But why do we want a big general scheme page? People putting elaborate schemes into one page regardless of the scheme type is the problem.
If we can define what sort of scheme it is, we can write it up as a trope. Otherwise, it's too general to mean anything. It'd be like a Complex Plot trope.
edited 14th Oct '11 5:36:08 AM by Routerie
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
We do have a trope for Awesome Characters, it's called Badass.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
...
Seriously? Our laconic for Badass is "Is insanely cool"? And its first line is "Rule of Cool personified"? Not "Intimidating, implacable and skilled at combat"?
Good lord. Do we have to cut ALL those pages? Or is it just a bad description?
Awesome Character is not a trope. I'm sorry, but it needs to be said.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Routerie, they're called "Supertropes. Any time that we have a number of tropes that are established, narrower variants on the same idea, we should have a page for the broader general idea. If we don't, then people shoehorn other variants into one of the established pages even if it doesn't quite fit.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Yes, supertropes are often useful. And if they're exampleless, I'd say they're always useful. But supertropes with examples are only sometimes appropriate. And they have to be tropes.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Gambit Index could tolerate getting split for the purpose of acting as a lightning rod.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
AXTE INCAL AXTUCE MUN
We do have Evil Plan and Zany Scheme as gambit supertropes.
Evil Plan seems good as it is. It's for a villain's overarching plan - take over the world, steal the moon etc. It isn't attracting lots of detailed examples about these plans' mechanisms and details.
Zany Scheme is, as its first line puts it, a sitcom plot.
How is "Character enacts a very complex, elaborate plan" not a valid trope?
Eh... nah, you're right, it's a trope.
I just hope that page's presence doesn't discourage people from analyzing and categorizing the plans. And there should be a continual effort to move that page's examples into relevant subtropes.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Unfortuantly I'm not Xanatos (whoever the heck he is) so I can't come up with a plan that is sure to fix every possible problem, no matter what casual editors do. I'm just saying that there should be an option for those that encounter gambits/schemes/plans that don't neatly fit into a single existing category but are still worth mentioning
I also think that the Xanatos cleanup will be a lot easier to do is we have an generic supertrope that we can assign unclear examples to, because unfortuantly not every wick is going to give enough information for us to apply our Elaborate Sorting Algorithms to in order to move it to the exact variant of elaborate plans.
BTW, cherries and cats are a bogus comparision. We are talking leopards and jaguars. Yes there is a difference. A very importance differnce worth noting. But that doesn't stop both of them from being in the Panthera genus of Felidae.
edited 14th Oct '11 9:25:03 AM by Auxdarastrix
During the Xanatos cleanup, I've just been changing unclear examples to a non-potholed generic "gambit." The ones I don't just zap outright or change to Batman Gambit, that is.
edited 14th Oct '11 9:29:57 AM by Discar
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Right, just having some fun with you.
Elaborate Scheme could be tropable.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
It really is tropable and we've noticed that filling in those missing supertropes helps a lot with stopping misuse of their subtropes.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
YKTTW for Elaborate Scheme is up.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
I don't know, there are some tropes that are so broad in concept that having examples is almost superfluous (like The Protagonist, by virtue of having characters at all in a story there will eventually be one who is more prominent). The fact that a character may use some sort of scheme is almost the definition of "plot."
People aren't misusing Xanatos Gambit because there aren't other tropes to fit the individual example, it's because Xanatos Gambit is one of the oldest and most popular tropes on this site and people want to shove in their favorite brilliant scheme because they think it will make their favorite show/movie better for it. While there is still misuse it is a lot better than before, as making Batman Gambit also came with polishing the description for Xanatos Gambit to make it clear about the "win even if you lose" scenario (it was originally one line while the rest of the description was about how clever the villain was for implimenting the plan).
Though I do recall that when I launched Moment Killer I realized it was basically the supertrope to the Almost Kiss. In theory we should work our way down from supertropes to subtropes to prevent overlap but given the community effort of the wiki that isn't always possible. We have to make do with what we got.
edited 15th Oct '11 11:18:30 AM by KJMackley
One thing I've noticed that can exaggerate the appearance of misuse in older tropes is that by being an older trope, they pre-date a newer one designed to be more specific, or that when a trope is retooled a lot of wicks can still have the older definition. Xanatos Gambit pre-dates the other gambits, as far as I am aware, so before the definition of the others was hammered out all of the wicks pointed to XG. Chances are that unless there was a massive and aggressive campaign of wick clear up, a lot of them still point there. It's not so much misuse of an older trope, its more that they no longer correct due to trope changing, but were correct at the time.
Plus the older a trope is the more likely it is to have misuse just through sheer age. If a new trope and an old trope have the same accumulation of misuse, then the older trope will have a higher number of incorrect wicks just due to having had more time to accumulate them.
I'm not saying these are necessarily factors at play here, but it is something that I feel often gets overlooked in TRS discussion, which tend to focus on absolute numbers as proof of problems rather than looking for other factors.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Isn't that the purpose of the Special Projects forum?
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
There is currently a cleanup going on here
, but everyone is ignoring it. Please chip in.
The Other Troper
The problem there is XG always meant that. And how can misuse not be misuse just because there isn't another trope? That increases ACTUAL misuse, not the appearance of it.
"When have you ever seen a Xanatos Gambit where literally everything the heroes could possibly do to foil it was accounted for? If such a plan exists, I haven't found it yet."
Getter Robo, just from the top of my head.
Raven: "We should merge cat and cherry. They're the exact same thing."
Other people: "Nuh uh! Cats have FOUR legs! Cherries don't."
Raven: "So, what if I cut a leg of a cat? Then it wouldn't have four legs."
Other people: "..."
edited 14th Oct '11 5:29:51 AM by Routerie