A few more Missing Supertropes which are needed

I'm putting together an Omnipresent Super-Trope called All Women Are Delicate, which is meant to be the default assumption about every form of media unless stated otherwise. The reason for this is that it's being argued (erroneously) that tropes such as Action Girl, and Tomboy are not tropes at all because it basically means "woman who fights" or "woman who doesn't act feminine" rather than "woman that subverts expectations of gender roles".

I brought up making a new supertrope in the Hot Amazon TRS thread, and a few people seemed to agree with the idea.

However, I've run into a problem. We need a few secondary supertropes which are corollary to this. For example, I was having a hard time adding examples of women using magic instead of weaponry onto the page, because using magic alone isn't necessarily an example of delicacy. However, I found Guys Smash, Girls Shoot and that made things a lot easier. Likewise, I'm now finding that we have a lot of tropes that deal with a specific form of "feminine combat" (Lady of War, Silk Hiding Steel, Kick Chick, Little Girls Kick Shins, etc.) in which girls clearly demonstrate that they fight differently than men and/or boys. We need a supertrope of this, otherwise it's going to look like an aversion of the gender stereotypes rather than a zig-zag.

Another example is the sexual side of things, where a woman being the dominant person in the relationship is played for fetish fuel. We have Abusively Sexy Woman, All Women Are Doms All Men Are Subs, Rape Is Okay When It Is Female On Male, and a few others along the same lines. Same here: a super trope would help indicate that the role-reversal is the point.

So with that said, here are a list of corollary supertropes I'd like to make:

• Dainty Combat
• Sexual Role Reversal
• Women Are Not Vulgar
• Men Lead; Women Support
• Magic Is Feminine
• Women Make Better Parents

edited 26th Feb '12 7:26:28 AM by KingZeal

I like the way you're going about this. It's going to be a big job, but it makes a lot of sense to figure out the tree before we start hanging branches on it.

I've actually got most of it figured out. The biggest problem is going to be finding the tropes I skipped over or deleted from my list because they were only vestigially related to the Super-Trope. But, I'm having fun, honestly. I'm finding a lot of tropes I never even knew existed.

edited 26th Feb '12 7:25:35 AM by KingZeal

Don't forget to take advantage of, and add to the family tree widget (the little "family" icon) in the subpages icon bar. It will help you find other related tropes that we already have, and make the trope family tree become a reality that much sooner.

I always forget we have that.

I do too, and I was one of the people who was asking for it. . But it is handy.

Magic Is Feminine could also be related to Closer to Earth (or whatever it got renamed to).

Makes me wish Special Efforts' purview included non-TRS-related wide-scale wiki improvement "projects" that requires the collaboration of as many tropers as possible to be feasible. It would've been perfect for this, as well as for hammering out the family trees for the tropes that predated the system (which could go a long way into spreading awareness of the feature itself).

^ It does.

Also, we downplayed the family-tree maker because when we first rolled it out, there was a lot of misuse of it, for instance people linking every trope on an index as child tropes of the index, or every "related to", "compare" and "contrast" trope mentioned on a trope page as subtropes. We figured that letting folks discover it on their own would have the effect of limiting its use to those people who genuinely cared about building family trees (in the hopes that they would also be the people who cared enough to do it correctly).

edited 26th Feb '12 9:15:47 AM by Madrugada

We're also going to need an Index called Men X, Women Y.

It does? Shimaspawn implied that it was strictly "executing TRS decisions" in one or more TRS threads that we've both been on in the past couple of weeks.

I see what you did there.

edited 26th Feb '12 9:28:34 AM by MarqFJA

It's for projects affecting the wiki that are too big for one person to do alone or that require a cohesive effort by a number of people.

99% of such projects are going to be things that either did or should have gone through TRS.

This is the first time that anyone has set out to make a concerted, careful effort to build a trope tree from the superdupertrope down. But it still fits the criteria for Special Efforts — a huge job, too big for one person to do alone, that will require cohesive work by a number of people to succeed.

