Opening.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure PurenessSplit and disambiguate into:
- Underground secret civilization, like of Mole Men or Lizard Folk (Hidden Elf Village?) (Underground City also mentions this one as an internal subtrope)
- The deeper one goes, the more eldritch the fauna gets
- Giant underground shelter (Underground City also mentions this one as an internal subtrope)
- There are some examples about sewers and subways growing own society of the homeless, if we don't have a trope for it, it may be worth considering
- Underground City (considering the overlaps, it getting own wick check would be good)
- Under City
Splitting, plus ^ sounds good. I wonder if there's room for number three in OP to be a subtrope of The Aesthetics of Technology. Also also, should the "increasingly deep eldritch fauna" idea include like, fossils of the animals or would they need to be living?
(Also just a heads up, the archive link should appear like this.)
Silver and gold, silver and gold^^For clarity, what are thinking of precisely regarding the "The deeper one goes, the more eldritch the fauna gets" concept?
^Not sure what happened there exactly, but fixed. I think.
I was trying to summarize it, though I've missed details. I assume it's underground version of Negative Space Wedgie.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupNot... precisely? Negative Space Wedgie is an object/event trope, whereas I was thinking more of a place/setting thing, if that makes sense.
NSW is the thing where space travelers occasionally come across random weird things and phenomena in space that are unexplained or just technobabble and make plot things happen. I was thinking of the fantasy/pulp trope where there is a huge — country-, continent- or setting-sized — underworld of caverns and tunnels full of strange sights, underground civilizations, lost worlds, and what have you.
It's a place where you can certainly find things like act like a Negative Space Wedgie, certainly, but it's not strictly that in itself.
Think like the Underdark or the Depths in Tears of the Kingdom or Blackreach in Skyrim, if any of those ring a bell.
Amonimus's idea of splitting off separate tropes (plus distributing examples that fit existing tropes, like Underground City and Under City) and disambiguating the old name might work.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 20th 2024 at 3:20:28 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.(I was paraphrasing the OP)
That's going to be a lot of drafts, and not sure if Beneath the Earth can be kept/rewitten so the examples are preserved until TLP handles the rest.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupOh, I misunderstood your post. I still think it's a good idea.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.That would seem like the right approach. There are a lot of concepts tangled up in here, which would require a lot of time and sandboxes/TLP drafts to separate, so I feel that we should hold off on the actual disambiguate-and-dewick process until that's all be sorted out to satisfaction.
Overall, the trope seems to want to be about underground settings as a general category, and specifically about underground areas with their own self-contained societies and ecosystems. The laconic is simply "Colossal underground spaces with their own ecosystem", while the body of the description talks about the various permutations of the setting, conditions encountered there, and things that live in it.
The most obvious feature here is a soft split between "Urban" and "Caverns" versions. The former is concerned with some sort of society living in the sewers, buried buildings and assorted underground spaces of a surface-oriented city, or in the ruins of an old city buried under a new one; emphasis here is placed on living hidden from the surface and mooching resources and energy from up top. The latter is concerned with extensive cavern systems running beneath the world and containing their own underground ecosystems and civilizations; the description lists off natives (mole people, morlocks, dwarves, dark elves, etc.), fauna (dinosaurs, giant insects), and environment features (lava, giant mushrooms, tropical lost worlds). The earliest version I could find on the Wayback Machine is this one, from 2006; it's much more bare-bones but shows the same general trend and a lot of text is carried over to the present version.
I went in with the suspicion that these two concepts are too distinct to be called variants of a single trope, and did this wick check to test that out. I checked fifty examples from each section and a hundred inbounds. I opted to skip the Real Life sections and Sandbox/ pages.
- Global/setting-wide "underdark" with underground cultures, monsters, strange sights and such: 14/50 = 28%
- Smaller or of undescribed size but otherwise as above: 7/50 = 14%
(Combined = 42%)(Note that both sections contain examples that should properly go in the other.)
In both cases, each section is a little under half made up of a single concept, with the rest made up of various other cases and tropes.
Wick check:
Note: many of these examples do not specify if the underground areas discussed are underground structures (e.g. sewers), tunnels in soil, tunnels in rock, or natural caverns.
General analysis of the wicks:
(It was supposed to be a batch of 100, but I miscounted.)
The wick check shows the "huge cavern system with wierd stuff in it" variant to be the most common. The "hidden society under another city" is drastically underrepresented, despite being nominally half of the trope's identity. ZCEs and pattern-less examples make up the majorty of the entries. As it currently stands, the trope's use on the site at large doesn't show much identity beyond "underground spaces exist".
As a general analysis, the main concepts identifiable within the confusion are:
As to what to do with this, these are my main takeaways:
Edited by Theriocephalus on Apr 19th 2024 at 9:48:27 AM