You thinking of a new heading? It's just that a fully separate page would be overkill IMO since the only characters to debut in Zootopia+ that might warrant inclusion are Sam, Tru-Tru, Molly, and maybe Gerald and Mabel.

Edited by DancouMaryuu Does anyone else here actually know Fighbird beyond the "Is this a pigeon?" meme?

I'm not sure. Maybe a new heading, or maybe a label to identify Zootopia+ characters. It just seems odd to have them mixed in with no indication that they were introduced in Zootopia+ episodes, rather than in the original movie.

Indeed, it seems that the tiger named Fangmeyer sitting in the back row and the tiger sitting next to Judy wearing purple eyeshadow keep getting confused with each other by fans (including myself). I was the one re-adding the example, but I think it's better to remove it.

Edited by Snicka

No problem. Zootopia has been out for almost 4 years now and it's reached the point where Canon and Fanon start blending together.

I personally like the fan-fics that ship Wolfard and Fangmeyer but I'm always aware that Fangmeyer is essentially portrayed as a male in the film and All There in the Manual resources. That's why I'm a big supporter of there being a brother & sister Fangmeyer in the bullpen. There's nothing in the film that directly refutes it and it doesn't force the discussion of Fangmeyer's gender into an either/or situation.

I say let Fangmeyer be both, but just don't forget that if we're talking Fanon here and at the end of the day, Canon is still the ultimate rule.

I played a Zootopia game on my phone where Fangmeyer was a minor character. IIRC, in the photo, the character Fangmeyer was wearing eye shadow. But I don't know how official that is.

But in my Firefly-Zootopia crossover fanfic, Fangmeyer is female (and is married to Clawhauser). :P

I suppose the definition "one that takes the lead or initiative : leader" could be considered meaningful, once her role as the Big Bad is revealed. Until then, it seems like more of an ironic name, given that she appears to be Lionheart's doormat, and not a leader of any sort. The historical definition of a wether that wears a bell and leads the flock doesn't seem to apply, except as a nod to the fact that she's a sheep (in much the same way that Judy's last name Hopps is a nod to the fact that she's a bunny).

It was more for the sake of categorization. I was under the impression that since Xenophobic Herbivore was a more specific subtrope of Fantastic Racism, I thought it applied. And as for the quote, it was the most fitting example that came to mind.

All things considered though, if you want to revert either or both pages, you're welcome to do so, but I'm curious to see what other people have to say about the issue first.

Edited by DancouMaryuu Does anyone else here actually know Fighbird beyond the "Is this a pigeon?" meme?

I actually see Xenophobic Herbivore as being a broader condition (ie I'm a herbivore and anything that isn't just like me is to be feared) whereas Fantastic Racism is essentially taking prejudice or racism and picking a "fantasy" element as the basis for the prejudice (ie three-headed aliens feel that two-headed aliens are inferior, elves think dwarves are a crude species barely better than dogs, etc).

Since I've watched many, many interviews with the various creators, I know that their focus was on social bias and prejudice that expressed itself in many ways among the various characters. Stu, a herbivore, was generally fearful of predators en masse, while Chief Bogo, also a herbivore, had a bias against smaller mammals being effective ZPD officers. The Junior Ranger Scouts had it in for Nick not because he was a predator but because he was a fox and everyone knows that foxes aren't trustworthy.

With such a broad spectrum of bias at play in the movie, I hope you can see why I feel that Xenophobic Herbivore is a little too broad.

Edited by rva98014

I bumped it back up to 350 since I found they don't look that big or aesthetically displeasing at all, if I'm being honest. There's ample amount of space left for text when checking it both at 2560x1440 (my main monitor) and 1920x1080 (my secondary monitor, and what I assume is most people's primary at this point in time). If anything the other images should probably be bigger too, but at least Nick and Judy being the main duo gives them a(n admittedly weak) justification for special treatment.

If we're at an impasse, however, it might help to get some other opinions from Image Pickin's general discussion - I wouldn't bother opening up an entirely new thread since I don't think either of us are disputing the actual images chosen, just the sizing thereof.

Moon◊

The current 350px width gives me short choppy sentences:

A bunny who is the

newest member of the

Zootopia Police

Department, this naive

but well-intentioned

idealist learns some

hard truths about

Zootopia—and herself—

when she takes on the

Emmitt Otterton case.

And yes, the images of Judy and Nick look huge, although part of that is that they are both very tall portrait-oriented images. Maybe the design goal should be to have images with comparable area. Tall portrait-oriented images like Judy's or Nick's should be narrower than wide landscape-oriented images like Clawhauser's or the ZPD Officers' group image.

FWIW, my default browser window has a display area that is about 1060px wide. I almost never use full-screen browser windows, even on a small laptop display.

Edited by mcgrew

Hey mcgrew,

I'm pretty sure the Nick and Judy images were promotional images hence the large portrait size. Many of the other images were made from screen captures.

My monitor resolution is 1280 wide and I still feel Nick and Judy are too big. They had been set at 250 for quite some time without any issues. This whole thing started when Mark Lungo adjusted the values without an edit reason. I'm still for just putting them back to 250.

.

I'm okay with setting all the images to 250px wide. I'm also okay with setting most of the images to 250px wide, but setting the widest landscape-oriented images to be wider than that. But either way, the current images of Judy and Nick seem too wide (and seem much too big in general).

Yup... sorry about the accidental half page deletion. I'm still not sure how I managed that. I held it locked so I could restore everything without stumbling over anyone else's edits.

As for the random site lock, that's a bug that came with the design/software update a few months ago and still hasn't been fixed. Sometimes pages look/act like they're locked even though they aren't. When that happens, just go to the page's history section, and the "edit page" icon will appear instead of the "locked" icon, allowing you to edit freely.

Edited by Hvedekorn

It's a mixed bag out there. The Zootopia wiki (which is fan driven) identifies Travis as a black-footed ferret, but there's no reference to support this identification and their own comment section seems to imply they've gone back and forth between him as a weasel vs ferret.

The Zootopia script identifies "Travis" as the "wolf henchmen kid" which is no help, but also says that during the Carrot Days talent show, Gideon is sitting next to a Weasel Kid and in the actual movie, he's clearly sitting next to Travis.

I know from a podcast with the directors and writers, that the "Gideon beats up Judy" scene came very late in the production. The anecdote was they were reviewing the storyboards and animatics on a Friday prior to a big formal review on Tuesday and realized they needed Judy to have a traumatic experience in her childhood to help properly justify her press conference actions. Thus the Gideon bully attack was quickly put together over that weekend.

As such, it seems very likely that they simply took Duke Weaselton's character model and changed the fur coloring and clothing to quickly create Travis. (if you look at them side by side the similarity is very apparent)

Thus is seems that Travis is most likely a Weasel if there's a Weasel that has his fur coloring. But this is pretty much educated speculation supported by related (but not direct) Word of God information.

I have learned more about zoology keeping up with Zootopia than I ever learned in school. So a little research shows that the generic term Weasel means a mammal of the genus Mustela of the family Mustelidae and includes the least weasels, polecats, stoats, ferrets, and minks. The actual animal weasel is actually the "least weasel" (Mustela nivalis).

To that end, I'd suggest the following changes.

For Travis... change his description to "Gideon's toady during his playground bully days. Due to his limited screen time, his species is never identified but he is clearly a member of the Mustelid family. His coloring resembles that of the black-footed ferret. However, his character model strongly resembles Duke Weaselton."

Also change his Wicked Weasel entry to... Wicked Weasel: He is a Mustelid and is the cowardly yet malicious toady of a playground bully.

For Duke... change his description to "A small-time weasel crook. His coloring identifies him as a least weasel (Mustela nivalis).

Edited by rva98014

Hmm... some of that may be too speculative due to the movie's relative ambiguity.

Duke's coloring resembles either a least weasel or a stoat, but, as already discussed under Animals Not to Scale, he is much too big. Although, a stoat still wouldn't be nearly as much of a stretch as a least weasel, size-wise. A polecat would be closer by far to being the correct size, but his coloration was not polecat-like at all. We seem to have already accepted that Animals Not to Scale example on the basis that none of the species he looks like are as big as him, but his exact species is still ambiguous.

As for Travis, well, I don't agree that he looks like a cheap recolor of Duke, regardless of how quickly that scene was made. But anyway...

Travis' coloration, as well as his not-very-tiny size relative to an unusually-big red fox of presumably similar age, seem to strongly indicate some sort of polecat or a ferret. The size part is muddied by Duke setting a precedent for not-to-scale weasels, but his coat coloration is still very distinctively polecat-like, strongly indicating that he's one of M. putorius, M. nigripes, or M. eversmanii.

But really, if we want the least speculative take on the canon, I'm not sure we can say anything totally definitive about either character except that they're both "weasels" in the general sense that they fall somewhere in the genus Mustela.

To put this in plain English, as would be preferable for the wiki text, we might merely describe either of them as being "some sort of weasel".

Though for Travis, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to taking the liberty of going a bit more specific and calling him "some sort of polecat or ferret".

Or even more simply (though maybe also more opaquely to those who don't know much about this), we might even just say "some sort of polecat."^note The "black-footed ferret" is also known as the "American polecat", so that would include them. Domestic ferrets are encompassed as well due to being a subspecies of European polecat.

But definitely don't go so broad as to simply call either of them "mustelids", as the family Mustelidae is much broader than the genus Mustela and also includes things like otters, badgers, and wolverines.

Edited by BURGINABC

I went ahead and made a change. How's this?

Edited by BURGINABC

Looks fine to me. Also, sorry, I didn't mean to come across sounding like Travis was just a cheap Palette Swap, knock-off of Weaselton. They did make adjustments to Travis' face (his nose is smaller) for example. However, they clearly used Weaselton's character model as his foundation and that seems to be a strong reason for the uncertainty regarding his species.

Edited by rva98014

I'd prefer to just remove Straight Gay as I feel that Bucky and Pronk have so little screen time and their presence in the movie is to be the annoying neighbors that give Judy no privacy instead of the subtle Straight Gay couple that's slipping in under the radar.

I had originally removed it because I felt they fit the trope "by default" not "by intention". However Hvedekorn added it back and I just wasn't interested in an Edit War or prolonged discussion.

I think Word of Gay makes the most sense. In the movie itself, their sexuality is never an issue one way or the other, is it? They're loud and annoying and nosy, but that is neither gay nor straight.

With a consensus being apparent, I got rid of it.

I'm fine removing the entry. It was a downplayed example at best.

I just found it interesting because (except for the koala), the mug appears in front of the body (or arm) of all the male newscasters. Since nothing in CGI is "just a prop", it means the animation had to render the mug relative to the character. It would have been easier to simply not have a mug on the set at all. Hence I went with the subtle implication of "must have caffeine". But it's also just the standard set dressing you'd tend to see on a news show anyway.

If there was a trope for "totally unnecessary prop whose presence makes production more complicated" I would have used that instead.

Edited by rva98014

Since we're already in agreement about removing it, this is probably off-topic, but...

I'm not sure what you mean by "nothing in CGI is 'just a prop'". I think this is exactly a prop.

And it just sits there and doesn't move, so the animators don't have to mess with it... I'm really not sure what you mean by having to render the mug relative to the character. ^note If you're talking about indirect lighting and the influence the moving characters have on the lighting of other objects, that may have been complicated to handle properly with old-fashioned renderers, but if they're using a path tracer like we talked about earlier, then that would be handled automatically. The main attraction of path tracers, which has apparently in recent years overtaken the downsides in the eyes of major studios, is that it simulates the natural behavior of light so comprehensively that a lot of the lighting/rendering tricks of traditional CGI become completely unnecessary. It's to the point that you can just drop a pre-made object into a scene and expect it to behave; in that respect it's become almost more like stop-motion photography than traditional CGI.

