Opening.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
The decision to choose 48 hours seems arbitrary and irregular. I don't see a need to keep this as a subtrope to Race Against the Clock.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Zzzzzzzzzz
While there's a good case that this is simply The Same But More Specific, 48 hours is a number that quite a few works use. "I don't see the need for this trope" is not a valid reason to misuse it, or to shoehorn non-examples into it. If it's specifically "48 hours" then any other period of time is a shoehorn and should be moved to the more appropriate supertrope.
Doing away with this page won't make the work any easier. The examples will still need to be moved and the wicks corrected.
edited 23rd Feb '17 8:20:24 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
I don't see a specific time limit as the tropeworthy part of this. I think the association with cop shows in the description's second paragraph is a better angle.
Zzzzzzzzzz
That makes it even more specific, and leaves us with "where do we put cop show examples that use 24 or 72 hours? "
It's a good point though, perhaps the trope here is not the time limit, but why it's imposed, who it's imposed on, and what the consequences of not meeting it are.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
But I don't think "all examples with [X] time" is anything more than a sorting strategy.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
No, the other one.
All else being equal, I don't think there's a meaningful difference between having 48 hours and 72 hours to complete something, especially if the time limit is based on the same law, but is different times in different states. 48 hours is more common, but that's the only thing that sets it apart. It's sort of like if you figure out that a Flunky Boss has five flunkies more times than any other number, you make a trope for that specific number. It's not like the Ensemble Tropes, where different numbers of people give different dynamics between them.
If there's a great deal of misuse on the trope page (which is true), it implies something is wrong with it, and in this case, I suspect that tropers just don't see the significance in the specific number either.
Subtropes for specific types of time limits make more sense.
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I think Maddy & Crazysamaritan have put their fingers on the exact problem. The different ways that "we have a deadline" are played in fiction have to do with what the deadline is for much more than the exact number of minutes/hours/days the deadline lasts.
edited 24th Feb '17 12:59:51 AM by Xtifr
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Whoever wrote up the trope description saw something special in the number 48. Is this just made up or is 48 hours indeed the sweet spot for writing a plot set against a clock?
Zzzzzzzzzz
"48 hours" is really common. I don't know why, probably because it's long enough to make success not too implausible, but too short to be able to do a thorough investigation in.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
It really depends on if "48 hours have shown that it has lots of examples" is justifying its merit as a subtrope or not.
I vote for "not".
We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.
See, I was under the impression that this trope was "characters are given an arbitrary deadline to accomplish a task to create a Race Against the Clock scenario" which seems suitably distinct from just Race Against the Clock.
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The Unknown
48 hours is really common because of cop shows/movies giving the heroes that deadline to finish their investigation (e.g. Zootopia) for some legal reason that may or may not be Truth in Television. Probably just Hollywood Law, though.
Ultimately I think the trope could be expanded to just be about an arbitrary time limit imposed on the heroes for reasons separate from the actual conflict, like what Larkman said above. The specific time isn't important so much as how and why it's being enforced.
edited 24th Feb '17 1:46:38 PM by Karxrida
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Zzzzzzzzzz
The write-up is explicit that as it stands now, that the only thing that makes this different from its supertrope Race Against the Clock is the "48 hours", limit, no matter who is given the deadline or why.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Do we need a crowner, or is there enough general consensus to cut this (and move all examples back to Race Against the Clock)?
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
So, I'm torn.
On one hand, as-is, this can clearly be merged.
But the (fairly widely) perceived definition of "an arbitrary deadline is given to the protagonists to do something for no reason other than to create a Race Against the Clock situation" is a viable and separate subtrope.
... that said, it isn't the trope so if it came up in a single-action crowner (Cut or keep) I'm honestly not sure how I'd vote.
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Creating a new trope would be a task for TLP. I don't think there is a point to make this repair contingent on making that trope.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
"an arbitrary deadline is given to the protagonists to do something for no reason other than to create a Race Against the Clock situation" is, ironically, the whole reasoning for Race Against the Clock.
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Merge.
We don't need justice when we can forgive. We don't need tolerance when we can love.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
How sweet it is
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NaNo 4328 / 50,000
9:0 in favour of the cut.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
The Unknown
Are we making this into a redirect to Race Against the Clock or outright cutting the page? It has ~650 inbounds and is a phrase with a decent amount of use, so I think redirecting is a viable move.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?
Crown Description:
The trope description defines a time limit of 48 hours (no flexibility allowed). Misuse is incredibly high, citing numbers other than the strict 48 hours. The TRS thread
has not reached a formal consensus on action, so the decision is left to a crowner. If cut/merge fails to reach consensus, the page/wicks will be repaired and a new Image Picking thread will be created.
According to the description, this is is a subtrope of Race Against the Clock dealing specifically with a given time limit of 48 hours (no flexibility allowed).
However, the majority of examples talk about other time ranges. It's not helping that current page image also doesn't depict the 2 days limit.
Solution A:
Solution B:
edited 13th Mar '17 2:00:44 PM by eroock