BehindTheBlack: Combine Behind The Black & The Ghost?

I think Behind the Black and The Ghost overlap a lot. I'm not finding a strong distinction between the two and think the two should be merged.

I see two different tropes. There might be overlapping misuse in the examples, but I didn't check.

Behind the Black = A character is in the scene, but the audience can't see him, even though it might make sense to.

The Ghost = The character is not (necessarily) in the scene. There's no reason the audience should be able to see him.

If there's misuse, then a cleanup is in order, but probably not a merge.

These are two considerably different tropes and should not be combined.

Behind the Black is visual trope. Something is physically present in the scene, but the viewer can't see it because it's out of the camera's view - as a result, none of the characters can see it, either.

The Ghost is a character trope. This is a character who is mentioned, who is referred to, who other characters complain about or praise, but who never actually appears. (They get all the reactions from other characters you would expect a "real" character to get, but they never actually show up to provoke those reactions when the audience can see them.)

They're related, in that they both are about things that can have effects on the story that are not visible to the audience, but they're pretty distinct.

FYI: you cannot link two tropes. Pick which one you want tagged and then edit the tag.

(The tag looks like this:

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edited 6th Sep '11 8:27:30 PM by Deboss

Anybody else want to weigh in on this? Any arguments to support a merge (or other action)? Personally, I think the arguments for taking no action are very strong, and we should be able to lock this up without much further ado.

I think Aldheim explained the difference between the two tropes very well.

Right. A merge is not warranted.

The only possible point of confusion I can see, looking at the descriptions, is that Behind the Black starts off with "The tendency for a character, plot point etc. to be invisible...". That does seem like it could be misleading if you're reading too quickly. I suggest changing that to something like: "The tendency for something to be invisible...", and then later, when it says, "even when the object should be in clear view", changing that to "even when the person or object should be in clear view".

Any objections?

If there's a case for confusing definitions, then by all means, clean them up. I don't think that what you're proposing is so grand that it should require a major forum consensus. This is a pretty clear case of "if it's broke, just fix it."

In any event, these tropes will not be merged. I think we're done here.