And for such a common object, they probably didn't even have to model it (not that that would have taken long) since they probably had one they could re-use from an earlier production.

I don't see adding a coffee mug to the set dressing as something that would significantly complicate anything.

Edited by BURGINABC

Sorry "just a prop" wasn't the best expression of my thoughts. I was speaking from the numerous "behind the scenes" and "making of" documentaries I've watched (not just for Zootopia, but for other CGI films as well).

One thing that comes across is that 3D CGI animation while visually stunning, is not actually easier or faster than traditional 2D animation despite the increase in computing power.

A common phrase I come across is in CGI, "nothing is free". Everything has to be designed, modeled, textured and rendered. They talk of how, because of constantly advancing CGI technology, even "reusing" old character models often requires tweaking, updating or even full redesign to conform with changes made to their CGI "camera" systems, lighting systems, rendering engines, etc between the original film and the sequel.

So a coffee mug on a table is not just running down to the Props Dept and picking up a $2 ceramic mug and once it's on the table on the set it's done. It has to be designed into the scene, its texture defined, and it has to be rendered each frame.

In the overall scope of generating a frame, the cpu cycles it takes is probably negligible and its complexity is not significant. But at the same time, it's not just a trivial prop... at least not as we think of a prop in a real-world filming scenario.

That's probably been true traditionally, and probably still is true in many cases, though I doubt that would currently apply to a coffee mug sitting on a desk.

Yes, it's true that a lot of material/texture setups defined for old renderers are not reusable in new ones that work differently.

However, with modern renderers, very simple physically-based materials (like plain white ceramic) can generally be assigned to an object without any object-specific effort put into setting up texture maps, leaving that a moot point in this instance.

You also correctly noted that character rigs also tend to become obsolete and need to be updated or recreated for changed or new animation engines, but that's not applicable to simple model geometry without moving parts.

Static polygonal models (the plain model itself with no armature and no material setup) are practically Ragnarok Proof by CGI standards, and can pretty much always be reused, albeit perhaps in need of a new paint job. If the object required complex image-mapped textures, then that might be a lot of work to recreate, but again, that would not be an issue for a plain unmarked ceramic mug.

The workflow would be:

1. Import the model
2. Assign the very simple (likely pre-defined) ceramic material to the model
3. If necessary, rescale the object so that it is the correct size relative to the rest of the scene.
4. Position model on the desk
5. Done!

As many complicating factors as there are in CGI, something as simple as an unmarked ceramic mug can still bypass nearly all of them when dropping into a scene. If something is just set dressing that doesn't interact with anything, and has a simple surface lacking fine details, then a lot of the factors that could complicate just dropping it into the scene like a prop, simply don't apply.

To be sure, CGI is still quite complex to work with, but for extremely simple things like this, I believe it can approach the simplicity of merely pulling something out of the prop room and placing it in the scene.

Edited by BURGINABC

I'd vote no. Several times in the past, we've had people unilaterally decide to re-categorize the characters (which is why there's the comment in the code to please start a discussion first..... Thank you for doing so, BTW).

It always ended up with categories that only had 2-3 characters in it with one big "Misc" or "Other" category at the end (your proposed organization would have 14 characters lumped here). Plus there'd often be some categories where a character didn't really fit (Are Fru-Fru and Manchas really part of the Mafia?).

I personally just don't see much value in trying to granularize them beyond "Zootopia Residents" even if it does make that category somewhat large.

Edited by rva98014

Mr Otterton is Mr Big's florist. Does that make him part of the Tundratown Mafia? Does that make Mrs Otterton part of the Tundratown Mafia?

Or is Mr Otterton part of the Mystic Springs group, along with Yax and Nangi?

Is Flash part of the Zootopia government group because he works for the DMV?

And what do you do with Doug, Jesse, and Woolter? If you group them with Bellwether, then that's a big spoiler.

It might work to have Zootopia Government (including ZPD, City Hall, and DMV) and Zootopia Civilians (everyone else). But I don't see a need for that.

Edited by mcgrew

I agree that attempts to create more categories would be confounded by characters belonging to more than one of them, and/or only being tangentially connected.

Also, creating a category for Bellwether's conspiracy would be a spoiler that's visible without even opening folders, spoiling even those who heed the warning.

Even if you group Bellwether with City Hall (which goes back to the above problem) the existence of the conspiracy is somewhat a spoiler in itself.

Also, while the proposed grouping for Dr. Badger and the wolf security guards isn't a spoiler, that's simply because it doesn't connect them with Lionheart, even though it would otherwise make sense to do so (once again, the problem of multiple categories)

It seems like more organization might be nice, but in practice, I don't know if we can do much better than the current structure of putting the protagonists in a prominent group up front and everyone else in broad catch-alls for Zootopia and Bunnyburrow. Trying to split it further creates narrow and arbitrary categorization and/or lots of characters ending up in the catch-all anyway.

Edited by BURGINABC

I see your points. The categories I suggested made sense to me largely because it follows the same pattern as the characters are listed right now, so all I would have done is add some extra titles. I would have grouped Fru Fru and Manchas with the Tundratown Mafia because both have direct ties to Mr. Big as his daughter and the driver for a limo service owned by him, whereas Otterton's tie with them feels a little more loose, but I admit it's a bit subjective. I definitely would have not grouped Woolter, Jesse and Doug with Bellwether because of their spoiler-like nature. Maybe grouping them with Weaselton instead would make some sense, as they are criminals with ties to each other. But I accept that the grouping is subjective and arbitrary. Honestly, to me even the current "Bunnyburrow Residents" category feels a bit arbitrary, as it contains only a few characters compared to the really long "Zootopia Residents", so I thought a little more categorization would have made it somewhat more even.

I'm not a big fan of the current division either. We could go with a simple list of characters, in alphabetical order by character name, or in order of appearance, or in some other neutral order. If necessary, we could move Judy and Nick to the front of the list, and list everyone else in a neutral order.

The order the characters appear in the end credits would be good, except for the characters with no spoken lines (e.g., Bobby Catmull or Mr Otterton). We could insert them after the other characters they appear with if we wanted to use that order.

I admit I really don't have a problem with the current arrangement but if there's a consensus to do away with the Zootopia vs Bunnyburrow split and just have a long list of characters, I'd advocate keeping "Main Protagonists" with Judy and Nick on top. Then have "Supporting Cast (in order of XXX) and we decide on what XXX is.

I think sorting by name has challenges, given the mix of people with only first names (Gazelle), only last names (Chief Bogo), both first and last (Benjamin Clawhauser) and those who are part of logical group even though they have individual names (i.e. Cliff Side Wolves including Larry/Gary or Judy's Childhood Friends including Jaguar, Sharla, and Bobby).

Cast Credit order leaves out the non-speakers, Mr. Otterton, Bobby Catmull, Gazelle's tigers) and is kinda obscure.

I'd lean toward order of appearance but we'd have to decide if it's purely physical appearance or does an image count? Both Gazelle and Mr. Otterton appear as images earlier than their physical appearance. Also, keep in mind Doug was the driver of the truck that nearly hit Nick at the ice cream shop so he'd appear in the list much earlier than expected.

Regardless, If we go the ordered list route we should agree to the ordering here first, and work out the exact rules so we can refer to this discussion for any future updates.

I was thinking of another possibility. After we corrected the whole "each character section has it's own subpage debacle" by pulling all the character entries back onto a single page, I was the one who did that work. I tried to group the characters together in a way that "felt" right without trying to formally define the grouping with a label. Thus, Lionheart & Bellwether were together, all the ZPD entries were together, all Mr.Big entries were together, Finnick was near Doug who was next to Jesse/Woolter because they were "bad guys", Yax was next to Nangi, etc.

Since we're probably not going to be adding more characters to the list and Snicka recognized the pattern I had tried to lay down, why don't we just remove "Zootopia Residents" and "Bunnyburrow Residents" and just include them all under "Supporting Cast" and keep the current logical (but undefined) groupings. Then if someone wants to tweak a character's position on the list they can do so. (Hopefully in a way that makes logical sense and not "I put Finnick next to Bellwether because I like slash fics of those two".)

Hmm, if we do lump "Zootopia Residents" and "Bunnyburrow Residents" into one catch all "Supporting Characters (Ordered by X)", I kinda prefer "X" here to be chronological appearance in the story over alphabetic order. All told, with Judy and Nick up top in their own "Main Characters" header, that'd (roughly) be:

• Officer Judith Laverne "Judy" Hopps
• Nicholas Piberius "Nick" Wilde
• Bonnie and Stu Hopps
• Judy's childhood friends
• Gideon Grey
• Travis
• Cotton
• Major Friedkin
• Mayor Leodore Lionheart
• Assistant Mayor Dawn Bellwether
• Gazelle
• The Oryx-Antlersons
• Officer Benjamin Clawhauser
• Chief Bogo
• ZPD Officers
• Jerry Jumbeaux Jr.
• Finnick
• Duke Weaselton
• Emmitt Otterton
• Mrs. Otterton
• Yax
• Nangi
• Flash Slothmore
• Raymond and Kevin
• Mr. Big
• Fru Fru
• Renato Manchas
• Junior Ranger Scouts
• Cliffside Wolves
• Dr. Madge Honey Badger
• Doug Ramses
• Jesse and Woolter
• Tiger Dancers

There's some wiggle room in there, though:

• Fru Fru technically shows up shortly after Weaselton does, but in spite of that, it makes more sense to me to group her with Mr. Big.
• The ZPD officers in general show up before Bogo does (they're awaiting him in the bullpen), but it feels more correct to put him first as they're far more incidental to the plot than he is.
• I'm not 100% sure where Cotton first appears at all, and am a little surprised she even has a folder, but I'm including her regardless. Though I have her before Major Friedkin (the drill instructor), she might better fit after Friedkin - heck, maybe after Mayor Lionheart and Asst. Mayor Bellwether.
• The Ottertons could very easily be flipped, since Mrs. Otterton appears before Emmitt, though at the same time Emmitt's more the driving force behind the investigation.

My two cents, anyway.

Edited by ShadowHog Moon◊

mcgrew mentioned putting the ultra-minor characters at the end of the list, regardless of the order otherwise being used.

If we did this, I think Cotton should also receive this treatment even though she technically has a spoken line, since she's still a background character.

I rewatched the movie last weekend, and I think Cotton appears after Major Friedkin. We cut directly from A Minor Kidroduction (before Cotton was even born) to the ZPD training academy. We see Cotton later, after Judy completes her training. (I think we see her at the graduation, as well as waving goodbye at the train station.)

And the same way that it makes sense to list Bogo before the ZPD Officers, I think it might make sense to list Mr Big before Raymond and Kevin. And for that matter, to list Bogo before Clawhauser. Bonnie & Stu are already before Judy's childhood friends, even though we see at least one of them on-stage with Judy before we cut away to see Judy's family in the audience.

And it feels odd to have the Tiger Dancers separated from Gazelle. From a strictly "order of appearance" point of view, they are seen with her at the peace rally, although we do see Gazelle in other contexts before that (on the big screen near the train station, on Clawhauser's app). I'm not sure Clawhauser's app counts as an appearance of the Tiger Dancers though, given that Clawhauser's face is pasted over the tiger's face. :)

By the same logic, I think it would feel odd to have Cotton separated from the other Bunnyburrow residents.

Technically, we see Emmitt's photo first, in the bullpen, even though at the time we know him only as "a teensy little otter" (or whatever Bogo calls him).

Edited by mcgrew

If we go by the cast credit list (which is a non-subjective list as it's right there at the end of the movie), the order of the characters is the following:

• Judy Hopps
• Nick Wilde
• Chief Bogo
• Bellwether
• Clawhauser
• Bonnie & Stu Hopps
• Yax
• Mayor Lionheart
• Mrs. Otterton
• Duke Weaselton
• Gazelle
• Flash
• Mr. Big
• Gideon Grey
• Drill Sergeant (Friedkin)
• Jerry Jumbeaux Jr.
• Badger Doctor (Madge)
• Nangi
• Mr Manchas
• Finnick
• (Frantic Pig - has no folder here)
• Fru Fru
• Doug
• (Peter Moosebridge - also has no folder here)
• Bucky & Pronk Oryx-Antlerson
• Officer Mchorn (and by extension the other ZPD officers)
• (Landlady, Mouse foreman, Priscilla - none of them have a folder)

Characters missing from the list, but having a folder here are: Judy's childhood friends, Travis, Cotton, Emmitt Otterton, Raymond & Kevin, Junior Ranger Scouts, Cliffside Wolves, Jesse & Woolter and the Tiger dancers.

The credits list sure does seem random. I'm sure there's some logic to it, even if the logic is based on how much the voice actors were paid, or something equally irrelevant to the story. And it does point out some of the characters that we've missed. For example, perhaps we should create a folder for the newscasters, with tropes that apply to Fabienne Growley, Peter Moosebridge, and the characters that replace Peter Moosebridge in the various localized versions of the movie.

My thoughts...

I don't like cast credit order, it's too hinged on the character having a voice actor and a name, it's incomplete and the order logic is undefined and some characters aren't named properly in the credits (like Major Friedkin and Larry who was named after the movie was released). Plus this is tvtropes not IMDB.

In terms of "order of appearance": Cotton first appears at Judy's graduation. So after Lionheart/Bellwether In pure appearance order, Doug appears just before Jerry Jumbeaux Jr as he's driving the truck that almost hits Nick. He's also at the press conference. Both are long before his appearance at the subway car. Mr. Otterton appears in photo form right after Mrs. Otterton, but in physical form after the Cliffside Wolves.

Personally, I don't see the value in saying we ordered the list by XXX, and then have a bunch of exceptions for things like it not making sense to separate the tigers from gazelle or putting Mr.Big before Raymond/Kevin or the minor characters at the end.

If we're going to group things by subjective aesthetic sensibilities, then let's just agree to do it that way from the start. Let's remove the "Zootopia"/"Bunnyburrow" headings, tweak the current list as it seems appropriate, and just have the new heading say "Supporting Cast" and not say it's ordered by XXX, if we're not going to follow that ordering rule.

EDIT: It feels like the basic consensus I'm getting from these comments is to put major characters more towards the top of the list, really minor characters towards the bottom of the list, and wanting to group characters that have a connecting theme together (ie all Mr. Big characters, all ZPD, keep the Ottertons together, keep Gazelle/Tigers together, keep Judy's friends together, etc.) But aesthetic grouping seems to be the guiding principle rather that pure objective rules.

Edited by rva98014

This vaguely defined aesthetic grouping rva98014 just described sounds a lot like what we're doing already, just without the Bunnyburrow/Zootopia distinction.

The question then is, do we keep this distinction or not? Personally, I don't mind keeping it as-is.

---

Also, +1 on giving the ZNN newscasters a folder. The question there is, should they share one folder between them, or each get one?

I think they probably ought to share a folder because they probably share most of their tropes.

Edited by BURGINABC

Also, a single folder for all the newscasters allows us to address the various localized versions of Peter Moosebridge.

Technically, the issue of the region-dependent second newscaster doesn't prevent the snow leopard from having her own folder.

But I agree it would probably be cleaner to just put the whole ZNN in one folder.

EDIT: Do you think we should start a new discussion thread for adding the ZNN? This thread was originally about increasing (or reducing, if we accept rva 98014's proposal) the amount of explicit organization in character sheet. Since that discussion isn't finished as far as I can tell, it might be cleaner to keep the discussions separate.

Edited by BURGINABC

How much more discussion do we need? Someone can create the ZNN folder, move the related tropes into the folder, and we're done. Right?

Eh, good point. I was overthinking it.

I tend to do that...

Edited by BURGINABC

I took the initiative and created the folder for the news anchors.

Regarding the reorganization, I think rva98014's "aesthetic" organization (the one we are currently doing more or less) works fine; I still think the Zootopia/Bunnyburrow distinction is unnecessary, but it's okay if we leave it as it is.

Late reply, and tangential at that, but something just struck me...

You said the Doylist reason for why he doesn't talk is that he has no voice actor, but that seems dubious to me. Obviously, this wasn't a low budget production where they can't afford to hire V As for minor characters. If they wanted to, they could have easily gotten him a voice actor even if it was just to speak one line.

The Doylist reason for him not speaking, then, is that the screenwriters didn't want him to speak. I doubt external constraints were a factor.

This still leaves open the question of whether there's a story trope or character trope in play relating to his silence, or if it's just an incidental product of how brief the scene was.

Edited by BURGINABC

You're correct that they could have easily come up with someone to do a voice for Mr. Otterton had they wanted. After all they did have someone do his feral snarling when he went savage.

So you're right that his non-speaking in that scene must have been intentional. The thing that always struck me was how absolutely silent he was in that scene. No words, not even a sigh of contentment or a vocalized "mmmmm...", nothing.

The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to feel that Mr. Otterton may in fact qualify for The Voiceless after all. The trope calls for "The character who, though able to speak, never does so on screen". It's usually played as a gag and the character often ends up finally saying something profound at the end of the film.

We know Mr. Otterton can speak, in fact his ramblings about night howlers is what initiates the Red Herring conclusion that night howlers are wolves. Yet he never speaks on screen even at a moment where it makes absolutely no sense for him not to. True, it's not a gag in this film like many of the other The Voiceless examples so that may count against it.

The trope repair discussion was calling out that this trope was used incorrectly by many, many examples to site where a minor or background character says nothing even when there's no compelling reason in-story for them speak. This is what prompted the mass-cleanup that removed the examples on this page.

But as noted above, for Otterton not to say anything while embracing his wife, just seems odd and perhaps a justification for the trope.

Thoughts??

Edited by rva98014

The cleanup seems to be for minor characters who don't speak simply because they don't have occasion to.

This seems like a frustratingly borderline example of that, since he has so little screentime, but one of the few scenes he's in seems like it should have given him occasion to speak.

I wonder, did this cleanup effort propose anything like a minimum screentime guideline for valid examples?

Anything at all about how prominent a character must be before their silence can be regarded as noteworthy?

Edited by BURGINABC

In reading the trope repair thread, I didn't get that they had worked out The Voiceless to that level of detail. They just had a consensus that there were too many examples of a minor character not talking being regarded as The Voiceless .

Their discussion was confounded as they began trying to to determine the distinction between nearly a dozen tropes all revolving around a character not talking (Cute Mute, Elective Mute, Elective Unintelligible, Enemy Mime, Heroic Mime, He Who Must Not Be Heard, Mute but Not Silent, The Quiet One, Silent Antagonist, The Silent Bob, Silent Snarker, The Speechless, The Unintelligible, The Voiceless).

They kinda had their hands full and went on a purge. Most of their cleanup on the Zootopia character page I agreed with but had three examples I felt needed a trope because the character was silent but more in the foreground than the background: Bobby Catmull (who I felt deserved Facial Dialogue), Raymond/Kevin (who I felt deserved Silent Antagonist) and Mr. Otterton because I feel he should have said something while hugging his wife after being savage for at least 4 months.

So since The Voiceless is still a bit undefined, if we decide to use it for Otterton, we can cite this discussion as justification during another purge.

Edited by rva98014

Reported him on Ask The Tropers for edit-warring. It's a shoehorned and horribly written example.

Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

FYI... ganymede8 has been suspended by the admins... Not for this instance but rather some wide spread trope abuse.

It looks good.

I tried tweaking the screenshot I had with my graphics program (IrfanView) and kept getting pink tinges as well. It's being caused by the red back-lit screen that's part of lock/keypad to Dr. Badger's right. It's filling the ambient light with a red tinge and Disney's custom rendering engine, Hyperion, calculates up to 10 light bounces for rendering purposes (by comparison PIXAR's engines only do 3-5 bounces, seriously, Hyperion, for the moment, is the most advanced rendering engine in the industry) that's giving Dr. Badger's normally white hair a pinkish hue.

I'm sure Photoshop or GIMP could remove the pink in a heartbeat, but I'm woefully unskilled with those programs. I think this is a probably as good as we can get.

Edited by rva98014

Interesting. I'd never heard of Hyperion, I assumed Disney had simply appropriated Pixar's Renderman. Also, I would assume that regardless of engine, you could probably calculate as many bounces as you want as long as you're willing to tolerate the slowing of render times that comes with that. However I'm more familiar with simple brute-force ray-tracing methods (e.g. Path Tracing) than the optimized, highly arcane rendering methods that have traditionally been used in the industry to keep render times under control, so maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe those methods have inherent limits in their bounces.

I am somewhat skilled with the GIMP, as well as the GMIC filter plugin that's much nicer than its built-in filters, but I felt like removing the pink without washing all the color out of the image would be challenging.

It's especially difficult when working with something that's been JPEG'd already; for example I wasn't able to run a sharpening filter because it made the JPEG artifacts more noticeable and thus ugly-fied the image. The term we use for that in image editing is "Garbage In, Garbage Out", meaning there's only so much you can do with a low quality image. Even if I had the screenshot straight off the Blu-Ray (the screenshot I posted earlier is from DVD), there would still be MP4 artifacts, and the simple fact that the original scene is dark and low contrast limits the amount of information that any image processing software has to work with^note unless you're using EXR, which is probably the format the frames were originally rendered to, but Disney's not likely to share them. when trying to enhance the image.

Despite this, I sort of took your "I'm sure Photoshop or GIMP could remove the pink in a heartbeat" comment as a challenge and decided to try again, and I actually was able to find a "selective desaturate" filter that, with a bit of tweaking, was subtle enough to cut back a bit on the reddish cast without muddying up the image.

Edited by BURGINABC

Nice work on the Dr. Madge cleanup. Also for what it's worth, I tend to get my screencaps from disneyscreencaps.com/zootopia-2016/. They've already split the film down into individual frames spaced about 3-4 seconds apart. I only screencap from my Blu Ray (actually VLC on my PC) when I need a very specific frame capture.

Disney had been using Renderman for it's earlier films and it wasn't until Big Hero 6 that they shifted to their own rendering engine. In fact since Hyperion was still in beta, for a while BH6 was in dual production, rendering the animation in both Renderman and Hyperion until Disney decided to risk finishing the film with just Hyperion.

There are many aspects of the Hyperion engine that are stunning technological achievements in the field of rendering animation from being able to automatically identify and group light paths that are traveling in a similar direction so they can be more efficiently calculated to being able to "self load balance" and interrupt a group calculation going on in one section of the render because another section suddenly needs more computational resources. If you're curious, here are two links that go into some good technical detail on Hyperion (www.fxguide.com/featured/disneys-new-production-renderer-hyperion-yes-disney/ and www.fxguide.com/featured/the-fur-reaching-tech-of-zootopia/ )

Edited by rva98014

Interesting articles. It sounds like Hyperion actually is a Path Tracer, albeit a super-optimized one with some clever ideas on how to work around the usual drawbacks of that method.

I always suspected that as computers kept getting faster and GPGPU became more mature, the old and arcane Renderman way of doing things would eventually be displaced by easier-to-use light simulations.

