A suggestion to redefine:: The Chick

As currently defined, The Chick is currently "the weak member of a Five-Man Band". While that's often the role of The Chick, and even more common when the Five-Man Band is a fighting party, I think that's a little too narrow as a definition (which is why we've had so many problems defining it in the past).

On Five Bad Band, the Dark Chick is "The counterpart to The Chick, they can vary quite significantly, and is chiefly defined by looking or acting wildly different from the other members, adding color to the group." I would say that's essentially what The Chick does as well. The Chick is there as the only unpaired member of the band  ^*

, and thus can essentially do their own thing and make the Five-Man Band interesting.

They are also overwhelmingly likely to not do the main thing the Five-Man Band does, which if the Five-Man Band is mainly combat oriented (as it usually is) will tend to make them the weakest member of the group, or the one who solves problems in ways other than bashing them on the head with a hammer. The Chick as currently defined is thus a very common subtrope of the actual role The Chick fills in a Five-Man Band.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Where does it say that The Chick is the weakest member of the Five-Man Band? Laconic says "more feminine", Five-Man Band says heart. It may be common for them to be weak, but is there any definition that states that the purest essence of The Chick is being weak?

The Chick might be weaker than the others. In many cases and examples, they are. It is therefore an element of the trope that they are weak. It's therefore worth including this fact on the description. But that doesn't mean "The Chick" is synonymous with "weakness".

In short, the trope is not defined as narrowly as you think.

We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!

The description is slanted a little too much towards "the chick is useless" but that's moreso describing a common attribute rather than saying "The Chick = Useless Girl team member", which we've had plenty of problems with in the past. If you feel it is too slanted than I would say go ahead and trim it down, but I don't think it is anything that is needed for Trope Repair Shop.

As for the Dark Chick comparisons, the idea is mostly that The Chick represents a female counterbalance and that is how they stand out, by being a girl. The Dark Chick stands out by being a psychotic girl. The idea of a "splash of color" to the group is that psychosis, while The Chick usually don't have such an aggressive personality. Again, this is common attributes and not mandatory quirks.

@Treblain: Yeah, and I'm arguing the Chick is not necessarily the most feminine member of the Five Man Bad.

Example here: Take Teen Titans. Robin, Raven, and Cyborg are all fairly obvious. If we're using the traditional definition Starfire would be The Chick, so then where does Beast Boy go? By elimination he would have to be The Smart Guy, but Beast Boy is not even remotely smart.

The answer? Beast Boy is also The Chick; he's just a different kind of Chick than Starfire. He's the comic relief type of Chick where Starfire is the feminine type of Chick.

@KJM: I can't trim it; all the Five-Man Band pages are locked.

AND The Dark Chick is not that often a Dark Action Girl.

Another example here: Kingdom Hearts Chain Of Memories. The bad guys form a fairly obvious Five Bad Band, and again it's fairly obvious who Marluxia, Larxene, Lexeaus and Vexen are. But that leaves Zexion as the Dark Chick, who is not even female, much less a Dark Action Girl. The reason he's the Dark Chick is that he doesn't ever fight you or want to fight you outright in the game; instead he deceives your character into dangerous situations.  ^*

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

The simple answer is that groups don't always fit into the Five-Man Band trope. It's just a popular grouping that fits a lot of fictional groups well, but it was never perfect, and it's probably going to become increasingly disused as the majority of writers become less male-oriented and drift away from the "classic" Chick as a female character who contributes a feminine side but not much else. It doesn't help to redefine the trope, because then the definition drifts away from the examples that it fit originally.

We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!

The very first sentence of the trope defines The Chick: "The "feminine", "spiritual", and "heart", aspect of the Five Man Band".

It appears that the problem is coming more from people wanting to force every five-member team into Five-Man Band and shoehorning characters that don't fit into The Chick. The example you give of the Teen Titans is a perfect example of this; If there's no Chick and no Smart Guy it's not a Five-Man Band, even if there are five people on the team.

