Two tropes here: Planet Of Hats

I was gonna YKTTW this but I feel I should come here first.

Planet of Hats covers two tropes:

• A species who has a single attribute as the core of it's being. War, Logic, Capitalism, Backstabbing, Evil, whatever. This is how "Hat" is often used all over the wiki, and the most often seen use of the trope.
• A species who exhibits a single culture. Everyone speaks the same language, the same religion, etc... This is pretty much a required trope for Planet of Hats, but it can happen separately.

So I was thinking of splitting off the definiton 2 as it's own trope. Thoughts?

Hmm... I think there might be enough to split, although we need to make sure that this isn't conflicting too much with One World Order (there is some overlap, but there are also examples where a world will have different countries while still maintaining similar outlook, one single religion, etc.).

I've associated Planet of Hats much more closely with the former: A single attribute or characteristic defining a planet's people or the planet itself.

"Culture," however, covers many different characteristics at once (language, customs, cuisine, politics, morals, history, beliefs, and so forth) and would not necessarily come to define any group of people by only a single characteristic.

edited 13th May '11 1:07:43 PM by SeanMurrayI

I agree, the trope is about creatures, for whom, "x is their hat", where x is a specific important element of their culture. It's almost never used as the second.

The second should be launched as a new trope, called Single Culture Planet, to reflect Single-Biome Planet.

edited 13th May '11 1:13:31 PM by EternalSeptember

I've only ever seen Planet Of The Hats as A. I've never seen it as B. If you want to make a trope for B go ahead.

Agreed with the consensus that Planet of Hats is used for trope #1. The question in my mind is whether trope #2 is sufficiently distinct from One World Order to be split off.

^I agree. Although a single unified culture is not necessarily a integral to a One World Order (especially when said world is often Earth), it does tend to show up more when the trope is shown involving fictional planets in galactic communities and the like.

I've YKTTW'ed it here, could use feedback.

If we do need a new trope for the second definition, how about "Single Culture Planet" (as a snowclone of Single-Biome Planet).

I can't think of enough examples of such a world to warrent it, though.

I like that name. Or perhaps Monolithic Culture Planet (but I prefer yours).

EDIT: Actually, Monolithic Culture Planet sucks. Monolithic Alien Culture?

I've Seen It A Million Times: the alien planet is a single political unit, has one capital city (bonus points if the capital is named the same as the planet), one language (or, if we're really lucky, a few languages, but nothing near the number that humans have), usually only one ethnicity unless the writer wants to make a point about racism. Often goes hand in hand with Single-Biome Planet.

A pertinent quote from this convention write-up (don't know who originated it, I'm afraid): "Why are alien cultures always monolithic? A holdover from the "Soviet Bloc menace"? "All foreigners look alike"?"

edited 22nd May '11 10:33:23 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Ah, yes. Of course.

I was trying to think of examples that weren't also One World Order.

But taken as a trope in its own right, its so commonplace that it would probably be easier to list the exceptions.

Probably is.

And that in itself is quite telling. The Earth has hundreds of nations, thousands of languages, and heaven knows how many cultures, yet in vintage science fiction, nobody seems to bat an eyelid at planet Tripton having a world-wide government and a single language.

Well, it is pretty prevalent. I think it would work well if it listed exceptions.

It's also present in fantasy. There's one Orc Culture, One Drow Culture, One Lizardman culture, etc... Only exception being the Defector from Decadence faction the Always Chaotic Evil races may have.

Good point. That should probably go in the same trope.

Wait wait wait, what happened to Planetville? EDIT: Aaaaand City Planet?

edited 5th Aug '11 12:08:10 PM by piearty

City Planet is about a Single-Biome Planet where the biome in question is city.

Planetville is more closely related to Planet of Hats, but still splittable. It's basically a form of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale—you can learn all there is to know about a planet by visiting one city on the planet; and the ground forces needed to conquer a planet aren't much larger than those needed to conquer a country.

Well, what does everyone think they can agree? When is it appropriate to cite things as examples of a trope? Am I asking unnecessary and poorly written questions but not answering any? Is it rhetorical or do I expect to learn from it? Flamebait?

Poorly written questions, yes. The rest I'm not sure about because of that first point. :)

Re-railing: the other trope seems to be at YKTTW, and Planet of Hats seems to be fine as it is, and not in conflict with the new trope. Are we done here? Can we lock this up and reduce the TRS backlog by one more tiny bit?