Are Cleavage Window and Super Title 64 Advance Chairs? (a.k.a. Did I misinterpret PSOC?)

This absolutely should've been the first thing I did with these two tropes, but better late than never, I guess.

For about half a year now, I've been convinced that Cleavage Window and Super Title 64 Advance are Chairs-y. The Cleavage Window examples I've seen only point out the existence of cleavage windows, while Super Title 64 Advance examples only point out instances of the name of a video game system in the name of a video game. I made two wick checks for the two tropes (which in hindsight I absolutely should not have done before taking the tropes to Trope Talk) and was going to continue working on them on my own. However, after what happened with Our Mermaids Are Different I started to wonder if these two checks relied on me misinterpreting the PSOC policy, so now I'm taking these two checks to Trope Talk to get feedback on whether or not I did that.

Thoughts?

Cleavage Window is a Rule of Sexy thing, i.e. an intentional design choice in the name of hotness (it's not really a "default" or practical style of women's clothing).

I think many Title Tropes are simply specific patterns repeated in many of them, like The Noun and the Noun. Some are more meaningful than others, but I'm not sure how Super Title 64 Advance is not tropeworthy.

Granted, Title Tropes in general have come under fire for being damn near impossible to add context to, since the entire context is the title itself and anything beyond it is just fluff. Still, I could see it at least being an index or something. Not the most necessary index in the world but it could certainly be one.

Some of the Super Title 64 Advance examples are puns that are a bit hidden, like "Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow" which references the Nintendo DS.

And Cleavage Window, like many Fanservice tropes, is hard to contextualize for a different reason. That is, respecting the No Lewdness rule.

Edited by animuacid on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:40:56 PM

People Sit on Chairs is about concepts that are incidental to everyday behavior and experiences. Tropes need to be framed as distinct narrative choices. We have Cool Chair and Slouch of Villainy, but pointing out someone sits in a chair at some point doesn't convey a narrative choice. Likewise Big Heroic Run and Girly Run, but not a light jog.

With the examples, we don't have cleavage as a broad topic but a wardrobe choice designed to draw attention to it is a trope. Titles that are trying to hype up being new or better than a previous installment is also quite specific, as "Video Game II" is typically the default.

I recall a trope that was just a list of common and popular installment titles, like "Requiem" or "Endgame." Don't know if it's still around but that's the kind of content that's fairly meaningless.

Are you perchance referring to Title: Requiem?

Yes. Soy Valdo 7 put it in the TRS Queue.

Edited by animuacid on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:42:47 AM

Ah, I forgot it was on the queue already.

Looking at the discussion so far, it's looking like the "Chairs" examples in my two wick checks are actually ZCEs, which is an entirely separate thing. Do I have that right?

Honestly, I do think they may be chairsy, and had been thinking of wick checking Cleavage Window.

to quote a post made in a thread made about Does Not Like Shoes chairsiness, and where the line on chairs is

Credit to Zuxtron for that post, which I still fully agree with. Also, if most off-page examples of a trope are ZC Es, that's sill a massive problem.

Cleavage Window isn't chairs, it's a specific (impractical) costuming choice used for fanservice. It's used for a narrative purpose, even if the purpose might not be more than "look at her boobs."

(It's also something I've never seen outside of fiction, primarily drawn media. In Real Life, skimpy outfits are far more likely to just be low-cut, not to have a bit cut out at the front.)

Cutout tops are definitely a thing, for example this one and (speaking as someone who has boobs) the purpose of the design is to emphasize the chest (even if it's not to the extent of fictional media like the page image). But I agree that they're not super common, and can be tough to wear/maintain decency with (that was what I was trying to get across with my "default" and "practical" wording above)

But you can say the same of real Sexy Slit Dress-es and legs. So I don't think it's chairs. Context and lewdness issues don't necessarily mean it isn't tropeworthy.

Edited by Synchronicity on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:56:39 AM

There's a number of tropes that people like to claim are implausible or don't reflect real life, but comes from either willful ignorance or isolation. A lot of wardrobe tropes especially for women fall into a No True Scotsman fallacy, that any given outfit was forced on an actress against their objections. While there are extremes women do put significantly more effort and strife into looking good, athletes and models in particular become very casual about what they wear in public. I used to do videos for weddings and clubs and could be surprised at certain clothing choices.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:21:01 PM

I mean... it's weird to call it a No True Scotsman fallacy since nobody is arguing that the actresses would never choose to wear these things normally. But wardrobes being what they are, actresses are made to wear such clothes if that's the character design. I'm just confused by your argument, and it has zilch to do with whether or not it's chairsy.

It was in response to a comment that they've never seen that kind of outfit in real life, implying it's a made up design women wouldn't wear otherwise. I was just commenting that excepting Impossibly Cool Clothes, which is expressly non-functional without a wardrobe team, you can find most costume tropes in regular life. PSOC has a complicated relationship with a lot of appearance tropes, as it's often chosen to be visually distinctive or eyecatching and not because of strict narrative or character reasons.

Yeah, alright, missed that comment which is why I was so confused.

With Cleavage Window, I think it's tropeworthy because that's a deliberate design choice. It isn't like these costumes just happen to have a boob window for no reason. It was something included for Fanservice.

I think at base the issue with so many sexiness tropes is that they are deliberate choices, but not always narrative ones. A Cleavage Window sometime helps the story (by emphasising the wearer is a show-off, a flirt or under some obligation to wear it) but can also come from out-of-story reasons like Sex Sells or the artist enjoys drawing it. That leaves them in an odd place that is not PSOC, but also not proper tropes.

Regarding title things: Things in the real world don't have names unless someone decides to give them one. They are always storytelling.

I figure the problem with a lot of title tropes is that recurring patterns of titling is a Tropes in Aggregate deal where each individual example, by itself, doesn't tell a lot.

Or, in most cases, tells us nothing at all (wrt title tropes specifically).

That's why I think they'd be better as indexes. The trend is certainly worth discussing, but does each individual work really need to have a trope somewhere in the mix just to tell us that, say, "Evil Bob 2" has an Antagonist Title?

I agree.

(For the record, I wasn't trying to argue that Cleavage Window doesn't exist in real life. I used its rarity as an argument for the fact that it's a deliberate design choice in media.)

@18: Our definition of "narrative choices" is a bit broader than you're thinking, basically encompassing any choice that's specific to being a story. A woman could certainly decide to wear an outfit with a cleavage window in real life, but the decision to have a fictional woman wear one has a different calculus than a real one. A fictional woman could wear a cleavage window even if it's out of character, or have their character defined such that they would, or even wear one completely orthogonal to what their character or personality is.