What even is a "Trope In Aggregate"

A long time ago the wiki put a hard ban on stock phrases because of how abstract those phrases tended to be. It became about the words rather than the purpose. Compare My Favorite Shirt, which features an escalation of a fight, to Present Company Excluded, which is just an offhand joke.

Edited by KJMackley on Dec 14th 2020 at 3:09:26 AM

Let's put stock phrases aside. What about all the other stock tropes from the Stock Room index? Are those Ti A, chairs, or discernable by looking at a work in isolation? I am not convinced yet that Ti A is as clear-cut a category as some make it out to be.

Edited by eroock on Dec 14th 2020 at 6:00:53 AM

Generally? Discernable in isolation, but you'd have to use specific examples to determine otherwise. Cartoon Meat, the first trope on that page, is something that you can see in a work, because it is about unrealistic portrayals of meat, used as a shorthand in several ways.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I still think Expy tropes might qualify since the character archetypes don't become obvious until you look at multiple works, especially if they're a recurring collection of personality traits and skills rather than, say, a huge villain in a dark outfit and mask.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Expy itself, no, as you can can pretty obviously tell a tall helmet-wearing caped villain named Dunkel Vater is a Darth Vader expy just as any other Shout-Out. But is Fountain of Expies, because you need multiple works to make expies for that to happen?

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 14th 2020 at 8:30:29 AM

Yeah, I was referring to Fountain of Expies and the subtropes.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Trivia can't be Tropes in Aggregate because they're Not A Trope.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I genuinely didn't know they were Trivia.

...Why are they Trivia?

Expy isn't, and these characters objectively exist in works as recurring patterns.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I see it. It’s not something that’s in the work; it’s not YMMV as it deals with other works. Like Follow the Leader.

For Dunkel Pater you are looking at one character and based on what’s in the story conclude he is a derivative. But you can’t retroactively do that for Darth Vader.

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 14th 2020 at 9:00:55 AM

But...but it is in the work. They're characters following archetypes that one character created. How is that external to the work?

I don't want this to get off topic so I might redirect this to the Trivia thread.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Because the “fountain” isn’t the expy, it’s the original character. Unless you’re considering it analogous to Trope Codifier and the like?

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 14th 2020 at 9:15:14 AM

I am, because from what I can tell the tropes are about the characters, not the character it's based around, hence why there's so many examples we collect on these pages. It'd be silly to have an entire page of examples we can't crosswick because the only actual point is to be a footnote on a Trivia page about how these characters exist.

Basically I can see how it'd be trivia for the work with the character that originated the archetype, but the works that feature these characters objectively do feature them and I don't see how these archetypes aren't tropes just because the characters are copycats.

Edit: We are talking about the same thing, right? I've been focused less on the actual Fountain of Expies trope and more the subtropes, like Darth Vader Clone and Fauxba Fett. Those are actual tropes and if they're not meant to be in Main they're miscategorized.

Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 14th 2020 at 10:22:53 AM

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Another trope that should be on the Tropes in Aggregate index is Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born. The definition is basically "When twins are born in fiction, expect them to be male/female fraternal twins."

Rock'n'roll never dies!

I was talking about the main Fountain of Expies trope, because you asked why it was in trivia.

For that matter, Always Identical Twins.

No, Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born wouldn't be an aggregate of works. You can see from the example of one work, that the children are opposite-sex fraternal/Half-Identical Twins. Always Identical Twins is closer to what you want, but still isn't an analysis of multiple works. Remember what I said about Chromosome Casting? The same thing applies here. You can observe, in a single work, the decision was made to have a Daddy jr and Mommy jr or to have both twins be the same gender. The fact that the pregnancy resulted in twins instead of a single child is unusual enough to be a trope by itself, which is why Always Identical Twins has both straight examples and aversions.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I think that Averted Trope list is more a relic of times past.

Twins are rare, but I don't think they are in the "so rare/impossible that this very detail is tropeworthy" like we are talking about for Hermaphrodite. I always thought Always Identical Twins was more about how identical twins are much more common in fiction than in real life. In singular work examples it just shows up as "there are identical twins in this story".

If anything has been proven by this discussion, it's that I'm not the only one with some uncertainty as to what a TIA is. Everyone seems to have a slightly different interpretation of how it works and what tropes would apply.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

^ I think the difference is in people's confidence to detect what may or may not be a trope just by looking at a single work.

Edited by eroock on Dec 16th 2020 at 5:32:31 AM

(quote edited to make my point flow more smoothly)

I agree; I think that, as it is currently, the article is about "twins in a work", usually the biological sort of twins. Twins have a large number of associated conventions, so I'm not convinced that's a problem.

That is implied by the name, and I would agree that only listing identical twins is a Trope in Aggregate, but the article isn't limited to that. It is saying identical genomes are disproportionately common as an observation/analysis of "twins in a work". (Technically, what we trope are siblings with phenotypically similar alleles, and environmental conditions can make genetically identical people appear phenotypically distinct, but that's getting rather deep into the science instead of the fiction.)

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Is now a good time to remind everyone that a trope cannot exist in just a single work? It looks like I'm arguing against my own point, but I know what I mean. I just lack confidence in my ability to communicate it.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Dec 16th 2020 at 8:56:15 AM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If we dig deep enough we always run into a problem that tv tropes has limitations in the ability to identify and categorize tropes themselves. In theory, a trope doesn't need to be part of a pattern in order to be identified as a "storytelling shorthand," but in practice we need tropes to have numerous examples across different types of stories to make a good trope page.

We do have Unbuilt Trope, which is about a trope that existed before it became a cliche.

Tropes in Aggregate tropes need to be about a topic that sounds innocuous at first or with unintentional implications, but its prevalence creates an oddly consistent pattern. I came across Lookalike Lovers and I think it would be another candidate. By itself it tends to manifest as family members all looking like family (often the child is introduced first, and then their parents obviously look like their child), but when multiple examples emerge you end up noticing that these married couples look like brother and sister.

I disagree with that too. Parents looking like their child is Strong Family Resemblance, but it's a conscious choice to have a couple look the same, because it has narcissistic and maybe even twincesty implications. You can objectively look at the work and see that these lovers strongly resemble each other.

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 17th 2020 at 11:07:05 AM

In principle it may be objectively noticeable, but in practice the ability to identify two lovers as meant to look alike outside of parody or exaggeration starts becomes more speculating over subtext (it often just comes down to hair and skin color). Much like Black Dude Dies First, it gets difficult to separate the origins of the trope from the commentary that came later.

Many of the on-page examples are drawn media (so it's obvious) and/or the resemblance is pointed out and/or a parody of the concept. There are comparatively few live-action examples where you have to guess if they are intended to be Lookalike Lovers.

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 17th 2020 at 2:05:45 PM

The point is that it's a trope that is filled with deliberate exaggerations of an existing concept. Parodies have to come from somewhere.

But that doesn't make it a TIA...many tropes are exaggerations of existing concepts. I do not see the meaning of "a couple looks like each other" stretched across multiple works. To me that just means many works are using straight examples of Lookalike Lovers, possibly with the meanings I brought up earlier.

Edited by Synchronicity on Dec 17th 2020 at 3:31:51 AM