Misused: Imagine Spot

It has a ton of ZCE's and non-indicative examples and quite a lot of misuse too. See here.

To recap, out of 69 examples checked

• 12 used correctly
• 15 misused
• 42 are ZCE, have not enough context to differentiate from the supertrope Fantasy Sequence, or are part of another entry's write-up

(The "averted" wick in Minimalism is part of a work entry's context.)

So, is there a point to having Fantasy Sequence and "brief Fantasy Sequence"?

It's brief (cuts to it for a few seconds and cuts back), usually comedic, relevant to the current situation, and I think if shown, should have the goofy fade or imagination cloud effect. Fantasy Sequence appears to be a supertrope where examples that don't fit under its subtropes go. This page has about 20 examples while Imagine Spot has more than 350.

Edited by Tabs on Jan 13th 2020 at 10:34:39 AM

Fair enough.

This is quite concerning. This is a clearly defined, common trope and it has so much misuse. Makes me wonder, does every trope have TRS-worthy misuse?

Back in the day, we set a threshold of 10% misuse for "needs repair". I am not sure how that was defined.

Maybe. But I feel like in cases like this, it's better to clean up (cut/move misuse) rather than do TR on the trope itself. Imagine Spot is a 12-year-old trope and has had plenty of time to accrue misplaced entries. And standards were laxer in 2007.

Edited by Tabs on Jan 14th 2020 at 9:06:31 AM

I wouldn't say every trope has this level of decay, but the really well-integrated ones probably do. Other long-term and heavily misused tropes I can point to are Big Bad, Five-Man Band, and Adorkable. Now this one isn't as overused as those are, but the issue is that the longer a trope is around and the more it's used, the more likely it is that it's being misused.

A recurring issue seems to be titles that aren't specific enough, allowing people to get the wrong idea about what the trope is. Imagine Spot sounds like another term for Fantasy Sequence, or at least like a synonym.

Even the page image for Fantasy Sequence is an example of Imagine Spot. Sure, every correct example of Imagine Spot is by definition also going to be an example of Fantasy Sequence, but in this context it seems worrying.

Anyway, first step on a cleanup is to get all the ZCEs. As an older trope, that's always a big problem.

^ While we are at definitions: Imagine Spot is non-deceptive. The image on Fantasy Sequence is a bait and switch as it starts in the fantasy and unravels into reality. This fits Fantasy Sequence more than it does Imagine Spot.

Edited by eroock on Jan 19th 2020 at 5:02:41 AM

Imagine Spot has more than 10x more wicks that Fantasy Sequence, even though I would expect the latter to be much more common.

Bumping this to ask what we're planning to do here.

Change the title? Change Fantasy Sequence's title? Merge the tropes? Create a disambig? What?

One possibility could be to accept the Trope Decay, make Imagine Spot a redirect for Fantasy Sequence, and create a new trope for the actual definition of Imagine Spot.

I don't like the idea of renaming Fantasy Sequence- it's the most commonly used off-wiki term for the phenomenon, and any new name will only cause more confusion. We could rename Imagine Spot, but with 4920 wicks that's quite a project.

A possible minor contributor to the problem is that Fantasy Sequence looks like it's not supposed to be wicked to because there's so few on-page examples. At minimum, we could give it an entry pimp so it looks more like a legit trope.

Imagine Spot has nearly 5000 wicks. If anything, I'd rather merge Fantasy Sequence to this trope, since the distinction between the two is not so clear to me.

^ The example in first paragraph of Imagine Spot demonstrates the concept pretty well. I think one can compare the relationship between Imagine Spot and Fantasy Sequence to Flashback Cut and Flashback.

Are the ones where it isn't spelled out how long the Imagine Spot is really misuse? These are 35/42 in the Other category. The definition of the trope says it's "usually no more than a few seconds long". Checking a few of the wicks tagged as non-specifying shows they have a format along the lines of "Episode 2 has an Imagine Spot where..."

They're not specifying how long it is because linking to Imagine Spot specifies how long it is: "No more than a few seconds long".

For sure, the ones where it's stated to be really long are misuse and should be cleaned up, but I don't think the situation is so dire as others have implied.

With examples like that, we can't tell if the trope is being used correctly. It might be a few-seconds long, it might not be.

