An honest conversation about Chairs: What is a Trope and how do we judge them?

You're on the right track, but it doesn't have to have any bearing on the plot. It can be characterization that has no effect on the plot. It can be dialogue style that has no bearing on the plot. It can be a music choice or a costume choice or a cinematographic choice that has no bearing on the plot. Plot-related is only one subset of tropes.

This is why I also mentioned "production-related" as one of the valid cases. Jitter Cam usually doesn't have any plot relevance, but it forms a visible element of production that is a distinct stylistic choice made for a reason.

Because "plot" isn't all there is to "narration".

@ Crazysamaritan: the caveat to Troperithmetic is that someone finds the "formulaic" connection after the trope is made. That is harmless (and sometimes clever). Making a trope with formula, though? That's questionable.

If I find the connection after the trope is made, I'm taking a hard look at the trope because I assume the sponsor was at least as intelligent as I am, which means they knew about it when they wrote the trope. The "arithmetic" should, in my opinion, always fall prey to the Fallacy of Division; some new consistent quirk comes from narrowing down a trope, otherwise it's always The Same But More Specific.

Fundamentally, it's not about abstract concepts like trope arithmetic, but rather whether the trope has interesting examples. An "interesting" example is one that's got enough information to be fun to read and to explain the use of the trope so someone can understand it.

A trope that is so clinically precise that the only examples possible are "this happens" is not interesting or fun. It is the counterpart of a trope that is so vast and broad that it happens in nearly every work, and so every example is simply, "Yep, it happens in this work, too."

edited 17th Mar '17 7:21:06 AM by Fighteer

@26 and everyone really.

Thanks again for all your input. I appreciate your time. I was worried that the definition of "trope" had changed and I didn't notice. The site's been though a lot of changes since I joined, I wouldn't have been surprised if I missed some policy/definition change. Thankfully, there wasn't.

It looks like chairs doesn't fully cover the much broader concept of trope, and that there are many kinds of tropes. Some are in the grey areas of "narrative significance," while others cover different aspects of media. Chairs is still generally effective for proving "narrative significance." It's not arbitrary, "significance" is just variable from person to person. We just have to collectively agree what is significant.

Again, thanks for the responses, this gave me some good thinking points.

edited 20th Mar '17 9:13:20 PM by pokedude10

Question:some tropes, despite being objectively in work, are listed because they are "bugs" in the work(both the Error Index and the Bad Writing Index has lots of them). Both Fighteer and Madrugada used "choice", but this apparently excludes them . How they qualify?

Tropes can be unconscious on the part of writers. Many of the items on the Bad Writing Index are caused by faulty assumptions based on the fact that writers have absorbed those ideas from other works without realizing that they are bad, or not caring. The tropes on Error Index are also often unintentional, but: a) are inarguably present in the game, b) most definitely add context or meaning, even if not intended, c) occur often enough to be distinguishable.

edited 21st Mar '17 5:30:50 PM by Fighteer

About b: The only meaning and context i noted in good part of them is that the programmers/level designers realized an error.

edited 22nd Mar '17 11:13:11 AM by MagBas

They visibly and substantially affect how the game is played, or how it can be played. We consider those to be tropes, even if they lack narrative meaning.

It isn't just TV Tropes that considers glitches and such to be part of the work. Speedrunners — and world record completion times — tend to count glitches as fair play. The glitches and errors are simply part of the finished product, and can sometimes be intentionally left in — with or without comment from the producers/developers/publishers. My point is that it isn't that weird that we trope errors and the like.

The "incidentally" in the first paragraph of People Sitting On Chairs refers to "Form a significant pattern", as Fighteer mentioned in {{3}}?

