Misused: Does This Remind You Of Anything

Does This Remind You of Anything? is a Trope of Legend, which unfortunately invites a lot of shoehorning and misuse. Not helping is its status as a Pothole Magnet and its name resembling a line of dialogue.

Common problems with the trope:

• Speculative Troping about what a certain situation might represent, despite the context not being blatantly evocative of that, which better fits Applicability
• Being used for clearly unintentional innuendo
• Being used for something that refers to the real-life situation in context, rather than substitute something else for the real-life situation (i.e. a sexual Double Entendre that is clearly talking about sex in context, as opposed to, say, baking cookies, or saying an abusive relationship is a metaphor for an abusive relationship)
• Zero context examples that either don't explicitly say what the scene represents, or don't give enough details of the scene to make the connection obvious
• Using the trope for a Shout-Out, Actor Allusion, or other similarity to another piece of media

We've compiled a wick check of 150 random examples, and determined that only 44 examples were sufficient, with 13 examples fitting other subtropes. 58 were low-context and 49 were misuse. In other words, only 29% of the given examples were clearly correct usage.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 15th 2020 at 9:09:27 AM

Opening, seems like a classic line of dialogue title vagueness issue.

Why not make it a supertrope, then?

How about Fictional Allegory?

One thing that has been pointed out in the past is that people often mistakenly think this is only for sexual symbolism, when it's broader than that. Image Pickin previously changed the image to the Cookie Monster image that's there now (I think in late 2017 or early 2018, when I first posted on IP) because of that misconception, rather than because of any quality issues with the previous image.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Oct 16th 2020 at 7:26:49 AM

Technically it is a supertrope, do you mean make it an exampleless index? That's what I was considering if all else fails.

We have Allegory already, which applies more to the entire work, while DTRYOA seems more designated for gags. They do tend to be used interchangeably though.

Probably doesn't help that its Tropes of Legend summary says that it's usually a sexual trope. I do love the current image, BTW.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 16th 2020 at 10:21:54 AM

As a Trope Of Legend, renaming is far more trouble than it's worth. There is nothing about the title that particularly suggest sexual usage so I don't think that's the problem. I think this is an inevitable problem that hits all the most popular tropes. It seems like virtually every heavily-wicked trope has gone through the TRS or has a permanent cleanup thread, and I think that is due to the nature of the Troper Hive Mind tending to not read trope descriptions.

I think a permanent cleanup and an organized effort to make sure that all the "related trope" crosswicks (Canonical List of Subtle Trope Distinctions, etc.) are defining it correctly is all we can do.

The problem isn't just that it's misused for sexual innuendo, though that's a decently-sized part of it. There's those weird Shaped Like Itself examples as well, though that can't really be attributed to the trope name, and the few misuses for Shout-Out or Actor Allusion, and especially those cases where it's ambiguous whether the situation was meant to represent anything.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 16th 2020 at 1:22:10 PM

I cut the We Are Not Alone Index entry for this trope, which linked to Innuendo. Since this is "like Allegory, but narrower", something like "Allegorical X" could work. I'm not sure what "X" should be.

I suspect the sexual innuendo misuse stems from the period before we changed the trope image away from this◊ beginning of 2018. For misuse in other directions, a rename could work but it would be a major effort.

Not supporting making this supertrope example-less. The entire range is not fully covered by currently existing subtropes.

Also, I feel that users dump their examples from subtropes into the supertrope because they are not aware that a more specific subtrope exists.

Edited by eroock on Oct 17th 2020 at 3:40:29 AM

I think a cleanup is a better idea as it would be easier to fix any misuses or ask if their examples in the thread

At 9k wicks, a Long Term Project does sound like a good idea.

Actually, no. The Long Term Projects forum is only for ongoing projects with no end point. A wick cleanup, even one of 9000+ wicks, has an end point and thus belongs into Short Term Projects.

But...that means a lot of threads in Long Term are actually Short Term?

I mean...after all the wicks are checked the threads still stick around for people to take future examples of misuse to. It's not like the misuse just stops when the cleanup does, and projects in Short Term generally get less usage.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 17th 2020 at 12:34:24 PM

Instead of making a project thread (short or long) for this specific trope, I want to suggest a "Tropes of Legends Cleanup" thread (long-term) that handles misuse of any trope pages from that category. We essentially identified that the more popular tropes attract more misuse/shoehorning, so why don't we follow that up with a thread dedicated to that sort of cleanup?

Edited by crazysamaritan on Oct 17th 2020 at 12:54:19 PM

Probably just because most of those would need unique cleanup and discussion, better suited to specific threads rather than one giant one. But it might work.

But I didn't say it would be a temporary cleanup, I implied it would be a permanent one. Unless we do something here to stop the misuse (and even then, what? A rename? Tightening the definition?), I think a Project is the best solution.

I did consider making a project before I figured a wick check and TRS thread would be a better first step, lest the issue is the trope being vague. I'm willing to catch that misuse with a project if the trope itself seems fine.

I mean, it's called "long term" cleanups for a reason; they don't have to be perpetual, just large and long-lasting.

So yeah, a long-term cleanup thread sounds fitting.

Boop. We can return to this thread if we notice any issues with the trope itself during a cleanup.

So in the cleanup thread, we're struggling to define what distinguishes a speculative example from an obvious one. Here's a few guidelines I suggest to make it easier to narrow down examples:

• If the subtext is just restating the context, it's not an example. It's just the context, no metaphor intended.
• The scene should only have one clearly intended metaphor. If it can be interpreted in multiple ways, that's YMMV, probably better fitting Applicability (though TBH, that thing confuses me too). For example, if something's intended as a metaphor for addiction, it usually isn't meant to double as a metaphor for an abusive relationship. If it's broad enough to cover multiple concepts, it's not a clear one-to-one metaphor as the trope suggests. This doesn't include concepts that have very similar narratives, like if a situation can be read as coming out as gay or coming out as trans.
• If the scene is more confusing with the subtext than without the subtext, then it's probably a shoehorn. A lot of examples read in symbolism that likely isn't intended, and when you try to apply the symbolism, the scene makes less sense than it did at face value.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 18th 2020 at 11:23:05 AM

Added banner to the page.

Should Symbolic Blood be considered a subtrope of Does This Remind You of Anything?? It seems like it fits the general concept of "a situation is made to look like another situation", and like most other subtropes, it involves an innocent situation that resembles a forbidden one (violence).

I'd say it should.