Duplicate Trope (single prop 12 March 2020): Infidelitytropes

The infidelity tropes are kind of a mess right now, with many duplicates.

There's Sympathetic Adulterer, which completely overlaps with Good Adultery, Bad Adultery. Good Adultery, Bad Adultery itself overlaps with Your Cheating Heart, as almost all stories have some moral take on it. Cuckold, in turn could be distinct—perhaps specifically the shame and loss of face associated with being cheated on?—but is currently being used as another duplicate of Your Cheating Heart.

Your Cheating Heart itself isn't really even a trope in the sense we use the word here. It's simply "cheating occurs". It's more a topic than a trope. It would make more sense to be an index. To quote from an earlier discussion (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/query.php?parent_id=48508&type=att):

Edited by Eievie on Sep 16th 2019 at 4:09:47 AM

Sorry for the wait, ~Eievie.

Since I have cleared out some finished projects, I'll open for discussion.

Yeah, Sympathetic Adulterer is just expounding on half the Good Adultery, Bad Adultery trope, so at the very least the two can be merged into GABA. There's no reason for both to exist concurrently as written.

I agree that Your Cheating Heart is more a topic than a trope, and it would likely serve better as an index. In fact, it is the closest thing to an "infidelity tropes" page we have.

As for "cuckold," if we're going to use it, I would think that should be limited to instances where the narrative focus is on the person who was/is being cheated on. But historically, "cuckold" was an Always Male term, and didn't apply to females. Yeah, language changes over time, but it's something to consider.

I agree that there's a lot of overlap here.

I don't have a wick check on me, but I usually see Your Cheating Heart used as "character cheats", which...is chairs. It really will serve better as an index.

Merging Sympathetic Adulterer with Good Adultery, Bad Adultery seems like a good idea. The latter has more wicks as well.

Hrmmm, while I'm not entirely sure I agree with the "cheating partner" thing being chairs exactly as it's pretty much always going to influence the plot in some way, but I do think an index is a good idea, and agree with the merge idea too.

But, I mean, is Your Cheating Heart not just "character cheats"?

I'm on the side of cutting both of them. If you think we should combine Sympathetic Adulterer with Good Adultery, Bad Adultery, could you explain to me why you think it's a trope, not just sitting on chairs??

It would be chairs if a person committed adultery, and the story took no moral stance on it, and the adultery didn't have a significant impact on the story.

The trope at the center of GABA and SA is not "adultery happens," which would be chairs. The trope is in the attempt to assign some moral judgement to the adulterer, in order to modify how the audience feels about them.

A person who cheats on an abusive cretin is going to be viewed with more sympathy than someone who cheats on their sainted partner — that's just human nature. The act of adultery is still adultery regardless of context, but the context is significant towards how the audience views the perpetrator.

But where does that leave Your Cheating Heart?

Personally, I'm in favor of doing an Example Sectionectomy and using YCH has an "infidelity index," because as far as I can tell, it's just logging instances of adultery in fiction, which I don't think is very useful.

The way I see it is that infidelity almost always does have an impact on the story and characters, but since the impact is always different and context-dependent, making it an index makes sense- as every trope listed would be a subtrope with a consistent pattern, while "adultery happens" isn't a trope but so much as something that can lead to a trope.

No argument here — I see adultery as a topic rather than a trope — it's just waaaay to broad to ever be useful as a single trope. Therefore using YCH as an index would create a hub for the other adultery tropes; which would allow us to break down the examples into more specific, more meaningful categories, rather than that big conglomeration of examples that exists now.

So everyone's agreed on Your Cheating Heart as an index, it seems.

What about Good Adultery, Bad Adultery, Sympathetic Adulterer, and Cuckold? Is anyone arguing those are trope enough to keep around? Even Sympathetic Adulterer has a page which lists 10 separate sub-tropes, so I'm not convinced.

I think those are valid, though I'll admit the line between Good Adultery, Bad Adultery and Sympathetic Adulterer is blurry....

I'd rather think of Your Cheating Heart as an Exampleless Supertrope, but we might need a rename if we want to avoid future use as a trope.

Doesn't adultery more often than not act as a plot point, though?

Right, our concern is that the examples of Your Cheating Heart, while tropeworthy, aren't all consistent in meaning and usage. The trope itself is just "adultery happens", so it makes more sense to make YCH an index of subtropes (which is, in effect, making an example-less supertrope anyway), and then move the examples to subtropes, some of which we may need to TLP.

Yes, most works comment on the morality of it one way or another, but is that alone enough to make it a trope?

Murder is also a messy thing that happens as a plot point, but murder by itself isn't a trope... instead, we have a host of Murder Tropes that document common murder scenarios and characterize people who commit it or are victims of it. I think the same principle can apply here.

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 11th 2020 at 11:47:40 AM

I agree.

I'd all be for converting Your Cheating Heart into an index due to it being currently defined as chairs-y manner, but I would examine the examples and see what tropes the examples fit under, e.g. "motive of murder is because victim cheated", "cheater attempts to cover up cheating", "character dumps cheater because they are repulsed by the cheating", etc.

Edited by Albert3105 on Feb 11th 2020 at 5:50:36 AM

If it's made into an index (instead of being treated as a trope), I'd prefer if we changed the name, preferably to something with "index" or "tropes" in the name. Infidelity Index has the benefit of being alliterative, and hopefully that trait doesn't sound forced.

If it is turned into an index, we'd be removing or changing wicks regardless of whether the name changes, so I figured renaming wouldn't make much of a difference when it comes to how long cleanup would take.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 11th 2020 at 9:53:46 AM

I do agree though we'd need to categorize all the examples, and we may need to TLP new subtropes, but that can be done without this thread being open; as in, if we're done cleaning up and then realize a trope needs to be made, we can just close the thread and go to TLP.

I agree.

I think alliteration is reason enough to name it Infidelity Index, and also agree that changing the name would be a good idea.

So we're in agreement? Rename Your Cheating Heart to Infidelity Index and treat it as an index, not a trope page?

What about Good Adultery, Bad Adultery and Sympathetic Adulterer and Cuckold?

I once tried to launch this trope before concluding it was the Invoked Trope version of Cuckold—basically The Same, but More Specific—and stopping. Would it be fair game to try to rework Cuckold into that? Or should Cuckold get cut, and the "maliciously invoking it" variant go through the TLP process?

Edited by Eievie on Feb 11th 2020 at 11:34:24 AM

Cuckold is a preestablished term (meaning a man whose wife cheats on him), so if we have a page called that it has to ascribe to that definition. Seduction As One Upman Ship seems distinct to me (in that not all cases of cuckolds are "some other guy one-ups him by stealing his girl"). Are there common ways cuckolds are characterized in fiction (eg. oblivious? unsatisfying? assholes?) so it can be reworked into a characterization trope?

Edited by Synchronicity on Feb 12th 2020 at 8:32:40 AM