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There is none, because not every work has characters sheet.
For a work with chaarcter sheet, if a trope only apply to single character on the sheet, then it doesn't belong to work page. That's pretty much the only rule I can think of.
It's always been a bit random, really.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
The idea is that tropes that apply to a specific character go on the character page, in the entry for that character, while tropes that apply to the work as a whole go on the main work page.
...except for the following (note: I'm not saying that there isn't a consensus for how these cases should be handled, just that they tend to cause confusion because it's not obvious how they should be handled):
- A trope can apply to several characters. Does it go on the character page, once for each character, or on the main page to prevent duplication?
- And what if the trope applies to a character, but is very important for the work as a whole (for example, Big Bad certainly applies to an individual character, but if the whole plot centers around fighting the big bad, surely it's important to the work as a whole.
So, yes, it's a bit of a mess. And it leads to confusion when somebody adds a trope to the main page that somebody else has already added to a character page.
But putting tropes on character pages serves an important purpose for many works: it keeps down the sheer amount of examples on the main page.
Edited by GnomeTitan
In theory, the only tropes listed on Characters subpages should be tropes on the Characterization and Characters as Device indexes; everything else goes in the main article. Plot Tropes and Settings should always go on the main article. In practice, we rarely live up to that ideal, largely because the current wiki software provides no mechanism to automatically categorize examples. 2.0 will, but that's a long way off.
Edited by Fighteer "It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
What I personally find the most difficult are things like when a characterization trope is important for the work as a whole, for example when the fact that one of the characters is X drives the plot. Does the characterization trope go on the character page for that character or on the main page?
Good question. There's no "right" answer, because the Characters subpages are technically part of the main article, just split for size, readability, and organization. It's just that the wiki software doesn't know that.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
^ Exactly, I'm against the compartmentalization some tropers do by moving stuff away to a separate page because in say, a 100 minutes movie, the so called character tropes are narrative devices to convey information as important as the rest, there's no much time to explain things, so characterization is a necessary tool used by the author to tell things . If you don't include those tropes in the main page, you are crippling it.
Is there a clear guideline anywhere about what tropes belong on character pages instead of in the main trope list?
I keep seeing tropes on character pages that I don't think belong (Adaptation Dye-Job is one I saw most recently), but I don't want to move them if they're just going to be moved back.