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Author: Pig_catapult

Oct 7th 2008 at 12:31:29 PM

@Wristmilk: "MacGuffin" is, from what I understand, already accepted literary jargon, so it's a little different than what we're dealing with here.

@Discussion: The main problem I'm seeing with the "The [Name]" tropes is that, if you aren't already at least passingly familiar with the character and/or franchise in question, there's nothing in the trope title that even gives a vague hint at what it's about, so you have to click on it to find out. Sometimes, the name is so generic that it's not even necessarily clear ''which'' of many characters (from as many series) with the same name it might be.

[[AC:Examples to appease my obsessive-compulsiveness for exacting detail and unnecessarily long and wordy explanations:]]

(note that when I say that something is "a good one" or "a bad one" here, I mean that in regards to the trope being named after that character as opposed to being given some other name. TropesAreNotBad.)

XanatosGambit: An example of a good name for a trope. You might not know who Xanatos ''is,'' but the trope tends to naturally crop up in places where one can still usually glean a vague idea of what it means from both the context and the word "gambit" itself, which has a meaning in everyday use.

TheKimberly is an example of a bad one, because Kimberly isn't a unique or iconic name. There's lots of people out there named Kimberly, and there's really nothing intuitive about it. It needs a better name.

MickeyMousing is a ''really bad'' one. It is named for a well-known character, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with him, aside from the fact that Mickey Mouse was in some works where the trope was used. There's no intuitive association that would make Mickey Mouse iconic of the trope. This trope ''REALLY'' needs a better name.

TheKirk is an okay/so-so example. Most people will recognized the name "Kirk" as being the one of ''StarTrek'' fame, and he's particularly infamous for what the trope describes, and there's really no good way to compress that trope into a short, serviceable Trope Name that people will remember. If you ''don't'' know who Kirk is, you need to lurk moar.

TheScrappy and TheLibby are also okay ones, since (as mentioned above), while you might not know the characters, the names ''sound'' descriptive of their tropes, and context easily completes the picture.

In closing, trope names should be intuitive. If possible, there should be a non-character, non-article word or words in the Trope Name to describe the general sphere the trope falls into (e.g., "XanatosGambit"), or the trope should be renamed to something that actually describes it.