Unclear Description: The Heavy

While I am half asleep ATM, me thinks that the distinction is going to be hair splitting and will lead to lots of duplication.

I suggest make Villain Makes The Plot an exceptions-only trope.

The Heavy (or whatever it will be renamed) will collect all the straight examples.

I feel that could work as a plan.

So then we're admitting it's the same trope. Why would we use two separate pages for straight examples and exceptions, though? We don't do that for any other page either, and it's just begging for misuse.

So the way I see it, The Heavy is just a character who embodies The Villain Makes the Plot. Which seems redundant.

I really don't get why we would turn one of the tropes into an exceptions-only page. Could someone explain the idea behind that?

edited 25th Apr '13 7:55:51 AM by Larkmarn

That's a problem with The Villain Makes the Plot, not The Heavy. Some of the examples go off the description (thereby explaining how the intelligence of the villain contributes to the cleverness of the plot) while other examples go off the name (thereby explaining how there wouldn't be any story without actions the villain took—even if the main plot is only tangential to what the villain is up to). That makes The Villain Makes the Plot the poorly-defined trope. And, really, that's not surprising at all since the page was originally an attempt to trope the page quote.

The version based on the name doesn't seem tropeable, or if it is, it's part of a trope cluster: villain makes plot, protagonist makes plot (i.e. protagonists makes a mistake and has to fix it), outside force (either a less important character or the world itself) makes the plot.

As for the original meaning, I'm not sure how tropeable this is, since it's just meta-analysis that Villains Act, Heroes React generally leads to a plot about as clever as the villain is. If anything, the underlying principle is that the plot is as smart as the smartest proactive character—another thing I'm not quite sure is tropeable. If it is, it would likely be an "aversions only" page: the interesting choice a creator can make is writing a plot more intelligent that the characters in it. (See most examples of Farce, most movies by the Coen Brothers, and Gambit Pileups that don't include master schemers.)

The Heavy of course exists independently of this: they're the living (or possibly un-living, never-alive, etc.) embodiment of the conflict of the story. In particular, once The Heavy either succeeds or fails, the audience knows that the plot is about to get wrapped up pretty quickly—either the conflict is already resolved, or now that they're out of the way, it's time for the hero to set things right.

Let's get back to the original question: can we rename the trope now?

Plot Driving Villain is at 18-9 and Spotlight Antagonist at 12-8 ATM.

And more to the point, this trope is redundant to The Villain Makes the Plot.

The suggestion above, to have one page for this trope and use another page for the exceptions, doesn't make a whole lot of sense and isn't what we do for any other trope either. We should just merge these pages.

The Heavy is the villain with the most impact on the plot.

The Villain Makes the Plot is about how a villain impacts the plot.

I see a lot of examples overlapping, though.

Looks like we're going to need a roll call as to whether it's a duplicate or not, since crowners are acting up again.

I say it's not a duplicate.

Setting aside that it can't be a duplicate of a "trope" that doesn't have a consistent meaning...no, it's not a duplicate of either of the ideas contained on the other page. (Reasoning expressed a few posts up, of course.)

Considering the two pages have attracted a plethora of identical examples, and the suggested name to this trope is almost identical to the name of the other trope, there clearly is an issue here, and a bland assertion that "they're not duplicates" is not going to solve that.

If, as Ironeye states, the issue is that The Villain Makes the Plot isn't actually a trope, then that still is a good reason to combine the two pages, merging the page for TVMTP into The Heavy.

I agree with Spark 9.

I understand that they're ostensibly different because The Heavy describes a character, and The Villain Makes the Plot describes the plot, but it seems where there's one trope, there's necessarily the other. Simply seems redundant.

I suggest that we make a separate thread for The Villain Makes the Plot, since it's derailing this thread.

Agreed. We can put this thread on hold until we resolve that one so we can determine whether or not there will really be an issue with the names being too similar.

Instead of putting this thread on hold indefinitely while we wait for the possibility to start a new thread and resolve that one, it would be much easier to just resolve it in this thread. It affects this trope, after all. Discussing a merger of trope A and page B can be discussed in a thread on trope A; I don't see any problems with that.

edited 1st May '13 3:06:05 PM by Spark9

Come to think of it, I guess it could be easier. I'll ask to change the topic to "Duplicate Trope" for the time being.

I'll also set up a crowner. As usual, crowners can't be hooked properly for the time being, so vote on that.

I always thought that Big Bad was the cause of the conflict (which it is), while The Heavy is just the driver of the conflict.

Plot Driving Villain certainly fits the latter description. Let's say the Big Bad is the concept of Greed, and the Corrupt Corporate Executive is one of those driving that concept through the story.

edited 5th May '13 2:59:41 PM by Serocco

The reason we have examples on The Heavy in the first place is because The Heavy overlaps with Big Bad in most cases. Examples on The Heavy are reserved to examples which don't overlap with Big Bad.

If two tropes overlap "in most cases", then that's a good reason for merging. There appears to be a lot of confusion and disagreement, even in this forum, about what (if anything) the difference is between the Heavy, the Big Bad, and the Arc Villain.

Are you talking about merging into Big Bad? Because the current issue is whether we should merge The Villain Makes the Plot into The Heavy or not.

Let's merge The Heavy with The Villain Makes the Plot.

Ultimately, it's the same concept, but worded differently. The former is when it's not the Big Bad. The latter is when it is. Let's merge it together and create a better description for it.

Agreed.