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Author: StarValkyrie

Dec 8th 2012 at 5:24:18 PM

I don't think "the city this story is set in is a capital city" is actually tropeworthy.  Trivia, maybe, but not a trope.  If the fact that its a capital city is the defining characteristic, then it's picture perfect PeopleSitOnChairs - just look at the second paragraph of the description.

Compare to any of the other City tropes: MerchantCity, HolyCity, NotSoSafeHarbor, LandOfOneCity, ShiningCity, and WretchedHive.  All of them have very specific archetypes associated with that type of city which CapitalCity doesn't.  The city setting in question could be any type of city, so long as its got a star on the map.

The old CapitalCity trope was renamed HubCity to relate with HubLevel and some examples were moved, I guess, but I'm not convinced that is actually a solution since the definition doesn't say how it's different from HubLevel and while the examples are mostly games (like HubLevel), the wicks are mostly not so there's clearly still a big problem.

I did the [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1311368417029051400&page=6#131 wick check]] for the remaining CapitalCity examples and the majority were the star-on-the-map type potholes where the fact its the capital doesn't actually tell you anything about the city in question (compare Ulaanbataar with Paris with Tokyo with Beirut, for example).

From the examples in the wick check, if we do want to find an archetype of capital cities, I think the best bet is to figure out something for spy/political thrillers which is the government equivalent of NotSoSafeHarbor (which is a city full of pirates, drinking dens and ladies of negotiable affection) - where the city is full of government officials, government offices, FBI types, embassies, etc as a backdrop/playground for spies and political conspiracies.  However, there aren't presently any examples of works with that archetype to copy over from CapitalCity so I'm not sure we actually need this one either.