Not Tropeworthy: Five Bad Band

In looking at the page for Five Bad Band I have come to the conclusion that it isn't a naturally occurring trope and that it was created by this site as an Evil Counterpart to Five-Man Band (something which is already covered in The Psycho Rangers). The page is subject to frequent misuse (more or less than five members, male Dark Chicks, multiple characters under one trope and vice versa, minor characters shoehorned into roles just so there are enough members, etc) with a small number of valid examples which I attribute to it not being a trope which writers put into their stories naturally.

Opening.

I've always been wondering about whether this is a trope. That Five-Man Band is one does not entail that a morally-flipped version thereof is automatically a trope itself, it is possible for the one to be a convention while the other one isn't. And this page attracts masses of misuse.

I forgot to mention that many villainous groups are less tightly knit compared to a Five-Man Band and thus many of the examples include characters who barely interact with the others which I think means that they don't really count as The Team in the same way that a Five-Man Band does. I think this has more to due with the nature of villainous groups (which are typically large groups with many members) than with misuse.

Well-written villains are generally constructed as opposites of (well-written?) heroes. Think of Batman and the Joker (especially in The Dark Knight). So I don't think it's fair to say that Five Bad Band is unnatural, if its existence is thanks to that of Five-Man Band. While I agree that there's misuse, I don't agree that it simply isn't a trope in its own right.

Kind of misintetpreting what I said. Batman and the Joker are philosophical opposites.

Edited by WaterBlap on Jul 26th 2018 at 12:16:11 PM

Batman in the Dark Knight had Alfred, Gordon, Lucius Fox, etc. Joker had... himself and some disposable goons. If he's constructed as an opposite to Batman, and Batman is a team player, then it follows that the opposite of a team player is... not a team player.

I agree.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jul 25th 2018 at 3:08:14 AM

Also a lot of stories with a Five-Man Band or Five Bad Band don't have the opposite trope present so it isn't really opposites.

We need a wick check to determine how common misuse is. Everything now is anecdotal.

We have other Evil Counterpart tropes, I don't see why we can't have this one. If there's serious misuse we probably just need a concentrated cleanup effort and tightened definitions like with Five-Man Band before it.

Edited by PhiSat on Jul 25th 2018 at 4:43:01 AM

I'm almost halfway done with mine and so far only 1 example is valid

I did a wick check of 50 of the inbound wicks to the trope page. The wicks were randomly chosen and I found 2 valid examples, 8 Zero Context Examples with no other misuse, 12 examples with some other form of misuse, 24 examples with misuse and are ZCEs, 4 wicks which have no characters or subtropes listed, and two wicks which have nothing to do with examples. I can post a list of all of these if needed.

You should post it. Doing a wick check for TRS involves posting the results.

Here's the results of my 50 wick check. I included links to any relevant pages and a breif explanation as to why examples don't work.

• Neither
  • They Were Holding You Back
  • D to F
• Good
  • Classof 1984
  • Live Free or Die Hard (can be found here

Edited by papyru30 on Jul 26th 2018 at 12:18:35 PM

This shows that its too rare to warrant its own trope since it doesn't appear often enough.

Now hold on, I took a glance down at the Western Animation page, there are valid examples there that just happen to be ZCEs. I don't think this is a case of too rare to trope, rather people are being lazy with their examples and shoehorning others in. Again, much like on the Five-Man Band trope.

Edited by PhiSat on Jul 26th 2018 at 2:51:34 AM

Technically, via How to Do a Wick Check, you're supposed to post the actual example (probably in a folder for aesthetics) for each one, not just your estimation.

I agree that this might not be a trope, since The Psycho Rangers covers "evil counterpart to the hero". The analogy to Five-Man Band also makes this a shoehorn magnet. Overlapping roles are common with this— it's pretty common for the Big Bad to be The Evil Genius, and the Dragon to be The Brute (or vice versa). I also seem to recall a discussion a while back about the Dark Chick not being a trope.

That said, I don't think evil team dynamics are inherently non-tropable. There are plenty of works where Evil Is One Big, Happy Family and all the villains work together, or where you have to battle your way through a series of henchmen with contrasting skills and personalities.

At the very least, this probably merits a permanent cleanup effort along the lines of Five-Man Band. I'm noticing a lot of these have the problem of including more than five members and misusing The Sixth Ranger.

How often is this used? How difficult will it be to cut this, as you want to do? Something to consider as well.

I'm not saying that evil team dynamics aren't tropable (Standard Evil Empire Hierarchy is a good trope in that regard) I'm just saying that this set up is bad. There are 1681 inbound wicks to the page but I don't think that that should determine weather or not we get rid of it or not, we shouldn't leave a bad page on the site just because it would be difficult to get rid of it. Also sorry about not posting the specific examples, this trope takes up a lot of space and that list was long enough with just the summary, I'll post the examples if you guys want me to.

In regards to the Dark Chick I think it is a trope but that many people just use it as an 'evil girl' rather than the kind of person described on the trope page in a similar way to how people use The Chick as just 'the girl.'

I think the problem with the format of the examples list is that it's really easy to shoehorn examples where the individual components of the team (The Big Bad, The Dragon, The Evil Genius, The Brute and The Dark Chick) are present in the work, but most of the time, they don't actually have The Team dynamics. The Big Bad and The Dragon, in particular, tend to fight independently from the others, so they don't really qualify as a genuine counterpart to the Five-Man Band.

We do already have Standard Evil Empire Hierarchy for evil teams who don't actually fight collectively against the heroes, so I don't really see a need for this trope.

Edited by Adept on Aug 1st 2018 at 4:29:58 AM

And that's before you tackle the question of why Five Bad Band is separate from Five-Man Band since it's really just when your Five-Man Band happens to be villains.

I've expressed my issues with that sentiment here but the group dynamic is different since only The Evil Genius and The Brute are direct reflections of their FMB counterparts.

I can't say I wholly agree with that statement, since morality does often serve as an important factor in how a trope is used, otherwise we don't need The Evil Genius and The Brute when we already have The Smart Guy and The Big Guy.

But I digress. I think the mistake of this trope is its assumption that every trope must have an equally tropeworthy Inversion. (And even if they are right, as the OP mentions, The Psycho Rangers already covers most of what this one is trying to define.)

Five Bad Band seems like a subtrope of The Psycho Rangers (or maybe the other way around), not the same trope. The Psycho Rangers requires a band of baddies to have all the same powers as the main cast.

Edited by PhiSat on Aug 1st 2018 at 12:30:10 PM

The fact that you're not sure whether Five Bad Band is the narrower Subtrope or the broader supertrope to The Psycho Rangers is really not helping its case. And as I said, just because the work have the individual components of the Five Bad Band, it doesn't mean anything if they don't actually work together the same way that the Five-Man Band does.

Edited by Adept on Aug 2nd 2018 at 12:39:01 AM

For the crowner I think it should have cut, or lock page as options. Does that sound good?