Rename: Spoony Bard

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpoonyBard

Crowner Renaming Discussion

As much as I love the name, Spoony Bard is being heavily misused within the page itself (and possibly on wicks, how the hell do I check wicks?).

Example:

• The Bard Class in Ever Quest is stated as a "Jack of All Trades, Master To None" in that it's sort of like multiple classes combined together. Unlike normal buff spells, the bard had to constantly keep "singing" almost non-stop and keep refreshing the songs over and over again every few SECONDS. Most players can successfully juggle 4 song buffs up at once. They can also wear Plate armor, and dual wield weapons (but not Double Attack.) Among the song types they have, they can increase run speed to being the fastest in the game (faster than the most powerful mounts), charm enemies, stun them, deal damage over time, and heal over time.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that the trope name is Spoony Bard people seem to assume that it's related to bards as a character class, not useless characters.

Comments?

EDIT: Also, note the sheer amount of natter on this page.

edited 6th Aug '10 5:28:32 AM by Autarch

It could be split.

Rename. The Trope Namer isn't even an example, as far as I know, and I've seen it misused.

Renaming Spoony Bard Crowner

How do I link it to the thread? =/

Just Wiki Word it - it uses the same markup as entries: Spoony Bard.

edited 6th Aug '10 9:31:33 AM by Semiapies

And good show on tagging the page, Autarch. :)

I'm absolutely for renaming - I would never think of that for "Spoony Bard" (I'd think Engrish or twitty characters who become worthwhile).

edited 6th Aug '10 9:34:04 AM by Semiapies

I agree with the rename, but the namer is absolutely an example. All of Edward's weapons inflicted odd status effects, and in other/more complete versions he got lots of gadget songs of limited utility. And one of his abilities was to split a potion. Between all 5 members of the party.

Still, needs to be renamed.

Useless Gimmick? Offbeat Gimmick Character?

Rename or not crowner is hooked to this thread, and it needs reasons to keep the name and the reasons to change it listed. Add them as bullet points in the appropriate spot.

And you check the wicks by clicking the "related to:" button on the trope page and going through the pages listed there to see whether it's being used correctly. It's easiest if you open each page as "View Source" and then use the search function on your browser —that will show you any potholes, which searching the main display page won't.

edited 6th Aug '10 12:04:24 PM by Madrugada

Technically, the line isn't an example of the trope, but more a "You son of a bitch!" line from Tellah for thinking Edward stole away his daughter.

But if we made the name for a trope about the bard class... do we even have one?

^ I don't think we even have a page for the Warrior/Fighter class, much less Bard.

There're a few for bards. Musical Assassin is one.

That doesn't require bards.

Does 17 versus 5 count as a majority?

Here we have a prime example of why renames are so overused as to make this entire website something like a game of "trope name musical chairs".

The problem we have here isn't that "people don't know what the trope is" because the name is misleading, the problem is that people do know what the term means before they ever come to this site.

This is like having the trope "Jumped the Shark" refer to literally jumping over a shark, and then complaining when people use it to refer to when shows go from engaging and enjoyable to just silly and overdone.

There are many people linking to "Spoony Bard" referring to bards because they know what the term means from places outside TV Tropes, and the problem is caused by the trope trying to make itself define something broader and somewhat different than what people who actually use the term already as opposed to people who have to read the description to figure out what the term means.

The problem, then, is that the trope description doesn't match what people are using it to mean, not that someone invented a new term that is misleading. The solution, then is to rewrite the definition of the trope so that it is a definition of what anyone who knows the term from outside TV Tropes will know what it means.

I'll rewrite this, but if anyone wants to go around deleting the examples and such that other people have created, and potentially start edit wars that way, they can do that, because this forum-based ability to unilaterraly delete the work of others by fiat is exactly what drove me away from these forums in the first place.

^ I agree, sometimes I wish people would devote just 10% of the effort they put into renaming tropes into improving descriptions and cleaning up bad examples.

And the phrase "spoony bard" is more well-known as an example of a Good Bad Translation, not bards being sucky.

^^^ Completely changing the definition to match the current name still means that we need to rename the existing trope.

edited 15th Sep '10 12:49:49 PM by Madrugada

(In the middle of rewriting the definition in another window...)

The problem is that there isn't really "another trope" here. The actual description part of the description on the page right now is literally just two sentences long, and describes almost nothing. (I don't know for sure, apparently everything on this website was deleted at some point when I was gone, but I'd expect this is a case of someone hastily throwing up a token description, and Wiki Magic only worked for bringing in examples.)

If you want to make a "useless character" trope, then go ahead, I suppose, but that's not what Spoony Bard really refers to. This isn't me "completely changing the definition" as it is correcting it. After all, if everyone is "using the term wrong", and there are no examples of "the existing trope as it is defined now", then does it even exist in the first place?

