Should HugeGuyTinyGirl and TinyGuyHugeGirl be changed into a gender neutral trope?

I find it annoying how there is only these two gender-specific tropes and no trope to use when two characters who are paired of associated with each other but of the same gender wildly differ in height. One Head Taller is gender neutral but is specific about being a head taller, Big Guy, Little Guy requires a specific dynamic between the two characters and their personalities. I feel like it would be better if these were turned into one gender-neutral trope about height. Also, how large does the height difference have to be to count as Huge Guy, Tiny Girl and Tiny Guy, Huge Girl? One Head Taller says it's a less extreme version of these two tropes which implies they have to be more than one head apart, but I'm not sure if this is always followed, particularly with Tiny Guy, Huge Girl where it's unlikely for them to be that far apart and being a head apart would still be quite unusual.

Personally I'd prefer that these two tropes stay separate like they currently are. Might edit my post to give an explanation of my opinion later.

Edited by jOSEFdelaville on Jan 17th 2023 at 10:38:38 AM

So, we don't just "make" tropes gendered or non-gendered. We go by what the tropes actually look like in the wild and base our descriptions around that. So, since there is often a connotation of "men are tall, women are small", these tropes exist to either exaggerate the stereotype or to flip it on its head. Making them into one gender neutral trope misses the point.

I think this captures why Huge Guy, Tiny Girl is gendered

Also, like War Jay said we are to document media patterns as they manifest in works. These tropes generate certain connotations that would be lost in a general neutral trope.

But should there in addition to these two be a gender neutral super trope of "two characters paired up in some way where one is very large and one is very small?"

I think a height difference alone is chairs. There has to be characterization (Big Guy, Little Guy) or real world traits (Huge Guy, Tiny Girl) attached.

"paired characters with deliberately contrasting traits" is Foil. Going from there to more specific, you've got:

• "visually contrasting character pair" (no trope page)
  • some subtropes like Fat and Skinny
  • "paired characters visually contrasting through size/height difference" (no trope page)
    • some subtropes like Tiny Guy, Huge Girl and Huge Guy, Tiny Girl

we do have Big, Thin, Short Trio as well in that same boat, just adding a third character type. i guess Tiny Guy, Huge Girl kind of falls into the same category as Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy — subverted expectations as the opposite is usually true in real life — but we obviously don't have Feminine Girl Masculine Boy because that's chairs. merging the two into one trope would kind of lose the purpose of tiny guy huge girl being about subvertrd expectations, though i'm honestly not clear on what reason Huge Guy, Tiny Girl has to exist

I think Huge Guy, Tiny Girl is primarily a visual trope that exaggerates a taller guy (that lines up with Men Are Tough) and shorter girl (that lines up with Women Are Delicate). So Tiny Guy, Huge Girl is a swapping of those positions.

...disagree? Masculinity and femininity are tropes, just the things that comprise them are spread across pages like Men Act, Women Are.

Not chairs, probably just considered so common that nobody bothered to make it and thought the inversion was more pageworthy.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 20th 2023 at 8:29:45 AM

I'd heavily disagree on it being chairs because it's a trope that's so prevalent it heavily influences visual media and character design. Especially works that are animated like video games and animated shows. Where the trope is often super exaggerated with men who are sometime 2 or 3 times the size of their female counterparts. It's a thing that so ingrained in our collective mind that it in turn affects a ton of stuff about how media is shaped and characters are designed.

We do have Big Guy, Little Guy for duos with contrasting size difference.

yeah i guess saying it's chairs is the wrong way to put it, it's more an Omnipresent Trope i guess. doesn't necessarily make it untropeworthy. i suppose the same can go for Huge Guy, Tiny Girl, now that i think about it — something being that common is still tropeworthy if it has meaning ascribed to it, while the opposite is more noticeable due to being a subversion of expectations.

It’s not an omnipresent trope. An Only Six Faces type of work might not bother. If a series stars a pair of, for example, identical Polar Opposite Twins who will of course be the same height, their differences will be expressed through personality, not height.

“Alice is six inches shorter than Bob” on its own means nothing because unsurprisingly not everybody in the world is the same height: hence, chairs. If the work is live action and the actors were not cast for their height, means even less because then you cannot even argue intent in character design.

“Alice is six inches shorter than Bob for the sake of Distinctive Appearances” is something, but still quite loose. That is why I suggested those concrete meanings.

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 22nd 2023 at 8:19:52 AM