Looks like it already happened and I failed to notice for some reason...

EDIT: Though this discussion page is supposed to be for editorial actions on this site, I actually just added some info to Wikipedia's path tracing article, using one of the articles you linked as a citation.

Edited by BURGINABC

You're right we probably should give Dr. Badger a folder.

That said I don't think this trope applies to her. Boomerang Bigot is a "character who thinks that all members of Group X are an inferior race/species... even while being a member of Group X themselves."

When Dr. Badger made her pronouncement, it was that the only animals going savage were predators and that it might be time to consider their biology. This all took place in the context of a Doctor giving her medical analysis based upon her work with the patients.

She never put forth anything that would imply she had a bias, like they may be reverting to their "primitive, savage ways".... that was Judy's bias and felt it was justified when she heard Dr. Badger talk about the predator's "biology" and the troper who posted the example seems to think Dr Badger supports that theory as well, but actually she kept it straightforward and clinical.

I don't think the scene justifies the Boomerang Bigot trope.

Edited by rva98014

Should I PM Macgyver644200 to get their input on this?

Yeah, I think it would be nice to let Macgyver644200 know we're discussing it. And I don't think the trope applies to Dr. Badger either, for the reasons rva98014 mentioned.

Edited by mcgrew

I went ahead and sent the PM.

I for one, am not sure whether or not this example is not to some extent applicable, though I don't entirely agree with the current wording. It would be nice to hear Macgyver644200 elaborate further on their reasoning.

It's ambiguous enough that it may not belong on a main page or character sheet example, maybe instead under Alternative Character Interpretation under YMMV, but I do have a headcanon that a lot of preds are to some extent ashamed or afraid of their heritage.

While we see Nick get very offended, a lot of the predators in the crowd at the press conference didn't look so much offended as alarmed, like they took Judy's pronouncements at face value and were afraid they too might go savage. And even though Judy took the idea and ran further with it than Dr. Badger had been willing to go, I still think it's somewhat telling that she was even willing to suggest that the mysterious affliction might be related to something in the predators' DNA.

But again, this is all may still be too ambiguous to warrant an example like this in the main page or character sheet.

And even if this basic idea is accepted, calling Dr. Badger a Boomerang Bigot may still be a stretch, to the point that it may be Square Peg Round Trope rather than merely Downplayed Trope. After all, worrying about the possibility of something latent in predators' genes is not quite the same as being a bigot who despises them and thinks they're all savages.

Her attitude was entirely one of fear/worry, and not at all one of hate/resentment. Whether she qualifies as an example at all, even a very Downplayed one, depends on how you interpret the definition of Boomerang Bigot.

If hate is a required criteria, then she doesn't fit, but if it more broadly includes any kind of racist or otherwise prejudiced ideas, then she may indeed fit as a downplayed yet still significant example.

She may not have used the "revert to their primitive savage ways" phrasing that Judy used, but her theory still did suggest she may have bought into in the concept of early predators having been violent savages, and suspected that the symptoms she was seeing could have been related to that by means of some dormant gene that was suddenly being expressed again for some unknown reason. So the questions to consider are:

A) Is this too ambiguous for a main page/character sheet trope example? After all, it's hard to extrapolate her views with any certainty from the one scene she was in.

B) Does this even fit the definition of the trope?

---

EDIT: Another thing that may be relevant, is that not only did Nick get offended when Judy parroted out a slightly exaggerated version of Dr. Badger's theory at the press conference, but there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Nick and Judy's facial expressions when overhearing Dr. Badger's theory for the first time. While Judy's face screamed "Oh, that explains everything!", Nick's face was more like "What the hell?".

So, in-universe, Nick found Dr. Badger's idea to be offensive even in the clinical way she herself phrased it originally, not just Judy's version. This sort of seems like a (not necessarily conclusive) point in favor of the example being valid to some extent.

Edited by BURGINABC

It would be interesting to hear Macgyver 644200 reasoning on this. Although I feel given the brevity of Dr. Badger's conversation, it's going to be too ambiguous to fully justify her intent.

She was cut off by Lionheart after she suggested the "biology" angle and wasn't able to elaborate on what she meant. Note that with the exception of Otterton (who was infected to keep him silent and preserve the masquerade), all the other missing mammals were of a species that were very clearly predators (only bears, wolves, and big cats). Dr. Badger may have been concerned about a virus that was only affecting predators or a possible contamination of something in the predator's food supply. Dr. Badger seemed to be operating from a fear/concern that there would be further occurrences given her saying "we can't keep this a secret".

However, she never took it down to "something in their DNA"... that was Judy's interpretation at the press conference which is a near mirror of what she said in her school play and, I think Judy felt justified in going with this explanation because she was triggered by Dr. Badger's use of the word "biology" but it's unclear if this what the doctor intended.

Edited by rva98014

Yeah, you've got a good point there. I just checked again and she never does specifically mention genetics, just "biology".

While I still think it's quite plausible she had some preconcieved notions, it's quite vague and ambiguous. Probably one reason we hadn't thought to give her a folder yet, is that a character only appearing in one scene is generally going to lack character traits that are clearly defined enough to start applying very many Character Tropes without extrapolating inappropriately and making assumptions about the character's underlying thought process without enough evidence.

Her folder is probably going to end up quite short, on par with the tiger dancers or Cotton...

As for this example, I vote we get rid of it and maybe replace it with an Alternative Character Interpretation example on the YMMV page.

Edited by BURGINABC

Original poster here, and I have to say I agree with you. My original post should be in Wild Mass Guessing. Though I hope I can come up with more than that guess to give her.

I would agree that Boomerang Bigot should be removed in favor of an Alternative Character Interpretation entry on the YMMV page. It's not quite WMG but not strong enough for the main character page.

If we decide to give her a folder on the character page (she does have a speaking role after all), it would be small, but I can think of a few things to mention. She'd definitely qualify for Small Role, Big Impact because as we discussed, her mention of "biology" gives Judy justification to express her "primitive, savage ways" bias at the press conference. She'd also be an example of Seldom-Seen Species, and possibly a few tropes that deal with the fact that her character was based on "Honey Badger" who was more prominent in the earlier "Tame Collar" version of Zootopia (she along with Finnick and Clawhauser were the team that helped Nick open "Wilde Times") and was transplanted into the new story. Maybe Reused Character Design?

Also possibly some mention that Honey Badger's character was a paranoid believer in conspiracy theories including one where Sheep were running everything and it was a sheep conspiracy that was running the Nighthowler plot (Recycled Script?).

and possibly a few tropes that deal with the fact that her character was based on "Honey Badger" who was more prominent in the earlier "Tame Collar" version of Zootopia (she along with Finnick and Clawhauser were the team that helped Nick open "Wilde Times") and was transplanted into the new story.

Shouldn't anything from an earlier revision go on the trivia page, under something like What Could Have Been or Development Gag? In fact, I'm pretty sure we already have most of what you mentioned listed there.

I don't think Reused Character Design is applicable because it's for character designs reused from separate works, not WIP versions of the same work, which the original "Wilde Times" plot ultimately is despite the massive amount of retooling. And Recycled Script is marked as a trivia entry rather than a trope, in addition to not fitting anyway (the fact that the earlier version had a paranoid character believing in a sheep conspiracy, and then the final movie has an actual sheep conspiracy, falls squarely under Development Gag, also a trivia entry, which I think we already have.)

...but yeah, if we don't allow tropes pertaining to earlier versions, then her trope list will indeed be pretty short.

I agree with the Small Role, Big Impact example, though. But I honestly can't think of much else. Nothing on the Doctor Index really seems to fit, except maybe Labcoat of Science and Medicine.

Edited by BURGINABC

I went ahead and removed the example, and wrote a replacement for the ACE subpage, which was apparently forked off from the YMMV page at some point due to length.

I think Dr. Badger deserves a folder for herself. Probably in proximity to the Cliffside Wolves, who work in the same facility as her.

She's a Seldom-Seen Species as a honey badger, she wears a Labcoat of Science and Medicine, she has Small Role, Big Impact, and also Species Surname (her last name is Badger).

As for Species Surname — Though we've been calling her Dr. Badger, do we actually know for sure what her last name is?

For that matter, as her name is not even given in the movie itself, with Lionheart simply calling her "Doctor", where is the Word of God type source that we got her name from to begin with? Does it give her full name, or does it simply call her "Madge"? I know that her character model was recycled from a character in the abandoned "Wilde Times" plot whose name was simply "Honey Badger" (first name "Honey", last name "Badger"), but that may not be relevant at all to the doctor character in the final film.

I went ahead and added a basic stub of the folder, currently listed simply as "Madge".

Edited by BURGINABC

I remember early promotional material calling her "Dr. Madge Honey Badger", as if it was her full name. Whether Honey is her middle name or she has two surnames is ambiguous. Apparently The Official Zootopia Handbook also refers to her by this name, but the film credits only call her "Badger Doctor", leaving it ambiguous.

Fair enough, I'll take your word for it that there is sufficient All There in the Manual to call her "Dr. Madge Honey Badger".

EDIT: I've renamed the folder and amended the All There in the Script example.

Edited by BURGINABC

I decided to add Species Surname anyway, since regardless whether her last name is "Badger" or "Honey Badger", both indicate her species.

Species Surname is definitely fine. Anyway...

Seldom-Seen Species is another trope that's been brought up, but hasn't been added yet.

Does she qualify? Badgers in general are traditionally a common fixture of Funny Animal media (e.g. The Wind in the Willows).

However, a honey badger is not exactly the same thing as that type of badger. But even if regarded entirely separately from Western badger species, I'm not sure if the honey badger qualifies as its public awareness has skyrocketed ever since the spread of the "honey badger don't care!" meme.

Edited by BURGINABC

Although the meme made honey badgers popular, they still don't often appear in media, apart from Bunga in The Lion Guard (another Disney product created after the meme).

AFAIK, Seldom-Seen Species is judged in terms of which species are rarely seen at the time the work was created.

It may have been rarely seen before the meme, but is that still the case?

After all, you were easily able to think of another example, and I don't think the fact that it's very recent makes it any less relevant.

If we saw a honey badger in something from 1992, that might qualify, but I'm not sure about 2016.

If anything, I'd say its appearance in a Lion King spinoff children's show alongside a lion, a cheetah, and a hippo is a decent indicator that the honey badger may be well on its way to joining those species as one of the best-known African animals. I wouldn't be surprised to see many more honey badgers depicted in the future.

EDIT: It may or may not be worth noting that the character sheet for the aforementioned TV series doesn't list Seldom-Seen Species for Bunga, but does list it for Ono the egret.

Edited by BURGINABC

Face Palm. Once again we overlooked the obvious. Sigh.

I vote for their own folder since they did have their own interaction and dialogue with Nick and Judy away from Doug on the subway car.

I'll start looking for some good images of them.

Also what would be a good quote for them? "Hey Doug we got your latte?" or their variations of "stop the train"?

Edited by rva98014

I like Jesse's line: "We kinda got a situation at the lab... Oh! It just got worse!"

But if that's too much of a spoiler, then Woolter's latte line works too: "Hey, Doug, open up! We've got your latte!"

This page is full of unmarked spoilers. The only way to avoid spoilers is not to open any folders.

The quotes are inside the folders just the same as the trope lists, so I don't see any issue there.

I like the situation quote myself.

I added a folder for Jesse and Woolter along with the best images I could find for them. Also added a few trope examples that we should fill out over time.

I added A Lizard Named "Liz" and Shout-Out Theme Naming for them. Also, do they qualify as Mooks? They are the villain's low-ranking henchmen who physically fight the protagonists, and she does have a few similar goons (like the ram police officers that assist her in the museum).

