3% of wicks, seem to be getting at the gender disparity having some significance - but without further elaboration, fail to explain how, and can be written off as the editor's personal dissatisfaction. The third to last line was the only example I found in the wick check I did where actual narrative neglect relative to other cast members was noted. Two of the examples note the characters getting significant character development, or getting more focus than the rest of the cast - the exact opposite of narrative neglect. With Two Girls to a Team rarely being wicked for anything more than noting two females in the main cast, I think it's safe to say that it's not serving the purpose of "two girls instead of one to avoid the appearance of tokenism while not providing more than token characterization."

I'm just.. a guy....

Just to be clear, it doesn't really matter if you follow the # generator exactly; the key is that the examples aren't chosen with any deliberate pattern or reasoning. Some of us just scroll up and down randomly. Sometimes I'll even put the entire wick list itself into the randomizer and do the ones that come up first. What matters is that you did it at random.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I'll keep that in mind - I was fretting about it quite a bit.

I'm just.. a guy....

Yeah, it's cool. Heck, I used to do the painstaking task of numbering the entire list in a doc and scrolling to find my wick. Sometimes I ended up on ones I couldn't use for whatever reason, so would just shrug and go one up/down and use that. Still random. Still counts.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness