Soft Split Cleanup

So, it's been a trend for soft-split tropes to be split into multiple sections even when it's not needed and makes the page a hassle to navigate. In some cases, the trope in question is so large that hard-splitting some (or all) of the internal subtropes into their pages is more beneficial than letting them take over the page.

EDIT: Here’s the sandbox for this effort—Sandbox.Soft Split Cleanup

Edited by MacronNotes on Jul 4th 2022 at 10:16:08 AM

If I may bring up another example, Arc Fatigue is soft split among two tropes, the "Arc Stall" (for an individual story arc) and "Myth Stall" (for the central conflict of the entire series). I'm pretty sure most wicks for the trope focus on the former, so I don't know if this is a case where it should be split into two separate audience reactions.

The ones I've been bothered about for awhile are:

• Nerd Glasses: Split into "type of glasses", which means any glasses that don't fit these exact forms can't be crosswicked.
• Gender-Blender Name: Same deal; split into "names", so if you don't have those exact names... (OTOH, this trope needs TRS anyway so it might be moot point later.)

Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 13th 2021 at 10:10:36 AM

Uh, Gender-Blender Name isn't soft-split anymore? Looks like Discar undid it a while ago. I know it had a clean up thread (looks like Sandbox.Gender Blender Name had the original page format) but yeah I think it needs TRS too.

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 13th 2021 at 7:53:35 AM

Fainting acts like it wants to be a combination of Index or Disambiguation and Useful Notes.

Note that a quick gander through TheOtherWiki's entry on fainting makes me question some the the Truth In Televison bits here.

I'd think that the "Monster Faint" and "Girly Man Faint" are subsets of "emotional faint"

"Fake Faint" might be a trope on it's own, or the faker might be invoking "Emotional Faint" or some other "Females are Delicate" type of trope.

"Corset Faint" are instances of Of Corset Hurts perhaps? With a pothole to fainting useful notes, if extant?

"Anemia Faint(Of the Vampire kiss subset, or other long term bleeding)", "Pregnancy Faint", and "Exhaustion Faint" all come down to "Fainted due to depleted body reserves" and should probably be put under whatever caused said depletion in the first place.

The Shoujo comment under "Anemia Faint" probably means that she's the Ill Girl and a victim of Soap Opera Disease or Victorian Novel Disease, as would other "Fainting due to undefined health reasons"

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Feb 13th 2021 at 10:03:37 AM

Never mind, then. I hadn't checked it in a while.

Re:

Arc Fatigue: I think an arc that goes on for two long and a series conflict that goes for two long aren’t exactly the same but they pretty much invoke the same audience reactions so maybe it’s not worth hard splitting but I think we can maybe undo the soft split.

Nerd Glasses: I think we should remove the glasses types and just go by media. I don’t really think the type of glasses a character wears matters that much if they all communicate that the character is nerdy

Fainting: Maybe split off these tropes: Fake Faint, Emotional Faint, Fatigue Faint and maaybe do Comedic Faint and Dramatic Faint and then have Fainting be a Disambig. I agree that Of Corset Hurts can be used to cover Corset Faints

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 14th 2021 at 1:33:00 AM

Double post but another bad one is Handshake Substitute.

Fainting: I'm pretty confident that Fake Faint and Emotional Faint are pretty good candidates to be tropeable. Should I start TLP for them, or wait for others to chime in?

Fatigue Faint I'm a little less certain of. Is "People pass out when they're too tired" a trope? Or is the important part the circumstances that caused them to be that tired? Post-Victory Collapse, "I ran myself ragged because I Gave My Word to too many people", or "Opponent has run me into the ground".

Dramatic Faint and Comedic Faint I think would both be Fake Faint where the character is Invoking, Parodying, or Playing for Drama one of the other options. (Or one of the other tropes that often include fainting as a symptom/side effect) Whether there is enough meat available for them to be their own tropes can probably wait until later in the cleanup.

BTW, would we eventually need to get a TRS thread to turn Fainting into a disambig? Or is it clear-cut enough that this thread is sufficient? (I'm newish, and trying to figure out where the lines are.)

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Feb 14th 2021 at 1:20:03 PM

Well fatigue fainting as well as other health related reasons for fainting is usually played for drama so maybe we can merge all that into a “Fainting for story related drama” or something.

We don’t need TRS to split these tropes off however if we are going for a disambiguation we might need to take it there as that is essentially cutting the trope. Also this thread is new and I don’t think it will get enough traction to be able to execute big changes like that but we will see.

Okay, I've got a draft TLP for the Emotional Faint over on Sandbox.underCoverSailsman. It's definitely going to need refinement, but it's a start.

I stripped the examples pretty much wholesale from Fainting's Girly Man, Monster, and Emotional subheadings. Very, very rough pass through to remove the most egregious ZCE, but they're not even alphabetized and there are probably some low-quality examples in there.

Anything specific that needs being taken care of before invoking the hive mind, or is this at a point where it's ready to be taken to TLP?

Also thinking ahead to try to reduce duplicate work: Are we better off trying to TLP Fake Faint at the same time, so that if they both go live, we can do a single sweep through Fainting's wicks and sort to either as appropriate, or should we try to get Emotional Faint to settle, and then if Fake Faint goes later, mine the appropriate examples out of Emotional Faint's wicks? I've not done this before, so I don't know if it makes a real difference.

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Feb 15th 2021 at 4:16:22 AM

Cat Girl... looks to be a weird can of worms, but maybe fairly straightforward to fix. It seems to want to be two tropes at once, possibly due to it's shared history with Nekomimi.

