Regarding the Trivia namespace (crowner switched 20th Jan 2020)

The source material is one work and the adaptation is a second work. Information about what has changed from one work to another is not internal.

Two points to that:

1. It's internal enough to be a trope rather than trivia. (I don't think it needs to be perfectly, wholly confined to a single work. That's not how people think about comic book characters, for example — where Batman is in comics, games, and shows and is a bit different from one era and work to the next.)
2. Changing it would be a whole lot more work than leaving it, and doing all that work for a minor bit of nuance is, imo, not worth the effort.

It's not really that internal.

About the only change is where we place the trope and have to properly mention what game it's from.

If anything, it makes it far easier to have proper context while not having just examples using links only.

I think Trivia fits well since it's an external reference overall. I can understand both points, but I don't think "it requires work" is a very good point. We want better work and better examples, and if this encourages proper usage, sweet.

Well, the point about "more work" has to do with manpower and if you want an example of "we don't have a lot of manpower here" just look at the TRS backlog or the Artistic License cleanup that stalled out a few years ago and has, like, three or four people working on them in the RL section maintenance thread (after a few years of zero progress).

Adaptational tropes are tropes at the Franchise level as opposed to the work level. They are still contained within a single Franchise in most cases. This is leading into a slippery slope where book 2 in a series might not be counted as part of the same work and I don't think that's right.

For instance, look at Star Wars. The franchise has been adapted into Comics, Films, Animated Series, Novels, Video Games, all of which are varying degree of cannon, but all of which show Adaptation Tropes at the Franchise level.

edited 4th Apr '17 4:25:39 PM by shimaspawn

Adaptational Tropes are a weird gray area since the information is still found within the work, it just requires knowledge of other versions of it. I'd rather keep them all as-is and not make them Trivia.

Requiring more effort isn't much of a good reason to not do something. It's a matter of whether the effort is worthwhile in the long run and works better when it comes to troping something that should matter.

However, that's a fair point. It seems like the trope can go both ways, but it's still within the same franchise as a whole. While it's external to the exact work, it's internal to a franchise. It's really a matter of what is more likely to happen, I guess. But considering similar stuff is already marked as non-trivia, I'd say keep it within the regular work page seems to be work consistently better as an option.

Pretty much what my point was. Gray area. Kind of works both ways. Current design works consistently well, so it's not worth the effort to change(especially if it ultimately causes more trouble and incorrect trope usage).

edited 4th Apr '17 4:29:31 PM by Irene

Adaptational tropes can also be apparent within a single work if the audience has even a Popcultural Osmosis or All There Is To Know About The Crying Game level of acquaintance with the source work.

I don't see a benefit to shuffling them into Trivia. At least not a benefit that's worth the sheer amount of wick-changing that making them all Trivia will take.

edited 4th Apr '17 4:32:37 PM by Madrugada

I think it's best to think of it as sort of a hierarchy. We have single episode tropes, story arc tropes, series level tropes, sequel tropes, and franchise level tropes. It all depends on how large a slice of the work you're looking at. Adaptation Tropes are tropes, just at the highest level of "work".

For example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer did season 8 as comics. Since it switched media from the television show, there were adaptation tropes, but it is still counted as the same 'work' by the creators.

edited 4th Apr '17 4:37:44 PM by shimaspawn

Your second paragraph is pretty much what I'm saying. There is no benefit, even if they could technically fit fine under Trivia.

My vote is to keep them as they are, in light of what you said earlier.

I must've not been clear enough on that. >.<

Production Foreshadowing requires knowledge of other works by the director and hence should be trivia by our definition.

Regarding adaptation tropes, why is Adaptational Context Change flagged as Trivia but Adaptational Sexuality isn't?

Calling Casting Gag. Since it's considered a Trivia item currently, it's a keeper.

I think Actor Allusion needs to stay Trivia.

Which means our definition of "trope" has devolved to something that excludes actual tropes found inside works that happens to reference outside material.

Are we going to mark Alice Allusion as trivia for the same reason? Or any and all Shout-Out tropes?

Hope I'm not derailing the current discussion, and I hope this hasn't already been hashed to death earlier in thread, but why is Aluminum Christmas Trees not trivia?

"This obscure thing actually existed in real life." OK...how is the author using this as a storytelling tool? How does its existence or obscurity affect the story being told? Looking at the trope namer as an example, I see spindly silk plants with tinsel for needles (which is what they were in real life) as distracting from the story, where aluminum Christmas trees are big bulky conical things.

edited 29th Jun '17 12:04:26 AM by pvsage

Actor Allusion is a reference to an actor's previous roles, knowledge of which shouldn't have bearing on the current story. Alice Allusion is a reference to a well-known work of literature and is used as a kind of cultural shorthand: "This is based on a story you should already be familiar with."

edited 29th Jun '17 12:12:39 AM by pvsage

No need for a doublepost.

Also, I thought Actor Allusion was decided as a trivia item via vote already? If so, no point in retreading the argument. It'd just derail it when we have new items to talk about.