I seem to remember it being deleted on the grounds that Doug is shown to be unfriendly in the more straightforward sense of being cold and curt, with the level of emotion in Weaselton's reaction being more of a joke.

I was the one who removed the entry, my edit reason was "The example takes Duke's label of "unfriendly" to mean it implies him being a vicious, dangerous criminal who is not to be trifled with. But that is an assumption. In the movie, Doug is portrayed as being self-absorbed, cold, calculating, and having a disturbingly casual attitude towards his job given the chaos he's inflicting on the city. In other words, not a very friendly character. "

As Informed Attribute is about "Something is said to be X, but not shown to be that way." I was looking at the specific attribute "unfriendly". While Doug may not have been unfriendly in the way Duke may have implied it (which I felt was more the writers going for a joke about Duke's limited vocabulary), he was still shown to be unfriendly in the movie.

Edited by rva98014

Hmm... I guess, going by the absolute most literal interpretation of what was stated, it was not an Informed Attribute.

Given that Duke said it in a way that implied this was a scary guy you don't want to mess with, but then it just turned out to mean that he's literally not-friendly, what do you think is the trope for this?

Maybe a Subversion of The Dreaded?

Edited by BURGINABC

That could work. It's definitely the tone of Weaselton's voice that conveys the sense that he's warning Nick and Judy that Doug will be a "vicious, dangerous criminal who is not to be trifled with".

Then when he is actually encountered that image is subverted by coming across as a "nonchalant Punch Clock Villain who appears to be much less dedicated than his associates Woolter and Jesse". Especially given the last we see of him is that he's looking more forlorn over his spilled latte than his laboratory car pulling away.

In that regard I think a subversion of The Dreaded or maybe The Heavy is a good fit.

I definitely don't think it has anything to do with The Heavy. I'm pretty sure that trope requires a villainous character to have an active foreground role for most of the story, so someone who isn't visible until the third act isn't an example of that, subverted or otherwise.

I think it works well as a subversion of The Dreaded, but I'm too tired right now to come up with a good writeup for it. I've also got a nagging feeling that there might be a trope that fits even better than The Dreaded, but I can't think of it offhand.

Edited by BURGINABC

I went ahead and added the example, though it could probably use a bit more work.

I just finished reading the discussion thread that explains the reason for redirect. I would vote that we change the links to the Race Against the Clock trope. I know I learned a lot about how tvtropes works by studying the pre-existing examples so I think it would be helpful to not reference tropes that have been decommissioned.

EDIT: This discussion may be a moot point as there have already been updates to the Zootopia main, character, and shout-out pages. Are there any remaining references to be updated?

Edited by rva98014

Race Against the Clock should, in my opinion, only be potholed to those who are given the deadline.

Technically they're the same characters, so I don't think so. After all, that's what spoilers are for.

Being located at the top of the food chain does not make one a superior species

EDIT: wrong thread.

Edited by BURGINABC

oops

Edited by mcgrew

Although Gideon is the only fox shown with retractable claws I would vote to put it on the story page because having retractable claws gives Gideon a chance to do a dramatic yet ominous flourish that underscores the level of threat toward Judy. He says "Oh, you don't know when to quit, do you?" and then pops open the claws on his right hand with a very audible "chink" sound, cutting to Judy gasping at the sight.

Since the Artistic License – Biology is done one time only in service of the story instead of being an ongoing character trait of Gideon (or any other fox), I think it's more appropriate on the story page.

Edited by rva98014

Are you sure they meant to portray him as having retractable claws? I think something shallower than that is at play.

While he did make a flourish with his claws before scratching Judy, complete with a "weapon being drawn" sound effect, I just frame-stepped through that scene to double-check an and sure enough he clearly had his claws out for the entire scene, even before he made a show of "drawing his weapon".

Now that I think of it, it's sort of a case of Fridge Brilliance that the scratches on her face weren't that severe, since even though Gideon was trying to use claws as a symbol of predator power, canids actually have relatively dull claws that are more suited to digging than to scratching. The actual natural weapon of canids would be their teeth and jaws, but Gideon wasn't quite psycho enough to use them on her.

Recently we've been finding a lot of examples of artistic license or other unrealistic elements that we'd missed (or willfully ignored) for a long time, but I don't think this is one of them.

Well, no, that's not quite right, as the scene is most definitely an example of another unrealistic trope: Audible Sharpness.

That trope is so pervasive that instead of noticing it as something out of place in and of itself, we take for granted that the sound effect means something is literally being unsheathed, and then based on that we fixate on how that in turn is unrealistic in light of fox anatomy :p

Do we currently have a listing for Audible Sharpness?

Edited by BURGINABC

I just re-watched the scene on Blu Ray and you're absolutely correct. Gideon's claws are out the entire time. The flourish of him going from closed fist to open open hand complete with Audible Sharpness sound effect, gives the impression that the claws are "popping" out even though they aren't.

I added Audible Sharpness a while ago, so it seems that Artistic License – Biology is actually an incorrect example.

EDIT: Unless there are objections, I'll remove the Artistic License – Biology example with explanation. EDIT 2: Or burginabc can beat me to it ;-)

Edited by rva98014

I just went ahead and deleted the example.

I also adjusted the wording of the Audible Sharpness example a bit.

Burginabc and I were going through the characters page and cleaning up duplicates (ie tropes that exist on both the main and character page) and re-cataloging a few tropes that seemed to be better suited as story tropes.

Very little was actually deleted, it was just a reorganization, so there's no content loss and therefore no problem reinstating as needed. It's sometimes tricky to best decide where a trope falls, so if you have tropes you feel should be on the character page, list them, let's discuss it and get them correctly assigned.

Edited by rva98014

Hmm... the idea, I think, is that the main purpose of having a separate character sheet is to avoid disorganization and clutter on the main trope list by only listing plot devices on the main list.

I guess if a trope is both a plot device and highly pertinent to analyzing a specific character, that's kind of tough because it's relevant to both pages, but too much duplication between the pages defeats the purpose of having a character sheet to begin with, as the character sheet is meant to be an offshoot of the main trope list that keeps things organized and de-cluttered, rather than as something entirely independent.

I'm open to discussion on how to best categorize these tropes. My "rule of thumb" has been the degree to which the trope is heavily tied to the specific story. For example, the essence of Judy is that she's an Action Girl, Cuddle Bug with Expressive Ears. Her role as the Unwitting Pawn is strongly tied to this specific plot and given her Character Development where she starts to grow out of her naivete, it seems unlikely to be repeated in future stories.

I still encourage Hvedekorn to collect the tropes they feel should be reevaluated and we can have a discussion from there.

Oh, I somehow missed that those tropes were actually present on the main page. Then I'm a bit more optimistic than when I thought they were deleted altogether.

I'll try (not now, but maybe during the next few days) to look into whether there are tropes that should be reevulated. Though a little comment: I feel like a trope is still valid for character sheets even though the character grew out of it. Think of all the countless works where a character is introduced as a Jerkass, then takes a level in kindness and is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold or a Nice Guy at the end. Does that mean the Jerkass trope doesn't belong anymore? I think it does belong. As long as a characterization or role trope is played straight at one point or another, I think it should be included even if it doesn't fit the character by the end of the story. Otherwise, 99,9% of TvTropes' character sheets would be due for a major cleanup.

Edited by Hvedekorn

Yes, this was primarily a reorganization, not a mass-deletion.

And I agree that characterization tropes should probably be listed on the character sheet even if Character Development causes them to be left behind later on, but temporary cases of character-as-plot-device tropes probably fit best on the page covering the relevant plot (either the main trope list in most cases, or possibly even just a Recap page if it's a massively serialized work and the example is very short-term.)

Edited by BURGINABC

I just noticed that during the purge,

---

• Honest John's Dealership: His "hustles" primarily involved reselling cheap things at a massive profit using dishonest salesmanship tactics and massive corner-cutting. Such as the pawpsicle scam of buying the Jumbo-pop, melting it on a rooftop and catching it through a drain pipe, refreezing it into mini Pawpsicles by putting it on the ground in Tundratown, then selling them as "organic Pawpsicles" to rodents. Then reselling the Pawpsicle sticks to other rodents as lumber claiming it is "red wood". He's been able to avoid arrest and stay inside the law thanks to having the required permits to sell his products (though how someone preparing food in such an unsanitary manner could get and keep such permits is a mystery) and his Exact Words Loophole Abuse.

---

was removed from Nick's character sheet on the basis that it is not a character trope.

I would contest that, it clearly seems to be a character trope describing a character who is a dishonest salesman. I think it belongs on the character sheet.

I would propose restoring this example, and removing Nick's main page example and migrating the Duke Weaselton example from the main page to here also.

Edited by BURGINABC

I agree with the assertion that Honest John's Dealership is a character trope; it's even categorized under "Stock Characters", so, yeah?

Moon◊

I've no problem putting it back on the character sheet. I would modify the wording slightly. The current phrasing makes it sound like the majority of Nick's hustles are of the "buy cheap, sell high" variety. In truth we only know of two "hustles".. the pawpsicles and skunk-butt rug (of which we have no real details). The best we can say is that the one hustle we are shown carried out in detail is an example of Honest John's Dealership.

Edited by rva98014

Hm... if you want to argue that we really only see one example of this, then I see why you wanted to classify it as a story trope.

I, however, got the impression that this was how he operated in general all throughout his career as a "hustler". That may not have been 100% explicit, but that's the impression I was getting.

I felt that what we saw of his popsicle hustle was intended to be a representative example of the sort of thing he did on a day-to-day basis, thus implying that this is generally the sort of thing that he does. Am I assuming too much?

Edited by BURGINABC

Okay, I looked at it more closely and sort of see what you meant. I revised it slightly to better convey the ambiguity of whether his "hustling" might have involved other things besides that. I also made a couple other adjustments.

---

• Honest John's Dealership: From what was shown of his "hustles", it appears he got much of his income by reselling cheap things at a massive profit using dishonest salesmanship tactics and massive corner-cutting. Such as the pawpsicle scam of buying the Jumbo-pop, melting it on a rooftop and catching it through a drain pipe, refreezing it into mini Pawpsicles by putting it on the ground in Tundratown, then selling them as "organic Pawpsicles" to rodents. Then reselling the Pawpsicle sticks to other rodents as lumber claiming it is "red wood". He was able to avoid arrest and stay inside the law thanks to having the required permits to sell his products^* though how someone preparing food in such an unsanitary manner could get and keep such permits is a mystery and his Exact Words Loophole Abuse.

Edited by BURGINABC

That looks fine to me.

Done.

The school name is confirmed in the book "The Art of Zootopia" here's a link to the page shot ... http://walt-disney-zootopia.tumblr.com/post/140757599162/caption-1p55-woodlands-elementary-school. It shows sketches of the students (one of whom looks like Bobby Catmull). I also recall there being a series of storyboards showing the play, not as an actual performance but as dress rehearsal at the school itself with Judy as the lead and the other students performing. I'm trying to find that but no luck so far.

Edited by rva98014

Well, the storyboards can probably be regarded as non-canon as they come from an earlier revision of the story.

Speaking of which, does the artbook contain art for any scrapped ideas, or is it exclusive to the final concept?

Remember, anything scrapped falls under What Could Have Been, which belongs on the Trivia page only. This applies not only to the shock collar plot and Jack Savage spy flick, but even to earlier versions of the Judy-centered plot.

I think I heard of an earlier version of the play scene where it was an officially sanctioned school play, and Judy objected to the stereotypical casting such as making herself a carrot farmer and making a raccoon play a garbage truck driver. This may have been the scene you saw a storyboard of.

