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I asked this before about Bi The Way. The answer was:
"What makes them tropes is the fact that they are unusual and thus almost always carry some narrative significance, as a deliberate choice made by the work's creator(s). They may not stay unusual as culture marches on, but that doesn't change the fact that having a bi or trans character in a work used to be very rare and is still uncommon."
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Alright, but then we should probably fuse the trope page and the Useful Note.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Why?
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Probably not fused, but I noticed some information, mostly relating to terminology, would work better on the Useful Note.
Lost in Space
Feel free to move anything that sounds preachy or like a RL digression to the Useful Notes page. You have our blessing. The foremost purpose of trope descriptions is to establish the criteria for when they apply.
edited 22nd Jun '18 6:01:37 AM by Fighteer
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The fact that people have questioned the tropability of transgenders is a proof that it, as a trope, is now a Dead Horse Trope.
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It's not actually trope, though. It's just a thing related to a characters being.
Lost in Space
It is a trope. The inclusion of a transgender character in a story almost always has a narrative purpose. If the example can't explain what that purpose is, then it's not an example. It may be more of a dead horse trope as society marches on, but that doesn't retroactively invalidate past examples.
edited 23rd Jun '18 1:39:51 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That's really confusing. So, if a character is trans, but it doesn't have any particular impact on the narrative, they don't count? Because that does not at all line up with what the page says, which is that a character just has to be transgender to qualify. There are tons of tropes and stereotypes (most of them shitty) surrounding how trans people are presented in the media. Documenting those individually would make more sense than just cataloguing all trans characters.
No, the other one.
Technically, a character being male is (or can be used as, at any rate) a trope. It's just so universal and has so many applications that it's borderline impossible to trope with any reliability on this site. We do have a lot of subtropes to that, though, in particular as contrasts to characters being female.
Being transgender is so rare that it's almost never included without a purpose of having a plot or character arc related to it. If it is, it's probably a work where only a small minority of characters are cis and straight.
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[quote]It is a trope. The inclusion of a transgender character in a story almost always has a narrative purpose. If the example can't explain what that purpose is, then it's not an example. It may be more of a dead horse trope as society marches on, but that doesn't retroactively invalidate past examples. [/quote]
No, it’s still not a trope.
More like it's no longer a trope. Doesn't mean it wasn't a trope before.
Just read any old story with trans character in it, their trans trait are usually important to their character, or even to the story; this is because transgender was seen as something worthy to exploit narrative wise, which makes it a trope.
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No, the other one.
It doesn't stop being a trope because it's more common. It stops being a trope when it's not used as a trope, but that doesn't mean you can't still use it as a trope.
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But what does it mean to "use it as a trope". To have it affect the plot? There are stories where race affects the plot, but we still don't have a trope for all black characters. If we want to have tropes about trans people that's fine, good even, but being trans is not, in and of itself, a trope.
No, the other one.
To use it as a trope means using it with a purpose to the story outside the thing itself. So just having a transexual character isn't a trope. Having one with the purpose of doing a plot or make some kind of point with it is a trope.
There are a lot of tropes about using race as a device. We don't have a trope for all black characters because it's just so common and used in a so wide variety of ways. That's why those tropes are more specific. Transexual characters aren't nearly as widely used, nor used in such variety.
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If there is a narrative purpose for having a Transgender character in the work, why not focus the description on that rather than this useful note write up that's currently showing?
^ admittedly, yeah.
Should also mention that Law of Conservation of Detail dictates that their transgender trait will be important to their story.
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
The main article is written more like a Useful Note, and a Useful Notes pages also exists, with a lot of duplicate info. This also seems like it opens the door to making other groups like "Gay" or "Asian" into tropes.