"Stock Animal" tropes

Maybe a trope/index for common animation shorthands, ban on page examples, and handle subtropes like we currently handle artistic license or stock yuck?

Someone is actually drafting such a page.

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So, uh...

Amour is still not grasping the gravity of the situation with this draft because they made this one, which will only serve to harm Stock Food Depictions, and also added a tag asking if Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions is "ready to launch" even though they've blatantly brushed off my concerns since "nobody agreed" (even though nobody was commenting at all to prove or disprove that).

I'm getting really concerned about their... stubbornness, I guess?

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Didn't they get suspended for using a sockpuppet account to manipulate votes in a TLP in the past?

Maybe an ATT report would help. I've noticed this pattern myself with their TLP stuff getting brought up.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 20th 2022 at 4:23:56 AM

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I would, except that mods like Macron are already aware and in the discourse so it feels sort of pointless to make an ATT thing.

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Good point. An ATT might not work after all. (This is what I get when I drink too much coffee and post.)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 20th 2022 at 4:37:13 AM

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Eh, I mean it's a toss up. The cartoon animals draft is part of the overall problem of Amour sort of not really being willing to listen to criticism or at least not fully understanding what the problem is, and it's bled onto other drafts as well, so maybe it should go to ATT.

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In that case, I'd say it's your call. I'm too over-caffeinated (as I said) to make any rational calls and I don't know enough about the situation so I'll leave it up to you/anyone else here who feels they want to do something.

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i did say it was mostly the same 2-4 users pushing these trends...

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 20th 2022 at 4:58:31 AM

Yeah, an ATT thread would help.

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I mean since you're here I guess I can just be up front and say that there's been a lot times where you continue trucking on a subject that people have issues with, or at the very least are controversial, and it seems as though you don't always get what people are trying to say. Like, I don't feel like I need an ATT thread when you're already here and seem willing to listen, but I can still do it I guess if you want the full break down?

Anyway this is getting off topic and I probably should've posted it on the TLP community issues thread, I actually almost did put it there but decided that the drafts were too important to this discussion to not be mentioned. I don't want this to get too derailed though. At the very least we should hop to the other thread.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 20th 2022 at 5:03:04 AM

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Hey guys, do you think draft is ready to launch?

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Gonna look at every current example and see if I can figure out what form of Playing With it is.

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Jokes Played for laughs

Literature

• The picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? features a brown bear, a yellow duck, a green frog, and a goldfish. Lampshaded

Music

• In "The Monkey and the Elephant" by Burl Ives, the monkey is described as brown. ???

Poetry

• A nursery rhyme in Japan features a snail with antennas:

???

Video Games

• Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life: The black-and-white cow is labeled "Normal Cow". Lampshaded
• Pokémon: Caterpie are designed after caterpillars, a group of animals that come in a wide variety of colors in real life but are most often depicted as green. Naturally Caterpie is also green. Caterpie's design is based off a stylized version of certain Swallowtail caterpillars with its osmeterium always visible (a special organ on Swallowtail caterpillars that releases a stink to protect itself, just as Caterpie's feeler does). The real-life caterpillars that bear the closest resemblance to Caterpie would have to include the Spicebush Swallowtail and the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, but largely in their later instars (in their first few instars, they are brown, but indeed turn green as they get bigger.) ???

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: Blackwing the raven, Vaarsuvius's Familiar, has bright orange beak and legs that, while typical of cartoon corvids, make him resemble a male common blackbird more closely than anything else. Largely justified in this case — being all-black would make him less visually interesting and, especially in the comic's deliberately simplistic art style, make his expressions harder to read. Justified
• Sheldon: Although it's hard to see in the black-and-white weekly strips, the colored Sunday strips show that Arthur is a standard cartoon yellow duck. Zig-zagged

Web Original

• The Bird Watcher's General Store's web article Real Crows Don't Have Yellow Beaks talks about why yellow-beaked and yellow-footed cartoon crows are so prevalent in cartoons and comics and how the yellow beaks and feet became a typical cartoon animal color for crows and ravens. Conversed

Western Animation

• The five major animal characters in Littlest Pet Shop (1995) include a blue dog, a purple cat, a pink rabbit and a yellow horse. Only the brown monkey has a normal fur color. ???
• Rigby from Regular Show is entirely brown, but actual raccoons have grey fur with some brown hairs. However, some are more noticeably brown than others. Rigby's brother, Don, and his parents, are also shown to be brown. ???
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Squidward Tentacles is a blue-green octopus, but octopi only look that color because of the sea tint. "Reef Blower" shows him to be purple above water as a justification. However he remains green in his other out-of-water appearances, such as in "Pressure" and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. Zig-zagged

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I guess I could delete the examples that don't fit any form of Playing With and add some exaggerated examples.

