Now I've also seen the Brother–Sister Team trope, which includes several pairs of twins. Should there be a subtrope about these brother-sister teams who are the same age, "without [...] making the boy or girl older and in an authority position over the other", and have been together all their lives? Anyway, I guess that that could be another reason why I've seen so many pairs of brother-sister twins in fiction.
We can also recognize identical twins in films, TV shows, etc. where we don’t know the twins closely, but can see them; or in works where we see them through the eyes of a character who doesn’t know them.
Couldn’t we compare the numbers of different kinds of twins within a fictional universe, or within the works of one author? For example, in The Baby-Sitters Club universe I think I know four pairs of identical twin sisters and a set of identical triplet brothers, fewer pairs of brother-sister twins, and no same-sex fraternal twins (I’m not sure about Callie and Keith in Karen’s School). Or in a very different book, Red Rising, I know two pairs of brother-sister twins and one pair of fraternal twin brothers.
Edited by Illa
I'm not sure what to do with this trope. Is this supposed to become a list of every single set of twins in fiction ever (there's listings for identical twins and fraternal which encompasses everything)? Since it's not at the moment I don't know if I should add to it or not.
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Yeah this trope is problematic to me; it's very self-selecting since as it points out there's not much dramatic use for fraternal twins beyond being siblings, so even if fraternal twins were around we wouldn't even know it. The writeup seems to say that identical twins are more common in relation to the total number of twins, but since fraternals are underreported that's a spurious claim. A much better question is, are identical twins more common in fiction than in real life out of the population of all families/siblings, not just "twins" which we don't have good numbers for.
In answer to your question, as written I think a better examples list for this trope (as with many "always" tropes) would be to list only the aversions, since by its very premise those are going to be more unusual and notable than twins.
That said, neither list is terribly long, so whatever.
Edited by jerodast
If Half-Identical Twins are an example of this trope, then its title means "Always Identical-Looking Twins" instead of "Always Genetically Identical Twins", right?
Also, this page says "Alex and Dan in The Dreamland Chronicles are a rare case of fraternal twins of the same gender", and I, too, remember more brother-sister twins from fiction than same-sex fraternal twins. I've heard the idea that if an author wants to write same-sex twins, they'll rather write identical ones. Should there be a trope for this (or is there one already)?
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