Trope Description Improvement Drive

May–December Romance is specifically for 30+ year age gaps. There's a lot of misuse involving smaller 5-20 year gaps, so Age-Gap Romance was made.

MDR still might veer too close to The Same, but More Specific.

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Yeah, that definitely strikes me as The Same, but More Specific. What is special and different about a 30 year age gap versus a 25-year gap that it warrants a separate trope?

MDR aside, Age-Gap Romance needs something to define when an age gap is considered "significant." Otherwise every non-Twincest couple would count; every romantic couple has some age difference, it's just usually too small to mean much. Being notable in-universe and/or representing an obstacle to the romantic partners works as well as anything, already being part of the trope definition and all.

That doesn't mean that the obstacles have to be insurmountable or that the pairing has to be portrayed as squicky or doomed by the narrative. But the obstacles do have to be present, or else why are we bringing it up at all?

Edited by HighCrate on May 27th 2019 at 6:11:01 AM

Not just that; the characters also have to be in different stages of life. A 50-yo and a 90-yo couple do not qualify as May-December because they are relatively close in age compared to a not yet 20-yo and a nearly 60-yo.

They're the same gap, but less than twice the age and roughly thrice the age are very different results.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Revised TGTBATE sandbox

I'm tempted to write scenario where the focus guy is the grey or the black side, but I have doubts, because I don't think that happens often enough to be notable.

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(*happy*) MUCH better! I like the details you used in the description this time. Covering three scenarios with bullet points should work well, and doesn't seem to require examples to fit certain categories, but does encourage examples to say how the faction may have developed.

(*helpful*) I made a change on the sandbox, because I do like the white/grey and grey/black wicks, but I felt a different First Line fit better. If you like it, too, I think you're good to swap with the main description.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

How accurate is this line from Queer Show Ghetto: "Genres like Yaoi, Yuri, Josei, and the Bara are often designed specifically to be consumed by LGBT people, and therefore are not in a queer ghetto."

A lot, if not most, yaoi and yuri aren't specifically aimed at queer audiences. Also "josei" isn't a genre.

About Age-Gap Romance and May–December Romance — you may want to look up an old TRS discussion (or perhaps in was in trope talk), and the TLP discussion of Age-Gap Romance.

30+ difference in age is significant because these two skip over two generations and often look like a man/woman with their grandchild. The restriction and specific numbers were added to the description because people were constantly adding exampless like 15-year-old dating 23-year-old or 13-y-o dating 18-y-o — teenagers and twenty-somethings are not Decembers by any means.

AGR is supposed to be a light version, so it's natural it feels like the same but more specific. It's the extreme version / exaggerated trope. The important thing is the relative age of the characters though. It was supposed to be may-september romance or twenty-forty romance mostly (because 40 is not a December either, yet to teens they are old as balls, but then it it was proposed that younger and significant age differences count, too (15 and 23, for example — high school kid and college kid are at significantly different life stages).

BTW "the description doesn't correspond to the definition" is a kinda nonsensical thing to say because description is definition.

I think most of the problems on that page happen because High Crate sets up high standard to example context for this trope for some reason. Specifically, the line that the age difference must be an obstacle for the couple. This trope doesn't need to be an obstacle — it just happens that is usually is and most characters in the story will point that out eventually or at least suppose there are problems. I hate ZCE as the next person, but deleting valid examples that point out the age gap is ridiculous.

Edited by XFllo on May 28th 2019 at 12:07:40 PM

Yes it does. A View to a Kill features Roger Moore, at 57. One of the Love Interest characters was Tanya Roberts, at 29. Moore was older than her mother at the time, but their age gap is never mentioned in the work itself. Women of a certain age are often overlooked for roles that go to much younger actresses. This is a problem, because creators are ignoring the age of their male actors and casting female actors based on their age. When Casino Royale (2006) came out, Daniel Craig was right between the ages of Eva Green and Judi Dench; a 12-year gap between the women. It's not the same thing as a fictional relationship that is strained due to the gap in life experience.

Edited by crazysamaritan on May 28th 2019 at 7:25:25 AM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

But this trope has nothing to do with Hollywood standards about casting men and women. If James Bond's age is not brought up in-verse in that movie, we may assume that the guy is acting a 'forever young' fantasy and thinks he's as young as the leading Bond girl.

Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester are an example of this trope, though they barely care about the age difference themselves. It's not an obstacle for them, but his servants point out that ha was acting like a guy madly in love, and with a young governess to boot. Social class was a bigger obstacle and contributed more to their unequal pairing than the age gap, but the age gap was still important.

Edited by XFllo on May 28th 2019 at 1:29:12 PM

Exactly! Age isn't pointed out In-Universe for the first example but age is pointed out in the second example.

This scene, where people are gossiping about the respective ages, is where the trope comes in. Until it comes up as an issue within the story, like in Jane Eyre, it isn't an example.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

See? They are an example, yet it is not an obstacle. Just characters gossiping about it.

No, the text presents the age gap as a problem.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Hardly.

~crazysamaritan

That opening paragraph was good enough to me (it compares with the "white vs grey" and "grey vs black" tropes we have), I might have difficulty in making a better one.

That said, I'll try, and maybe you'd like to help?

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~XFllo — On a scale of 1-5, where 4 is "world-ending stakes", Jame Erye presents the conflict at about 0.3, but that's different from James Bond, who doesn't even register the conflict at all, despite having a larger gap. In James Bond, the gap exist, but does not cause any problems. In Jane Eyre, the gap exists, and characters present it as a problem.

~Tropers/{{4tell0life4}} — I did. "That the good guys are good and evil guys are evil are a given, but it's the added "bad guys" or "grey guys" that stirs the whole dynamic." Is your best opening line. Start from there. I said if you were fine with my edit, we were done changing things.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

That is, I added a few lines above those. (Check this again)

Are you OK with that, or should I delete them?

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Made improvements over on Middle Grade Literature and clarified based on feedback here, and tweaked Children's Literature and Young Adult Literature based on it.

Hello, first time in this forum.

A couple of days ago I started a new tropes on the TLP called Absurdly Charismatic Villain (this is a link to the discussion). The trope is about villains obtaining followers through pure charisma, like the Magnetic Hero, without any supernatural aid or manipulation. However, I was then told that those examples are also covered in Charm Person as a form of Charles Atlas Superpower. My TLP is nowhere close to launching, but now I'm uncertain: is it worth the effort to split the tropes? Or make my draft a subtrope to Charm Person? Other than the person who informed me of this detail, it hasn't been opposed...

SpaceBattles.com fanworks (unnoficial) index in my Sandbox.

What's the connection between Post-Somethingism and Postmodernism?

Disambig Needed: Help with those issues! tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13324299140A37493800&page=24#comment-576

The latter's a subtrope.

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Speed Round and Bonus Round are healthy tropes, but their descriptions seem a little lacking.

Should Miley Cyrus's description be updated? There had been a lot of things that happened especially after her revamp in 2017 and her marriage to Liam Hemsworth in 2018. And I read that she only became a panelist on The Voice for two seasons.

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Her personal life is irrelevant unless it impacts her work.

Light Bulb Shot was discarded by the good deletionists in this thread based on its similarity to the existing Kill the Lights trope. The trouble with Kill the Lights's description is that its first sentence implies this must be done in a mysterious/supernatural manner, rather than the mundane ways suggested in both the Light Bulb Shot proposal and its own second paragraph.