Setting Up Trope Relationships

Yes, we do. Keeping with Triangles... Scalene Triangle and Obtuse Triangle are sister tropes that are both subordinate to the Triangle trope. They have overlap, but not all Scalene shapes are Obtuse, and not all of the Obtuse shapes are Scalene.

We occasionally have debates on if an Equilateral Triangle is a subtrope to the Isosceles Triangle. Such debates basically explore if an Isosceles Triangle means at least two equal sides, or only two equal sides.

edited 13th Jul '17 6:04:59 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

A subtrope is a variant of it's supertrope that has become widely-enough used that it is a trope in it's own right. If the supertrope is fairly restrictive, the variation that makes the subtrope a subtrope may not be part of the supertrope.

It's not something that can have hard-and-fast rules applied to it. Trying to hash out exactly, precisely what the rule is is pointless. The rule is "a variant that has become well-enough established that it we recognize it as a trope on its own" — it would be still a trope even if the supertrope isn't.

And Super/Sub are not the only relationships that matter, either. There are sibling tropes. There are tropes that almost always appear together — symbiotic tropes, if you will. There are tropes that are Opposite. In one, x happens because Y. In the other if Y happens, X won't. (There are tropes that are antagonistic — if one is in use, the other one can't be.)

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Man, got distracted by real life several times over the past month and a half. Sorry for vanishing like that when I'm the one who pushed for this thread's creation. That said, I'm happy to see more tropers participating; two heads are better than one, so it follows that the more heads, the better it would be (barring specific exceptions depending on the nature of the discussion). This is no better illustrated than by how other posters managed to explain my point about the nature of the supertrope-subtrope relationship (i.e. "the subtrope must be a subset of the supertrope") better than I have done and possibly better than I could've ever done.

So with that said...

~crazysamaritan [1]:

That seems to support the part of my post that you're quoting. Am I interpreting your response correctly?

~Xtifr [2]:

... We actually do have Blind Weaponmaster as a subtrope of Handicapped Badass, so a Blind Swordmaster trope would have to be a subtrope of Blind Weaponmaster rather than of Handicapped Badass itself. Just saying.

~Madrugada [3]:

I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to multi-parent subtropes, where Subtrope Z is what happens when Supertrope X and Supertrope Y coincide in the same example?

EDIT: Damn, forgot to properly do the "Check out this post" markup for my last response when I submitted the post. And it doesn't work if you edit it in.

edited 27th Jun '17 3:05:50 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Yes, I think I was providing additional evidence.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Well, while we wait for more feedback, here's a new item on the table.

Speculative Fiction LGBT's description ends with a claim that it's a supertrope to Discount Lesbians, Lesbian Vampire, and Free-Love Future. I find that claim suspect for the first two tropes, because Discount Lesbians doesn't require the work to be set in Speculative Fiction, and Lesbian Vampire is only about a single character, whereas Speculative Fiction LGBT is typically about a whole setting.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Also, if anything, Discount Lesbians and Free-Love Future are opposed.

Also, Free-Love Future has nothing per say to do with LGBTQO; many examples (especially older ones) are purely het.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Look people, I don't know where this idea that sub-trope/supertrope relationships have to be strict "But more specific" and have a perfect one-to-one reciprocal relationship came from, or that two subtropes of the same supertrope can't be opposites to each other. But that is simply not the case. Just because SF includes works that are Free-Love Future that are het does not mean that Free Love Future isn't a subtrope of Speculative Fiction LGBT.

edited 12th Jul '17 8:22:24 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The Sub-Trope page states quite specifically that all examples of a Sub-Trope must by definition also be examples of that Sub-Trope's Super-Trope, linking to The Other Wiki's page on genus and differentia to make its point. The Super-Trope page says the same thing.

I can't say I've heard anyone try to claim otherwise until now.

edited 12th Jul '17 8:36:13 PM by HighCrate

Well, for one thing, Sub-Trope's description pretty much decrees that a subtrope has to be completely contained within boundaries of the trope that it calls a supertrope. This includes subtropes with two or more supertropes, in which case the subtrope is defined by the area of examples that lies completely within each of the supertropes simultaneously (i.e. the intersection of all the supertropes).

For another thing, I personally got this understanding of Sub-Trope's nature from the past few years of having both participated and observed several TRS and Long-term/Short-term Project threads, as well as answers to questions that I had posed in Trope Talk, some of which came from staff members (possibly while speaking in a staff capacity to resolve a prolonged argument that was otherwise going nowhere).

If that's not enough, perhaps it's long overdue for a serious dedicated discussion thread to (re)define what a Sub-Trope is.

EDIT: 'd.

edited 12th Jul '17 8:34:04 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Subtrope says that they all "share the same common theme." Nowhere does it say that they must be a strictly linear progression of specificness. Unicorns, pegasuses and alicorns are not horses, they're unicorns, pegasuses and alicorns. They have different characteristics, but they share one common aspect with Cool Horses: they are typically presented as equines and as cool creatures. So they're subtropes of Cool Horse, even though they aren't horses.

You guys are looking for a hard-and-fast, bright-line rule about the relationship between tropes and there isn't one.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

You are factually, demonstrably incorrect. Both the Sub-Trope and the Super-Trope pages specifically define their relationship using the concepts of genus and differentia in logic.

While we certainly could change both definitions into more of a fuzzy, "they have some sort of relationship but we're not entirely sure what" type thing, I fail to see what would be served by it.

edited 12th Jul '17 9:24:55 PM by HighCrate

I don't think using the perpetually misused "Cool X" tropes is a believable argument for or against specific trope requirements. I mean, Cool Horse includes creatures that aren't strictly speaking horses. And I don't even buy that unicorns aren't horses. They're horses with horns.

A subtrope is always an example of its supertrope. That's the rule we've worked with, to the point of not including examples on the supertrope if they fit the subtrope, because that's already assumed by the inclusion on the subtrope.

Check out my fanfiction!

The genus/differentia analogy is just that: an analogy, and like most analogies, it has flaws that appear when you try to use it as anything except a rough comparison. It is not the rule for how trope relationships work, it's a close approximation of one aspect of trope relationships.

If it were an accurate statement of the "rule", no trope could be subtrope to more than one supertrope, because something cannot belong to more than one genus.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

• Super-Trope: Animal with four legs
• Super-Trope: Animal with wings
• Sub-Trope: Four-legged animal with wings

It's a simple Venn diagram relationship. It's seriously nowhere near as complicated as you seem intent on making it.

Such simple, straight-ahead relationships don't work for all tropes that are related, of course. That's why we have Sister Tropes, for tropes that are related in various ways that don't fall neatly into a set-subset categorization scheme.

edited 13th Jul '17 8:07:56 AM by HighCrate

From you:

• Examples should always be under the most specific trope,that fits cleanly, rather than a more general supertrope.
• A supertrope is simply a trope that's spawned at least one variant that has become a trope in its own right.

Other moderators have also enforced the "a Sub-Trope is more specific and Super-Trope is more generic" instruction. Almost nine years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20081002112319/https://tvtropes.org:80/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SubTrope

Of course sister tropes can be opposites, the majority of examples from Inverted tropes (This Very Wiki) are sister tropes of one Super-Trope or another.

False: a square is a member of both the genus [a] rectangle and the genus [a] rhombus.

edited 13th Jul '17 10:29:50 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I owe you folks an apology. In reading back over, it's clear that I was more over-tired than I though t I was, and therefore more muzzy in my reading and replying.

I still think that trying to create a mathematical or formal-logic-based rule for the super/sub/sib relationship pis not a good idea, because we aren't working with things that all have nice, neat, clearly-bounded definitions. We're working with literary concepts and words to describe them. The problem is that literary concepts are fuzzy and complex (especially compared to math and logic terms) and different people often use the same word differently.

That's part of the reason that the tool that this thread originally started about was taken off the wiki: it was not working as intended. Part of that was that it wasn't written very well; part of it was that anyone could use it and many people did so without making sure they were using it correctly.

edited 13th Jul '17 5:18:05 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Honestly, reading this thread really makes me doubt that a formalized "trope relationships tool" is workable at all, for the reasons you just gave - fiction, and the elements that make up fiction, don't break down in as structured a fashion as it seems to need.

At one point, we had a fellow who was going to see if he could start with genealogy/family tree software and make something that worked, because that's already set up to deal with secondary and sideways relationships. But he disappeared. It would take a lot of tweaking, but I still think that might be the way to start.

Anyway, the other thing. This isn't a projects thread anymore, so I'm going to move it to Wiki Talk in a bit.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I think that if we don't have specific definitions for them, there's no point in the labels to begin with. They're just related tropes with various kinds of relationships.

Check out my fanfiction!

How much more specific do the label definitions need to be?

• Supertrope: A broadly-defined trope that has more-narrowly defined variants

• Subtrope: a trope that is a more-narrowly-defined variant of a broader trope

• Sibling Tropes: two or more tropes that all share the same supertrope one step up.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

For some reason, tropers are claiming that the broad definitions do not encompass the more-narrowly defined variants.

edited 14th Jul '17 9:18:52 AM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If they don't pay attention to the clear definitions we already have, how is making the definitions more complex going to help? "They don't follow the rules we have" is not a problem we can fix by making more rules.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

You are one of the tropers not following the rules we already have.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

A trope can be called a subtrope of a supertrope that is more than one step removed from it. If A is the supertrope, and B and C are subtropes of it, and D is a subtrope of C, then D is also a subtrope of A. "Dogs" would be a subtrope of "Mammals". It is also a subtrope of "Animals". This is reflected in our rules for listing tropes on an index, where each trope is listed individually, not indented under another one. On the "Animals" index, "Dogs" should not be sub-bulleted under "Mammals", it should be in the proper place alphabetically on its own line.

Sister or sibling tropes, on the other hand, must have the same parent. Again, A is the supertrope. B and C are its subtropes; they are also sibling tropes. B's subtropes are not sibling tropes to C's subtropes, though. They may be called "related to".

edited 14th Jul '17 10:25:54 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.