Rather than redefining "The Chick" to make shoehorning even easier, lets clean up the misuses of Five-Man Band.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

@Mads: But the Teen Titans are clearly a Five-Man Band. If they're not a Five-Man Band no work has ever had a Five-Man Band in it.

It's just a Five-Man Band with an extra Chick instead of The Smart Guy. (Also since you seem to not have picked up that there is at least one clear Chick in the Teen Titans I'm betting you didn't read my post closely enough.)

@Everyone: What I'm arguing here is that The Chick is defined much more narrowly than it should be, and much more narrowly than the other members of the Five-Man Band.

The Hero is Exactly What It Says on the Tin and is thus fairly broad. The Lancer is The Foil to the hero and is thus equally broad. The Big Guy is just "the strongest member of the band"; The Smart Guy is also just "the smartest member of the band". They're both roles in the band, and they're both foils to each other.

Well, since it's five members, The Chick can't be a foil to anyone, but defining her as "the most feminine member of the band" seems odd. There's no "most masculine member of the band"; in fact that just sounds silly.

So, like The Dark Chick, The Chick is really not "the most feminine member of the band"; rather she's "the weird member of the band", which lets her be a foil to the band itself.

(Not to mention that when writers write in a Chick intentionally without considering the nature of the band, it just comes off as Bad Writing. Take Ma'Ti from Captain Planet as an example of this; the main band didn't do much fighting themselves, so as the "guy who doesn't fight" he was totally bland and redundant.

edited 12th Feb '11 9:17:26 AM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

There are variations in the specific archetype of the Five-Man Band. They might not have the traditional The Smart Guy but they'll have a wise cracking smart mouth. Whatever. It can vary, slightly, I'll buy that.

Why then, if I accept it varies do I then have to turn that variation back onto itself? I can say that Five-Man Band includes the variations or I say that all those variations are actually also a Five-Man Band by redefining the members. One or the other. Beast Boy isn't The Chick, he's something else.

The point of The Smart Guy in the Five-Man Band is to solve intelligence-based problems.

Beast Boy does not do that. Beast Boy is the first to be confused by intelligence-based problems. Robin is usually the one who solves them.

But the point of this topic is not to argue about my specific example; I can give plenty of other ones if you want.

EDIT: And I'm arguing that the traditional definition of The Chick is actually a subtrope of the actual "fifth-person-in-a-Five-Man-Band" trope. What Beast Boy is would also be another subtrope of that trope, even though he definitely isn't a Chick as currently defined.

edited 12th Feb '11 12:38:54 PM by BlackHumor

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

We've got a page of The Chick examples that demonstrate exactly what the page describes.

I'm going to disagree with this. Something like Gatchaman would be the purest example of a Five Man Band, where you can literally just take a group photo of the cast and identify the really obvious archetypes of every single character. Teen Titans has a five member group, but aside from Robin the characters are designed to not adhere rigidly to the archetypes listed on the Five-Man Band trope page.

I wonder if it would be practical at this point to split Five-Man Band into two separate tropes, one with the more rigid character roles and a more flexible one that only requires five members with complementary personalities of some sort. There are a ton of the latter, which people keep shoving into the Five Man Band page even though some of their members don't really fit the five established character types listed currently.

@SSOT: And many examples on that page are not in a Five-Man Band, which just further reinforces that this trope is in fact "the feminine person who perhaps provides moral support" and not "the fifth member of a Five-Man Band".

In any case, I agree that The Chick as we currently have it is a trope, it's just that "the fifth member in a Five-Man Band" is a different trope.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

The five characters of the Five-Man Band is the most common incarnation, but there are times when The Smart Guy and The Hero are one and the same, or the The Big Guy is merged with The Lancer. The Chick is the most common member to be replaced with a different archetype, often The Bumblebee. Just because certain characters are merged or replaced with a different trope doesn't mean that the base purpose of the band is suddenly nullified. Anything too different we have other ensemble tropes like the Command Roster or Three Amigos.

