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Unclear Description: Five Man Band

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JXZ Since: May, 2011
#1: Sep 15th 2020 at 4:31:56 PM

Five-Man Band currently has two requirements regarding the gender of the team members. These requirements inspired pages of heated arguments in the cleanup thread, starting here and continuing indefinitely.

  1. The Chick must be a girl.
  2. No more than 2 girls to a team.

I propose removing both of these requirements.

First, there seems to be an unofficial policy against strict gender requirements on tropes. Gender-Inverted Trope states:

"While it's not possible to pull off with many of these tropes, due to some of them requiring certain biological features, and others are automatically seen in a different light when gender-inverted ... making them an entirely different trope, others are only based on certain generic concepts associated with the gender, and nothing stops the writers from playing with them."

The Chick falls squarely into the final category. Its definition is gender neutral and its page even notes that men can fill the role, but aren't allowed on the page because it inherits the gender restrictions from Five-Man Band.

Second, and more importantly, the gender requirements are entirely arbitrary. The tropes for the individual members are gender-neutral, and Five-Man Band itself isn't about how people of different genders interact or anything like that. (The "max 2 girls to a team" rule is so unimportant that the page doesn't even mention it.) The genders of the characters in the group have no effect on the group dynamic that the page is describing, so excluding examples based on gender doesn't make any sense.

SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#2: Sep 19th 2020 at 2:46:12 AM

Sorry, but given the TRS backlog we cannot afford a new thread that is likely to invite a sea of misuse.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
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