Not Tropeworthy: Fan Favorite

I suppose I'm playing Devil's advocate to myself here but we could make a page documenting fan favorites as they are portrayed in fictional works.

Granted, I can't think of any good examples right now. Maybe The Avengers. There is an issue of Black Panther where someone questions why people love the Avengers, a group of freaks who can destroy cities, but despise the X-mutans(because of John Sublime)

I think that's a bit of a different concept, and we might have a few tropes for characters who're well-liked In-Universe.

I see only two viable solutions:

• Limit to characters who're significantly more popular than anyone else in the work, and there's no competition at all for the position of most popular character. Audience Reaction, and would still need a maintenance thread. This is the only way I can see having the trope with examples working without significant misuse, and where it isn't just Character Who Has Fans.
• Remake into an index for tropes about characters who're well-liked by the audience.

Reworking Sliding Scale of Character Appreciation could possibly fall into the second point.

By the way, Hate Sink and The Scrappy are different tropes. There's a large difference between designing a character to be hated, and hating a character who's designed to be likeable or at least neutral.

edited 4th Jan '15 12:34:11 AM by AnotherDuck

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potentially opening a can of different worms: how would you know that a character is designed to be hated? Where's the line?

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One, some of the discussions in the maintenence thread for The Scrappy are about that distinction for specific examples. Two, in most cases it's not that ambiguous. Most Hate Sinks are hated for being horrible people, one way or another, which is (mostly) a designed feature of those characters.

Another way of looking at it is to see if the story would be better or worse if you hate the character. Hating one of the heroes isn't usually a benefit for the story, but hating a villain can make you cheer harder for the heroes.

Or you could make a Watsonian versus Doylist distinction: Do you hate the character so you want her gone from the story, or do you want to see the heroes beat and humiliate her, but still think she has a good place in the story?

All those ways of thinking leads to basically the same conclusion in the vast majority of the cases. But as with many tropes, there are always borderline examples that are hard to place.

If you want more than that, you should probably bring it up in The Scrappy Cleanup thread.

To tie that to the actual topic, I have much the same idea about why Fan Favourite probably shouldn't be an In-Universe trope. While it's about liking characters, it's quite different how that like appears, if that makes sense.

edited 25th Jan '15 8:40:13 AM by AnotherDuck

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We could use the name Fan Favorite as a Fan Speak terminology page, no examples on pages / wicks.

The cleanup for that result isnt even that high.

edited 4th Jan '15 5:20:47 PM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I don't see why we'd need a definition for it. It's pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

If the hateful character does something awful and is either punished for it or lambasted by the other characters for it, those are clear signs that we're not supposed to like this character. If neither happens or if the character is praised anyway or even for their action, that would signal something like Protagonist-Centered Morality and make them qualify for The Scrappy.

edited 4th Jan '15 5:35:16 PM by Tuckerscreator

If we do decide to narrow it to make sure it only accounts for characters wildly more popular than all the others, perhaps it should also be limited to series with an Ensemble Cast or Loads And Loads Of Characters?

I am personally for indexing it, because the concept is related to our other tropes, but if people think it would be interesting to list the astoundingly popular characters of fiction, that can work with some watching.

You mean because otherwise there aren't any characters to be wildly more popular than? That's a good thought.

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@Duck, Tucker: thanks, I see it now.

I'm thinking about how some manga will make a poll for fans' favorite character (or something else ^note such as "favorite Zanpakuto" in Ble Ach) in the story; the one who comes on top is, undeniably, a Fan Favorite.

Now that makes it an objective... trivia.

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Please clarify; do you think the page should be cut? Because otherwise we are giving a definition, and the definition would ideally match with the use of term outside of the wiki, correct?

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

But even with official polls, I'm not really sure what the value of the page would be. Just listing characters who have won polls? Not to mention, I only know of manga doing fan polls on such large scales. No other medium/genre that I can think of does that.

I think what's being said is that there's no point in defining it. The definition is right within the term.

And yes, I think it should be cut.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Not tropeworthy, cut.

Well, ultimately I still feel like a cut is in order? Any other thoughts?

I agree with cutting. Not a useful page; nowhere near enough inbounds to justify sparing it.

There's a lot of wicks, though.

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

Eh. It's an annoying number of wicks to cut, but not an insurmountable one.

Agreed—I also thinks it accrues wicks at a fast rate because of how easy it is. Basically the instant you see it you're going to think of your favorite series and your favorite characters.

Definitely not tropeworthy, as a sufficiently popular work can have more the half the main cast qualify; if you have more than one example, then they probably aren't a favorite (as "favorite" implies special treatment more or less exclusive to them), and defeats the purpose of the trope. ->[insert The Incredibles quote from Syndrome here] For example, the Super Smash Bros YMMV page now has a Fan Favorite subpage that lists 24 player characters, about half the cast of the fourth game.

edited 12th Jan '15 9:14:37 PM by Karxrida

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I don't really see why not. I felt that there needed to be an opposite to The Scrappy, and Ensemble Dark Horse just does not cut it. However, I do feel it should have a go in YKTTW before getting its own trope.

"That is hard to argue or agree with." ~Penny

Either the page should be cut, or be used as a terminology page without examples. Alternatively, it could be used as an index for tropes like Ensemble Dark Horse and Draco in Leather Pants instead. That way the page is more fleshed out and isn't left as vague.

Making it an exampleless definition page won't stop it from spreading like cancer all over the wiki unless we put it under a wick ban, in which case we might as well just cut it, since the page has no reason to exist.

As for making it an index, we'd still have to clean the wicks and moderate them to prevent misuse, an issue we can easily avoid by creating the index under a different name that clearly identifies it as an index.

I simply can't see a better solution to the problem than cutting. This page contributes nothing useful, and any attempt to change the definition will just result in misuse.

So... crowner time? If we going to declare a verdict on this P.O.S., it's better we do it sooner than later, because this thing is spreading like cancer. It's already broken the 200 wick mark.

I'm alright with a crowner. I suppose the options would be 'cut', 'index', 'rewrite and clean up misuse', or even 'keep as is'?