Too many tropes being labeled "Medium-specific"?

No, TRS isn't necessary. I just took out the bit about "in anime and manga" so the description isn't medium specific anymore.

A run through YKTTW to gather examples would probably be good, so would adding it to Tropes Needing Examples. (I've done the latter.)

edited 4th Apr '13 5:38:53 PM by Madrugada

Ok, thank you, and I'll do the former.

EDIT: Link to ykttw Fist of Enthusiasm

edited 10th Apr '13 8:09:55 PM by XFllo

I've caught another trope. Finger-Suck Healing started with "In Japanese media" — I took the liberty to delete it. I think it's universal, and some of the examples are from the West.

It's a form of commonly socially acceptable cannibalism throughout the world. Well, if you want to define it as that... Hardly Japanese-specific.

Finger-Suck Healing, a Japanese trope. Ha Ha Ha No.

Death Is Cheap says it is common in comics. Is that true for comics regardless of genre or only for Super Hero comics? (Yes, I know the trope is also known as comicbook death, but I don't think that should stop us from mentioning which comicbook genre that inspired that name.)

Hmm, I'm not that much into comics, so I wouldn't know. I associate it mainly with sci-fi and fantasy TV shows.

Fond Memories That Could Have Been had a subtle line saying "that the trope is appearing with increased frequency in Anime dramas" at the beginning of the article. I've deleted it because I think's it's misleading.

By the way, where does this amine/manga/Japanese specific plague come from? ;-)

edited 15th Apr '13 9:02:18 AM by XFllo

We have plenty of anime/manga fans here.

Kay Fabe is really bad in this. Claims it's a wrestling trope, and I saw several potholes in other medium. Start a dedicated thread on it, and if so, where? Not the only problem by far.

edited 17th Apr '13 1:20:22 AM by spacemarine50

Kayfabe is a wrestling thing. What are these other potholes?

Kay Fabe's last two paragraphs expand the Kay Fabe 'trope' to other media, so presumably the links in question are for instances when someone upholds the Masquerade outside of the parameters of a piece of media and never, ever breaks character, which certainy does sound like a trope. One of the examples given is one of the Doctor Who Doctors being The Doctor in any public appearance, and I could add the fact that Mr. Rogers himself lived and breathed Mister Rogers' Neighborhood to the point of regulating his lifestyle to stay at 143 lbs, AKA 'I Love You' and answering all of his fan mail, every day. Actually, that might be a subversion along the lines of 'there is no Masquerade', but that'd still be worth documenting. Is there a non-wrestling, not In-Universe version of Kay Fabe already? I suppose that's a really good example of why we shouldn't write a trope that restrictively, but the actual Kay Fabe page is more like Useful Notes, isn't it?

While reading through the YKTTW Guidelines, I noticed that they actually seem to encourage tagging tropes as region-specific:

Fortunately, it's a bit less encouraging of medium-specificity.

edited 18th Apr '13 4:13:00 PM by Prfnoff

What's up with Abandoned Laboratory? It only have video game examples and the decription seem to limit it to video games for no reason at all.

edited 31st Jul '13 12:16:35 PM by m8e

It's possibly a setting trope with video game properties, but I don't know.

Back from the Brink is written from an entirely videogame-centric perspective, but is a pure plot trope.

And while it does have mostly video game examples, it has a bunch non-video game examples as well. It doesn't look like it's meant to be video game specific either, what with mentioning a Real Life example in the description. I think it's just narrowly written, not narrowly defined.

A thing that came up in YKTTW: the X Episode pattern (see discussion).

I think it's harmful in most cases, since it steers the way the trope is interpreted towards parts of serialised works (ie, episodes), and thus can cause people to forget to check for non-episodic media. But I have a hard time getting that point across.

Are you saying that that YKTTW should cover chapters as well, not just episodes?

No, I'm saying it should cover every camping trip. Three Men in a Boat was mentioned early on, and that's an entire novel. Movies should also be included, even if the camping trip takes the entire film (like possibly The Blair Witch Project). And so on.

Now, these can be grandfathered in via Tropes Are Flexible, but I think Tropes Are Flexible should only be a guideline for adding examples, not when deciding on a name.

Camping Trip and Camping Episode sound like different tropes to me. The former only about the trip, the second about how it fits into the larger scheme of the series.

Most such episodes don't "fit into" any larger framework, though. It's just a generic premise that easily accomodates different casts.

Yeah, look at some trope examples:

Beach Episode - it's a bunch of characters hanging out on the beach Halloween Episode - a story set at a specific time

There are cases where I think X Episode is good, like

Noir Episode - there is a shift to a certain form, and then back to default

And then we have the cases where X Episode really is justified:

Bottle Episode - cheap episode to keep the season within budget Recap Episode - tell what happened earlier

Exactly. Another one is Lower-Deck Episode, which could go either way - I know there are complete stand-alone works that fit the format, but I'm not sure if they already have a trope of their own.

And The Doll Episode, which... I'm not sure why we have that one, since it's pretty much just an elaboration of Creepy Doll in X Episode form.

edited 2nd Oct '13 3:11:44 PM by Noaqiyeum

Lower-Deck Episode could perhaps be named Lower Deck Interlude, but that might give the impression that the episode or story isn't capable of standing on its own, so I think that one's okay.

Note that I'm not advocating renaming existing tropes here, but something to look out for when creating new tropes, or perhaps when going over a trope for other reasons.

If we want to get technical here there are a few different definitions for "episode"

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/episode

a : the part of an ancient Greek tragedy between two choric songs

b : a developed situation that is integral to but separable from a continuous narrative ; an incident

c : one of a series of loosely connected stories or scenes

sure some media are more obviously "episodic", and it's a term that's used on TV. But if you look at the examples on these pages I think it's pretty clear that people are smart enough to figure out that an episode is just a singular part of a story that can be separated from the other parts. People will just use words like "act", "chapter", "issue" (for comics) in place of it if they want to differentiate it from a televised or serial online medium. And they already pretty much do since there are plenty of other types of media on those episode pages.

I also agree with Septimus that a work that takes place completely in a setting (like Camping Trip) is a different trope all on it's own. The distinction is that that's a setting might be used for the majority or the entirety of the work. Whereas for these "episode" tropes it's used for filler or as a breather story to either develop characters or take a break from the main plot (or sometimes an excuse to expand the plot). Putting in examples of works that take place completely in that setting would be redundant. Because the setting in those "episode" tropes is used sparingly. It's not something that usually happens, it's exceptional.

edited 3rd Oct '13 12:03:29 PM by xanderiskander