Suggesting we delete webcomic time.: Webcomic Time

This trope seems pointlessly banal to start with, but looking through the examples it seems to portray the trope as some form of unacceptable deviancy from a norm that doesn't exist within the genre it attempts to critique. That would be bad enough, but there are lots of reasons webcomic time exists, almost all of them practical, sensible, and in no way inherently detrimental to the work. I'd recommend putting it up for deletion as a 'People Sit On Chairs' trope, because frankly what the trope describes is so far the norm for the genre that exceptions are more worth noting (And even then, what would be the point of saying "This webcomic is topical and takes place in real time" as a trope? None, if you ask me. Anomalous yes, but hardly worth defining as any form of genre convention, it would be just as chairsy, only for a smaller remit)

If not deletion, At the very least this article should be rewritten and examples removed, in my opinion. (Although doing such would inevitably result in it being a one or two sentence article stating "In webcomics, due to the method of production, time often passes much more slowly for characters than the audience. This happens.", rendering it even more of a 'people sit on chairs' trope than it already is.)

The too long unread version of this - Everything this trope describes is obvious to begin with, bringing it up adds no value to a webcomic discussion or may even be detrimental to said discussion due to it effectively being a simple platitude expanded to article length, and it should be deleted.

edited 9th Feb '11 11:27:05 AM by PsyTrancer

I'd favor an example sectionectomy. It's not People Sit On Chairs, but it's so obviously the standard that there's absolutely no reason it needs to have examples.

"Webcomic stories tend to take longer to tell in real life" isn't a trope in the normal sense. It's a meta-trope. It's also a sufficiently universal meta-trope to be along the lines of "films usually have producers."

Delete, chairs. Or if it's a concept you're going to insist on throwing around, nuke the examples (perhaps limit only to aversions/subversions, if there are any). We might as well have a list of books that have chapters.

edited 9th Feb '11 11:41:11 AM by aishkiz

One could argue that the timing schedule is as much a part of the webcomic medium as something like chapter breaks in novels, or the Coming Attractions at the beginning of a film. It's part of the presentation.

edited 9th Feb '11 12:03:57 PM by troacctid

I'd leave the lampshadings on the page.

Edit: The lampshadings are usually more examples of either fourth wall tropes or medium awareness though. I don't see why those tropes, which already cover this, should have such a specific offshoot.

edited 9th Feb '11 12:13:30 PM by PsyTrancer

Except things like chapters do count as tropes. They're part of the Paratext. I see no real reason to cut this.

I can see giving it an example sectionotomy or making it lampshadings/aversions only. It's not People Sit On Chairs because it has a pretty significant effect on the reading experience, though, and we don't cut ubiquitous tropes just for being ubiquitous or "obvious". They're still tropes.

edited 9th Feb '11 12:11:48 PM by Shale

I think even the straight examples give some information because especially in cases where this is taken to extremes it's interesting to see the divergence of the comic from the rest of the universe. Really, of the comics I read, most of them tend to happen in real time or ignore time all together and thus would be aversions and uninteresting. This isn't an omnipresent trope in my experience.

Right, Paratext, that's the word I was looking for. Added it to that index.

It's so obviously the standard that I don't see why it needs examples.

Because it's not the standard. I read a large number of webcomics and most of them don't run on it.

Yeah, it's really only used in heavily arc-driven webcomics along the lines of Order Of The Stick.

I'd argue that most longrunning webcomics are arc based anyway. I can think of penny arcade and little gamers that aren't, most others, even those that start off as gag a day stripes, eventually have a sufficient cast and established canon they begin to evidence this, intentional or not.

Not in my experience, but then again most of the stuff I read is more xkcd, User Friendly, Sinfest, and Perry Bible Fellowship which either doesn't have timelines, or uses the real world time.

Put it this way - Go to webcomicslist. If you just click through all the most popular webcomics, the vast, VAST majority are subject to webcomic time and arcs. At no point on the list can you pick out say, a block of 50 comics, and come away with more comics that adhere to what you say than arc comics that are subject to webcomic time.

That is, until you get to the extreme lower echelons, at which point most of the comics are stillborn messes that never got a chance to make an arc.

It depend vastly on the genre. In a Gag Per Day Webcomic such trope is mostly inexistent.

Webcomic Time found in: 181 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 2,169 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Yeah... I'm gonna say no. "Seems like People Sit On Chairs to me", might(might) be acceptable for a severely under performing trope, but something like this? No.

Regarding lampshade hangings: We have That Night Felt Like Months.

What I'd like to know is why are there examples from things like Anime and Manga and Live Action TV, that are virtually impossible to produce on the time scale required to avoid this.

Yeah, since we agreed to only leave Lampshadings, and the Lampshading is its own trope, I say example sectionectomy and be done.

We didin't agree about it, shimaspawn argued that even the straight examples give some information, and I agree with her. The number of inbounds is another reason that it is working as it is.

There are also others who want to see the entire thing cut.

Also, That Night Felt Like Months already collects lampshadings.

I think, while the fact that comic books are written slowly, wouldn't be a trope, but how writers have to consider this, is a trope. Backdating, time skips, sticking to the starting date, these are all forms of Webcomic Time. Even not adressing it, and just leaving it that way, and letting the inconsistency pile up, is a form of dealing with it.

It's one thing that we don't have a list of Plots, that would be a list of every work ever minus slice of life, or The Protagonist, that would be a list of everything ever minus Ensemble Casts, but sometimes, even very common tropes can be demonstrated by the variations of how they appear.

That is not an interesting thing to have at all:

• Star Wars had a plot
• Legend Of The Galactic Heroes also had a plot
• Me Myself And Irene also had a plot

...But that...:

• Although Ozy And Millie have celebrated Christmas every year for the past 11 years, the two main characters have only aged two years.
• Freefall is set in the far future, in a distant starsystem with no stated earth-date, so staying synched to the calendar is no issue, but the story so closely follows its character's lives that one of the in-story days took 250 comics (over a year and a half) to tell. This got pointed out as one of the main characters hit her bed exhausted.
• In Questionable Content, the Not a Date between Dora and Marten was established as under a year after their first meeting, almost two years before in real time. The two years since have covered a matter of weeks. This is made stranger by the strip's up-to-the-minute indie music references.

It shows how different works dealt with this phenomena: One of them causes inconsistency by yearly holidays, other one is made outstanding by the extremely detailed attention to daily events, the third one's inconsistency shows at trying to be up-to-date.

This is interesting. Why would we want to be less intersting?

edited 13th Jun '11 8:26:34 AM by EternalSeptember

Seconding everything ES said, save my gender. I'm female, not male.

edited 13th Jun '11 8:07:35 AM by shimaspawn

Fixed. To me, everyone on the internet is a 20 year old white american male, who looks like our default avatar, until the opposite is stated.

edited 13th Jun '11 8:31:31 AM by EternalSeptember

Do you guys think we need a Crowner?