But that was scrapped in favor of a talent show project which Judy and her friends appear to have come up with independently. With this change, can the school even still be regarded as canon?

Edited by BURGINABC

I'm familiar with the storyboard you mention, as I recall it was a school play that involved a song filled with animals singing about their particular stereotype...racoon=garbage collector, beaver=builder and Judy balks at singing her verse about being just a carrot farmer. I believe this then shifted into Bobby Catmull getting stuck up a fake tree that was on stage and Judy's cleverly used a laser point to guide him down safely. This was followed by the arrival of a ZPD officer who had been called who praised Judy for her quick thinking and comments that she'd make a good cop.

The storyboard scene I'm thinking of was a rehearsal of the play that's actually shown in the movie (more or less) except that Judy's blood, blood and death scene included a plastic, beating heart which caused the teacher overseeing the play to do a facepalm.

I don't have a copy of Art of Zootopia in front of me but I seem to recall it was a mixture of final concepts and scrapped concepts.

I'm still looking to see if Woodlands Elementary appears in something more tied to final concept like "The Guide to Zooptopia" book.

Hmm... the link you referred to earlier says

Hopp’s peers are Woodland creatures like bunnies, squirrels, deer, and bears. The school, which isn’t in the film, was a simple, playful set that reflected the mostly friendly nature of Hopp’s childhood.

It seems notable to me is that it refers to the school in the past tense. Rather than "The school ... is...", it says "The school ... was..."

To me that seems to throw its canonicity relative to the final version into doubt, but maybe I'm reading too much into that.

Anyhow... unless you succeed at finding some sort of All There in the Manual showing that the school still exists and is still connected to the play in the final concept, I think it would be better to find a different name to refer to them collectively as, such as "Judy's childhood friends" or something like that.

Edited by BURGINABC

It's been a month, and no evidence has been presented that the school should be considered as part of the final concept.

I'm going ahead and changing it.

My preference is option #2, keeping the entry and marking it as a notable aversion. Gideon's willingness to engage in counseling is a significant part of his character development and I would hate to lose it.

I remember back after Zooptopia came out how many times tropers said how Gideon entered therapy as part of their examples and we had to edit it back because while we all kinda knew it was 99.9999% likely that is what the writers intended from Gideon's Sophisticated as Hell spiel it was still speculation in the context of what was shown in the movie and it had been agonizingly impossible to find any Word of God confirmation about it for a very long time. It wasn't until that October 2016 podcast with the writers/directors that they finally confirmed that Gideon had indeed participated in some kind of therapy.

So, yeah, I'd like to keep it as an aversion. Even though it's not among the list of OmnipresentTropes, it is a trope that is occurs so ubiquitously in stories that I think we should acknowledge a case where it is clearly and intentionally averted. I've lost count of the number of fan-fics I've read where Nick or Judy experience something traumatic on duty or fall into a serious relationship problem and even after numerous failed attempts to work through it themselves, seeking counseling is never considered as a option, even as a dismissive handwave.

Edited by rva98014

Hmm... I still prefer option 3. Not only does it sidestep the difficult issue of what Aversions are notable, but I've found another reason to prefer it: that the element of his characterization being described is deeply rooted in the Sophisticated as Hell example, with that example really being the one in-film occurrence that implies he's been to a shrink, and with the Twitter statement being little more than a confirmation that this implication was intentional on the part of the writers.

I prefer Word of God as a means of adding context to examples of tropes that fully occur within the work itself, as opposed to examples that rely entirely on Word of God for their entire substance.

After all, Word of God itself, and its subtropes like Word of Gay, are classified as trivia entries, not real tropes, in accordance with the Death of the Author principle of analyzing works as distinct from their authors.

This is not to say that author comments can't be useful or insightful when analyzing a work. I think they have a place in main trope pages and character sheets, but only to add flavor to examples that can clearly be placed in the work, not as a source of examples in itself. While definitely still of great interest, after-the-fact assertions by the authors must be kept subordinate to the actual work being analyzed.

I think the whole of it can be subsumed into the Sophisticated as Hell example, with it being a fairly unique and creative use of that trope to subtly imply some background details as to the nature of a character's off-screen development.

Edited by BURGINABC

I re-read the Averted Trope page and as much as I'd prefer to not lose the "No Therapist" entry, I agree with your points. If we can subsume the essence into Sophisticated as Hell I think it would be fine. Do you have an approach as to how you'd rework that entry?

I can think of two appreaches to this.

On the one hand, we have

• Sophisticated as Hell: His apology to Judy as an adult included some terms far above Gideon's usual vocabulary level, with the implication being that he was repeating something he had heard from a psychiatrist.
  Gideon: Hey Judy, I-I'd just like to say I'm sorry for how I behaved in my youth. I had a lot of self-doubt and it manifested itself in the form of unchecked rage and aggression. [Beat] I was a major jerk.

which is simple and concise, but could invite outcry of being speculative since it doesn't include the link to the evidence that this implication was intentional.

or we could do

• Sophisticated as Hell: His apology to Judy as an adult included some terms far above Gideon's usual vocabulary level, in a way that lead many to believe he had been seeing a psychiatrist. This was later confirmed in a 2016 podcast with Screenwriter (and Gideon's voice actor) Phil Johnston, who confirmed that Gideon was reciting something he heard in therapy.
  Gideon: Hey Judy, I-I'd just like to say I'm sorry for how I behaved in my youth. I had a lot of self-doubt and it manifested itself in the form of unchecked rage and aggression. [Beat] I was a major jerk.

which is more thorough and provides evidence but doesn't flow nearly as well, and its emphasis on how people interpreted it feels inappropriate outside the YMMV page.

I like the first one better. Knowing that the evidence backing up this implication exists, I don't see the need to clutter the example with it. And this discussion thread can be referred back to if anyone objects. However, I'm open to suggestions as to a better way to more fully incorporate the essense of the current There Are No Therapists example without running into the problems of my second version above.

Edited by BURGINABC

Actually, I just thought of a good compromise, making good use of an aside note:

• Sophisticated as Hell: His apology to Judy as an adult included some terms far above Gideon's usual vocabulary level, with the implication being that he was repeating something he had heard from a psychiatrist.^note Phil Johnston, one of Zootopia's screenwriters and the voice actor for Gideon, discusses this here
  Gideon: Hey Judy, I-I'd just like to say I'm sorry for how I behaved in my youth. I had a lot of self-doubt and it manifested itself in the form of unchecked rage and aggression. [Beat] I was a major jerk.

Edited by BURGINABC

Honestly, this is just making me wonder if "character received therapy and had a drastic personality shift as a result (for better or worse)" is flat-out a missing trope that'd warrant a visit to the Launch Pad. Might want to confirm it at Ask the Tropers Lost and Found Trope Finder before doing anything, though.

Edited by ShadowHog Moon◊

Closest existing trope I can think of would be The Shrink, but that's more a character trope for the psychiatrist themself, than the patient. So it certainly can't be applied here, where the relevant psychiatrist is never seen or described but merely implied to exist.

The trope you describe might be worthwhile to try to launch...

Edited by BURGINABC

I like the compromise of including the aside note. Do you have any objection to just going ahead and saying in the note that the implication of Gideon repeating what he heard from a psychiatrist was confirmed by Phil Johnston instead of vaguely saying it was discussed in the podcast?

Actually I kinda do object to that, because the format of talking about viewer's interpretations, and then saying that they were confirmed by a writer, seems wrong outside of YMMV. Even if the viewer interpretations aren't directly mentioned, they are implied by the "confirmed" phrasing.

When I wrote that 3rd example it seemed to me that it conveyed well enough that he discussed how he had used that trope to imply that Gideon had been in therapy, but now that you mention it I guess it could possibly be construed in other ways.

We could go with

• Sophisticated as Hell: His apology to Judy as an adult included some terms far above Gideon's usual vocabulary level, with the implication being that he was repeating something he had heard from a psychiatrist.^note Phil Johnston, one of Zootopia's screenwriters and the voice actor for Gideon, discusses this scene and its implications about his character here.
  Gideon: Hey Judy, I-I'd just like to say I'm sorry for how I behaved in my youth. I had a lot of self-doubt and it manifested itself in the form of unchecked rage and aggression. [Beat] I was a major jerk.

which is a tad more verbose than I'd like, but also harder to misconstrue.

I seem to be missing some subtle point here, so please forgive me but I'm not following your reasoning.

We were going to subsume the There Are No Therapists content into the Sophisticated as Hell entry. My assumption was we were going to keep the confirmation that Gideon did in fact receive some kind of therapy as part of his Reformed Bully growth. You felt the Sophisticated as Hell example that included the "confirmed in a 2016 podcast with Screenwriter (and Gideon's voice actor) Phil Johnston,...etc" was too verbose and suggested including it in an aside note.

That made sense, the main example just contains the "implication being" phrase which is technically accurate as Gideon attending counseling is never mentioned in the movie itself. But then in the two examples of you presented of moving the podcast link into the aside note we're still not confirming that yes there are therapists. We're making the trope reader open an aside note, click over to the podcast, listen to it for 45 minutes before they finally hear Phil Johnston say yes Gideon attended therapy.

I'm not understanding why the example can't just say something like...

Sophisticated as Hell: His apology to Judy as an adult included terminology far above Gideon's usual vocabulary level, with the implication being that he was repeating something he had heard from a therapist. ^note  Phil Johnston, one of Zootopia's screenwriters and the voice actor for Gideon, confirms this in his discussion of the character of Gideon here.

Edited by rva98014

I just don't think it's good editorial form, even in the aside note, to talk about fans' inferences being "confirmed" in a main trope list or a character sheet. And without said fan inference being explicitly mentioned, the "confirmed" wording just seems odd.

I feel like in the version in my most recent previous comment, it is adequately implied that the "discussion" mentioned in the aside note is fully consistent with and relevant to the main body of the example, which states that the line implies Gideon saw a psychiatrist.

Ultimately what I don't like about the "confirmed" wording is that it relies on the presumption that it was in doubt and in need of confirmation.

Though it could be argued that's technically true, as we (perhaps wrongly) wouldn't accept that implication as being a part of the work rather than as a speculative fan inference until corroborating Word of God was found, I don't think it's good editorial form to have an example that treats itself as being in doubt, even if it can provide evidence to resolve that doubt. If an example exists, it should take for granted that it exists and be written with full confidence in itself. If the example is in doubt, it shouldn't exist, because Examples Are Not Arguable. As it stands in my preferred version, the aside note is sort of a cheat to get evidence in there, in the guise of an interesting tidbit about the example^note  I believe aside notes are supposed to be for extraneous information which either clarifies potentially unclear points or is simply interesting, but doesn't flow well when placed on equal footing with the main content. I don't think it's really intended as a means to provide Wikipedia-style citations for backing up statements. , which fortunately it legitimately is.

Any doubt, about if an example actually objectively exists in the work or is simply being read into it from the viewer's perception, really should be confined to the discussion page, and stay out of the example itself. That the example exists should imply that it isn't in need of confirmation. If the argument about a trope's presence in the work leaks out of the proper channels (edit summaries and discussion pages) and gets into the example, that reeks of Conversation in the Main Page.

Edited by BURGINABC

Thanks for taking the time to explain. I think I've got the gist of what you're saying. Let's go ahead with the updated Sophisticated as Hell example that includes the note text "Phil Johnston, one of Zootopia's screenwriters and the voice actor for Gideon, discusses this scene and its implications about his character here."

Okay, I went ahead and did it.

