Not Tropeworthy: Designated Love Interest

Romantic Intention Platonic Execution sounds good.

I don't normally take this position, but that's an awfully bland title. More importantly - isn't the "failed execution" part not always necessarily that it comes across as platonic specifically? (For instance, intended Belligerent Sexual Tension where the characters actually seem to just outright dislike each other).

Edited by nrjxll on Mar 12th 2020 at 1:30:18 PM

Romantic Read As Platonic?

That's the thing though, we're specifically changing this trope to when the lovers came off as platonic, and turning Relationship Writing Fumble into the supertrope for everything else.

I don't remember any consensus to rename this; only to make it YMMV. The decision was to rename Relationship Writing Fumble (to Friendship Writing Fumble) and reuse the Relationship Writing Fumble name for a supertrope to Friendship Writing Fumble and Designated Love Interest.

The supertrope stuff is happening in the Relationship Writing Fumble thread, as far as I know, while this thread mainly has to move Designated Love Interest wicks to YMMV pages.

Edit: I saw that the crowner isn't screwed up anymore, and it doesn't say this is getting renamed.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 12th 2020 at 4:09:07 AM

Again, the options were never mutually exclusive. Every upvoted option reached consensus; there's absolutely no reason not to do all three things.

Only Relationship Writing Fumble had consensus to rename. Designated Love Interest didn't.

Relevant crowner option:

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 12th 2020 at 4:26:42 AM

Dang it, you're right; somewhere along the way the rename discussion just kinda happened and I'd assumed it was part of the crowner options without checking (I'd clearly forgotten what was actually on the crowner).

Still need to change the description, though.

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 12th 2020 at 5:30:44 AM

My thought, indeed, was bringing Designated Love Interest in line with Designated Hero and Designated Villain.

So Sandbox.Designated Love Interest exists; but the description doesn't actually describe what we're going for (the platonic-seeming version specifically).

Also, can this be starred?

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 13th 2020 at 9:39:00 AM

Wrong thread

Edited by Adept on Mar 14th 2020 at 11:46:22 PM

...So this was never starred despite us being in the projects phase.

But I guess we need to get to work.

soo before we fix the wicks, we have to rewrite the description right?

Wouldn't hurt if there are any problems with the current description.

Also, once the Trope Transplant of Relationship Writing Fumble to Friendship Writing Fumble is done, the description of Designated Love Interest should probably be changed to cover the supertrope. Since Relationship Writing Fumble has its own thread, that crosswicking can probably be done as part of Relationship Writing Fumble's thread.

So, these have 12+ Consensus:

1. Redefine Designated Love Interest to mean "characters who are meant to be romantic are seen as being platonic". In other words, the inverse of the current Relationship Writing Fumble (characters who are meant to be platonic are seen as being romantic).
2. Make Designated Love Interest YMMV.
3. Transplant Relationship Writing Fumble (defined as characters who are meant to be platonic are seen as being romantic) to a new name, using the name "Relationship Writing Fumble" for a Super-Trope about audience interpretations of relationships.

Not sure why I followed this thread? For laughs I guess?

But that consensus seems to be saying "Split Designated Love Interest into those three tropes / concepts".

Edited by Malady on Sep 22nd 2020 at 8:15:19 AM

What about Informed Love Interest? Where the romantic angle of the relationship is explicit but nevertheless seems to be an Informed Attribute?

Missed the crowner, but I at least strongly agree with the consensus that this trope makes more sense under YMMV.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 23rd 2020 at 3:55:32 PM

Weren't we also going to do something about the idea of a Platonic relationship that doesn't seem very friendly? Not in the romantic way, but in the "are these people actually friends" way?

Do you mean With Friends Like These..., or something more like "these characters don't seem to know each other very well, but the story still calls them friends"?

More like With Friends Like These..., but maybe the latter too. IDK, I just remember discussion on this.

We already decided on the name Friendship Writing Fumble in the Relationship Writing Fumble thread; that thread is where the Trope Transplant is taking place. It's too late to suggest new names for Relationship Writing Fumble. This thread is starred because Designated Love Interest's wicks need to be moved to YMMV pages; the thread is clocked because wick cleanup has stalled.

Edit: Courtesy link to the Relationship Writing Fumble thread, which is at the bottom of the list.

Another edit: I bumped the Relationship Writing Fumble thread, which has sandboxes relevant to the Trope Transplant (Sandbox.Friendship Writing Fumble and Sandbox.Relationship Writing Fumble).

Edit: I took care of the Characters/ wicks for Designated Love Interest because there weren't too many to go through (there are already 94 YMMV/ wicks out of 222 wicks total). There were a bunch of ZCEs, and I had to delete some because there were no YMMV pages to move them to (since ZCE-only pages aren't allowed, meaning I couldn't make the pages).

Edit: Main/ wicks cleaned since I'm feeling better than I was earlier. This is probably the most wick cleanup I've done in a while, but the amount of wicks isn't that high, so it's not nearly as hard as with a lot of other cleanup efforts.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 23rd 2020 at 1:09:19 PM

Double post, but I went through the namespaces in alphabetical order (with the exception of Main/ coming first), and LightNovel/ is next up for me if someone else doesn't get to it. Everything above that is either on a page for a YMMV item, an example subpage for a YMMV item (such as Ho Yay) or an in-universe example on a work page.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 24th 2020 at 11:41:06 AM

Reposting from the ZCE thread which I originally posted in by accident, but one thing I noticed while doing cleanup was that there was a lot of offhand misuse of Designated Love Interest to mean "obligatory love interest", or to complain about issues that are actually an example of Strangled by the Red String, with no qualification as to whether the relationship suffered from a lack of being romantic enough or not, as the trope actually means. Most of them were ZCE or potholes anyway so I deleted them hastily.

But while it's too late to trope misuse at this point, and 10-20 examples out of 200 probably isn't enough to qualify for the usual case of misuse, it does bear mentioning that some portion of people who know of the trope came away misunderstanding what it actually means based on a surface reading of the title alone.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 24th 2020 at 12:43:27 PM

Adding to this, I responded to that ZCE thread post saying I don't recall participating in this TRS thread's discussion, so if there was any misuse discussion, I probably didn't see it. That said, I'll keep the misuse problem in mind when I'm done taking a break from dewicking.