You are in error about what People Sit On Chairs is. People Sit On Chairs is "It happens in Real Life and adds no information or serves no purpose in the work.
Additionally, a trope doesn't have to be relevant to the plot. A trope is a storytelling device. It may or may not have anything to do with the plot. "Starting a fairy tale with "Once upon a time" " is a trope. Starting a story with the formula "Once upon a time" establishes a certain expectation in the reader.
edited 8th Apr '11 5:06:18 PM by Madrugada
Hmm... I know at some point People Sit On Chairs was defined as something other than simply Not A Trope.
New proposal: redefine People Sit On Chairs to something, make Not A Trope an index of all the ways a thing can be Not A Trope.
Or alternatively rename People Sit On Chairs, because in its current form it's a horrible name.
EDIT: And yes, starting a fairy tale with "once upon a time" is a trope, not because nothing ever actually happened once upon a time but because nobody ever cared to mention it in that fashion except for fairytale authors.
But starting something with "Hello my name is Bob" is Not A Trope, and it's Not A Trope for an entirely different reason (not enough people actually do that) than People Sit On Chairs.
edited 8th Apr '11 6:56:47 PM by BlackHumor
It's right there in the page. Second paragraph, second sentence: "People Sit On Chairs don't convey any meaning — they aren't storytelling conventions at all, they're just things that happen normally or incidentally during the storytelling."
The first sentence explains what the purpose of People Sit On Chairs is: A predefined message that indicates what you're talking about isn't a trope.
Second paragraph, first sentence redefines "trope". Second sentence explains why Chairs isn't one.
Other reasons why things aren't tropes don't need to hinge on redefining Chairs.
edited 8th Apr '11 6:59:25 PM by Madrugada
No, I know it's a synonym for Not A Trope now, but I knew I saw it before when it had a totally different definition.
Which is why I'm suggesting we go back to that definition:
Yes, but that's not the whole definition. People Sit On Chairs is a kind of Not A Trope, but it's not the only kind of Not A Trope.
Like what I just mentioned; Not A Trope because nobody uses it.
I could claim "pink rabbits with snakes as tales" is a trope because it's clearly not People Sit On Chairs, but it's still Not A Trope because it's not an established convention.
So what you're really suggesting is that Not A Trope be removed as a redirect to Chairs, and made into a broader listing of the myriad ways something can be Not A Trope? I'm agreeable with that.
Yes! That's exactly what I said in my first post!
I think we once had a case of that, someone wanted to create Psychic Blue Skined Space Elf Babes or something. It was suggested that that was just a clump of several other tropes, Blue-Skinned Space Babe and Space Elves with a dash of Psychic Powers thrown in, rather than an independent trope, even though he/she had found three examples.
Fight smart, not fair.Ooh yes, there's also the already existing The Same But More and The Same But More Specific.
Thanks for reminding me of those.
So we make Not A Trope an index of the other predefined phrases and a precis of what each one is. It would include
- People Sit On Chairs: There's a pattern, but no significance
- Too Rare To Trope : There's significance, but it isn't used enough to establish a pattern.
- The Same But More: a trope can be summed up as "the same as Article X, but pumped Up To Eleven"
- The Same But More Specific: The proposed page can be summed up as "the same as Article X, only with <specification>" — or may alternately be phrased as "combination of article X and article Y".
- Ridiculously Similar Trope: "Tropes Are Flexible. Splitting and organizing them as Subtropes, Supertropes and Sister Tropes are just the means to make the browsing more comfortable and practical; this doesn't mean that every single thing that can be identified as a distinct trope should get its own page..."
What other important ways for something to be Not A Trope are we missing?
edited 8th Apr '11 9:30:35 PM by Madrugada
Yeah, the Blue Skinned Psychic Space Elf Babes would really be The Same But More Specific.
edited 8th Apr '11 9:51:33 PM by Madrugada
Hm, do we have an exception on The Same But More Specific for when the specificness is there to divide up the trope into subtropes?
Fight smart, not fair.Those are Not A Trope for an entirely different reason than the things we're talking about. Could be misleading.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I've gotten in a lot of arguments about splitting out huge subtropes because of people complaining that it's The Same But More Specific in the past. A note on there that subtropes exist and that they're ok wouldn't be bad.
Generally splitting tropes up are due to misuse (when the misunderstood definition can be its own trope as well), broad definitions that overwhelm a single page and/or a consensus that there is merit in two different parts of the trope. We could take any page that lists variations of the trope, like The Bumblebee, and split it down to each variation. But since all variations are well unified under The Bumblebee definition there wouldn't be much purpose in splitting.

Currently Not A Trope and People Sit On Chairs redirect to the same trope. However, People Sit On Chairs is actually a very specific form of Not A Trope: People Sit On Chairs is "Not A Trope because it happens in Real Life".
I know there are other forms of Not A Trope from the many times I've seen people misuse People Sit On Chairs, so I think we should use Not A Trope for an index for all the ways a YKTTW can be Not A Trope instead of just being a synonym for People Sit On Chairs.
Since I just came from someone using it this way, another example of Not A Trope is "Not A Trope due to not being relevant to the plot". Can't think of any others at the moment, though.