Five-Man Band has been receiving a lot of misuse. As was concluded in this TRS thread
, it needs a massive cleanup. There are over 30 subpages and almost 3500 wicks to be gone through. This thread is for organizing the cleanup effort and discussing any and all examples to be added and cut.
What is correct use of the trope?
- The characters must be part of a team, that is, a team dynamic must exist between members of the band.
- There must be exactly 5 team members
Format for examples
In an effort to cut down on misuse as well as get rid of all the Zero Context Examples, we are trying to shift all examples to the following format. If you are familiar with a current work and can do a writeup for it, please do so and post it here.
The sandbox for sorting examples is here.
Completed
Subpages:
- Other (Moved and redirected to a Just for Fun page, as that is what is was acting as.)
Still needs work
Wicks (Related To page
):
- B-V
I will keep this post updated with the progress made, and any other needed information.
Edited by MacronNotes on May 19th 2022 at 8:59:40 AM
Looks good to me except we don't count the Sixth Ranger or 11th-Hour Ranger as FMB members, so they should be removed from the example.
but it looks like FMB + The Heart, which is 6 core members. so I would err on the side of it just being a Team.
Well, The Heart only becomes playable some time after The Leader's Disney Death, so it's still five members. I'll have to go and specify that.
I'm sorry of just coming here, I just found this example on Mirai Sentai Timeranger
- Five-Man Band:
- The Hero: Tatsuya, also doubles as The Chick due to him being dragged along by the group as their Rookie Red Ranger.
- The Leader: Yuri, who is the only female member of the group.
- The Lancer: Ayasenote
- The Smart Guy: Sion
- The Big Guy: Domon
- Sixth Ranger: Naoto
Found this on Characters.Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers:
- Five-Man Band: While there's some overlapnote the core cast nonetheless fits:
- The Leader: Chip. He's the Only Sane Man keeping them all together, and the one they look to for guidance.
- The Lancer: Dale. While he's rarely actually in charge, his personality is the most contrasted, and is Chip's Heterosexual Life Partner.
- The Smart Guy: Gadget and Zipper largely split this role.
- Gadget is the Gadgeteer Genius who's responsible for all their equipment, and is the most intelligent overall.
- Zipper also fulfills this role. While he's not as intelligent as Gadget, as the smallest of the Rangers he must rely more on being clever than brute force, and often takes advantage of his size to benefit the others.
- The Big Guy: Monterey. He's the physically strongest and biggest of the group, and a Boisterous Bruiser who prefers to charge right in.
- The Chick: Gadget pulls double-duty. She's the one who often plays mediator when the others come into conflict, and is the one most likely to seek a non-violent solution. She's also The Heart of the group, who best exemplifies the Rangers' ideals.
- The Sixth Ranger: Foxglove. By the time of the Boom! comics she is more or less officially a member of the team
I assume this should be cut, or at least reworded so Gadget is only The Chick and Foxglove is ignored (since she only joined after Boom!).
Edited by GoldenCityBird on Jul 19th 2020 at 3:25:27 PM
TRS Wick CleaningI'm noticing Four-Man Band has a lot of the same problems Five-Man Band had: a table format that promotes ZC Es, shoehorning of works where the ensemble has more or less than four people, and shoehorning of characters that don't fit any of the archetypes. Is that within the scope of this project?
Edited by naturalironist on Aug 7th 2020 at 8:56:02 AM
"It's just a show; I should really just relax"Few works I recognize so can't comment on the validity of the examples but definite second on 'table format promotes ZC Es'. Not sure if we should discuss this here or take it somewhere else though.
I didn't even realise there was a Four-Man Band trope.
I can see one glaring problem that jumps out at me. The trope image is the Real Ghostbusters team... I understand why people might think of them, the show had a strong comedic element and the characters do play off each other, but the four guys do not neatly fit into four stated categories of the trope (plus the image is one that gives Slimer a high profile suggesting it might be one of the images that's from the period where the creators were trying to make it a five-man team of four humans and a ghost), there's also the complication of Janine's oft-changing role in the cartoon.
The Western Animation section lists the guys as: Zeddemore (Only Sane Man), Spengler (The Smart Guy), Venkman (Casanova Wannabe), Stantz (Butt-Monkey). The problem with this is that the Butt-Monkey was actually Venkmen most of the time. Stantz was mostly The Heart. But sometimes he was The Smart Guy. And sometimes he was indeed a Butt-Monkey. Spengler was The Smart Guy, but it wasn't uncommon for him to be the Butt-Monkey (which gave rise to one of his top quotes 'Sometimes I think the universe just waits for me to get cocky'). And, while Zeddemore was often the Only Sane Man, even that could pass around the team (and sometimes there was no sane man at all). There's too much sharing of tropes between the guys, and ignoring the Janine and Slimer complications, depending on who was writing the episodes and what the episode was going for.