Er, just wanted to ask, isn't Cyborg The Smart Guy?

Since, you know, he's the guy who builds all the stuff for the titans?

Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.

He is, He just so happens to double as the big guy and some don't see it like that. The Five Man Band is restrictive yet flexible, we don't need to change up The Chick position just because the times are a changin'.

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Five-Man Band didn't really have much pattern to be a trope in the first place.

At one point it most certainly did. However, as time has passed, the role distinctions have become less clear-cut. There are fewer classic Five Man Bands now than there used to be, and it's more likely that roles will be switched off between characters depending on the story.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

^^^^ x whatever.

If you just want to remove "Five-Man Band" from the first line, I'll say "go for it". I think that is more to do with overuse of Five-Man Band. Jut change it to "the team".

There's also The Heart. It was originally intended to replace The Chick, which was not a great idea. How does it compare to The Chick now?

I say The Chick needs to be less 'the most/only feminine member of the group'. That's too much like the Smurfette Principle. It also needs to be less about 'moral support/guidance' that's The Heart. What the Chick should be, in my opinion, is something like a Utility Player. They fill whatever role is needed in the group. The Defintion as it stands says the Chick could be anything from -healer -mediator -fighter -chessmaster -artilery I say the Defintion should be rewritten to focus on the Chick's diverse abiliites, and write out as much as possible any Token Girl language. This should help prevent shoehoring.

somewhat difficult to do when the original point of the chick was to have a Token girl that just happened to fill whatever role the others lacked. I mean that's why we called it the chick to begin with and also why the position is so diverse that to some it seems ill-defined. I mean it's hard to flesh out a position designed specifically so you wouldn't look sexist in your casting.

The Blog The Art

So so far CN is the closest to agreeing with me; I think The Chick is really "the weird member of the group"; he thinks it's really "the Jack of All Trades". Both of us agree it's not the Token Girl though, which is a start.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

One of the main problems was the original incarnation of The Chick existed to provide drama as a Distressed Damsel and was a part of the team just to offset the testosterone level of the group. As The Chick came to be better written and a more valuable member of the team we tropers have had to come up with a definition that reconciles the original incarnation with the modern use (not that much different than the MacGuffin, funny enough). Evidently this has been difficult.

Actual incarnations of The Chick tend to be more varied than the rest of the group, since Most Writers Are Male it can be hard to write a female character who is not girly but also not a man in a female body. You get everything in between. The Heart was originally made to replace the chick (which was a nice attempt but misguided) and right now it is used as a possible characteristic of The Chick much like Ineffectual Loner is for The Lancer.

I think at least as a troper community we are able to better recognize when a female group member is or is not the chick. It's the male characters that tend to cause problems, because people like to attribute the "useless male character" in that role.

I look at it being that if they are the token girl, they have a less-aggressive personality and support role skills (The Archer, Staff Chick, Healing Hands) then they are the chick. If a male character has those attributes they have to be written similarly as if it was a female character and not merely having a "feminine" personality.

To me, The Chick is The Heart, essentially. They're almost the same thing. Even in scenarios where the woman (if there is one) is not The Chick, their role will be the most moral, the kindest, the "glue" for the team. S/he's the emotive, caring. I see a clear role for this, but I think we need to mention that The Chick Classic was the Damsel in Distress mould more of the time, and later has morphed into being an Action Girl. Action Girls are not exempt from The Chick, but The Chick is often the least action-y along with The Smart Guy. She might not like violence, or be slow to hurt others, but it's not out of lack of Badass or fighting capabilities.

I'd say the biggest part of The Chick is that she is the emotional core. She cares the most, and shows the most feelings.

Maybe we need to alter Five-Man Band, to note that older, more pure examples have The Chick as the fifth member, but newer, more PC examples tend to have The Quirky One instead, and both are valid Five Man Bands.

BTW, I'm a chick.