Multimedia Media Category

So in a recent thread some confusion had come up with where exactly the Fate Series should be placed in terms of Media Categories. The problem is the Fate Series has most of its entries in Video Games but originates from a Visual Novel. It was being placed in a Multimedia Media Category, Other, Video Games and eventually Visual Novels.

This isn't usually a problem when not all the entries in the franchise especially the cross-media ones are canon to each other. But some are, for example, in the case of the Injustice franchise where it is a Video Game franchise but also as several tie-in comics that are all canon to the franchise my solution is usually to put them in the Video Games Media Category because.

Another thing that makes this weird is that from what I have heard a Multiple Media/Multimedia Media Category is against the rules and also not listed under Media Categories.

This is not to discuss the idea of a Multimedia Media Category (at least not exclusively, I just couldn't think of a better title) this is more a place where we discuss what to do in these situations whatever way it ends up going.

Edited by Ordeaux26 on Jul 29th 2021 at 10:52:07 AM

Does it matter whether the various entries are canon to each other?

My thinking is that each example be able to largely stand by itself, at most referencing other works. In which case canonicity to another work doesn't seem relevant to the placement of a given example-work. Thus it seems to me that individual example-works from within a franchise can simply be sorted into their respective media, even if that means separating them from each other.

I did, I believe, see the mention in the thread that originated this of franchise-wide examples. However, would that perhaps fall afoul of "Examples Are Not General"?

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Jul 30th 2021 at 11:29:47 AM

I saw this in the Complete Monster thread after someone Hollered it. I wasn't aware there was a broader discussion about it.

Our general policy to-date has been that when a single work exists across multiple media, we pick the original or most recognized one to use as the namespace and media category. The other ones can be redirects (although that's no longer necessary with the automatic disambiguation). Note that this applies when the various media all form a single continuity. When they are independent adaptations, each would get its own article in its own namespace.

When a work has multiple adaptations across multiple media categories, we give each its own article and make a Franchise article to handle disambiguation, but trope examples still attach to individual work articles.

Just as we discourage "General" and "Other" categories, "Multimedia" is also too vague. What category would someone looking for the Fate series expect to find it in? Obsessive overcategorization is something that we should be seeking to avoid.

Another consideration to this question is how many works would fall into the category we're describing. A namespace consisting of only a handful of works wouldn't be very useful and I'm afraid it would become a temptation to miscategorize things out of laziness.

"If you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did, you will become an agent of evil."

Edit: I haven't been happy with the current media categorization system and would like to give it a general overhaul anyway, but there's no realistic way to accomplish it in the current architecture. We would have to wait for TV Tropes 2.0, if and when that ever happens.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 30th 2021 at 8:44:54 AM

I am actually pretty certain that we don't do Multimedia folders.

Rather, we list each example in the folder of the medium in which it applies. For franchises, in the folder for the original or main medium.

Yeah, I thought that was the case, in that case, doing the one that the franchise originates from seems to be the correct path.

There is only a handful of times where a multimedia folder may be appropriate, but is so rare that you should default to the specific work you're trying to reference. If the work has enough examples you can split off a franchise folder or subpage (ie Superman and Clark Kenting).

Yeah, a good way of dealing with these multimedia problems is with a separate page, the thing is that isn't always possible if there aren't enough examples.

Edited by Ordeaux26 on Jul 30th 2021 at 11:22:16 AM

I'd be in favor of multimedia folders. Yeah, there's not a lot of examples, but they do exist.

BIONICLE, for instance, told its story across like a dozen different mediums. All of it canon, and all of it telling essentially the exact same story. Do we really have to have basically identical examples in three different folders just to cover when something happened in the comics, the films, and the novels? That's really redundant.

Could potentially also be beneficial for works in the public domain that have had numerous adaptations.

A few things for clarification, this thread isn't me advocating we allow them it's a place to discuss these situations. Secondly, we wouldn't actually split it up instead all of it would be placed in the media it originates from including from other pieces of media, for example, BIONICLE would go under the Toys folder, though this would depend on what is covering if an example was only covering the Animated Film Trilogy it would go under "Films — Animated" but it was covering the franchise as a whole including elements from the Animated Film Trilogy it would go under "Toys."

Our policy has long been that if a trope is present across a franchise, it should be listed under the medium it started in. So Bionicle falls under Toys. Not ideal, but it's better than cluttering the page with multimedia folders.

A work with adaptations should again be under its original medium, and adaptations should only be listed if they play the trope differently; otherwise we assume they have the same tropes, and listing them all would be redundant.

With FSN it gets weird.

The original Fate/stay night has three routes: Fate, Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel. In-universe they're divided For Want Of A Nail, covering alternate versions of the same events. But out-of-universe you read them in that order, and they form a Three-Act Structure with the protagonist's Character Arc continuing across routes (with the side effect that Fate read on its own is relatively boring).

The VN had an Animated Adaptation by Studio DEEN, titled simply "Fate/stay night", which was mostly based on the Fate route but with some original scenes. Much later, the UBW route received two adaptations (a movie and a series) and then the HF route was adapted into a movie series.

The strange thing is, that this first Animated Adaptation doesn't have a page despite the UBW series and HF movies having their own. Basically, these more recent adaptations drew in a lot of fans unfamiliar with the original work, which resulted in a common misconception - that the original VN was only the Fate route, and that UBW is an anime-original storyline created to be an improved version of it. A lot of FSN-related examples nowadays are being incorrectly listed as exclusive to the UBW anime adaptation, or refer to Fate as "the VN version" and UBW as "the anime version". And I'm honestly not sure if the adaptations even have enough differences to qualify for a separate page in the first place.

Honestly I think it might make most sense to divide the Fate/stay night VN page into three pages, one for each route. It's a bit unusual, but FSN is a very long work (each route is about 2/3 the length of The Lord of the Rings), the routes can be regarded as "installments", and the adaptation pages are basically being used as route pages already, so it seems like the easiest way to stop misuse.

Edited by Prime32 on Aug 6th 2021 at 5:01:12 PM

Thank you for clarifying, because in the past I thought it was safer to put BIONICLE in the multi-media folder, my rationale being that some tropes were really about the story that ties in with the toyline, but have nothing to do with the toys themselves.

I don't believe toys are the most prevalent storytelling medium^note not that you can really tell a story through toys alone of BIONICLE (I feel like half of it is Literature though), but since it's the original, I agree that nothing's wrong with putting story tropes in the Toys folder. I'll do it this way now just to be consistent, since there is no definite "primary medium" besides the LEGO theme.

Literally none of the story was told with the toys. It was always comics, books, movies, web content, etc.

Same with Transformers, really.

I've been trying to think of which tropes a multimedia folder would be valid, and then recalled Era-Specific Personality. As the trope is about the divergent characterization of a character across novels, tv shows, films, comic books, etc it does make some sense to have that kind of general purpose category, as otherwise you would either be including examples from a different media category or trying to reference examples in another category, which gets messy. Probably one of the few exceptions.