Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Cleanup needed
, started by Arha on Oct 16th 2010 at 8:40:22 AM
Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by bwburke94 on Jan 4th 2015 at 3:46:15 PM
The following Zero Context Examples have been commented out. Please don't add them back unless you also add context to show how they fit this trope.
Anime and Manga
- Sawako Yamanaka from K-On!.
- OL (Oruchuban Ebichu, aka Ebichu Minds The House).
- Dominura (Simoun, unusually old for a Sibylla).
Ezio from Assassin's Creed ends up with someone. In AC Revelations (the final Ezio game), he meets a smart woman that he eventually starts dating. The canon animated film AC Embers confirms that they got married. Somewhat impressively for someone in his 50s, he even fathered a daughter with her.
The summary needs serious revising. Too much pandering to the weeboo's
Your gonna go far kid...
This makes no sense to anyone from the British Isles (and probably some other Commonwealth countries), as christmas cake is a real thing here. The connotations do not exist here, it's just a cake that people eat some time around christmas (not on a specific day or anything).
That's why the trope needs to be renamed "Old Maid". These cutesy Japanese idioms go way too far.
I completely agree with the calls to rename this trope. The term "Christmas cake" gives new meaning to "obscure." I think that Vidor is correct. The trope should be renamed "Old Maid."
I'll start a Trope Repair Shop discussion as soon as the mods lock the old thread which explicitly purports to not be about renames.
In the meantime, here's a crowner on whether or not to rename and a list of alternate titles.
...And it would seem we're now open for business.
...Well, it would seem that was a waste of time. Looks like we'll have to resort to alternate measures. New plan- I've made a YKTTW proposal for a new trope called Old Maid. We'll just define that as the term everyone keep misusing Christmas Cake to mean, fix the wiks, and finally put this issue behind us.
As you all can see from the blue links, Old Maid is now a trope. As to Christmas Cake, well, I've gone through a lot of examples, and that Wiki Word is used inappropriately nearly everywhere, usually to mean "hot unmarried woman in her twenties". If you see any uses of Christmas Cake that are not either specifically referring to the phenomenon described on this page or can easily be replaced with the term Old Maid, delete them on sight.
Edited by SomeGuy See you in the discussion pages.
I have started the process of moving examples to Old Maid and Maiden Aunt as indicated above. My editing time will be extremely limited for the next couple of weeks, so anyone who would like to help out with the process should feel free to do so.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!
Honestly, I think at this point this trope borders on the verge of being compeletely decayed, maybe not on its main page, but definetey on pages linking to it. First it went from a culture and genre -specific (Japan and manga&anime respectfully) to somehow existing in all the kins of both Eastern and Western media. Okay, fair enough, marriage and age anxieties are fairly common for women all around the world, even though for Western women the age is much closer to thrty or even thirty five these days, and the averarage age at first marriage for women is at least a bit higher than twenty five in most developed countries, Japan (at 27,3, source: The Other Wiki) included. Then people went on to just list unmarried women over 25 under this trope. No matter her situation (see Rachel Weisz, who had been living with Darren Aronofsky for eight years now and still somehow qualifies, why not then just also add Helena Bonham-Carter - legally she isn`t married, and Tim Burton who?), or her actual desire to marry (Samantha from Sex and the City has never expressed any, quite the opposite, but, yet again, somehow qualifies, while Robin from How I Met Your Mother misteriously doesn`t), or even her family`s desire to marry her off. It`s kinda understandable for manga and anime, where the cast usually consists mostly of teenagers, but in Western media, especialy in modern live action TV most of people are in their mid-twenties to at least mid-thirties, and Everybody Is Single, so married women under tventy five are rare, not vice vesa. And then (as it is said on I Was Quite a Looker page) this trope somehow started meaning "attractive woman from 25 years old to middle age", which is downright ridiculous, What, an attractive woman that age is so noticeable between her contemporaries to be its own trope? Isn`t "attractive woman from 25 years old to middle age" just a synonim of an "attractive woman" as opposed to "attractive girl"?
Edited by Jaelinque Hide / Show Replies
Seconded. It might be discredited only recently though; women's average marriage age in the US for example went from 22 to 24 between 1980 and 1990. Sometime between 90 and now it went up another 2 years. Similar quick changes could have happened in Japan, but I can't be bothered to look it up.
I started going through to cut bad examples, but there's a lot I'm really not sure of. However, there's a very large number of misuses where people are thinking it's just 'women over 25.' It's even worse on the wicks I've seen for this page.
Merged with Old Maid per TRS:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16669650130.74708400&page=2#comment-32
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.