^ The problem with that view is that redefining the trope into what people use it for would make the examples that are currently correct examples of the current discription, suddenly incorrect. Assuming the concept the current description describes is tropable, we need a new name to put the current description under. Hence, renaming it.

I don't think anyone would deny that a page titled "Spoony bard" should be about bards, but you can't just toss aside examples of what the description is saying out the window.

edited 15th Sep '10 1:15:28 PM by Twilightdusk

(Spoony Bard redefined)

No, if you can say a term, and people will understand some concept, and are capable of providing examples of that concept, then congratulations, you have a trope.

Spoony Bard is a trope. People (who are part of the subculture of JRPG games, anyway) know what you mean when you call something a Spoony Bard. To rename it is to eliminate what is a valid trope.

Looking through the examples on the page, I see more examples of Spoony Bard than "useless class", but that is a product of a bad definition, and possibly can just be swept into a new trope if someone wants to create a "useless class" trope, but the fact remains that Spoony Bard is justifiably its own trope.

EDIT: When saying that something falls under the normal definition of a "Spoony Bard", I include things like "dancers" (which are often just bards under a different name), which means all those dancers in the fairly long list of examples from Fire Emblem still count.

I'm not so sure about things like the Cancer Mage from the D&D example, because I never read that splatbook. Maybe it is a useless debuff spell class, maybe it isn't.

The zombies from Ogre Battle (which one, it's a whole series...) being declared useless because they can't do anything a skeleton can't do is another trope.

edited 15th Sep '10 1:54:42 PM by Wraith_Magus

What I meant was, proper examples of "This class is useless" that linked to Spoony Bard, are now incorrect, as Spoony Bard is now about bards. We need a new page to send examples of that trope, and we need a name for that page.

Looking through the examples, I see some pretty serious confusion, here.

For example, this one: "Ironically, Bards in Final Fantasy V are a subversion, as they are Not Completely Useless. However, the Berserker class plays this straight, what with its lack of control and low speed. The Oracle from the Advance version fits this, except for its very high magic stat."

So, even with the old lack-of-definition, they have to deal with bards just because they are bards, but then they talk about "useless class" in the same sentance.

Basically, something like this has to be cleaned up by hand no matter what we decided, unless the decision was "do nothing".

(I also have to wonder why there are so many seperate bullet points for Final Fantasy examples, instead of just putting everything under one massive "Final Fantasy" bullet point with sub-bullets for all the other Final Fantasies... It's also worth noting that Final Fantasy takes up about half the examples by amount of text, here...)

Also, like I said in the edit of my last post, something doesn't have to be a bard to be a "Spoony Bard", even in the usual definition. A "dancer" is probably still a spoony bard. In Disgaea3, cheerleaders and shamans were spoony bards (cheerleaders passively boosted all your party member's stats just for being on the field, but was useless for anything but hiding in a corner while the characters benefitting from the boost did all the work, while shamans reduced the stats of enemies).

That is, even under the usual definition, not all bards are spoony and not everyone spoony is a bard. In fact, a good deal of these examples start out with "subverted by this bard class that was actually useful".

EDIT: In fact, the Berserker in the example I quoted above is not even really an example of the previous two-sentance version of the definition, as it relies upon simply attacking, but has negative traits that just make other physical attackers generally better. The gimmick isn't some "supposedly useful, but really not" gimmick, it's a purposeful drawback that other classes don't have, the problem with the Berserker class is that it doesn't get any compensating boost in usefulness for it.

In fact, I think I found the "useless class" trope we can move many of the bad examples to already here - Master of None exists, and it's already filled with many of the exact same examples as Spoony Bard was attracting.

edited 15th Sep '10 3:26:51 PM by Wraith_Magus

(I also have to wonder why there are so many seperate bullet points for Final Fantasy examples, instead of just putting everything under one massive "Final Fantasy" bullet point with sub-bullets for all the other Final Fantasies... It's also worth noting that Final Fantasy takes up about half the examples by amount of text, here...)

And the Trope Namer is not this trope in the remake its more Lethal Joke Character

from that page.

* In Final Fantasy, the Bard is usually thought of as a joke class, mainly due to the fact that most people outside of Japan were first exposed to it by Edward in Final Fantasy IV, then called II in North America, and he sucked. In the DS Enhanced Remake of IV, Edward gains "Life's Anthem" one level after you meet him, which is nearly a Game-Breaker: It lets the entire team regenerate a set amount of HP every second for the duration. Thus, the best use for him is to make him go first, set up Life's Anthem to fully refill HP, then destroy the enemies. At higher levels, he gets "Hastemarch", a full-party haste, and "Hero's Rhyme", a full-party 10% boost to all stats.

edited 15th Sep '10 3:20:07 PM by Raso

Right, anyway, I cleaned up the description. Someone else care to review and comment?

Several of the existing examples don't really seem like they fit this (or the previous) description of the trope, but I'm not going to be handling that for right now, although I may do so later.