Five-Man Band cleanup

Someone attempted to do a TRS thread for this trope, but Septimus Heap denied it due to backlog, saying it would only cause "a sea of misuse".

Rock'n'roll never dies!

Good question, I sometimes feel that the definition and boundaries of the each five man band's role is too restrictive and outdated. I mean, the chick can only be a female ? Can't a man have some psychological insight too ? Why does a five man band only have up to two female characters (I seriously read that on the edit's rules and the thread's ones) ? Society marches on, after all...

I am a drow and I'm diggin a hole, diggy diggy ho, diggy diggy ho

I have to agree, that's always been my biggest gripe. I feel like if you made it so The Chick was The Heart, tons of "misuse" would be straight examples.

You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid

There have been a few TRS threads proposing a broadening. Some in the Eddie era were shut down by administrative decision, I think. Others I asked for second opinions on in the mod forum and the responses were always rather tepid. I'll see to ask again.

The main issue I have with broadening is that many proposals to do so appear to be informed by proponents' experiences with examples of the trope listed on the wiki, rather than broad experience with the works themselves. Examples being comments like "I feel like if you made it so The Chick was The Heart, tons of "misuse" would be straight examples" When a trope is often misused (and for the record, many many examples would still be misuse even if The Heart was allowed), such an approach can easily lend a wrong impression of what the trope is about. And because we've had a serious problem with apophenia when it comes to ensemble tropes - people often see spurious patterns.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Exactly. There's a ton of otherwise valid examples that just happen to not fit the perfect gender ratio.

FMB isn't an outdaged trope like has been claimed. It's an evolving one.

I mean, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, I'm not seeing how it wouldn't be a duck just because it has a different assortment of feathers. If the examples are otherwise perfect, then they wouldn't be coincidence. That's how we have to operate w/ every other trope, after all. They're meant to be flexible and we're meant to trust examples as long as they have context. Why would it be different here?

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 21st 2020 at 12:48:36 PM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Since when has "I want to fit this example into this trope, so I'll change the definition of the trope" ever been an acceptable argument on our wiki?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Okay, the polemics (from the Greek πολεμος, "war", if you get what I mean) here was a digression. At this stage, my point is just to politely get an admin to replace the italic words between brackets right by "The Chick" in the trope description from "tambourine, vocal effects" (which isn't even a real role in a rock band) by "bass guitar", an instrument which fulfills the same role as the Chick.

I am a drow and I'm diggin a hole, diggy diggy ho, diggy diggy ho

That isn't what's happening here. There's evidence of the trope occuring without the strict ratio. We aren't just pulling this out of thin air. I don't see why asking the trope to be flexible, which every trope is meant to be, the same as trying to get misuse added.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

The real misuse problem with FMB is that unlike Complete Monster and Magnificent Bastard, it doesn't have a large group of dedicated Wiki Curators willing to zap unapproved entries and do writeups. It's not a matter of mere Square Peg, Round Trope waiting to conform to misuse.

By the way, the SPRT page says The Heart is the unisex equivalent to The Chick, except in Five-Man Band? That seems to contradict Tropes Are Flexible.

Edited by ccorb on Oct 21st 2020 at 1:57:26 PM

Rock'n'roll never dies!

I feel like changing the description to change the instruments would be a redefinition that we would need the TRS for.

That said, I have a TLP draft on my computer for a trope about the Token Girl in a band being the bass player, which seems to be what Ozzy Mandias has in mind. I'll put that up later today.

---

Edit: here it is.

Edited by naturalironist on Oct 21st 2020 at 2:46:39 PM

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

The Heart and The Chick are related tropes but The Heart shouldn't just be used as a unisex The Chick and vice versa.

Whether The Heart or The Chick deserves to be on the band is one discussion.

Whether The Heart or The Chick are the same, the answer is no.

Edited by acrobox on Oct 21st 2020 at 1:11:42 AM

Not particularly, naturalironist. As I said, my request is purely technical. It's about the function the Chick, whatever their gender is, fulfills in the band, and it draws parallels to the function of the bass, so it would be more evocative than the analogy in the trope description.

