When To Rename A Trope

People have always proposed renames simply because they don't like the old name. That's never going to change. The When To Rename A Trope guidelines give us a tool to use when that happens; namely a list we can point at and say "Which of these is the current name failing?" A surprising number of rename proposals are dealt with that way in less than a dozen posts. Browse through the Trope repair forum threads list and look at the old topics that have only one page. You'll see what I mean.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I don't see the troper hivemind agreeing on anything such a list in the near future, but it would be nice to have something relatively objective, rather than "I think it's vague or misleading"

I would assume a criterion would be the number of wicks, but I'd advise care on that. A trope can have few wicks because people don't understand it or understand it wrong, but it can also have few wicks because of poor publicity, or simply because, while tropeable, it doesn't come up that often.

Should renames have the same rules as new names? That is, does the weight of tradition count for anything? Obviously a bad name should be changed however old it is, but does the fact (or belief) that a name wouldn't get through YKTTW today necessarily mean it's bad?

We have the criteria listed on the When To Rename A Trope page. They're fairly clear and boil down to "confusing", "opaque", "inaccurate", "irrelevant to the trope" "misleading" or "named for a work or character which does not have the trope as its main identifier"..

edited 1st Apr '10 7:49:56 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Yet I so rarely see people cite that.

Indeed, I heartily agree with all of those except maybe the last, and yet I see so many rename proposals that are ill-defended at best. Are the guidelines being ignored, or are other people applying them differently from how I do?

edited 1st Apr '10 8:34:28 PM by calieber

In some cases they are definitely being ignored. I've seen at least one case where that page was even cited as justification for renaming a trope due to the name failing two of the criteria, and, well, most people didn't care.  ^*

I also know a few cases where it's gone uncited because people disagree with the list.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Lots of people either don't know about the criteria, don't care about them, or choose to ignore them to push a rename they want for some other reason.

^ The language thing is a Berserk Button for a lot of people. Berserk Buttons aren't rational.

And quite frankly, simply saying "I think it fails th[is/ese] criteria for when to rename" isn't enough. You need to make a solid case for why it fails them. The old name gets the benefit of the doubt — not a free ride, but the benefit of the doubt. If you say "It's misleading and is being misused and we should rename it because of that" expect to provide evidence that it's being misused. You almost certainly will be asked for it, and it's a reasonable request — burden of proof rests with the positive claim, and all that. You say it's being misused — show us where and how.

edited 1st Apr '10 9:33:31 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I see that not happening. I don't know if this is the proper thread or even subforum for this. I don't want to bring up specific examples because I'm not trying to fight old battles here.

Short of an admin fiat (which do happen sometimes, but are by far more of an exception than a rule), everything is sort of at the mercy of consensus. All of our "policies" are more or less just guidelines.

If consensus can't be found for taking an action on a page, that action won't be taken no matter how sensible it is. And likewise, a consensus in favor of an action that doesn't make sense in the context of policies is still basically binding.

Ultimately, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Our rules are loose and fluid and allow us to treat each situation as one deserving of its own examination. The key is for people who believe in the rules to make a convincing case. And if you're trying to get a trope renamed, for goodness sake provide people with an alternative name they're actually going to want to use.

What about the guideline that trope names with a specific character's name in them are to be avoided unless the character is universally known? This certainly seems to violate that.

From the guidelines for renaming: "Most titles with a character's name in them. By and large only characters that fall under the One Mario Limit (e.g. Mario) have any hope of actually making the trope title sound sensible. This is, of course, a bit of a simplification- see Character Named Tropes for more discussion on this topic."

I don't see how "Bridget" falls within the One Mario Limit, or how anyone unfamiliar with the character would see the name "Dropped a Bridget On Him," and intuit that it has to do with someone being shocked by the revelation of someone's maleness.

There isn't anything tying the trope name to the trope beyond a reference to a specific character (who isn't really that well known to the public at large), and a pun based on another trope name. It may be clever, but it's not going to make sense until you read it, unless you know this Bridget, and you assume that s/he's the Bridget that the title refers to.

Personally, I find that trope names like this - the ones that could mean virtually anything if you don't have some very specific knowledge - are among the least likely to be misused, because people won't be able to make any assumptions about something that's meaningless to them. (In other words, if you've never heard of the word "Bishonen," you're not going to assume anything about it.) That doesn't mean, though, that it's an intuitive trope name, or that it's easy to search for.

For quite some time (like, from the time the wiki was started in 2003 to sometime last year) Character-named tropes were dandy. Then we realized that we had a bunch of tropes with completely opaque character-based names because the person who launched the page simply named it after someone in or related to a show they liked.

Names like (seeif you can figureout what the trope is from the name.):

• Karim The Assassin: The trope  ^is
  ^{"not telling an actor something important about their character (like they're going to die in this episode) or the work, so that they play it differently than they would if they had that information."}
  The trope namer  ^was
  ^{an assistant producer on HarpersIsland who was in charge of telling the actors, at the last minute, that they were going to be written out of the show.}
• The Fonzie: The trope  ^is
  ^{: a character who starts out as a minor character in a show, then is made into a major (or the main) character in the same show}
  . The trope namer   ^was
  ^{not a good example, because even though the character is well-known, the fact that he ever was a minor character is not. Tell someone that another character is "The Fonzie" and they'll almost certainly think of the cool biker who's a decent guy.}
• Green Lantern Corps: The trope  ^is
  ^{a plot trope where a superhero discovers that there's a huge organization of heroes just like him.}
  The problem  ^was
  ^{that well over half of the uses of it weren't about the plot trope, they were simply references to the actual Green Lantern Corps itself.}

So, when we started cleaning up badly-character-named tropes, we added that note that a character name is very rarely a good name for a trope in the hopes of cutting down on the number of new ones. And we still have a lot to clean up, including some that will probably never be changed.

