Misused: The Dragon

Okay.

Sure, let's rename the dragon, but the trope about the penultimate challenge before the big bad shouldn't be called the dragon...more over, such a page shouldn't exist, because it suggest there should be an ultimate showdown with the big bad when the bad guy could very easily win, be of the self disposing variety or otherwise be defeated in an anticlimax or be taken down early with a later conflict against one of the big bad's loyal minions.

We already have Threshold Guardian, no need to make a page for every possible variety of such. And The Dragon is a terrible trope page name. Never mind it already refers to at least four more recognized terms in common language(the Asian Long/Tatsu, the European Wyrm, a common martial arts rank, several species of reptile or insect), it's just not an intuitive title. A dragon often is the big bad of a story, and is just as often the final obstacle even when it isn't(Dragon Ascendant for just one example of that, no matter your definition of "dragon" in this case)...

And if The Dragon as evil number 2 or penultimate challenge seriously survives on this wiki then I might as well campaign for Foreign Wrestling Heel to switch back to it's original title, Evil Foreigner, because this is the exact same argument used for renaming that page despite the "broader" evil foreigner page having yet to surface, either on the part of those for the rename or by Wiki Magic.

If you think that that trope isn't tropeworthy, bring it up in the TLP when it's created.

And like you said, the penultimate challenge trope being called The Dragon is equally non-indicative as the second most important villain trope being called that. Most of the previous discussion in this thread is based on a false premise - that this wiki's use of The Dragon as the penultimate challenge was taken from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That is incorrect - that book referred to the concept, but not the term. The original page description for The Dragon mentioned that The Hero with a Thousand Faces discusses the fact that monsters serve as Threshold Guardians (a term it did coin) in the Hero's Journey, hence the trope name. From this, people assumed that the term was directly taken from the book. If we created the trope, and called it Campbellian Dragon, it'd be a flat-out wrong reference and extremely confusing to wiki outsiders (who might even think the trope is about a term Campbell coined in another book about something completely different). If the TLP is launched with that name, I'll bring this up there.

edited 24th Dec '17 8:34:14 PM by Lymantria

Oh, so this thread was started on a wrong assumption, and now it might actually drastically change one of the Tropes Of Legend(which admittedly doesn't have a very good name)? I think we have a trope for that, and if not we should.

The name The Dragon for the second most important villain is too cemented to change, as said many times before in this thread.

edited 25th Dec '17 7:43:39 AM by Lymantria

We good with swapping in the sandbox?

A name like "the dragon" sounds like a character type as opposed to a character who is the penultimate challenge for the hero. It doesn't help that we have other tropes like The Ophelia or The Cassandra. The X should probably be deprecated for new tropes, but idk. (Pretty sure it already is, honestly.)

But concerning the new trope, there are at least two reasons I can think of for having a Penultimate Challenger trope (as a subtrope of Threshold Guardians). The first thing that differentiates Threshold Guardians from the Penultimate Challenger is that the former are meant to test the hero whereas the latter is meant to defend the villain. Another difference is that T Gs benefit the hero in some way after testing the hero for some sort of, y'know, heroic trait whereas P Cs do not. The Penultimate Challengers aren't there to prove the hero is ready to defeat the villain but to (attempt to) kill the hero before they have the chance to attack the villain.

The other reason to have a specific page for this concept would be how common and well-known it is outside the wiki.

edited 16th Jan '18 6:38:36 AM by WaterBlap

I agree that The Dragon has gotten to close to "trope of legend" territory and seen heavy use outside the wiki as the villains badass right hand/Number Two. So it would just be a mess to change the name.

For the new trope I also agree the name proposed on the last page violates the rules about trope namers, especially when it's one from such an obscure source a lot of people causally using the wiki won't be familiar with.

We've already decided to keep the misused definition of The Dragon.

TBH it's for the best.

I didn't even realize it was seeing misuse because a villainous counterpart to Number Two (ie: the Big Bad's right hand and most trusted officer/enforcer) is only way I've ever seen it used.

edited 17th Jan '18 1:21:58 PM by shoboni

Right now, the TLP backlog is full. Can we continue this as a Long Term Projects thread?

Probably. Has the description been edited yet?

- Hasn't been changed? First sentence is still:

Reminder that the sandbox is still a thing and (probably) ready to swap out.

I'm personally unsatisfied with it since I feel like I didn't make it long enough. There also might be a run-on sentence in there.

edited 17th Mar '18 9:24:23 PM by Karxrida

Just swap it in and make changes later, or else this thread'll be dead soon.

What happened to Penultimate Challenger / Campbells Dragon? Did anyone ever make that?

Sandbox is good.

Edited by naturalironist on Dec 9th 2018 at 11:16:13 AM

Not sure, but as I've said before, Joseph Campbell never actually used "dragon" as a term for the last Threshold Guardian, so a trope about that concept shouldn't be called Campbellian Dragon or anything like that, especially since he gave that name to a completely different concept.

If it hasn't been TLP'ed yet, someone can do so whenever they want.

Edited by Lymantria on Dec 11th 2018 at 7:13:36 AM

I'm late to the party and I admit I haven't read the whole discussion, but is changing the meaning of The Dragon still a thing? It seems fine as it is. This is what is written here: Square Peg Round Trope:

The Dragon trope was used incorrectly so many times that its definition had to be changed. It originally referred to a minion of the Big Bad who was stronger than the Big Bad, representing more of a physical challenge to the protagonist while the Big Bad represented a mental one. Too many tropers took this to mean "the Big Bad's right-hand man, regardless of whether he/she is actually stronger than the Big Bad."

Edited by Asherinka on Dec 13th 2018 at 2:11:42 PM

We're past changing the name of The Dragon. At the moment, we're talking about a page for the original term invented by Campbell, which has some use in academic circles.

Edited by Discar on Dec 13th 2018 at 5:49:18 AM

I think I was the only one messing with the draft and I've been hesitant to swap it in due to lack of significant feedback.

Nobody ever swapped in the Sandbox definition. Can we do that? It seems good to me.

The article as it reads now is fine. I'd say no further action required for the definition. T

Super opposed to changing the meaning of the trope to suit whatever misuse there has been in the examples. Fix the examples.

Edited by eyebones on Jun 30th 2019 at 6:00:35 AM

Sorry, but changing the definition has already been decided. Read the whole thread next time.

I did read the thread, snotty person. Didn't do a single thing to change my opinion that the proposed change is a bad idea and completely unnecessary. It has had that definition for the past 15 or so years, being in the first dozen or so trope write-ups written. In all that time, it served quite well.

You folks need to move on to something that actually needs fixing.

edited to add:

This entire exercise is disproportionate. Altering 13,000+ uses of The Dragon throughout the wiki is a massive amount of work. Also consider the forty thousand off-wiki uses rendered invalid, which will make either the referrer, or us, or both look bad.

To what end? "Correcting" what is essentially a quibble.

So, there was a vote. Uh, yeah. At some point, we are going to have to address the "under-quorumed" issue. In this case, some 30 or so people, generously assuming the 30 are all unique, decided this, out of the tens of thousands of people who visit the wiki on any given day.

The argument I've seen that goes something like "If they care, they should come to the forum and participate" doesn't really address the issue. Given that "they" don't do that, it is just a statement of why the process is broken. I'll say it again. The process is broken. The process that is in use now, is not better than no process at all if it is resulting in decisions like this one.

Would anyone like to seriously address this issue?

Edited by eyebones on Jul 14th 2019 at 10:04:18 AM

If you read the thread you'd know that we decided against reverting to the old definition because it was too much work. So what you're saying is what everyone else has already said.

Edited by Lymantria on Jul 20th 2019 at 7:58:02 AM