I guess any clean-up action will have to skip those ambiguous cases and focus on the clearly misused cases.

I'm wondering what an appropriate level of detail would look like.

Let's look at this representative example of a wick labeled "unspecified", from Digging to China.

• The Thomas the Tank Engine episode, "Deep Trouble" features an Imagine Spot where Monty, having fallen down a mine shaft, continues to fall through the Earth until he in ends up in Australia.

Let's assume that Imagine Spot is being used correctly here, and that the sequence is a few seconds long. What would appropriate context be here? A natural answer would be to edit it to:

• The Thomas the Tank Engine episode, "Deep Trouble" features an Imagine Spot a few seconds long where Monty, having fallen down a mine shaft, continues to fall through the Earth until he in ends up in Australia.

This has clarified that Imagine Spot is being used correctly, but otherwise, it's repetitive word cruft and doesn't say anything. Saying an Imagine Spot is a few seconds long is unnecessary because Imagine Spots are always a few seconds long. Adding the length to every reference to an Imagine Spot would be pointless and repetitive.

There's a Zero-Context Example policy, but not a Zero Context Offhand Explanatory Wick policy. Example bullets need to be detailed enough to determine if the correct trope is being referenced, but tropes referenced in the explanation itself don't.

The trope is fine. Sometimes you just have to clean these things out.

Right, but that only works if you assume the pothole is used correctly. It's entirely possible that wick is actually referring to a Fantasy Sequence; based on the context, we can't tell.

If your entire reason for assuming it's valid is that it's using Imagine Spot, and Imagine Spots are always short so this must be a short Imagine Spot because that's the trope, that's Circular Reasoning; nothing has been proven true yet. Sure, the trope is short sequences. But we have no evidence that the work's scene is a short sequence, besides that they're calling it an Imagine Spot, but it could be misuse. They could mean Fantasy Sequence.

Granted it might not be, but that's the issue here.

As-is, we have no way of knowing if the trope is being used correctly or not, unless we know the context of the example itself.

Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 1st 2020 at 9:20:22 AM

I agree with JXZ that the vague usage in a different entry isn't particularly bad. We have cut tropes before for being pothole magnets, though, so that could potentially be a problem... In an entry for Imagine Spot, an actually good one should explain how the Fantasy Sequence is introduced. Typically you can clearly spot an Imagine Spot with a thought bubble, dissolve, or other type of transition, so you don't literally have to add "a few seconds long" in there.

Unfortunately, the wick check doesn't specify whether uses are entries for Imagine Spot or potholes/casual mentions, so it's hard for us to know which type of usage fits the unknown/misuse categories in the wick check. Yet another reason that wick checkers should copy the actual wicks!

I want to clarify that I'm not saying the example is misuse or that we absolutely need to add unnecessary details to every example. I'm just saying that for this discussion, assuming the ambiguous examples are correct just because they claim to be Imagine Spot isn't helpful, as the only evidence we have that it's correct is the example itself claiming so.

We can't assume they're all misuse, but we also shouldn't assume they're all valid.

Well, I assumed the pothole was being used correctly because I was making a point about clarification and context in the case that it was correct. If it was incorrect, none of that would have mattered and the wick could just be changed to Fantasy Sequence without any other work.

most of the wicks I checked labeled "Unspecified" were context for other tropes' examples. Whether or not something happened in a character's imagination or in canon is important to know, so it seems fairly common.

That's good to clarify. Context-free offhand mentions are a weird area where you just have to assume that the writer means what they wrote. Adding context where it's not important other than for verifying that a pothole is correct doesn't seem like the right decision to me.

What to do with Imagine Spot is a tough choice. Like I said earlier, a lot of offhand mentions certainly do refer to short sequences and use the fact that readers know that to quickly add detail to the example they're in. That makes me want to keep it as is and clean up misuse. On the other hand, the fact that there are more definitely-wrong uses than definitely-right ones (based on a sample of 27, but still) is Not Good.

If there really are that many misuses, I think the best balance of fixing things without too much work would be:

• Make Imagine Spot a redirect to Fantasy Sequence. All wicks and potholes will become technically correct, but correct ones will lose specificity.
• Rename Imagine Spot to something like Imagine Shot, and move examples that we know are good to there.