Edited by BURGINABC

Your discussion contains quoted definitions of Expy and Captain Ersatz but in rereading their definition pages, I'm not finding the text you've quoted. When I look at Expy it says it is "a character from one series (ie Zootopia) who is unambiguously and deliberately based on a character in another, older series (ie The Godfather). A few minor traits, such as age (species) or hair color, may change, but there's no doubt that they are almost one and the same" (parentheses content is mine). Whereas Captain Ersatz is the "character equivalent of a Bland-Name Product" used "when an artist or writer wants to use a character but for whatever reason isn't allowed to at the present time"

Mr. Big really seems to fit the "Expy" trope better and yes the cross-wick should move from Captain Ersatz to Expy as well.

Edited by rva98014

Expy definitely seems like the proper trope. Expy is any deliberately similar character, while Captain Ersatz is... well, I'm not even sure why it's a trope. Its description sounds like it can't decide whether it's describing Expy or Lawyer-Friendly Cameo, rather than like a specific non-duplicate trope...

Edited by BURGINABC

The quotes came from sections of each page describing how to distinguish one from the other. And yeah, they seem awfully similar to me, but since they are separate tropes, and since they explain how to distinguish each from the other, I figured we could try to get it right.

I see where you're going but it seems like a big stretch. It would have helped if Yax was shown eating grass at some point.

Yeah, the problem with that trope is that it is very subtle by nature, so without Word of God it's very hard to tell the difference between real and imagined examples.

For now I think I'll leave it out.

Although I suspect that if most editors were this cautious, that trope would probably have 95% fewer examples than it does currently...

Edited by BURGINABC

Otterton had no lines. If anyone "voiced" him, it would be to make hissing and snarling sounds for savage-Otterton. Which might not be credited like a normal VA, thus not end up on IM Db, but Wikipedia still could have found out.

On Wikipedia, everything is supposed to be cited to an external source. Check the citation, see if it's valid.

I just looked at the Wikipedia myself, and couldn't find any citation for it. I went ahead and removed it not only from here, but also from Wikipedia.

I think that makes sense. It's a lot like the page quote that was changed to an excerpt from Judy's rousing speech at the end. But rather than hammer home the movie's message, the page quote should introduce the concept of the movie. (Which is why the page quote was changed to the current one.)

But Gazelle really doesn't have many lines. There's the video billboard message ("I'm Gazelle. Welcome to Zootopia."), the various phrases from the app (for example, "I'm Gazelle, and you are one hot dancer."), her speech from the protest rally (where her current character quote comes from), the things she shouts to the audience at her concert (for example, "Good evening, Zootopia!"), and the lyrics to the song "Try Everything".

Personally, I like the video billboard message the best, but I think a quote from the concert scene or from the song lyrics could work too.

Yeah, the billboard message is what I was suggesting.

Honestly, I'd love to just use a lyric from the song, but for some reason we did that for the tigers instead? Granted, it's just the name/main chorus of the song, leaving a ton from the rest we could crib from, but still...

Moon◊

I put "try everything" as the quote for the tigers. The tigers have no lines in the movie but that's literally what was being sung at the moment of the screen capture used for the image. I'd lean toward leaving that as the tiger's quote and using Gazelle's billboard message as her quote but I'm open to changes.

Edited by rva98014

Looks like I was late to this discussion by about a whole month due to having been inactive here at that time...

Regardless, I think "Try everything" would be a good quote for Gazelle, while the tigers could simply do without a quote since they never say anything. Even if makes it not consistent with the other characters' sections, it doesn't make much sense to me to give character quotes to characters who have no lines.

Yeah, gonna agree with that last bit; they don't speak, so they don't need a caption giving them dialog they never said.

I think I'm just gonna go ahead and make that change, then, since it's been over a month and there haven't really been any objections.

Moon◊

The character page was getting a bit large, though whether it was quite large enough to justify a split is debatable.

Breaking them up in exactly this way is something that I've seen done before on many other character sheets, although typically this is for a series and not a standalone movie.

I don't think the navigation is a huge issue; you can get back using the index at the bottom or simply with the back button of your browser.

But yeah, it should definitely have been discussed first.

EDIT: hmm, indexing does appear to be broken for the Bunnyburrow Residents page. So you're right about there being a navigation problem.

Edited by BURGINABC

I just invited DougDevilsMutt via PM to participate in this discussion.

Edited by BURGINABC

There were 28 characters on the character page and it didn't feel excessive to me especially since any more additions were pretty unlikely at this point as we seemed to have captured the entire movie's cast. The breakup into multiple sections doesn't evenly distribute the load. Main characters has 2 entries, Zootopia Residents has 22 entries and Bunnyburrow has 4 entries.

Also, I would regret that 8 months of discussion content would become "orphaned" on the top character page.

I also sent DougDevilsMutt a PM about 2 hours ago when I first started this discussion asking them to participate.

I am strongly leaning toward putting the page back to it's original configuration until we come to a consensus. I've never done this type of reformatting before and don't know how to even back this out. Have you?

(ED: accidental duplicate posting)

Edited by rva98014

The size issue is more about total word count than number of characters. On this note, putting Nick and Judy on their own page made sense.

Although I still agree it probably wasn't quite huge enough to justify splitting in the first place, and your point that the page probably won't get much bigger is still valid.

I'm familiar with this sort of split as I myself did one to the WMG page, which was growing out of control. Although that split was done with proper discussion beforehand.

As for reversing this, putting everything back on the main page would be easy, but deleting the new pages would not. I think moderator privileges are required to delete a page.

Edited by BURGINABC

Would there be any way to migrate the existing discussion content to subpages or would it remain up at the top character page? Also when a character page is split into sub pages, would future character discussion occur at the "top" page or would discussion occur at the sub page closest to the character being discussed?.

I don't think there's any way to migrate past discussions.

But honestly, I'm not terribly concerned about that.

As for future discussions, I assume they would go on the most specifically relevant page. As long as all the pages are on your watchlist, you need not worry about missing a discussion.

The indexing problem seems to be fixed now.

Hello. I'm Doug Devils Mutt. Received your messages about the problems of navigation in the Zootopia Characters Page and how the lack of discussion about such an issue beforehand is problematic. Willing to accept mistakes, face the consequences and discuss to mend it.

So far the problems seem to be indexing, navigation through subpages and discussion before making this big of a change.

According to BURGINABC, the indexing seems to have been solved with now discussion being about moving conversation to subpages and whether splitting the main pages was a good or justified change.

Please, I want to help. How can I?

Welcome DougDevilsMutt, thanks for joining the discussion.

Overnight it seems that annette12 has fixed the indexing issue and has added a link on each subpage to help navigate back to the top character page. Both welcome fixes (thanks annette12!)

At this point it seems the main issue is a discussion of whether the character page should be split at all. So far, only myself and BURGINABC have engaged the issue and I'm seeing that other tropers have already started revising content on the subpages. I'd still like to get a consensus on this issue but I don't know if there's enough interest at this point and from past experience it seems that inertia will tend to keep the changes as they are.

Any thoughts on how to proceed?

Well, if, "if" the changes were to remain, notes would have to be added to inform people where characters are in the subpages: Main Characters ^note  Judy Hopps, Nick Wilde. and so on. Within subpages, characters's affiliations would have to be especified since they were divided by location: above Bogo and Clawhauser there would be

Zootopia PD,

above Mr. Big, his henchman, Manchas and his daughter Fru-Fru, there would be

Mr. Big, Family and Associates. "If" it were to stay that way.

If it were to be returned to its original state, it would be Copy/Paste and 3 options: to ask a moderator to erase the subpages, to add them to the Cut List and hope for an answer on whether or not it's cut or to simply redirect the pages to the main one.

Neither is complicated and would be more or less small changes, so it's more a matter of personal opinion at this point. What do you think?

You bring up a good point in that if we keep the subpages organization, helping a troper determine where a character is located would be helpful, it's just that the "Zootopia Residents" subpage could lend itself to further sub-grouping gone wild (ZPD, Mr. Big&Associates, City Hall Corrupt Mayors, Big Bad&Cohorts, Elephants with Character Flaws, blah,blah,blah, etc) Tongue firmly in cheek here ;), some sub-classification could help but wasn't really necessary when all characters were on same page.

I don't know, right now it feels like it really could just be divided into "Nick and Judy" and "Everyone Else" but that's yet another reorganizing verses "all on one page". I wish there was a little more involvement on this issue to get a greater sense of what the tropers in this area prefer.

As to whether the split was necessary to begin with:

The main purpose of a split is when a page is either too unwieldy to navigate (it wasn't; the folder structure worked fine) or else the page actually gets so big that load times become excessive and browser performance is weighed down (this page was kinda borderline on that front, arguably this was starting to become an issue but not in an extreme way.)

I'm not really convinced this was necessary, but I'm also not sure if reversing it would be worthwhile.

As to further sectionizing the "Zootopia Residents" page...

I don't think it's necessary. It would just end up with a few small subcategories, and then one big catch-all "Other" section.

Even though the split was unnecessary, I find myself agreeing that there's not much value in reverting back since the navigation and indexing issues have been fixed. Also agree with not trying to sub-categorize the "Zootopia Residents" page

That said, a few formatting suggestions....

1) Should we add the "ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED. Beware if you haven't seen the movie yet." warning to each of the subpages or just leave it only on the top page?

2) Would there be value in changing the label on the top "Characters / Zootopia" page from "Main Characters" to "Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde" since they are the only ones on that page? I'm just advocating changing the text label, the actual page id can remain Zootopia Main Characters)

3) Suggest changing the text of the "Back to Main" link on all the subpages to "Back to Characters / Zootopia" to clarify that it takes you back to the top Character page and not the Main trope page.

Edited by rva98014

For #3, how about "back to Zootopia Characters index"?

Re #3, I don't know, the actual name of the top characters page in the system is "Characters / Zootopia". That's even what appears when using the index navigation at the bottom of a subpage to navigate back to the "top" character page. I'd lean toward being consistent.

I went ahead an addressed #1 (added the spoiler warning to all subpages) and #2 (changed link text to ""Main Characters (Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde) " to make it apparent where Nick and Judy are.

Giving #3 a little more time for feedback.

It looks like everyone's focused on making the split work, but I don't see much point in it myself. The new Zootopia Residents page is nearly as large/unmanageable/whatever as the intact Characters page was, and the simple fact that the characters are divided among three subpages makes the subdivided version less usable.

The split also gives us 4 separate discussion pages for character-related tropes. It's already hard enough to keep up with multiple discussion pages for a single work. Dividing the Characters page like this makes it worse. (This is in addition to the reduced usability of the split Characters pages themselves.)

Agreed with the above. Clawhauser's absence in the climax had nothing to do with his reassignment but rather that Judy went to Nick first instead of the ZPD. She doesn't make an attempt to communicate with his replacement either.

I also agree, in addition to the dramatic disconnect described above there's also the simple logistical fact that Judy quits the ZPD right after she learns about Clawhauser and by the time she is shown returning to Precinct 1, Clawhauser is also being welcomed back to his old post. So technically we never see the ZPD without Clawhauser at the front desk. His reassignment is just a dramatic device to show things are getting bad and add one more straw to Judy's growing list of My God, What Have I Done? realizations.

I went ahead and got rid of it since there don't seem to be any objections to doing so.

Yup, missed that one. I'll put it back, the original quote had a better flow to it.

I don't recall any discussion. I don't see a problem with listing the non-English voice actors, or any reason to remove their names.

I also don't see any problem with listing the foreign dub VAs.

Edited by BURGINABC

It seems like everyone agrees that the foreign VA's shouldn't have been removed, but no one's put them back yet...

