Heart Trauma, as defined by its description, is "[w]hen a character has something physically happen to their heart (often in a way that generally would be impossible without magic being involved), it often affects their personality in drastic ways. Either they lose all of their emotions, or their personality changes — for the worse. Seen most often in fantasy works, particularly those with a symbolic or Fairy Tale theme." That's fine as it is.
The problem is, there has been a longstanding use of this trope to mean any plot-relevant heart disease, even completely mundane ones. I recall this trope has been used that way as early as 2008, and even now I see subpages of Delicate and Sickly (fka Ill Girl) among the trope's wicks, and (unrelated to admin action of course) the Pantheon entry for this trope (Hisao of Katawa Shoujo) is also based on this definition.
I think I will start a wick check for this trope, and I'm making this thread to get some ideas on how should we deal with this, should the wick check reveal more or less what I mentioned.
Heart Trauma, as defined by its description, is "[w]hen a character has something physically happen to their heart (often in a way that generally would be impossible without magic being involved), it often affects their personality in drastic ways. Either they lose all of their emotions, or their personality changes — for the worse. Seen most often in fantasy works, particularly those with a symbolic or Fairy Tale theme." That's fine as it is.
The problem is, there has been a longstanding use of this trope to mean any plot-relevant heart disease, even completely mundane ones. I recall this trope has been used that way as early as 2008, and even now I see subpages of Delicate and Sickly (fka Ill Girl) among the trope's wicks, and (unrelated to admin action of course) the Pantheon entry for this trope (Hisao of Katawa Shoujo) is also based on this definition.
I think I will start a wick check for this trope, and I'm making this thread to get some ideas on how should we deal with this, should the wick check reveal more or less what I mentioned.
Update: Started the wick check. At the time of writing, there's around 20% misuse.
Edited by SamCurt on Apr 4th 2024 at 2:25:49 AM
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