Needs Help: Rare Guns

This is a sub-TRS proposal related to my Cool Guns TRS proposal.

I believe that Rare Guns should focus exclusively on cases where a gun appears more than in real life, not guns that appear more in fiction than real life. There are two reasons to this. One is that as I've stated on the Cool Guns TRS proposal, these gun entries are really just Useful Notes. Two, it is unclear just how rare does a gun have to be to be a rare gun. The Howa Type 89 is listed as an example of a rare gun, yet it is most definitely not a case when your show is set on Japan and focuses on the JSDF. If we focuses exclusively on cases where a gun should be rare but isn't like the Type 89 being in the hands of Somalian pirates, then it becomes valid.

I propose that the gun descriptions should be merged with the gun descriptions from Cool Guns and spun off into their own Useful Notes section. The page will then be reworked into specific cases where a rare gun that shouldn't appear commonly appears in great quantities. Any cases where their appearance is justifiable, it will be merged into the new Cool Guns trope entry. For instance, Battlefield 1's Hellriegel showing up as a common weapon in singleplayer is a valid case, since the Hellriegel never went into production and is too rare to justifiably show up as a common weapon, while the Chauchat in the same game is not, since it is World War I and it is introduced in the DLC where the French Army justifiably uses it.

edited 25th Nov '17 2:29:52 AM by Wuz

Not sure if this is an example: The US military is shown using nothing but A Ks, and Russia is using M16-type weapons.

So it's an inversion of the normally used guns? That's something else entirely.

I'm for enforcing the restriction that the gun has to be more common in a work than it was in reality (and to reiterate from OP: a single work, not works in general). They have to appear in some kind of signifiant number, and that number has to be larger than their real life availability. This is my interpretation of the trope as written right now, so if it were up to me, that wouldn't need a TRS decision, just a cleanup effort.

It can be justified (like the alternate timeline of the Fallout franchise, where rare guns can be used to emphasise the difference from our reality), but that doesn't change whether it's an example.

Does this have to be "A gun type is more common in a fictional world than in real life" or can it be any case of "character uses a gun which would be very unusual for their situation" including a singular character using a gun, such as a modern action hero using a WW 2 era pistol for no particular reason?

edited 1st Dec '17 8:26:17 PM by tioseafj

The latter is explicitly excluded by the trope definition.

That really should be part of the trope and not excluded at all, a lot of works just throw in nonsensical rare guns in places because they just look fancy / cool. Some haven’t had ammo made in a 100 years or more but they still feature them for some reason.

Also in Near Future works they will include things seen in a magazine cause they were expected to be common but ended up not taking off or even existing.

Non-standard armaments for military units is Did Not Do The Research and would be a different trope.

Using the enemy’s weapons could be for various reasons such as On-Site Procurement or an undercover supply it would go into those tropes.

So how much sense does it need to make to not fall under the trope? How many guns have to be produced so they're not "rare"?

If it went into mass production, actually sold and,depending on the example, sold to the right people then it wouldn’t be this.

The subpages go into detail on the specific rare guns that show up in media and how unlikely they would be in the hands of anyone but a collector let alone find ammo around without getting it custom made.

Like the VP 70, a West German hand gun, that never sold. No one wanted it in the western market cause of bad design flaws and safety issues. Law Enforcement especially didn’t want it sooo why does a cop like Leon have one in Resident Evil 2? It looks futuristic and cool they probably just saw it in a magazine, which literally is the same reason why it appeared in Aliens as a standard issue gun for the marines.

Also several specific guns appear far more often than they should be, which is an aggregate and either rule of cool or a Follow the Leader.

IE there are way too many Desert Eagles in media then there should be and are way too impractical in the areas that media uses it... not to mention absurdly expensive, high maintenance, and it weights more than an assault rifle. When works like CSI use them they specifically mention it and it’s rarity.

edited 2nd Dec '17 5:38:21 AM by Memers

That boils down to either misplaced guns, which is a different concept, or, "this one gun shows up in several works", which is a generic "example", and by rule we don't allow those.

A point I realized recently (just to keep the discussion going) is that the current format is gun-centric rather than work-centric. If we were to rework the format into being work-centric (like every other trope out there), it would completely disrupt the gun description format we have right now. This would require the gun descriptions to be moved elsewhere.

The gun descriptions shouldn't be deleted because the trope is very much embedded within real facts, since the "rare" which defines this trope is a real life property.

Improperly Placed Firearms and Selective Historical Armory are already tropes

Unless you can demonstrate some kind of misuse or reason WHY the trope should be changed there's nothing to be done here.

edited 26th Jan '18 11:45:43 AM by shoboni

I think the individual write ups need to be trimmed down. They tend to ramble past the relevant point of explaining how or why the fire arm is rare and head full into trivia territory. There are appropriate places for that none of which are the example spaces or pages. That being said though these pages look a lot better than the Cool Gun pages did. Throw in someone had the forethought to add in some sort of regular page organization to the sub-entries has helped keep these pages from becoming a similar mess.

Though the entries still need some policing I see some ZCE creeping into some sections and some of the entries need some more context.

I don't think it needs a major overhaul but it does not need some of the descriptions condensed and the examples policed a bit better. Someone should check the wicked examples to make sure they aren't causing problems on other pages to be sure.

Disregard.

edited 14th Mar '18 9:43:17 PM by Wuz

Considering how we ignore the “used much more than real life” clause, should we touch up the trope description to remove this restriction?

I personally saw rare guns as a more specific variant of cool guns, where the weapon’s real life rarity becomes a factor of impression. In that sense, “more than real life” is needless.

I also think that we should remove the clause of the weapon being unreliable/problematic from the description, since it detracts from the intent of “cool gun but cooler because it’s rare”. We’re not talking about “cool gun but it jams”

edited 9th May '18 4:53:47 PM by Wuz

Clock expired; closing.