Bad Snowclone: Our Sirens Are Louder

As someone said in the YKTTW ""Our Sirens Are Louder" is another snowclone title and a particularly meaningless one. At least "Our Werewolves Are Different" pretends to be about how they are different (whether or not the trope is actually about that). This one is only a pun but doesn't actually compare their loudness at all."

Our Sirens Are Alluring?

Our Sirens Are Melodic?

Our Sirens Are Enthralling, maybe?

Yikes! When I read the title of this one, I was thinking of the other sort of siren — you know, the ones on fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances!

For a trope about ladies who sing people into watery doom, we definitely need a rename.

If we keep the form, let's do Alluring or Enthralling, so that no one thinks this trope applies to fire trucks.

I'd say enthralling, since that's closer to "enslaving" whereas alluring has more of a fashion-model feel to it. A Femme Fatale might be both, but I'd say a siren is the former.

Why keep the form? We're in this situation because of a bad snowclone. They're sirens, the singing type not the ambulance type. I'd argue that the enthralling stuff is the signature feature and a bit redundant. People use Siren sometimes as a shorthand for these qualities in someone. Singing Siren is fine if you want to avoid ambulances.

edited 15th Oct '10 4:57:29 PM by SomeSortOfTroper

I prefer Our Sirens Sing Better.

I put a trope through YKTTW which was closely related to Siren Song and found that there was none. I kept meaning to go back and make one, but never found the time. I suggest we do that, move the examples that work from Our Sirens Are Louder to there and cut this, then if people think there should be a page for Sirens themselves, you could go with something like Singing Siren, although I don't think that would be necessary.

@Fnor: We found enough examples for this to be tropable, and sirens are creatures, so I don't see why this is any less viable than vampires, zombies, or werewolves (oh my).

@Some Sort: I personally would like to stick to the form because the Our Ys are X tend to imply that the trope is specifically made for a creature that is one trope because of a cultural consciousness thing, and part of the trope is made around how different they can get. Which is why we have the same vampires for trapped inhuman monstrosities who survive on human blood and sparkly creatures who are irresistible and can do just fine on bear blood. It seems appropriate, given we're talking about a creature who may or may not be a species, and may be half-bird or half-fish.

edited 16th Oct '10 4:34:27 PM by RedWren

^Red Wren: Yes, the trope deals with both the common idea of the creature as well as how different they can be represented. Most tropes work that way. Boring as it is to simply name it Singing Siren, I don't see the point in the title insisting "Sirens can be represented in a lot different ways", since that's the case with most mythological creatures.

(Honestly though, I'd be posting this in this snowclone's general evaluation thread if I could respond to your there.)

Did you mean to link to Index of Fictional Creatures? Linking to Our Monsters Are Different sort of supports the Our Xes Are Y title-scheme. Unless one is against snowclones as a matter of principle, I suppose.

(This was written late at night and in Sincerity Mode, sorry if anything came off as sarcastic, that tends to happen to me.)

edited 16th Oct '10 11:05:22 PM by RedWren

Let me see if I've got this. This trope is supposed to be about how sirens in modern works are different from the "classical" portrayal, right? So a new title has to focus on that. Our Sirens Are Louder kind of sort of does, but it's a pun on "siren" (you know, the kind you have on police cars and whatnot) and that makes things confusing. So the new title also has to work around that.

I guess the real question here is: how can we refer to this particular trope without using the word "siren"?

^^Sorry, I thought that might be confusing. I linked to Our Monsters Are Different to make the point that there are 30 tropes currently using this naming scheme, which covers most named mythological monsters on this wiki.

I could see the argument for keeping Our Sirens Are Louder in it's snowclone family, since they can look very different from each other. However, the narrative use of the Siren (their enthralling voice) remains consistent in every example. I think the ways in which they differ, in this case, is of less relevance.

Our Vampires Are Different works because traditional vampires haves their own page, and both are common enough to warrant separate pages. A lot of the creatures under Our Monsters Are Different don't have a page for the traditional version. Like Sirens, they are often represented very different in each work, but their use in a story remains consistent.

Not sure if any of those points are vaild, by the way. It's late at night for me as well. :)

edited 17th Oct '10 1:54:14 AM by Rhatahema

Erm...yes?

I'd go further, the bad snowclone uses- the monsters don't vary that much. Looking at Our Sirens Are Louder- what are the changes? Well sometimes people confuse sirens and mermaids. That's it. That's not even a range of changes, it's one particular issue that we make it's own page.

Then how can we expand it? Surely appearance isn't the only distinction between classical and modern we can make.

Ah, no, actually appearance isn't even one of the distinctions we can make because there are some modern versions that keep to that. It's just that now it's considered an optional element. After that, yes, there aren't much more differences and it's a trope, not every All Just a Dream is waking up in the shower.

Our starting point should be- there is the mythical creature Siren, this forms a trope, all the information on the page matches up fine with just having the ruddy page for the trope and really all the bad snowclone does is obscure the fact that "Yes, Sirens are a trope, they behave like a trope and there's nothing extraordinary about that."

One issue, already mentioned, is that the title needs to distinguish sirens as a mythological species from sirens as electronic alarms.

Mythological sirens sing. Alarm sirens wail.

It would work better even if the title was just Our Sirens Sing Louder. The additional verb prevents any confusion (besides, "are" is almost a placeholder verb anyway).

edited 17th Oct '10 9:01:36 AM by Stratadrake

And what does louder have to do with it?

The article in its current form reads like it should be called Modern Portrayals Of Mythical Sirens, or simply Mythical Sirens.

edited 17th Oct '10 10:00:01 AM by SeanMurrayI

Not entirely sure if this is enough of a difference to justify the snowclone, but I'd say that "lures sailors to death on the rocks" to "lures someone into some sort of danger, perhaps her own" is a change in use. I only see the Batman and Teen Titans examples, but it's there.

And, yeah, Louder has nothing to do with it. It's a pun that hurts clarity, however much, so probably make it Our Sirens Are Different or Our Sirens Are Enthralling if the snowclone stays.

edited 17th Oct '10 12:27:13 PM by RedWren

Not entirely sure if this is enough of a difference to justify the snowclone, but I'd say that "lures sailors to death on the rocks" to "lures someone into some sort of danger, perhaps her own" is a change in use. I only see the Batman and Teen Titans examples, but it's there.

Not really. "Lures someone into some sort of danger," I believe, has the right amount of generality to befit any definition for a trope, if only because Tropes Are Flexible.

edited 17th Oct '10 2:12:42 PM by SeanMurrayI

I like Our Sirens Are Different. In any case, I agree with a rename.

How about instead of focusing on differences lets focus on the aspects of sirens that are always the same.

Sirens Are Enthralling, because sirens always enthrall others- that what makes them sirens

Singing Sirens works better I think; the new title has to not confuse people as to which kind of siren we're talking about here.