I am a drow and I'm diggin a hole, diggy diggy ho, diggy diggy ho

In theory, the people who contribute on this thread are a group who are willing to inspect and judge examples. It's just that the trope itself is not concrete enough for that to work, as it's a messy tangle of sub-tropes and grandfather clauses.

still agree with this point as well. Changing the instruments seems relatively minor compared to changing a band member or a gender ratio.

the instruments are just for flavor. most Five Man Bands aren't musical bands at all.

Edited by acrobox on Oct 21st 2020 at 3:25:59 AM

Yeah, that sounds pretty fair.

But seriously, I think we have evidence to suggest that the FMB model isn't stuck-in-the-past, but actually evolving to be less gender-specific. The dynamic can play out regardless of gender, and does!

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

i can argue both sides, but ultimately i do agree its grown beyond the gender roles that original codified it.

Both the FMB dynamic and The Chick as an individual trope could be edited to reflect modern usage.

Tropes Are Flexible and a lot of trope pages get their descriptions changed overtime piecemeal by various tropers over years. These pages however have been locked for so long that the "natural" evolution occured everywhere except the main page itself. So it would require rewrite sandboxes and crowners and consensus of course but I ultimately think it should be done.

Also if this is thread is followed by the people who are dedicated enough to check examples for shoehorning as is now, I feel we should also be trusted to be involved in a fair update edit that allows for modern flexibility while still keeping an eye on shoehorning.

giving this a bump. or is it at an impasse?

i guess at issue last time on:

• Should the chick's instrument be changed on the FMB page? (Always A Female Bassist is pretty close to launching from TLP which might further support this)
• Should The Heart replace The Chick in the band?
• Should we address gender makeup of the band as a whole?
• And just cause i like banging this drum, can we update The Chick to its sandbox?

Anyone wanna tackle any of these? or put any to a crowner?

Edited by acrobox on Dec 9th 2020 at 11:51:23 AM

Take it to the Trope Repair Shop, citing this thread and preferrably a wick check to determine how common male-Chick variants of FMB are. There is a large backlog at that thread, but threads are rarely declined for that reason.

The categories for such a wick check would be:

• Current definition
• Male Chick
• Too many females
• Gender unknown/ambiguous
• Non-gender shoehorning (e.g. too many members, not all roles filled)
• Insufficient context

I'm back!

We did. Septimus declined it.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

A recent TRS thread for Five-Man Band was declined, so unfortunately I don't think any TRS-based approaches are going to get anywhere for the time being. Instead, we have to work with what we have. Edit:

I am coming around to the idea that The Chick is the bassist. But that would require a change to the trope description, which I think is difficult without TRS.

The only gender-restriction explicitly mentioned in the description is that The Chick has to be female, which few of us here contest. The idea that The Chick must be the Token Girl is based purely on mod fiat and is not explicitly stated anywhere. Both The Smart Guy and The Big Guy explicitly mention that this character can be female (though these tropes can exist outside of a Five-Man Band).

Based on that, I see no reason to go around removing examples purely for having too many female team members. As I've said before, I suspect that many female-dominated teams are going to be shoehorns due to the difficulty discerning who is The Chick, but those examples can be removed for shoehorning, not because they violate some strict gender ratio rule.

Edited by naturalironist on Dec 11th 2020 at 2:31:26 PM

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

Technically at the moment the only real rule is that there must be more guys than girls...which I still think is nonsense. But at least it isn't as strict as only having one girl?

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Yeah, this cleanup effort is just stuck in a rut. If the TRS has been firmly denied, it's staying in that rut. A wick check would help, but probably isn't worth the effort without a TRS.

I'm convinced that if this trope hadn't existed and was bought to the Launch Pad now, it'd get shot down.

That's also not mentioned in the description, it's another case of mod fiat and hazy consensus.

I think rather than worrying about borderline edge cases, we should focused on cleaning up egregious violations, of which there are plenty. Should we have a concerted effort to clean up certain namespaces, or keep this as the sort of thread where people bring up problematic examples? If the latter, how do we jumpstart activity on this?

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

I found this on Characters.South Park The Boys.

Don't have time to read the whole thread, but I'm guessing this wasn't approved since it doesn't use the template, and because it lists a boy as The Chick. Am I correct?

Correct.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness