What's the general opinion on creating new appearance tropes?

I'm toying with an idea for new Hair Tropes, specifically a subtrope of Anime Hair. I know there's been some debate on how to properly introduce new appearance tropes, since many of the existing tropes like Hair Intakes, Hair Antennae, Mega Twintails, etc have a lot of examples that are just "X character has these" with very few examples explaining if they serve any purpose.

Was there ever any official decision on how to go about these? Obviously, narrative context is preferred, but a lot of appearance tropes are just "X character has these" even outside of hair.

Edited by DRCEQ on Jul 21st 2019 at 9:57:51 AM

Meaningful Appearance is the acceptable appearance trope (index).

I would just say not to bother, since they almost always turn into ZCE magnets.

They never seem to make it through TLP. I think the "No New Appearance Tropes" regulation is only until all the current tropes are cleaned up, but that's a veey slow process that I don't expect to finish within the next decade.

It'd help if more people (including myself) took part in the clean-up thread, because obviously clean-up moves slowly if only a few people are doing it.

But yeah, even the ones in TLP are ZCE magnets from the start. They aren't worth it.

As long as it's a Meaningful Appearance you can do it safely. It enforces meaning so ZCE can be prevented.

Prevented, yes. Stopped? Nooooo. The problem is that people don't think the meaning needs to be explained, or they shoehorn characters that fit the appearance, but not the rest of the qualifiers. Just being "meaningful" doesn't mean they won't be ZCE magnets.

I can prove it; Good Colors, Evil Colors is on that index, and yet my TRS wick check showed an extreme amount of ZC Es.

does that mean tropes based on appearance are fundamentally wrong? Hell no.

We're not so low as to go "we can't have nice things" just because of that, right?

ZCE is ultimately not the trope's problem, it's the tropers'.

It's both. The problem is, making new appearance tropes only makes things harder on those working hard to fix the issue with the existing ones. It's the fault of the troper community, sure, but oftentimes the tropes themselves have misleading titles, context that's near impossible to add, the potential to be PSOC...

You can argue all you want that these tropes should be fine to make, but it goes against all evidence. Hell, one trope that was only up for a little bit before being unlaunched, Heroic Dimples, had major ZCE problems in just the short time it was up. People don't know how to give context for these things.

Why not check out some TRS threads and the appearance cleanup thread, to see exactly what I mean?

Edited by WarJay77 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 12:48:31 PM

Some tropes' meaning and context are just easy.

Is that anything wrong?

False. Context is never self-explanatory. Every example must describe how the trope fits the work in a way that allows people who don't know the work or the trope to understand, and "self explanatory" tropes are more often than not chairs. The meaning of a trope is inherent in context, and if context cannot be provided, there's likely no meaning.

Seriously, it might do you good to check out the other workshop forums besides Trope Talk and actually lurk at some of the threads, because it'd teach you a lot.

I didn't say it was Self Explanatory (I know that page exists).

Admittedly, some tropes may be shallow that proper context of the trope looks "easy".

Looks easy, yes. Is easy, no. That's the exact problem with Appearance Tropes, "meaningful" or not.

Many appearance tropes ended up falling into a similar problem with Stock Phrases, where you can identify repeating patterns but it ended more based in real life trends and idioms rather than having any sort of weighted narrative purpose, even if the description tries really hard. For that I like to compare Present Company Excluded to It Has Been an Honor, PCE functionally admits it's a throwaway line, while Honor makes it clear the line comes as the culmination of a long relationship.

With appearance tropes they ended up in a similar rut as the No New Stock Phrases policy, as we have separate tropes for Side Boob, Under Boob, Absolute Cleavage and a few more and all it really comes down to is "You can see boobs." We don't have any official policy against new appearance tropes, but I would recommend casting a big, broad net over what you are trying to propose and not narrow it down to something like a particular haircut or type of sleeves.

that's why I only said Meaningful Appearance as the standard.

Even meaningful appearances can be tricky, since some aren't considered tropes. For example, the "tsundere pigtail" has been through TLP more than once but isn't individual enough to be a trope. Most meaningful appearance TLP's get canned.

You can connect various "meanings" to any appearance, but the look itself needs to be intuitive with the trope (and name) to avoid Zero Context Examples rather than tacking on extra clauses in the description. It's why we have separate tropes for Big Fun and Fat Bastard.

The problem is, there's functionally no difference between "appearance tropes" and "meaningful appearance tropes" in practice, as they attract ZCEs like flies to honey no matter how meaningful they are in theory.

That isn't significant when other tropes can have (people submitting) ZCE too.

It's the troper's problem, not the trope's own.

I'm sorry, but there's overwhelming evidence to suggest that appearance tropes cause people to make ZCEs, so if you want to claim that you need to prove it. Find some non-appearance tropes buried in ZCEs, and I'll show you double the amount of appearance tropes that have that same problem.

You can't just make claims like these without supporting it, so support it or acknowledge the evidence proves you wrong.

What I'm saying is that there's no relation between ZCE and appearance tropes. Only tendency.

I agree that some appearance tropes need to be fixed because they are chairsy, but beyond that, if ZCE still appears, it's the troper's fault.

But there is a link between them, or else this same problem would be had by a majority of tropes, not just appearance tropes.

It's easy to blame the tropers when you're not the one trying to prevent this problem. I'm sorry if that sounds blunt or harsh, but I do a ton of ZCE cleanup, and I can guarantee appearance tropes are far-and-away the worst when it comes to no-context examples. This doesn't just happen unless the trope itself is problematic, or unless trope decay is so major nobody knows what the trope means, and in both cases the solution is to fix the trope, not just blame tropers and keep adding to the mess.

"I can guarantee appearance tropes are far-and-away the worst when it comes to no-context examples."

Because I know that some of them are chairsy. And/or "shallow" (like just putting one trait with another without connection). That's the reason the Personal Appearance Cleanup thread exists, right?

And many of them are chairsy because they're old tropes. Where we don't have as much grasp as to "trope meaning" compared to today.

Yes, that's the exact problem. It's not the tropers, it's the fact that the tropes themselves are bad, and the ones that can be salvaged still have a lot of ZCEs. Creating more only adds more work right now, because the clean-up isn't done.

Warjay is correct. The reason we do not permit more appearance tropes is because they only add to the pile of work that the existing ones have created.

It may turn out that "appearance" cannot be meaningfully troped. If so, adding more such non-tropes isn't going to help.