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I think I get what's going on here, so I'll throw in my two cents.

I thought this was all just a 'black-and-white' issue, with one side of tropers like amathieu, WarJay, etc., saying that these tropes are chairs, and another side with tropers like Armour, EdnaWalker, nw09, etc., who are trying to split off every animal into its own trope. In that case, I'd be neutral and not on either side. Previously, I really haven't gone over the "Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions" draft, so today, I read the description and comments from the past month. (Also worth mentioning I got a PM last night from the sponsor asking if the trope was ready to launch; I said yes, not thinking much of it because I was busy and multi-tasking.)

My understanding is that certain animal depictions are slightly unrealistic, such as ducks being yellow, but are done so the audience recognizes them as what they're supposed to be. On the other hand, there are animal depictions being mentioned that are completely realistic, such as grey elephants, that are kind of what causes these issues to begin with.

In my opinion, there should just be a general trope for certain kind of depictions of animals that are species-neutral. All these splits are unnecessary. Some of the unrealistic penguin depictions Cartoon Penguin are covered by Penguins Are Ducks. The only part worth splitting IMO was penguins wearing bowties/tuxedos, since that's decently common. It's similar to how there's a trope about a Bare-Bottomed Monkey, but nothing else about the monkey's appearance. For the unrealistic depictions, I think Fuzzball Spider could've just been a trope for any cartoon animals depicted as a Cephalothorax (head with limbs), such as bats, frogs, baby birds, etc.

I understand the concept of an animal (i.e. penguin, monkey, whale) not resembling any particular species being tropeworthy, but that's where I think the general trope would've come in handy, rather than having splits like Cartoon Whale and Cartoon Monkey.

I also just discovered now that Typical Cartoon Animal Colors was taken to TRS (I found it kind of ironic that Armour was the one who took it there). Maybe a trope about animal colors was unnecessary, because a general trope about stock depictions could cover the color in addition to the other traits that make the animal present as no particular species. I could also see how other traits, such as the animal's behavior, could have the same effect (for example, in The Loud House, Fangs the bat has eaten both fruit and blood, making it unclear what species of bat he's supposed to be). For a general trope about this, I could even see mutts being a Real Life example!

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TLDR; I think there should just be a trope about when a cartoon animal has generic/combined traits that make it unclear what species it's supposed to be without too many splits, unless the splits make sense.

Edited by MylesHenryVigilSr on Sep 4th 2022 at 12:48:04 PM

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Actually, one solution is that we go even broader and make a trope about stock "objects" in general, so that we can focus on the broader concept instead of trying to analyze all the tiny individual uses. It'd probably be too omnipresent to have examples for, but that's okay and probably preferable, since the examples are IMO the hardest part to pin down.

It's rare that they're interesting in any way shape or form, and the ones that are are interesting because of how they use the stock art or how much they use the stock art.

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(Deleted.)

Edited by MylesHenryVigilSr on Sep 4th 2022 at 2:39:14 AM

The one job in the world that's harder than a brain surgeon is being Joe Biden's sign language interpreter.

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A "Stock Object Depictions" page would be an issue since we already have Stock Object Colors.

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Which was made in 2012 and has no examples, so it could very easily be TRS'd and merged into a supertrope if we want to try; or we could just expand it or something.

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Really? I thought it was created this year by the same 2-4 tropers involved in making the “stock animal” tropes.

The one job in the world that's harder than a brain surgeon is being Joe Biden's sign language interpreter.

Nope, that one's been around.

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you can see the TLP draft for it here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=p56tvlxixcwx6fpuu3e1xgmv

Edited by amathieu13 on Sep 4th 2022 at 8:02:36 AM

Given how the Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions draft is going, I was reading over the comments again and noticed nw09's comment:

Small Taxonomy Pools and The Coconut Effect cover most of this. I moved some of the examples from TCAC to the latter trope's analysis page.

And...yeah. isn't Small Taxonomy Pools essentially the definition-only version of what Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions was trying to be? Granted it's not cartoon specific, but the general idea seems to be the same.

I do think since Amour Le Fou has also tried a Stock Cartoon Television draft and there's Stock Food Depictions that a unified "Common Artistic Depictions" (or whatever) trope would be best to stop any future attempts of flogging this dead horse, but at least for the animal version, is Small Taxonomy Pools sufficient?

Edited by amathieu13 on Sep 6th 2022 at 12:09:02 PM

The Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions draft is different from Small Taxonomy Pools with animal depictions that are just plain inaccurate. It's more like Artistic License – Biology.

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I support an umbrella "common artistic depictions" trope

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