Yup, those are SubTropes and Sister Tropes. That's a very Troperiffic scene.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
Oh, that story is also certainly involves an instance of "Last Stand"
I made it trope-heavy on purpose, but... I mean, there are more words just listing the tropes of the story than in the story itself. Does Delaying Action (a military subtrope of You Shall Not Pass, which is itself a subtrope of Heroic Sacrifice) really need its own page? The number of nearly identical tropes in this area just seems a little excessive.
Ravenous Sophovore
The idea of specific subtropes is that if you list the most specific one that relates to a work, you don't have to list the supertropes. Not that everybody follows that, or even grasps super/sub relationships, but that's the general idea.
If you list Idiot Hero, you don't have to list The Hero. If you list You Shall Not Pass!, you don't have to list Heroic Sacrifice. And so on.
Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.
If I understand correctly, in the page for a work you would list only the most specific, relevant trope? That makes good sense to me.
But what about in pages for specific tropes? Does that mean that one would also not list the event in question under a subtrope and all of its supertropes and sister tropes? For example, if somebody performs a delaying action, would it be proper to mention it in the trope page for Delaying Action, You Shall Not Pass, Last Stand, Heroic Sacrifice, AND Go On Without Me (and list it as a subversion in No One Gets Left Behind).
If adding all those entries is not proper - wouldn't that require a knowledge of all the related tropes to place properly? And require checking all related tropes first to avoid posting duplicates?
If adding them is the right thing to do, doesn't that mean that events like my short story will end up on half the trope pages in the wiki? I feel like everywhere I go I see a reference to Iron Man's antics in Earth X, for example.
edited 11th Mar '11 9:48:55 PM by Nathaniel
It seems to me that a lot of tropes that involve doing something important while getting themselves killed - while they are theoretically all marginally different things, in practice it is hard to tell the difference between the two and you get a whole bunch of events listed under multiple tropes. Even when events are not double-listed, it seems almost arbitrary as to which list the event gets placed under. For example, take this one-sentence story -
An injured soldier serving the protagonist convinces the hero to let him stay behind at a defensive position so that the rest of his unit can escape from an enemy, inflicting a lot of damage against the enemy but eventually dying.
This story provides examples of -
Heroic Sacrifice, Delaying Action, You Shall Not Pass, Taking You With Me, Go Through Me, Pyrrhic Victory (for the bad guys), I Will Only Slow You Down, If I Do Not Return, Go On Without Me, and More Expendable Than You
...or does it? And if it does, why do we have so many tropes to describe the same thing?
edited 11th Mar '11 10:02:57 AM by Nathaniel