Markup View

Author: Aielyn

Mar 13th 2012 at 7:20:58 PM

You missed my point, Dragon Quest Z - To put it in contrapositive form, if a trope has a purpose and isn't an OmnipresentTrope, then you should be able to segment it out into subtropes. Why? Because if a trope isn't Omnipresent, then different authors will use it in different ways.

To take King Zeal's example, characters walking on two legs is generally done to humanise the character, and walking on four legs usually suggests animal, rather than human. But I can think of many different sub-cases. For instance, in Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast, Beast only moves on four legs when he's being particularly bestial, and the only really four-legged living piece of furniture was the dog. There's already two subcases, here - characters switching between modes depending on how human they're being at the moment, and animal characters moving on all fours even when they're not currently animals. A third subcase is where animals that walk on two legs (like penguins) are generally given more human qualities than those that walk on four legs.

The primary purpose, distinguishing human from animal, hasn't changed... but the details have. Why? Because to be used so often, it has to be versatile, which means that it'll be used in many different ways. Purpose is what makes it a trope. The details is what splits it into subtropes. Note that even OmnipresentTropes split into subtropes... but there are so many of them, we just ignore it and call it a supertrope and let that be the end of it. For instance, about [[AssPull a third of all tropes on the site]] fall into the {{Plot}} supertrope.

So no, I'm not misusing the message, I'm pointing out a key property of it. People sitting on chairs (the literal example) isn't really something with subtropes, because the fact that a person sits on a chair isn't really versatile. Yes, you can add a purpose to it (creating specific tropes), but that would make it a different trope, since tropes are purposes, not descriptions. If you can't make subtropes (and it's not Omnipresent), and it's that common, it's almost certainly PeopleSitOnChairs.