Shout Out and Fairytale Motifs

Courtesy links: Shout-Out and Fairytale Motifs

Tropes like Expy need some kind of authorial intent to have been specified to confirm this so that the tropes don't degrade into fandoms just listing 'X seems to have Y in common with Z'.

Now, Shout-Out's description does mention that the associations have to be deliberate. Does that mean that if there are examples on work pages where fans are just making the associations themselves and it's not creator-confirmed, those examples can be removed? If a character is confirmed to have been 'inspired by' a character from another work, is that enough to label it a Shout-Out, or does it need more?

Also, there are works that list characters who might be inspired by fairy tale characters (Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White, for example), and they are listed as Fairytale Motifs instead of Shout-Out. Looking at the Fairytale Motifs trope, this seems like misuse. Should those examples be moved to Shout-Out?

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jan 14th 2019 at 10:04:55 AM

I don't think restricting ourselves to creator-confirmed shoutouts is a workable approach. How is this working out for Expy?

Fairytale Motifs makes references to popular characters in its 5th paragraph, so that's not misuse as far as I can see.

As far as I can tell, the need for citation has helped the Expy clean-up thread, rather than causing problems.

The problem with Shout-Out is that, if the trope description is right about requiring citation, it needs a big clean-up. If the trope description is wrong about it requiring citation, the trope description needs to be changed.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jan 23rd 2019 at 5:37:57 PM