More needed Super Tropes:

• The Opposite Gender Will Improve Your Life:
  • Covers things like Magical Girlfriend, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, High-Heel–Face Turn, etc.
• The Opposite Gender Will Ruin Your Life:
  • Covers things like Females Are More Innocent, Love Makes You Crazy, Femme Fatale, Psycho Ex-Girlfriend, Bastard Boyfriend, etc.
• Even Girls'Own Bodies Hate Them:
  • Covers things like Menstrual Menace, Tampon Run, etc.
• Women Are Crazier:
  • Covers things like Menstrual Menace (again), Hysterical Woman, Psycho Lesbian, etc.
• Daughters Are Always Vulnerable:
  • Covers things like The President's Daughter, Farmer's Daughter, The General's Daughter, Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter, etc.

edited 26th Feb '12 2:31:05 PM by KingZeal

Those sound like indexes not supertropes.

I didn't mean to. I just was trying to convince you that it wasn't the place to go to fix one page. It's for large scale efforts but people keep trying to start TRS threads in there because the TRS has a cap on it. On the flip side, people shove TRS threads there because they're too lazy to finish them so they can be locked.

The problem is that adding certain tropes to the list requires specific corollaries that "Women Are Delicate" doesn't explain. For example, it doesn't explain the connection between the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter and the Farmer's Daughter. On the one hand, one is tempted to the side of good by the strong hero. On the other hand, you've got a farm girl who is tempting bait for a visitor. There doesn't seem to be anything similar between the two other than the sexual connotations, and even then, they're somewhat inversed.

However, when you look at it from the perspective of the Fathers on both ends, it becomes clear what the connection is: if you don't watch over your daughter and fiercely protect her sexuality, she'll be too delicate to defend herself from the men who come to steal her innocence. That's a trope in and of itself, and it isn't one we've actually got (that I'm aware of). We just have several tropes (The General's Daughter, included) which repeat the same message with different variations.

edited 26th Feb '12 2:55:59 PM by KingZeal

Which is great thinking honestly. Your logic I mean. You seem to be making a lot of progress.

^^ And that missing midlevel-supertrope would be something like Daughters Are Vulnerable.

Yes, that's definitely a trope. And you could discuss the ways it is related to patriarchal control of daughters' sex lives, fear of male-on-female rape, social implications of marriage and of premarital pregnancy, heirs born to heiress only children, etc.

Women Are Crazier is probably also a trope.

The first two on that list are probably actually four tropes: Men Will Ruin Your Life, Women Will Ruin Your Life (these two at least are surely legitimate tropes), Men Will Fix Your Life, and Women Will Fix Your Life.

edited 26th Feb '12 2:53:56 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Maybe. I was trying to be simple, though, since there's probably gonna be a lot of overlap.

But, either way, it can work.

Shimaspawn: If Special Efforts is only for things that require multi-person coordination and/or involve multiple tropes, the TRS is only for things that require major decision-making, and Trope Talk is just discussion instead of repair, where do I put threads like these two? These things need to be done whether or not anyone bothers while they're in the TRS. Indeed, I only noticed them by chance, as the TRS threads were locked without addressing these issues.

edited 26th Feb '12 2:57:00 PM by ArcadesSabboth

Honestly, I would holler for the thread to be reopened. They aren't supposed to be locked without the wicks fixed.

That said, I don't see the point in dividing the tropes by a heterosexist division. It doesn't need to be the opposite sex, and it doesn't matter if it's men or women. It all places out the same. The gender that you're attracted to has a big impact, for good or ill.

Well, actually, the opposite sex component is important.

The idea is that the opposite sex is a strange and mystical "other" that the person can't understand, but feels compelled to anyway. On the other trope, they're a dangerous, scary "other" that should be handled with care. Homosexual relationships don't carry the exact same connotations. However, that's an interesting trope to explore on its own.

edited 26th Feb '12 3:00:20 PM by KingZeal

Trust me, even in gay and lesbian media, potential romantic partners are treated as a strange mystical other you'll never understand.

In other words, gender-based Double Standard at work here?