Trope Description Improvement Drive

Changing a description from anime-specific to Japanese-specific does not strike me as a major, fundamental change. I'd have no objection to .

Rhymes with "Protracted."

The note on Covered with Scars was added to prevent trope decay. Too many people think that a little scar through someone's eyebrow meant that they were covered in scars during the YKTTW process. People were treating any scars at all, even if they were minor as the trope.

edited 21st Sep '11 8:17:28 PM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Reword it to something like "Profound / large / deep and in numbers"?

edited 21st Sep '11 8:27:41 PM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

The trope is "Someone whose entire body is covered in scars." The current changes just changed the entire trope description without even a TRS. It's not for someone who just has one body part scarred up. That's actually specifically not the trope.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I can understand why it was removed; having a description go "This trope is when blah blah blah. NOTE: The trope is ACTUALLY blah blah blah blah." is generally not good. Just say what the trope really is up front.

edited 21st Sep '11 8:53:50 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Eh, the problem is that people keep tweaking the definition and trying to broaden it form what the core trope is. Someone who is actually covered in scars. Not someone who has scars on their hand or their foot. It really should be reverted and have the bit about faces be removed instead.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Wouldn't scars in general be covered by Good Scars, Evil Scars or something?

Fight smart, not fair.

There may be a subtrope about massive facial scarring in particular.

There may be, but it's not that one and now the description doesn't match the examples. Yes, scarring in general is covered by Good Scars, Evil Scars.

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:46:08 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

@Shimaspawn: Do note that it was Eddie who took out that note, not me. I just added the "(or other body part)".

That's already covered by "is covered in hundreds of scars".

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:53:30 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

I know. That's why I'm talking about this here rather than just changing it back and taking out the bit about faces. The problem is that someone changed around the first line of the trope to shoehorn in some bad examples and I didn't catch it when I revered it. The original line was the much clearer:

A characters' whole body, sometimes even face, is covered in hundred of scars.

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:54:49 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Wait, that was the original line?

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:57:24 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

For some reason it was not. The YKTTW was getting examples where people had three scars on one part of their body and they were basically thin almost invisible lines.

Yes, that's the line from when I launched the YKTTW.

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:56:24 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Regardless, such a phrasing excludes cases of scarring that is abnormal (though not actually impossible) but not all-over-the-body in its extent, like Trigun's Vash (upper body), or One Piece's Whitebeard (who appears to have only sustained injuries on his upper body as well).

edited 22nd Sep '11 3:58:03 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

It's always implied that Vash has scars other places, but we never see his legs clearly. He tends to keep pants on even while shirtless. I don't know who the other person is to comment. And the trope isn't about improbable scarring. It's about being Covered with Scars. If over 50% of your body is covered, that's a lot different than having your hand scarred which is what your rewrite is.

edited 22nd Sep '11 4:01:13 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Yeah there is a difference from just having a few scars in a few places (Like say Negi in Negima who has three small ones, one on his cheek one on his arm and one deep one on his other arm.) and those that have big easily noticeable ones like you know he has been though a lot of crap.

Shock factor and in-universe comments usually do the trick.

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

My proposal is more like "50% or more of the surface of a 'major' body part (i.e. excluding fingers, toes, ears, nose, etc.) consists of numerous scars or one single huge scar", with the (almost) entire body variant being an Up To Eleven case.

edited 22nd Sep '11 4:26:31 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Yeah, that still counts people who have just a large burn on part of an arm that's easily covered. Burns over ALL of one arm is not this trope. 50% or more of their whole body total is more what this trope is going for. Zuko from Avatar would count under your definition and he's really not the point of this trope.

edited 22nd Sep '11 5:22:49 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Okay, my sole problem with the current description is that it implies that every part of the body has at least one very noticeable scar. If it's "roughly half of the entire body is scarred", though, I have no problem with it.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Again, if we can't agree on the definition of something, the place for that discussion is not here. I get that with the TRS being incapacitated TRS-like discussion leaks wherever it can, but if we keep this up, this thread will be rich in arguments and poor in improving descriptions.

The best idea I have is that we take quibbling about definitions to the discussion pages for the time being.

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to

Probably better in Trope Talk where people will see it.

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

No good. Eddie had already shut down the Covered with Scars Trope Talk thread that I made for being a "stealth TRS thread".

That seems to be the only recourse. Unfortunately, from my experience, a good portion of the discussion pages is practically never visited by anyone.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:51:19 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Okay. Plan: Turn the drive sandbox page into a page which tracks every aspect of this thread for reference. For each trope mentioned, it'll say how much work has been done on each aspect of it. If there is trope-specific discussion to be done, it'll have a link to the discussion page. Basically, a place to override the inherent cumbersomeness and prone-to-derail-ness that is a forum thread.

Right now I'm at work. (No, I'm not getting paid to post here my shift just ended so I hopped in here via my trusty laptop). I'll do this when I get home.

edited 22nd Sep '11 8:07:25 AM by TripleElation

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to

Okay. I added Covered with Scars to the list on that page.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Done. See link edited into the OP.

Right now we have six (6) pages up for description improvement that aren't TRS-blocked. Let's put the limit of how many ongoing ones we can have at 10. Let's also say a description can go out of improvement*

when it gets lots of +es, and someone moves that we are done with it.

The idea is that when we are done with a description it's the kind of thing someone reads and thinks "ooh, I like this site".

edited 22nd Sep '11 11:03:42 AM by TripleElation

Pretentious quote || In-joke from fandom you've never heard of || Shameless self-promotion || Something weird you'll habituate to