Misused: A Boy And His X

Does Clifford the Big Red Dog count as an example?

Does the girl (Clifford's owner) experience any sort of transformative journey or character growth over the course of that comic?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So I took a closer look through A Boy and His X to see what different ways it was being used. I found four main ways people were interpreting it:

1. The 'boy' and 'x' just make up a recognizable duo. This seems to be the most common use. You'll get no argument from me that these examples should be removed.
2. The 'x' is the center of the plot and the catalyst of all the actions of the 'boy'. I looked through the synopsis' the classic instances of these like Shiloh and Old Yeller. In these case the 'x' characters main job is to get the 'boy' to like them and then get into situations where the 'boy' has to act. They might accomplish something early on to cement their relationship with the 'boy' but otherwise have much less impact on the rest of the world. These works are what likely were the original intent of the trope.
3. Closely related to the previous are the cases where the 'boy' and 'x' have an extremely close bond and both equally contribute to the plot. To clarify the difference the 'x' in the previous example may create situations the 'boy' needs to react to but often is not solving any problems. Pokémon and other mon series would fall in here as would Lassie and Temeraire. Often both 'boy' and 'x' are inexperienced and are learning together both growing in maturity as well as in other areas.
4. Lastly we have the cases where the 'x' is a mentor or surrogate parent of the 'boy'. In many cases though not all the 'x' is intelligent and capable of speech though others veer into Raised by Wolves. The Heralds of Valdemar books would fit here possibly as well Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army. This seems to be the least common.

Along side this is the intelligence of the 'x'. As I noted the last type has almost entirely intelligent speaking 'x' characters. Point 3 was pretty split but point 2 was mostly non speaking and at best cunning animals.

Looking ahead to clean up measures, we could move anything that falls under point 1 to Non-Human Sidekick.

As to the question about Clifford the Big Red Dog. I don't remember a whole lot about the series but I looked it up a little. Emily is in part an audience surrogate, given the audience is mostly young kids, she seems to be the recipient of morals from the stories, so in a bit of a meta sense she does grow due to her interactions. These books would fall into type 3 of my above list.

NOTE: If something I wrote seems confusing let me know. I had some trouble figuring out my words for this post.

Edited by Rymyll_the_Wanderer on Nov 7th 2018 at 8:57:48 AM

^ Scenario 1 seems quite general and would probably cover most cases of 3 and 4.

That was not particularly my intention, I sort of meant scenario 1 as the catch all for things that did not fall better in the other 3.

That is helpful. I would advocate for lumping 2 and 3 together in this trope.

Definition 4 seems like it should be a different trope.

"It's just a show; I should really just relax"

Me Too!.

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I agree that 4 should be separate, and part of the trope is that despite being entirely different beings, their relationship is one of equals. It's not "A boy under X's watch".

Along with this, I think the X should have some cognitive handicap that mirrors the boy's immaturity: not necessarily an animal, but often a Fish out of Water that cannot talk to humans or does not understand the world it is in. After all, their relationship is often non-verbal.

I realise that by these criteria Narnia's The Horse And His Boy might not count. The horse needs the boy, but is a clear-speaking adult.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

I don't mean to keep falling back on Temeraire as an example, but I am familiar with the work and it makes a really good edge case.

Looking at works within 2 and 3, what do we want to do with works that fall outside the tropes intention? Cases where the 'x' is fairly intelligent and/or powerful on its own. Also cases that toe the line in terms of growth for the 'boy' character.

For example, I would say that Lawrence and Temeraire from Temeraire could work as an example, though I will admit they are very near the edge. Lawrence is an accomplished naval officer so his growth while there has smaller impact on his whole character. Temeraire is also very intelligent and capable on his own.

Is there another trope we already have that we might move examples to? Or would we want to make a new trope for these, or just cut them as well as the examples from 1?

The trope should be defined as plots where a child has a pet, and the emphasis of the story is the relationship between the child and the pet. So, Harry Potter has a pet owl, but the books aren't about the relationship between Harry and his owl, so that wouldn't count. Neither would Frozen, as the story is not about the guy whose name I forget and his moose. Something like National Velvet, though, that's the trope.

Where exactly are we in this discussion? jamaicanst01 is already going around removing entries following the proposal of .

We have started to define how the trope is currently being used. Also, we have started to figure out what specific points an example should have. However we have reached no clear consensus for any of this yet.

While there are some examples that could obviously be removed, I think any large amount of work on the page would be a little premature at this point. There are likely a number of edge cases in there yet and we have not really decided on the edges.

I think part of the trope is that the boy learns lessons from the X (and possibly vice versa) not from directly hearing them, but figuring them out based on the other's actions. The actions also need to be relevant to the species of the X, or vice versa, if the X is also learning something.

Clock is up; closing.

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