Basically, it claims two supertropes, Little Bit Beastly and Unusual Ears. For the second, I think that Animal-Eared Headband is what was meant.

The main trope description defines a biological cat girl, but then adds a paragraph that says that characters can "Wear a cat-eared headband, fake tail...." etc. to "Invoke" the trope.

My first impression is that characters that do not have any Intrinsic (biological or similar) cat traits are Not CatGirls. Instead, they have Animal-Eared Headband or other accessories to enhance their Femme Fatale or Moe characteristics, or because they like the cat theme... They are referencing Cat Girl without being it.

If the above is the case, than a clarifying edit and cutting all of the accessory examples would be my recommendation. Maybe TRS?

If, on the other hand, this "Two tropes on the page" is the intention, I think the sort should go column-major rather than row-major. Two Subheadings:

1. Biological/Intrinsic Catgirls: Their feline traits are a part of What they are.
2. Use Cat-Themed accessories, tools, etc. but have no intrinsic feline traits. (Some examples have characters that have some feline traits, and then lean into that with their accessorizing. They would belong in the first heading.)

Each of these headings would then have the normal media namespace folders.

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Feb 15th 2021 at 6:07:58 AM

I will look at the Fainting sandbox later but good that you started working on it!

As for Cat Girl, TRS determined that non bio cat girls still count so it’s all part of the same trope and I rewrote the description the reflect that (with consensus) I don’t agree with hard splitting but it’s fine if it make more sense than what we have now. I asked if we should remove the soft solo on the examples in that thread but got no response iirc. I will dig up the trs link later

EDIT: Here!

I wouldn’t mind going back to standard media categories or doing the soft split you suggested. Also, Unusual Ears is the super-trope because it covers all forms of non human ears on human/humanoid characters

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 15th 2021 at 10:01:24 AM

Ok ,looked at the sandbox. I think it's good enough to run through TLP. We can do further refinement there. We don't have to release the fake fainting draft at the same time necessarily. I can write a quick description draft for fake fainting and then we can look that over and send to the TLP once we are done if that's ok.

TLP for Emotional Faint is up.

If you want to start Fake Faint, go for it. I'm not sure that I'll be able to babysit two TL Ps at once.

Cat Girl: Okay, I see where the TRS was coming from. I'm finding that particular corner of trope taxonomy... odd... in general, but I see why the chosen best solution in this case was to keep the two basic variants in the same trope.

For the record, if anyone wants to discuss the exact layout within page, my reason for preferring to soft-split by Intrinsic Vs. Thematic CatGirls goes like this:

Convenience for the reader. I'm modeling three types of user looking through the example list:

1. Just wants to find all the cat girls: This one doesn't really care how we arrange them, as they'll just open all folders and read straight through, though the current in-folder headings are probably a bit distracting.
2. Wants to find cat girls in a certain media type. A single Media-Type folder list is probably ideal for these, but the soft-split wouldn't be too bad - just one more folder.
3. Wants Only Intrinsic catgirls or Only cat-themed girls. The current setup sort of works, but can be cumbersome depending on how many media categories they are interested in. Soft-split is ideal. Un-split is completely unusable for this group of users, as they have to scan every entry, and hope that there is enough context to easily tell which type of catgirl is represented.

I remember the Trope Talk discussion briefly touched upon Names to Run Away from Really Fast, which are soft-split into various "themed categories" and suffers the same problem as what used to be in Gender-Blender Name. Most of them has its own subpages, and trying to add new examples is a nightmare.

Edited by Adept on Feb 24th 2021 at 4:08:18 PM

Hm I think soft split will probably make everyone happy in that case.

I don't even know where to being with that one. Looks like it would be a lot of work but maybe we can break it into broader subtropes (if those tropes don't already exist that it).

So, going to make a list of the tropes that we need to work on soon? Can I get more opinions on what to do with Nerd Glasses?

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 21st 2021 at 1:46:02 AM

I think we should just remove the categories entirely and merge everything together. OTOH, that might leave us with a page of ZCE.

War Jay... Which page are you talking about?

Edited by underCoverSailsman on Feb 21st 2021 at 9:52:47 AM

Nerd Glasses: I'd say trim to just the media folders. The split by style seems to be encouraging entries that are "Wears this style" without communicating nerdiness...

@Macron: I suppose some of them can work as subtropes, like how Bland-Name Product has iPhony, WcDonald's, Fauxrrari, etc. Also, those subpages are further soft-split into sub-categories such as "Blade", "Bullet", "Hammer", etc. from NamesToRunAwayFrom.Weapons—which definitely needs to be removed.

Those pages are also rife with ZCE, since a lot of them are just "a list of characters that use a particular name", which is People Sit on Chairs, without explaining how those names are meant to make them seem more intimidating/dangerous.

Nerd Glasses.

Speaking of names... Two First Names is also subdivided for "Superheroes", "Non-costumed Heroes and Associates", "Female Examples", " Fictional examples outside comic books" and "Real Life". This distinction seems nonsensical to me, and a lot of them are ZCE.

Bizarre Alien Locomotion is currently split between types of movement. I find this to be quite restrictive, especially since it leaves me with nowhere to put this example:

• The pouffes' primary method of movement is via the usage of a long, grappling hook-like tendril that they can shoot from their bodies, which allows them to drag themselves to any surface and stick to it. The tendril is also shown to be strong enough to pierce a hole through the metal shell of Su and Jack's car, as well as through people's heads in order to kill them. Aside from this, the pouffes are also able to simply slide along surfaces and jump through the air. At one point, a pouffe is even able to levitate and float around.