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Author: MorganWick

Mar 14th 2012 at 1:05:06 AM

Calmed down from my resort to "Caps Lock Yelling"...

"When you said "emerged out of TRS by getting split into subtropes", I read it more along the lines of "that was the problem"... perhaps because I don't think of PSOC cases as actual supertropes, but rather, as bad tropes. I wouldn't call the Dolphins article a supertrope, I'd call it an index. I was extrapolating from what I assume was my mistaken interpretation, and I apologise for that."

Actually, I'm using "supertrope" and "subtrope" figuratively; obviously something PSOC can't be a supertrope if it's not a trope at all. But in terms of whether or not something can be split up into subtropes, that's a purely semantic, technical distinction. That's my point: it's obviously not the reason you think PSOC things can't be broken into subtropes.

"On a pure side-note, I don't think that Women Are Delicate, Everyone Is Right Handed, and other similar tropes are actually Omnipresent Tropes, although they're on that list. ... They're not even "too common", let alone omnipresent."

They're not "things that happen", though, more "underlying assumptions" or "default states" (I think "ubiquitous" was a poor choice of words). They're generally not things an author consciously intends in any way. In fact, even though they're averted a lot, when they are it's really only different in degree from TheGoodGuysAlwaysWin, which I think you just proved in the case of EveryoneIsRightHanded. (Considering that TheBadGuyWins is a huge spoiler, I don't think it needs to be part of the entire point of the whole work.) But at this point if we're going to take this line of reasoning further it should be on the Too Common for Examples YKTTW.

Frankly, I think the point you're trying to make about OmnipresentTropes actually really disproves your original point. The most omnipresent of tropes are things like {{Plot}}, and those sorts of things are indexes of subtropes. It's not being omnipresent (as opposed to common) that makes them unsplittable into subtropes. I think you're basically saying "if a common trope is unsplittable, it's PSOC, unless it's not", and defining OmnipresentTrope overly narrowly to mean "all the exceptions" (assuming they ''are'' exceptions).

Omnipresent literally means "always present". If we divide it into three classes - basic building blocks of story, like {{Plot}}; tropes like TheGoodGuysAlwaysWin; and tropes like WomenAreDelicate, the class you're using it for, the middle one, is the one ''least'' befitting the name.