Markup View

Author: CrypticMirror

Dec 15th 2013 at 10:15:56 AM

I'm certain there is a valid trope here, but the arguments have gone around in circles so many times I'm completely lost.

The main cast packing up to go camping and have an adventure; sometimes due to it being disastrous, like in most sitcoms, sometimes due to camping on top of the sacred burial mound like in horror films, sometimes due to setting up camp just where the smugglers are operating like in TheFamousFive and other children's lit, or sometimes just being heartwarming trips of family reconciliation like in Hallmark Movies.

Tents, campfires, it being something that is not the character's normal life, that all seems tropeable. Non-tropeable would be nomads, wilderness men, traveller-lifestyles, border guards in fantasy works, wood elf camps, etc aren't really a camping episode because that is the character's normal life.

Non-tropeable, being on the run, just being incidental to the plot (for example in ''Series/{{Atlantis}} there is often a campfire scene simply because they have to trek through the wilderness to get where-ever the adventure of the week will happen), that is just a scene which happens to be set in a camp/tent and is PeopleSitOnChairs. I'd say that cabins in the wood and [=RVs=] (and maybe magical palaces enclosed in TARDIS-esque tents) probably oughtn't to count either (although horse drawn caravans might). It just doesn't carry the connotation of roughing it in the woods, moors, desert or seaside (or whatever).

As for the "episode" part, it should be either part of an ongoing series. One-off works about someone going camping are not camping episode, they are works that happen to use camping as the plot device. For ongoing series it ought to be the focus off, or at least the major part of, that episode.

That is what a camping episode implies to me. If it said in the tvguide or book review pages "tonight/this book is a camping episode where X... etc", that is what it would bring to my mind.