Needs Help: Bald Of Awesome

This trope has an issue wide enough that I think "Needs Help" was the best way of describing it.

The Problem:

Per the wick check, it's clear that the trope suffers from a ZCE misuse issue, with 75% being some form of ZCE. The most common is using the trope to just describe a real life person or character as bald.

I think the reason why we see such a huge amount of misuse is because "awesome" is a very vague term, so vague that many people are just outright ignoring it. This is despite the fact that the trope description (kind of) provides a definition: "baldness instead indicates just how awesome a character is, usually representing leadership or over-the-top manliness." Only 2 of the examples checked mentioned leadership and none specified manliness or masculinity.

The wick check shows a breakdown for "correct" usage.^note I was really lenient in determining what correct meant since as mentioned, "awesome" is vague enough to encompass a lot of different things. Outside of what was suggested by the description, the trope was interpreted as being applied:

• to indicate a character is heroic or good
• to emphasize that a character is strong or good at fighting
• to emphasize that a character is good at whatever their specialty is (a bald chef who is depicted as being one of the best chefs in the world, for example)
  
  Suggestions:
• create new tropes based on the current usage: Bald Head of Toughness was created to fix a similar issue with Bald Woman and several of the examples in the "emphasize a character is strong or good at fighting" category would be covered under it. Therefore, you'd only need to create the remaining two tropes. That said, I'm not sure if "bald is heroic" and "bald is competent/skilled" are anything but People Sit on Chairs, especially the latter of the two.
• rewrite the description and rename to focus on the authority aspect, something like Bald Head Of Authority. This seems to have been the original intent of the trope and it would make the subtrope Bald Black Leader Guy make more sense since that trope is explicitly about bald black men in positions of leadership. I also think given how older people tend to bald and older people tend to be the ones in leadership positions, it'd be covering some Truth in Television
  • since none of the examples checked even mentioned manliness, I think it's safe to say that it has been interpreted as a non-essential part of the trope. in addition, Bald Head of Toughness may be able to subsume any examples we find that are about manliness depending on how they are written due to the Men Are Tough connection

FWIW, I prefer suggestion 2 over suggestion 1.

Opening

rewrite and rename

Renaming to Bald Head Of Authority and rewriting sounds good. Would that mean Bald Black Leader Guy is a subtrope?

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 25th 2021 at 5:44:57 AM

yes. it currently is labeled a subtrope of Bald Of Awesome already, so nothing would change if we rewrote and renamed

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 25th 2021 at 10:15:45 AM

I guess you already mentioned that in the opening post. I missed it because I wasn't completely awake at the time.

Do we have any crowner options other than renaming and rewriting?

To renaming. Someone just being bald is People Sit on Chairs, doubly so if it refers to an IRL person. It's got to express the character's badassery/intellect in order for baldness to be a trope.

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Dec 31st 2021 at 4:48:31 AM

Are these our options?

1. Split and disambiguate (would involve launching new tropes for baldness indicating that a character is heroic or good, and for if a character is especially good at what they specialize in; Bald Head of Toughness covers the remaining meaning mentioned in the first post)
2. Rewrite to focus on the authority aspect
3. Rename

2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive with each other, but 1 is mutually exclusive with those two.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 31st 2021 at 7:00:46 AM

^Yup, those are the three viable options in my opinion. If others have any other ideas, feel free to share

^^"badassery" and "awesome" as concepts are way too vague and have contributed to the issue in my opinion. See the opening post as to what the new meanings would possibly be

Edited by amathieu13 on Dec 31st 2021 at 9:06:58 AM

The use of a word like "Awesome" in the name does feel like an artifact of that 2000s/10s "Awesomesauce" era of the internet, where people were obsessed with things like bacon or mustaches or the word "epic" (Epic Meal Time is a great example of this). Because of that, I'm 100% in favour of a rename to make it both clearer and less dated.

That time period is probably when the since-cut Bacon Addiction (which was determined to be a meme and not a proper trope) was created.

Another year, another misused ZCE-laden appearance trope facing the chopping block.

...I'll just throw out a limb here, next to be analyzed, Cool Shades?

^ not sure what to do with this but say, let's stay on topic and keep the discussion of other unrelated tropes that may or may not need TRS to the main thread

How about "Bald Head of Authority"?

^that was my default and I'm fine with it. Bald of Authority would also work and would mimic the current name

Can the crowner be called for Bald of Authority? It's been five days

I started a draft for the new definition on the sandbox i did the wiki check here.

Thoughts, concerns, questions, and edits are welcome

Your current draft seems fine to me.

It looks fine to me.

considering that the majority of examples of Bald Of Awesome are ZCE and the majority that aren't ZCE aren't focused on leadership, can I take this draft over to the TLP to get more examples?

Edited by amathieu13 on Jan 10th 2022 at 12:51:45 PM