Point taken, and I apologize for the double post.

I'd like to point out that sometimes actors get cast for similar characters that are developed independently depending on their previous performances, which is an inversion of Actor Allusion called Typecasting (also a trivia thing). If there's Word of God supporting an Actor Allusion, it could qualify as a Shout-Out to the previous role; the two should be treated separately. Again, not wanting to retread the argument; just clarifying my understanding of why Actor Allusion belongs in trivia.

edited 29th Jun '17 1:00:00 AM by pvsage

Double posts aren't that bad if they contain unrelated topics.

Actor Allusion is current uncalled on the crowner, so it's a relevant topic.

If you use "relies on outside knowledge" as a definition for Trivia, and adding "unless it's 'Notable'", then you're going to have to define "Notable". When is a Shout-Out (which Alice Allusion is a subtrope of) "Notable"? That goes especially since it's directly against the definition of Shout-Out, which apparently is okay. It specifically says that they can be obscure references. I don't know about you, but in my dictionary "obscure" is the opposite of "what you should be familiar with". Otherwise you're saying that a Shout-Out is Trivia when it's to something relatively unknown, but a trope if it's to something well-known.

Also, "shouldn't have a bearing on the current story" is false. It's a joke, and jokes are part of the story. It's easy to see how it's used as a storytelling tool: It's obviously meant to provoke a reaction, usually a humourous one.

Basically, my point is that you (and others with that opinion) are using different standards for different related tropes with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Typecasting isn't by definition referenced within the work. Actor Allusion is.

Aluminum Christmas Trees strikes me more as a YMMV trope, since it relies on the Audience Reaction to it.

edited 29th Jun '17 9:22:54 AM by AnotherDuck

OK, I guess we gotta retread this. Are you arguing that Alice Liddell isn't a character or name that the average viewer would immediately recognize as easily as they'd recognize The Bard on Board, and that the reference is no more likely to be noticed by the viewer than any allusion to an actor's previous works? Are you saying that Freddy Krueger confused you when he said "Welcome to Wonderland, Alice!" to the protagonist in the first Nightmare on Elm Street film?

Suppose Alyson Hannigan were to play a character with a backstory similar to the one she played in My Stepmother was an Alien, but the writer didn't draw on that film for inspiration and had a different actress in mind for the role. Would this count as either an Actor Allusion or a Shout-Out? Would you recognize the similarities in the roles, considering how few viewers have even seen My Stepmother was an Alien?

Before we even had a trivia namespace at this wiki, I asked about whether Aluminum Christmas Trees should be YMMV; see the discussion page there. I agree with the other troper's refutation.

I'm arguing that notability doesn't matter in the case of this family of tropes. Why is it a trope when it refers to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but not Sylvie and Bruno? Where is the line drawn?

I mean, you could take Norse Mythology, for instance. You can reasonably expect that someone would recognise Odin or Thor. What about Baldr? Fenrir? Hel? Jormungandr? Ratatoskr? Where do you draw that arbitrary line, and why does it stop being a trope and becomes trivia? You can also add the ambiguity of who's supposed to notice. Are we talking about an average person catching an episode while channel surfing, a regular viewer, or a real fan?

Or you could go back to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. People probably recognise the name Alice. What about lesser characters? Can we equally expect people to get references to obscure details in that story?

In that supposed case, it would depend on if the writer added a reference after she was confirmed as the actress. If it was written before, it'd be a coincidence, and not a trope.

edited 29th Jun '17 12:22:57 PM by AnotherDuck

EDIT: Regarding lesser characters in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, I'd certainly expect people to recognize the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, the Red Queen, and the Walrus and the Carpenter; I'd also expect them to recognize the Cheshire Cat Grin, if only by virtue of Pop-Cultural Osmosis due to the works' adaptations by Disney and the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit".

Let's suppose Sarah Michelle Gellar is cast in a role where she has a brooding boyfriend who isn't some form of Ambiguously Evil. Is this an allusion to her relationship with Angel or Spike in BtVS? Is it a shout out to that series? Was the part written for her, was she picked for the role because of her history playing such roles, or did she just kill the audition?

Of course at some point Death of the Author needs to be invoked, but there's a slippery slope from there to Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory.

edited 29th Jun '17 12:50:40 PM by pvsage

What's a Jefferson Airplane? Or rather, you're expecting people to know things solely by what you believe, and the moment you step out of your own personal and cultural sphere, there are other people with other experiences.

Would that SMG role make any specific reference to Angel or Spike that you can refer to in the example? The trope is about a specific reference, not some vaguely alluded similarity.

You're also trying to justify the use of one slippery slope, the expectation of knowledge, while saying a slippery slope is a problem in another case. That's using double standards, which has been my main problem throughout the issue.

In support of Another Duck: I've never heard of a song called "White Rabbit", to the extent that I'm genuinely uncertain whether that's a typo for Jefferson Starship or if there's also a band I haven't heard of called Jefferson Airplane.

edited 29th Jun '17 11:54:25 PM by nrjxll