Unclear Description: But Not Too Black

It's not irrelevant. I would certainly hate to retool this into a cleaner trope about colorism and have it be inaccurate.

Anyway, perhaps we should just crowner. Options for review:

• Disambiguate the page into various tropes about skin color and colorism
• Rename the trope
• Redefine to be more clearly about colorism

I'm thinking if we disambiguate we could put Half-Breed Discrimination on there as well?

I mean, I can see the relation between this and Half-Breed Discrimination, but isn't this a trope about the discrimination that only dark-skinned people face, not mixed people?

I'd also add "create different tropes (e.g. Dark Skin Stigma, Adaptationally Paler, etc.) for examples regarding colorism and skin tones" as a separate option. Disambig and creating tropes are two different things.

The issue is, if we create new tropes, that doesn't necessarily solve the current issue. What do we do with the trope afterward? In theory, even if this and the disambig aren't mutually exclusive, we could have a crowner that results in us making new tropes... and taking no other action.

Anvil of the Story's situation, 2.0

Yes, that's why I suggested that. People can agree to disambiguate this, but not to create other tropes. Creating new tropes is useful for these examples we have, and these tropes wouldn't be as confusing or broad as But Not Too Black is. Or a rename could be enough. This can go many ways, depending on the votes.

Edited by selkies on Aug 26th 2021 at 6:03:46 PM

Yes. I guess those options are fine.

Do we have a trope called The Paper Bag Test maybe? I think it would cover a lot of the colorism stuff.

Apologies for coming in late, but isn't "Dark-skinned character is made lighter skinned in an adaptation" already covered by Race Lift?

Not inherently. There are light-skinned black people.

Only one person supported the crowner idea. Anyone else?

To get the ball rolling again, I wanna note that I included an entry on the What If ... Zombies?! episode of What If…? (2021) regarding Okoye, which would fall into the Adaptationally Paler category. (I also included an image link on the trope Image Link page.)

Not sure if this helps the repair discussion along in any way, but since I saw the link on the trope page and then read thru the discussion, I figured it couldn't hurt.

Edited by ShaiPa on Sep 15th 2021 at 9:47:41 AM

I support the crowner idea.

I think it's crowner time.

I hollered since the crowner went four days without being hooked.

I'm downvoting the redefine option barring a clearer scope — some recent threads have borne out messy without a concrete redefinition. What is included? In-Universe colorism?

What about the But Not Too White trope?

That's an issue for another discussion.

Is the crowner safe to call? It's been four days since it was hooked (the timestamp on the crowner itself isn't from when it was hooked).

So… now what does “more clearly about colorism” mean here?

That's, uh... a good question.

It needs to be clear that it's about colorism (in general as a topic) being brought up in a work, not just anything related to skin tone in general. That means removing the parts about real life people. However, I'm not sure how this is gonna work with the trope's current name.

So to be clear, the outcome of this crowner is that the trope is going to be about when colorism is mentioned, focused on, or discussed as a plot/narrative relevant point in-universe?

The conversation about casting predominantly light/er skin toned actors in roles is going to be completely removed?

If so, that's kinda unfortunate since as the original person who brought this to TRS noted, that seemed to be the closest as definition as to what BNTB was trying to get at.

I do think there should be a trope covering that since it is a thing. Someone mentioned the Paper Bag test earlier and that still is in play now. That said, I do wonder how we cover what is essentially a race based appearance trope i.e. the bias towards lighter/more racially ambiguous actors and actresses. Will that be part of the useful note?

Also if my reading of the crowner outcome is right, then that also means we're losing the aspect that's a sister trope to Race Lift, i.e. casting someone in an adaptation that is Lighter/more racially ambiguous than the original in the source material. That should definitely become a separate trope

Yeah, I think that the topic of colorism involves many tropes that we don't have yet. I still think there's a distinction between how colorism is presented in fiction vs how it plays out IRL (including casting) so they can't be covered by a single trope.

Anyway, I created a sandbox for the useful notes page, feel free to change and add to it according to our discussions, because ik my wording isn't the best.

Well, amathieu13 expanded the sandbox and did an amazing job at fleshing it out. Any remarks so far?