Duplicate Trope: Five Races

Yup

Thanks, it should be added then to Sandbox.Standard Fantasy Races (can someone more familiar with the work than me write up the example)? To me it also seems that the urgals are basically orcs with horns, is that correct?

Edited by Snicka on Jan 30th 2021 at 6:55:19 PM

^They are. I've added the example.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Jan 31st 2021 at 11:26:21 AM

Thank you. I really think it's good to go now.

I have a few image suggestions, but I guess that should go through Image Picking instead of here?

Probably, yes.

I think so as well, yes.

... so, now what happens?

Holler a mod to migrate the sandbox to the Main namespace; de-wick and cut Five Races, crosswick Standard Fantasy Races.

EDIT: Hollering done.

Edited by Snicka on Jan 31st 2021 at 3:06:34 PM

I thought the agreement was to redirect, not cut.

^In practical terms, what would the difference be? My understanding is that either way you're wholesale replacing the old page with a new one — a redirect might be handy, if only to keep the inbound links, but at the end of the day the result is much the same.

Holler actioned.

Thanks. Five Races has only 315 wicks, should be easy to de-wick.

Should the quote from Five Races be salvaged for Standard Fantasy Races? I think it fits well. Also, the video example definitely fits.

I did some de-wicking. Down to 306 now.

It seems that Lords of Magic and Dragon Sanctuary have at least some of the Standard Fantasy Races, but I'm not familiar enough with either of them to write up the example.

Edited by Snicka on Feb 1st 2021 at 9:18:27 PM

Yeah, I do think both are worth keeping as well.

Why are Five Races being cut? It's a flexible, handy and very useful trope. Switching it to "standard" races cuts that flexibility away and we are left with whole lot of situation where something that was troppable will suddenly be unfit for Standard Races. Meaning cutting down genuine content, because suddenly a good, workable category to list things no longer applies. It just figures.

The first couple pages of this thread go more in detail about this, but it's because the basic premise of Five Races, that fantasy works tend to use five and exactly five races that fit into specific character archetypes, does not actually seem to apply anywhere. The current page does not actually contain any true examples of what it says that it's about — almost every single example there lists multiple races with each category having multiple shoehorned examples, has too few, has a single race cover two to three archetypes at once, lists things entirely other than races, deliberately ignores a large portion of in-universe races that don't fit the scheme, or does many of these things at once. There just quite plainly don't seem to be any cases that fit the trope without extensive shoehorning, bargaining or "creative" reinterpretation, so it's... just not a trope. There isn't any work that uses it the way its description wants it to be used.

Oh, and the majority of examples are zero-context in the bargain.

This isn't the first time you've shown up to a TRS thread, seemingly without having read the actual thread, just to complain about the decision made in the thread you didn't read.

Like, by all means, if you disagree with decisions made speak your mind, but at least do us the bare minimum of reading the discussion instead of just yelling at us.

It's not being cut, it's being made into a redirect.

...Which is basically just a cut, but still. I think the way most of us here see it is if the trope no longer exists in the form it used to, to the point where the original page doesn't exist, it was cut.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 1st 2021 at 8:44:15 AM

While de-wicking, I noticed that Five Races was very often potholed into the words "three races" or "four races". Which was clearly a misuse.

In one case, I found that it was more appropriate to pothole Demihuman than Standard Fantasy Races in place of Five Races.

A bit of status update: Standard Fantasy Races now reached 100 wicks, Five Races is down at 156 (less than half of the initial 315).

A lot of the examples I've been dewicking don't even try to fit their races in the five roles — they just list off five names and leave it at that.

EDIT: Oh, I think I just found my two favorite potholes so far — Eleven Races and Nine Races. No attempt was made in either case to shoehorn the races into any category, either.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Feb 2nd 2021 at 5:56:50 AM

Why doesn't this have the star? Oh well. I'll start clearing away some wicks.

Update: Video Game/ is done. So many of the wicks were either ZCEs just listing the races, or people shoehorning completely made up races into the Five Races model.

We're in the home stretch. 40 wicks left.

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 3rd 2021 at 3:53:50 PM

What are we going to do with the examples on the Five Races page itself? Are we going to transfer those to Standard Fantasy Races?

Well, if they fit. We can also just cut them.

Or revise them to fit with the new trope.

I mean...if they fit. I've deleted multiple examples today of people shoehorning examples into the old trope. We can only revise examples if they actually fit Standard Fantasy Races.