Regarding foreign voice actors, Disney movies in particular tend to be dubbed in every country they are released. So listing three or four different ones while leaving out the other several dozens seem to be a bit arbitrary.

I guess you have a point there.

If this is done on other characters pages, then it needs to be removed from those other pages. The standard is to have character quotes on the top, where they can be easily seen. Caption under the pictures tend to be for some other (often ironic) content. It's unpractical to have the page quotes there because not all characters will have a picture.

I see. I'm still learning about tvtropes and wasn't aware there was a standard for character images and quotes. I like to bookmark the Administrivia standards for future reference. Can you direct me to the Administrivia section that covers this? Thanks.

Well I was basing myself of the format seen over an overwhelming majority of pages.

There is a Character Sheet Template, but it's a bit threadbare. Now that you mention it, it would benefit for a bit of expansion.

What is correct, and what is most commonly seen, are not always the same thing. After all, Conversation In The Main Page is all over the place, but it is a hated scourge. And Getting Crap Past the Radar is specifically about sneaking things past the censors, but probably well over half of the examples are not examples of this, but rather of Accidental Innuendo, Have a Gay Old Time, or are simply obvious risque jokes that were not sneaky at all and were not so much "slipped past the radar" as they were "cleared for landing by air traffic control". To say nothing of the Chained Sinkholes that people often leave everywhere despite the fact that official policy says very clearly to never do it.

Not to mention the wide variety of other tropes that are widely misused in ways highly contrary to their defintions, due to people making assumptions rather than actually reading the trope description. Though in these cases, misleading trope names may share some of the blame.

In all, there are plenty of things around the wiki where the most common way is not necessarily the right way. When people see it around the wiki and assume it's acceptable, a common violation can gain a lot of inertia and be hard to purge from the wiki. Once a violation becomes common, it tends to stay common for quite some time before it can be stopped. So it's best not to assume.

That having been said, this issue doesn't seem comparable to those issues, as it seems that neither the way this page was previously formatted nor the way StFan has commonly seen around the site seem to be based on any official policy.

It may be that there's not even a "right way" to do this at all. The official policies are not always terribly specific about minor details of formatting...

Edited by BURGINABC

I spent some time trying to find any posted standard for formatting character image captions with no success. Then out of curiosity, began visiting character pages at random just to see how they were arranged. After visiting over 40 pages, I found the majority to be setup like the Zootopia page had been, with a character image and quote underneath. A few (3) were formatted with quotes near the "voiced by" information, and 2 were formatted with (different) quotes in both places.

Then I saw StFan had a troper page and observed that there's a quite a penchant for Anime. Visiting many of the Anime character pages I see that a majority do tend to follow the formatting StFan described (if there's a character quote at all, it's in the "voiced by" area, and character images usually have captions that indicates clicking to see different versions of the character).

However outside of that Genre, not so much, checking out some of StFan's non-anime favorites (Alien, Mad Max:Fury Road, Predator, Terminator, TRON, Les Visiteurs) reveals that they follow the other formatting style of having an character image with a quote underneath.

So, if there isn't an official standard and if the Zootopia character page's original formatting was not violating any policy, I repeat my preference to restore the page back to the way it was. We made an effort to make sure each character had an appropriate image and putting the quote under the character image makes it pop out and seems more aesthetically pleasing (to me anyway).

Thoughts?

ps Not going to list them all but here's a sample of the pages I visited: Avengers / Flash / Firefly / Lion King / Elementary / Game of Thrones / Sponge Bob Squarepants/ Girl Genius/ breaking bad / guardians of the galaxy / Fargo / hunger games / inside out / john wick / Kung fu panda / rise of the planet of the apes / saving private ryan (I tried to visit a variety of genres and styles for comparison)

pps. Caught your trope misuse reference a la Turn in Your Badge ;-) My pet peeve is the frequent misuse of What Happened to the Mouse?

Edited by rva98014

We appear to have established that the original layout was not in violation of any standard and its formatting matches the character pages of many other works.

In the absence of any further feedback in over 24 hours, I am going to revert the character page image/quote formatting back to its original layout until such time as directed otherwise by an official standard or a consensus is reached that a different layout is preferred.

Edited by rva98014

I was initially comparing Judy with Spider-man (one of the best known Classical Anti Heros), who while having conventional heroic traits was also neurotic, racked with guilt over Uncle Ben's death, never able to catch a break in the long term, and obsessed with keeping his elderly Aunt alive even at the cost of his own marriage (yes, "One More Day" I went there). Comparing this to the nearly classical heroic character of Judy except for her unconscious bias toward predators and she really didn't seem like a good fit of the trope.

But reflecting on your comments, I can see the point. She did struggle with the flaw of her bias and she still hasn't dealt with her impulsiveness which realistically if this wasn't a kids movie would have resulted in her being dead many times over.

So if you want to reinstate the Classical Anti-Hero trope to her section, I have no objection.

Edited by rva98014

I sort of see what you mean. But on the other hand, if she really didn't buy into the Playful Otter stereotype, there are plenty of other ways she could have worded it that don't emphasize the fact that he's just a "little otter". For example, she could have said "but he seemed like such a nice guy!"

Regardless of context, it's kind of hard to construe "But he's a sweet little otter!" in a way that doesn't imply any preconceived notions about how otters are supposed to behave.

Edited by BURGINABC

I agree that there are clearly preconceived notions about how otters behave, but I'm not sure they fit the Playful Otter stereotype. They could just be the same "small furry attractive mammal" stereotype that would apply to bunnies or kittens or puppies.

I think we should go with adult pictures when available.

^ Um, you might want to rephrase that...

;)

In all seriousness, though, I am definitely in favor of switching to a less psychotic picture, regardless of whether it's schoolyard-bully-Gideon or baker-Gideon.

but please, no adult pictures, thank you very much.

...

LOL sorry, I couldn't help myself...

Edited by BURGINABC

Sorry, I thought there was consensus for a young Gideon image. If the consensus is for an adult Gideon image, then go ahead and revert my change. Sorry.

I honestly don't care one way or the other. It might even be better to have both, to show the change.

Just out of curiosity, anyone of the two versions of the character have more screen-time than the other?

Not really. I guess the young version was technically present for one more scene than the older version, but only had one line in that extra scene.

I like BURGINABC's suggestion of two images for Gideon one as a child bully, one as an adult Baker since he did have a big influence on the other characters lives at each point. As a child his bullying of Judy formed her subconscious prejudice for Foxes which lead to her character development .

As an adult he provided the essential clue about Night Howlers and he gave Bonnie and Stu an opportunity to overcome their own prejudices by inviting him to be their business partner.

As far as a non psychotic image of young Gideon I'd suggest image #89 from http://disneyscreencaps.com/zootopia-2016/3 And Baker Gideon as image #150 from http://disneyscreencaps.com/zootopia-2016/52

Edited by rva98014

Actually, if we're doing both child Gideon and adult Gideon, then I don't mind the psychotic version of young gideon. It makes for a stronger contrast.

If you check out image #89 from link above it's actually just a few frames before the current Gideon image. He still has the vicious look about him which fits the bully image but his eyes aren't bugged out which is what makes the current image rather disturbing.

I couldn't find a #89 anywhere, maybe the number scheme changed since you got the link?

Anyway, this one◊, labeled #449, seems reasonable. It's still intimidating/aggressive, but not quite as freaky in the eyes.

That's the exact one I meant. Sorry for the confusion. On my browser the screen caps would come up in a in scrollable list and was identified as 89 of 180 but that's the one I think would be a good young Gideon bully image.

Added two images for Gideon's section one as Young Bully other as Adult Baker.

Edited by rva98014

Thanks for cleaning up my mess!

No worries! It was good discussion and I think the two images approach is well suited for Gideon's section.

Quite honestly, I agree. He is motivated by protecting his career to an extent, but I really don't think to the level of 'It's All About Me' on the trope page. At the very least, I think that should be downplayed a bit.

Being located at the top of the food chain does not make one a superior species

Agreed, at least "'It's All About Me" should go.

Loving his daughter and mother could certainly count as a virtue.

Just because he's also serving his own self-interest wouldn't necessarily mean he's not an Anti-Villain, though personally I agree with you.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

Unfortunately, it is really hard to tell, and open to interpretation, whether he was really angry at the beginning of that scene and only forgave her after hearing her apology, or if he was already willing to forgive her but acted as though he was still mad to get a reaction out of her.

I was the one who put that example there, but I wasn't understanding it as mean-spirited, but as his way of showing her that he had forgiven her so completely that he was even willing to joke about the situation. (Although it was still sort of trollish to toy with her emotions like that, he didn't really mean any harm by it).

Although plenty of other people seem to think that he really was still mad, and only forgave her after hearing her apology (and came up with the carrot pen prank on the spur of the moment, halfway through the apology), I've always had trouble believing that interpretation. His change in demeanor was so incredibly abrupt, that I had trouble interpreting his bitter, angry behaviour at the beginning of the scene as anything more than an act. He is, after all, very good at that.

I feel like if he was actually forgiving her right there on the spot, his change in attitude wouldn't have been so instantaneous, but more gradual, and he probably wouldn't have been quick-witted enough to instantly come up with the carrot pen prank, but probably would have been forced to be more earnest in conversing with her.

The other reason I think he'd already forgiven her is that I tend to think of Nick's behavior after the press conference as being an overreaction fueled by his childhood trauma, given that all she really did was repeat a theory she heard from a badger. While it's understandable he would react that way given his history, I think three months is plenty of time to cool down and realize she really didn't mean anything by it (Even though Judy, for her part, did feel terribly guilty about it due to hurting Nick's feelings and the effect that it had on the city).

This is all just interpretation though, so I guess if you really want to you can remove the example on the basis that it's reliant on a specific interpretation of an ambiguous situation.

Edited by BURGINABC

I agree the scene is open to interpretation and could see the other side which is why I posted the discussion topic. What didn't sit well for me was the line "even records her groveling for his own amusement". For me groveling has such a strong emotional connotation and to take amusement from it is what tipped out of playful trolling into mean-spirited. I'm glad to have heard your interpretation and I'm fine with leaving it as it stands.

I guess if you don't like that wording you could change it a bit.

I modified the wording in a way I hope keeps essence of your interpretation while smoothing the sharp edge a little.

Yeah, "highly respected" is a pretty major component of it.

Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

Good catch. She does earn more respect towards the end of the movie, but I don't think it comes anywhere near the levels required for The Ace. Other than being chosen as the public face of the ZPD (which was politically motivated), I think her recognition is more One of the Boys (just as good as the rest us) rather than The Ace (the best of the best and everyone knows it).

Some of the examples on the Strong as They Need to Be page aren't strictly about brute strength, but demonstrate speed, reflexes, combat prowess, and other abilities. So I think Tropes Are Flexible applies, or at least, has been applied in the past.

So I think the question is whether she was using her top speed in all cases, such that the variations are truly examples of her top speed varying depending on the needs of the plot.

The ZPD academy boxing ring is another example. Her rhino sparring partner took her out with a single hit. She had to figure out how to win a match without getting hit once.

Yeah, that's another good example. I'm just going to go ahead and put it back.

Lots of stuff negates spoiler tags in lots of sections. Trope names for instance.

I vote we remove all spoiler tags.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!

You've kinda got a point there.

Good idea, especially considering the fact that there's already a "beware of unmarked spoiler" warning at the top.

Is there a consensus then? Are we actually going to purge spoilertags from the page?

If it helps, I want the tags to be gone too.

I'm gonna do it right now then.

Done.

I still like the idea of using an image of the young bully version of Gideon as his character image.

Without some sort of evidence for deliberate reference the most you could say is to put under Counterpart Comparison in YMMV.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!