So, if there's a problem with the show that represents the trope... actually representing the trope, it might need looking at in its own right.
Edited by Wyldchyld on Aug 9th 2020 at 7:26:40 PM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.If nothing else, Four-Man Band should go on the sandbox so we can get rid of that table format.
Do examples have to be proposed and approved in this thread a la Complete Monster?
Heck, I'm going to assume they do and propose an entry. AFAIK it was never on the site before.
- E. W. Hidick's The McGurk Mysteries was a series about a group of pre-teen detectives. Starting from the sixth book in the series, they were also a five man band. They added a Sixth Ranger in Book 16.
- The Leader: Jack P. McGurk, the Jerk with a Heart of Gold leader of the group, also the main detective whose "hunches" usually saved the day.
- The Lancer: Joey Rockaway, The Ishmael. He was intelligent but more of a librarian/archivist type, and rational where McGurk was intuitive.
- The Smart Guy: Gerald "Brains" Bellingham. He was the inventor and Gadgeteer Genius, but skeptical, sometimes too much so for his own good. Also an Insufferable Genius. At first an enemy of the group he joined after the group collectively outsmarted him.
- The Big Guy: Willie Sandowsky, who was very much the Gentle Giant/Lovable Coward type Big Guy, but intimidating the one or two times he did actually lose his temper. His main contribution to the group was actually his abnormally powerful sense of smell.
- The Chick: Wanda Grieg, a Tomboy who was usually the first to get aggressive, but was also the mediator to any fights she didn't start, knowledgeable about etiquette and other 'chick' things, and the one who was good with both younger kids and adults.
I think you only really need approval for entries added to the tropes page itself, which is locked; and I think your write-up looks good.
I would like to remove an entry from Characters.Derry Girls but I'm afraid I will be in a very slow-moving edit war territory if I do. I think all of it is accidental and I assume no ill will on anyone's part.
I removed this original entry over a year ago in April 2019:
- Five-Man Band: Erin is The Leader, Michelle is The Lancer, Orla is The Big Guy, James is The Smart Guy, and Clare is The Chick.
On Feb 20, ~Dristarg added this entry
:
- Five-Man Band: Gender-flipped - leader Erin, lancer Michelle, big guy Orla, smart guy Clare and only male James, the chick.
I made a post on the discussion page
about why I don't think Five-Man Band applies to the series. But I'd like to get agreement and permission to remove.
Extended reasoning
- Derry Girls is a sitcom where all the characters are Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists. They're a bunch of people hanging out and getting into random scrapes, not a team working towards a coherent goal. I'm not sure Five-Man Band can ever apply to to a work with this premise.
- The characters don't consistently fit the roles. Erin is the protagonist and sometimes initiates plots, but not always. For example, in the "bridges across barricades" episode, Clare is the most enthusiastic about the project, Michelle leads everyone to party with the Protestant lads, but Erin gets the most spotlight overall. Who is the leader here? I don't think there's an obvious lancer or heart either.
- The gender makeup is also Four Girls and a Guy. Though it was never resolved what gender combos should actually be allowed, this one seemed unpopular. And the latest entry has a male Chick.
If it's not clear how the roles are distributed, it's shoehorning. The fact that they're not a "team" is another point against the example. It's fine to remove.
And yeah, the gender debate was never resolved, it just died out.
... If I wanted to start up the gender debate, I'd need to make a TRS thread for it, right?
yep. It's on Tropes Needing TRS already for that reason.
i personally feel its premature to update the band requirements without first updating The Chick with its sandbox, because the sandbox was what we used to clean up the band in the first place.
Sandbox page here for reference.
Can we take that there instead first?
I think deciding on gender restrictions should happen before rewriting The Chick. The sandbox isn't very clear to me (it's very long and seems to assume a strict gender requirement without making it explicit), so a definite answer on gender requirements could help refine it a bit.
Yeah, I think we should finally settle the gender-issue before worrying about The Chick; lifting the gender restriction will allow us to merge it with The Heart.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallEither change needs to happen in TRS, but I don't think it will happen anywhere soon. We have historically not allowed discussions on redefining these two tropes owing to concerns that they'll just invite more shoehorning. That and the eternal TRS backlog.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynmansure. I mean it may be a lost cause at that point.
for sake of discussion to me it feels like The Chick and The Heart should not be approached with the goal of merging them, and shouldn't be only approached in context to how they fit FMB.
The Hero and The Leader coexist, as does The Lancer and Number Two. Chick and heart are often similar but have key differences, and don't need the FMB to exist. They can both be part of any kind of Team. that's my two cents.
I think they could stay separate if The Chick can actually stand on its own and not just be a part of FMB.

I know there hasn't been a post for a while but I was directed here... I wrote a Five-Man Band entry a quite a while ago, and now I'm wondering how correct it actually is. Here is the entry: