Five-Man Band cleanup

Can there be in-universe applications to this trope? For example in the film Valentine: the film centers on a group of five girls who have been lifelong friends and near the end of the film, one of them, Dorothy, goes on a rant about what roles they played throughout their lives: Kate, the Nice Girl who everyone wanted to hang around with was "the popular one", Paige, the Ms. Fanservice was the "sexy" one, Shelley (Katherine Heigl who gets offed in the first 12 minutes) was the "smart one" (she was studying to become a doctor during the events of the film), Genki Girl Lily was the "fun one", while Dorothy herself, who was fat and wasn't as popular as her friends, was always the "fat one".

Edited by k410ren on May 23rd 2021 at 3:44:04 PM

They need to fit the five archetypes within the band (as seen above and on the page) and work together as a team of five, and, to be perfectly honest, I'm not seeing either of those aspects in your post.

On an additional note, does anyone have anything to add in terms of example indentation on the main page?

Edited by GoldenCityBird on May 23rd 2021 at 8:49:00 PM

How's this for a new example?

• The Kingkiller Chronicle: During the second book of the series, 'The Wise Man's Fear', the protagonist Kvothe is tasked by Maer Alveron to hunt down and defeat a group of bandits in The Eld along with a band of four mercenaries.
  • The Leader: Kvothe, a genius prodigy who, despite his young age, has earned the trust of the Maer by uncovering a plot to poison him. Kvothe is a brilliant strategist and manipulator of people, but his abilities as an Arcanist unnerve those around him.
  • The Lancer: Dedan, arrogant, prone to angry outbursts and physical fights. Constantly questions and disobeys Kvothe's leadership because of his young age.
  • The Smart Guy: Marten, aging and experienced warrior who teaches Kvothe and the others how to track enemies in the forest. He serves as the Voice of Reason and often diffuses arguments between Dedan and other members of the group.
  • The Big Guy: Tempi, the incredibly deadly foreign assassin who, because of cultural and language barriers, hardly interacts with the others. A member of the Adem race, Tempi does not believe in communicating with facial expressions. This gives the impression of stoicism, but in reality, his culture uses hand gestures to communicate emotion instead. Once Kvothe makes a concerted effort to learn Tempi's native language, Tempi opens up more.
  • The Chick: Hespe, the only girl in the group. She and Dedan have romantic feelings for each other, but neither will admit it. She is critical to the emotional well-being of the group, because when she and Dedan fight, Dedan usually takes it out on the rest of the group.

This group is active for one section in the middle of the story, about 20% of the length of the book. In the end, the group finds and defeats the bandits, but on their way back, they are attacked by Felurian and are separated.

Edited by BigBlueBackpack on May 24th 2021 at 7:29:23 AM

Looks like a good example, but it needs to be edited to follow Example Indentation in Trope Lists. I'm not 100% sure if we're doing the big rewrite for the main page yet, but in the meantime, feel free to add it to the sandbox.

Re example indentation: We went over this with the mods a few years ago when we did the edits the main Five-Man Band cleanup page. The way it is is allowed by mod fiat on-page, but not off-page. Yes this is confusing, but take it up with them.

A lot can change in "a few years" tho.

I'm not entirely sure what the mistake is, but I put the example into the sandbox page and made it look identical to all the other examples on that page.

It was stated on the indentation administrivia page that the whole example should be on one bullet point.

I was well aware of the fact, having gone through the whole thread after being told to. I shall do as you say and get a mod over here for discussion.

So this is on Injustice: One Earth Regime.

• Five-Man Band: The Five-Bad Band subtype.
  • The Big Bad: Superman, the Regime's leader and most powerful member. Among the playable roster, only Darkseid, Brainiac and Gorilla Grodd come close to matching him in power and threat level.
  • The Dragon: Wonder Woman and Black Adam are Superman's Co-Dragons. Both are Flying Bricks like Superman, and have political pull in the form of being supported by a Renegade Splinter Faction of Amazons and being the king of Kahndaq respectively. The comics show they have both served as Mentors to Supergirl, teaching her about her powers and how to use them, as well as telling her a heavily biased version of what happened to Superman to keep her complacent. Adam also serves as The Team Benefactor, using Diplomatic Impunity to shield Regime supporters from prosecution.
  • The Brute: Robin/Nightwing. Although a lot smarter and less thuggish than most examples of this trope, he is the most bloodthirsty of Superman's supporters and contributes little to the plot except to kill Victor Zsasz and get into fights with others.
  • The Evil Genius: Cyborg, who served as the Regime's tech guy before his arrest and incarceration and who helps the joint effort against Brainiac by removing Brother Eye from Brainiac's control and creating a signal disruptor that cuts Brainiac off from his own neural network, allowing Superman to take control of the Skullship.
  • The Dark Chick: Supergirl, the Naïve Newcomer and Token Good Teammate of the group who's Late to the Party and just wants to be a hero the good old-fashioned way like her colleagues used to be. Becomes a Sixth Ranger Traitor by ultimately siding with Batman on the matter of Brainiac's fate, and joining the Justice League if Batman wins. But if Superman wins, he forces her back into the fold by ordering her to become The Dragon to his restored Regime, threatening to cyborgize her if she refuses.

Is this allowed I don't really know since Five Bad Band was cut a while ago?

Breaks the "roles can't be shared/overlaped" rule with the The Dragon entry, even if a dark-themed variant would be acceptable.