Yes, and it also refers to whether the pattern in question has any significance to the production, story, or audience.

edited 22nd Mar '17 2:23:14 PM by Fighteer

The whole premise behind People Sit On Chairs is that the subject matter is so generic and/or mundane that the act itself is not something deliberately done by the storyteller. The act of someone sitting in a chair is incidental, considering that as human beings we probably spend at minimum 50% of our day sitting down. This is in contrast to an act that is, if maybe not uncommon but certainly not ubiquitous in everyday life. That's why if a Lamborghini is shown prominently it would count as a Cool Car, it's comparative rarity is what makes it a trope.

And as PSOC explains, there are usually loads of actual tropes that are occurring in its stead, such as a Slouch of Villainy in that the manner one is sitting conveys narrative significance. Similarly, pretty much every character will have some form of hand gestures but it becomes interesting with Milking the Giant Cow, Giving Someone the Pointer Finger and Flipping the Bird.

Noting here that a Lamborghini appearing in a work (other than in a B-roll traffic shot) would almost always be deliberate Product Placement, so even if the car itself is not featured enough to be considered a Cool Car, it would probably be an example of the other trope.

edited 23rd Mar '17 5:01:08 AM by Fighteer

Another question: and cases where something was considered perfectly natural in a culture but the times changed and this is considered more exotic now? They qualify as PSOC in works created prior to the cultural change ? Examples: Free-Range Children, Politically Incorrect Hero(the "politically incorrect" part), Everybody Smokes.

edited 26th Mar '17 8:43:07 AM by MagBas

They may qualify in works from the time that they were made. It all depends on if they were significant at the time. Your example of Free-Range Children, for example; while many children were far less tightly-supervised than they are now, and were expected to be able to do things like walk a mile to and from school by themselves, it still had narrative significance, it was still often the only way to kick off a plot (Lassie would never have worked if Timmy was not free-range; neither would Leave It to Beaver or Flipper or the Encyclopedia Brown series of books...).

edited 26th Mar '17 9:17:38 AM by Madrugada

This was considered a trope in the time?Was because was more common in fiction than in real life?

It was a trope because it facilitated character development for child characters, it instigated plots and plot complications, and so on. Whether or not it was common in Real Life really has little to do with whether something is a trope or not. Something doesn't become a trope just by being extremely common, it doesn't become a trope just by being extremely uncommon, either. It becomesa a trope because a substantial number of creators of fiction find it to be a useful tool in telling their stories.

But writers also used the freedom of adults to facilitate character development, etc.

edited 26th Mar '17 5:32:08 PM by MagBas

The point is whether the character's relative freedom from parental supervision is important to the plot. An adult is not expected to have parental supervision under most circumstances, so there's no trope to be found in the fact of them not having it.

edited 27th Mar '17 5:34:30 AM by Fighteer

"many children were far less tightly-supervised than they are now, and were expected to be able to do things like walk a mile to and from school by themselves". As noted in this bit of Madrugada's post, they were not "expected to have parental supervision under most circumstances".

edited 27th Mar '17 7:24:55 AM by MagBas

The trope is "Children are allowed a great deal of (in some cases, nearly total) freedom to do things without parental or other adult supervision."

That's all.

Not "... and that's good." or "..and that's bad", or "...even though it's dangerous.". Those can all be added within the work, but they aren't inherent to the trope.

? The last post was in answer to Fighteer noting that the freedom of adults is not a trope because adults are not expected to have parental supervision under most circumstances, with i noting that children themselves were not supposed to have parental supervision the entire time. I not mentioned nothing about "danger" or "good or bad".

There's nothing about "the entire time" in there. If a work has kids walking a mile to school, that's not a trope. Free-Range Children is when they're hitchhiking across the country or solving crimes or founding nations or whatnot and there's not a parent (or truant officer) to be seen.

Imagine Danny and Emily, Junior Detectives. They head off to stop a criminal mastermind, spending several days embroiled in danger and intrigue. When they return home, not only is there not a missing persons report, but nobody even seems to notice or care. Maybe they earn a scolding for missing their schoolwork. That is the trope.

edited 27th Mar '17 9:20:12 AM by Fighteer