Duplicate tropes discussion thread

sounds like a difference in degree/magnitude

More like a difference in centrality to the plot.

^^ It's similar to what Chuck Cunningham Syndrome is to What Happened to the Mouse?. The Splitters have won out on those ones.

The Reveal, Broken Masquerade, and The Unmasqued World: I feel like the first and the third are different and the second is some hodgepodge of both

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 7th 2022 at 3:41:50 PM

Huh. I always thought that Broken Masquerade was specifically about the plot of breaking The Masquerade, but looking at it now I'm not so sure of that. The description is super unclear in an old-school self-demonstrating way, but sounds like it's more about someone being "initiated" into the Masquerade.

In which case it probably needs TRS, because I think easily 80-90 percent of usage I've seen is very much not that.

Edited by nrjxll on Dec 7th 2022 at 5:50:42 AM

Semi-recent Trope Talk thread on the subject.

and i might do a wick check to check usage given the unclear description. if there's a distinct usage separate from The Reveal and The Unmasqued World, it should show up

The Reveal is when something is show to the audience, not (necessarily) to the characters. Broken Masquerade seems to be limited to specific characters learning the truth while the rest of the world is still none the wiser. The Unmasqued World is when whatever was the Masquerade is no longer a secret.

Is Psychic Dreams for Everyone redundant with Dreaming of Things to Come? The latter is about prophetic dreams talking about the future, while the former is specifically about settings in which anyone can have such dreams. Wouldn't the opposite, settings in which people with specific abilities and powers have dreams about the future, be more tropeworthy?

• Dreaming of Things to Come: About prophetic dreams. Has 2083 wicks. Launched in 2008.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Multiple dreams is prophetic. Says it's Sub-Trope. Has 431 wicks. Launched in 2007. Has a lot of on-page misuse.

I'll support merging when it comes to.

Dreaming of Things to Come YKTTW for reference, since the archived discussion seems to have been wiped at some point. The earliest version of Psychic Dreams for Everyone, back when we were still TV Tropes, seemed to suggest it was the norm for that medium, but it's still surprising that it took a later YKTTW to have a trope for psychic dreams more generally.

Edited by MorganWick on Dec 20th 2022 at 5:52:16 AM

Interesting, it seems that even back then in 2008 there was some confusion about which example should be in each trope.

I disagree with Amonimus's definition of Psychic Dreams for Everyone. The trope description simply requires that dreams of future events are not limited to special beings. A single such dream by a muggle suffices. I would agree that this is not a good enough distinction from Dreaming of Things to Come to make it a subtrope.

Necessary Evil vs. Shoot the Dog vs. I Did What I Had to Do?

• Necessarily Evil: Someone does an extreme action for the in their mind greater good and expects-accepts punishment.
• Shoot the Dog: An ideal hero has to break their good code for once.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Is a Stock Phrase.

Is there any meaningful difference between Faction Calculus and A Commander Is You as tropes? It seems to me that the two just describe two different levels of complexity in the distinctions between a given strategy game's factions, and in fact Faction Calculus' categories can be easily described in A Commander Is You terms.

Faction Calculus is about races and units having balanced advantages. A Commander Is You is about the strategy a player can follow to level the army.

I also believe Faction Calculus, A Commander Is You and Player Character Calculus aren't tropes and belong to Sliding Scale/ and Analysis.Strategy Game, but that needs own thread.

Edited by Amonimus on Dec 22nd 2022 at 3:30:22 PM

What? No, A Commander Is You is still about factions and units, just in a more complex way than the simplified model that Faction Calculus uses. Is it the name that gives you the impression it's about a player's choice of strategy?

I'm probably gasping to find a saving grace in the description, but yeah, they are interchangeable and should be in TRS.

FWIW, we're not the first to recognize the problem, as shown in the discussion page. Unfortunately, the one TRS thread that was made for this was promptly shut down because of the "prove there's misuse via wick check" rule.

I mean... then the obvious solution is to just... do the wick check when you have enough time and see how the usage lines up with your theory.

I suppose that is the only way to do it.

Are With Lyrics and To the Tune of... too similar? They're both about putting new lyrics to older music, except With Lyrics specifies instrumental music.

Edited by harryhenry on Dec 25th 2022 at 10:00:41 PM

Organ Autonomy and Animate Body Parts?

Organ Autonomy doesn't imply that the organs are independently animate and capable of wandering around on their own - it just means that the character is not fully in control of their body, including alien hand syndrome and more fantastical things like possessed transplants.