Lavaring X added examples of Five-Man Band to Characters.Bionicle, attempting to apply the trope to teams containing six characters. I removed their edit, citing the simple rule that if there’s not five characters, it just ain’t a FMB. They sent me a pm disputing this, so I’m making this post and linking them to this thread so we can get things sorted peacefully.

Yeah, if the teams don't contain exactly five characters at any point, then they can't be a Five-Man Band.

Bumping to advertise a wick check that I have started. The aim of it is to measure the effectiveness of the cleanup thread, as well as the effects of the indentation on the main page, and if gender affects anything. It's located at Five Man Band Wick Check.

Rise Of The Believers: The main page have a bit of "X is The Hero, Y is The Lancer..." issues without any decent context

Feel free to link your check in the sandbox in my signature.

I have finished the wick check. A few observations:

• A vast majority of examples, including the only examples with context, that I checked violate example indentation rules. This is likely a direct result of formatting on the trope page itself. (I know that there is at least one context-and-indentation-abiding example, but I have not encountered any others.

• Speaking of context, there are more than six times as many zero-context examples than there are contextual examples.

• The one/two girls rule put into place by Eddie is only followed by half the checked examples. This seems to suggest that the gender ratio doesn't naturally disqualify a five-man band in many people's eyes. However...

• Three-fifths of the checked examples use role-doubling, role-cutting, or the addition of non-FMB roles, which disqualify the teams from the "Five" part of the trope name. About half of these are The Sixth Ranger.

• Most examples use The Chick, as opposed to a mere two instances of The Heart being used instead. Male characters are sometimes used as The Chick, in spite of that trope being Always Female.

All in all, I feel that this ancient cleanup thread has been ineffective at combatting misuse of the Five-Man Band trope across the site. I'm not entirely sure what path of action needs to be taken. Should the trope be taken to TRS? Should we just start working on deleting and re-formatting examples as soon as possible? What should be done with the gender requirements?

Edited by GoldenCityBird on Jun 14th 2021 at 6:18:40 PM

Well, this thread stagnated because of the gender issue. Because we kept getting denied the chance to discuss these things in TRS, the cleanup effort screeched to a halt. I wouldn't blame this thread more than I would the current controversial rules surrounding this trope.

I somehow hadn't completely realised that the gender issue was slowing stuff down that much. Now that I'm fully aware, I am completely on-board with TRS-ing this. Once the backlog clears up, of course.

also the thread at some point shifted to be about cleaning up the FMB page, rather than all the wicks, which was mostly successful.

Remember the trope page itself used to have a bunch of ZCE's in a table format, instead of solid examples with context in the bulleted format. (there are a handful on the page that people have brought up disagreements with after the fact, but we can't update the page on the fly to address because it's locked by mods)

the rest is stalled per above.

Edited by acrobox on Jun 14th 2021 at 5:51:28 AM

Well, the past threads were shut down by moderator/admin fiat and based on past discussions in the moderator forum I get a distinct impression that yet another TRS aiming at changing gender roles would be denied.

There are two problems here. First, a lot of the arguments in favour of removing the gender restriction sound like they are based on on-wiki usage which is an excellent way to get a wrong idea of how a trope operates.

Second, ensemble tropes in general have a signal-to-noise problem; characters naturally appear in groups of three, four, five etc. and the exact number is basically irrelevant and cannot be made a trope by itself. There are so many different permutations of team dynamics that most of them cannot be called a trope, either, unless a specific pattern is disproportionately common. Which folks say is the case for Five-Man Band but would not necessarily be the case for a variation on it.

I'm still not 100% convinced Five Man Band is a valid trope. Its definition is weirdly complex and feels fairly arbitrary at this point.

Like I said, even if you're right about this Sep, I don't see any harm in just letting us hash these things out in TRS. If we're wrong, then that can be proven through debate, rather than just shutting down the subject.

There's nothing to lose if we're wrong, and a lot to gain if we're right, so refusing to let us go to TRS and de-stagnate this thread just seems petty.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 15th 2021 at 2:16:51 PM

Given that The Leader, The Big Guy, etc. individually aren't gender-restricted to me, and that Five-Man Band is primarily "a team divided into these roles", it seems weird to me that Five-Man Band has these additional gender restrictions, especially since we actually had a hard time finding examples that fit the strictest interpretation of the restrictions (where The Chick is the Token Girl).

The main reason to have any gender restrictions is that The Chick is the "most feminine member", and in my opinion the more female characters you have, the harder it is to figure out who is the "most feminine". And I think this is the principle we should be operating on rather than a hard cutoff. Maybe rather than TR Sing all of Five-Man Band, we could do one for The Chick to solidify Sandbox.The Chick as the new description?

Issue is, The Chick is also the only one that's based on the Five-Man Band and can't exist in isolation. So I'm not even sure how to discuss it without also tackling Five-Man Band at the same time, if only because the tropes are inherently linked and both need the other. Altering The Chick could have unintended consequences for FMB, making the problem worse if we can't fix FMB at the same time.

Now, this isn't me opposing a TRS on The Chick. I just also don't think that doing just The Chick will fix anything except for, well..The Chick, if that makes sense. Like none of the actual problems FMB has will go away, and might just escalate, even if The Chick itself benefits.

Also, you know, we need a wick check for The Chick and already have at least two of them for FMB.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 15th 2021 at 2:41:59 PM

Even if we can't get it TRSed on the gender balance issues, we can try to get it TRSed for attracting zero-context examples and indentation violations. That's a valid reason in and of itself.

I have noticed that FMB is absent from Tropes Needing TRS. I could've sworn it was there before, but it may have been cut for reasons discussed above. Would anyone object to me adding it to the first or last folders?