In short it's not a blanket ban on character-named tropes. It's a warning to be very careful about assuming that "everyone will know" what the name means or why it was chosen.

edited 30th Jun '10 3:05:37 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Madrugada... while I think in a lot of cases you're right, I'm missing the "unless the name is taken from Buffy The Vampire Slayer" thing. I mean, that is a clause in the naming convention, right? That it's okay to have Buffy Speak and Phlebotinum (with that last one being not from buffy itself but from DVD commentary on it - and being used in dozensof trope names at that) but not okay to have Green Lantern Ring (even though that's the simplest and most concise way to express the idea and if you haven't heard of the Green Lantern you're an alien).

Right? I mean, maybe I'm a hypocrite because I started the "rename fever" trend when I suggested the change from Spoon Speaker to Verbal Tic (despite facing freaking ridiculous amounts of opposition on that directive), but... I don't know. I think character or whatever named things are fine. And if they aren't, then, like, virtually every trope needs to be renamed.

Wrestler, bodybuilder. No hopes, no dreams.

No, there's really not any work that automatically confers safety form being renamed for being too reliant on knowledge of a character. Off the top of my head, we renamed Spikeification, and that was a Buffy-character-based name, and Olaf's Hammer, which was also a Buffy-character-based name. The only other trope names that directly require knowledge of Buffy are Buffy Speak, Jossed and Whedon'th Thyndrome.

Buffy Speak has 15,900 google hits; Jossed has 42,200; (so they're both fairly widely used. Whedon'th Thyndrome (or Whedon Thyndrome) has 12, across both spellings, only one of which isn't this site or a mirror. But it's also come up for a rename — there are two threads on renaming it, and it's simply languishing.

Phlebotinum has 102,000 Google hits; it may have started on Buffy, but it's clearly spread far, far beyond only being clear to Buffy fans.

On something like the Green Lantern Ring, it's the likelihood that it will be misused by people who don't bother to check the page before the pothole it, because it must be about the actual Green Lantern Ring, not simply "a piece of technology that gives a superhero his powers." We've just run into that with Green Lantern Corps: fully half of the wicks were talking about the Corps itself, not the trope it's an example of.

edited 1st Jul '10 6:07:16 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Except that's not what Green Lantern Ring is about, it describes a power to craft things through imagination.

But that aside, point taken. In the case of Green Lantern Corps, it probably didn't help that there is an ongoing comic with that exact name and people would logically assume that to be the series page.

Wrestler, bodybuilder. No hopes, no dreams.

And they're going to make exactly the same sort of assumption about Green Lantern Ring — that it's about exactly what it sounds like, not a broader category that the namer is an example of. A broader category several steps removed, in fact. I knew it wasn't about the ring itself, so I went one step broader — "powers through a widget". I needed to go at least two steps broader, to "power to create via imagination through a widget".

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

It's not so much "via" anything, it just describes the ability to create something through imagination alone. The concept cannot be expressed in simpler, more familiar terms than "you know, like a Green Lantern Ring".

But that's besides the point, we resolved the complaint that I had, let's just forget it.

Wrestler, bodybuilder. No hopes, no dreams.

Quick question. In the list of things for which we should use a redirect not a rename the guidelines list

The rename causes lists:

What does the first one mean by "context"? It can't mean "context from the show" or else it would be the second one. Is this just a reference to Pop-Cultural Osmosis? If so, I think it might need to be clearer.

edited 20th Jul '10 1:07:57 PM by Visla

Pacta sunt servanda, bitch!

That covers examples like Luke, I Am Your Father, where the Trope Namer is a line from a show, but the title is sufficiently self-explanatory to stand by itself. For example, it's not necessary to know who the "Luke" is in this case to know that the trope is about someone claiming to be another character's parent.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That's kinda what I thought. You might want to rephrase the guideline a little to clarify that it makes sense without outside context, or makes sense on its face. I dunno.

Thanks for clearing it up for me at least.

Pacta sunt servanda, bitch!

This post was thumped by the Shillelagh of Whackingness

You make a separate thread for each rename, you don't post here. Thumped.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Now at Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Titles

BTW, I'm a chick.

Oh, right, better change the OP.

See you in the discussion pages.

When the whole thing was moved to Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Titles, among the things removed was the process for putting something in TRS:

The first bullet has largely been automated, but what about the others? Are they elsewhere, and should they be?

edited 13th Sep '10 12:02:15 PM by HersheleOstropoler

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

If it has been determined that "consensus" means "a 2/3 majority"  ^*

, perhaps the page should say that, rather than "consensus is hard to pin down."

The child is father to the man —Oedipus

I think Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Titles could use a section on "How to identify a broken trope", as distinct from the section currently titled "Reasons to propose a rename", which is a list of ways to find how a bad title may be causing a trope to break, and fix it.

The thing is that prospective "bad titles" don't mean broken tropes. Extremely low wick counts, confusions about the meaning of the trope, or confusion with another page do. Basically, I think "If the title has good inbound links, it is working. If the title is being accurately used around the wiki to refer to the trope, it is working." is important enough to be its own paragraph.

This came to mind largely because of the One-Winged Angel discussion, but it's not too rare for renames to be proposed and campaigned for solely because a title looks like it "should" be bad, even if it's working admirably.

edited 12th Oct '10 8:37:39 PM by Shale