Unclear Description: High Concept

A premise that "can be summarized in one sentence" is a highly subjective point for a non-YMMV trope.

As Sandbox.High Concept Wick Check (a few months old, but it's still illustrative IMHO, so I didn't bother to update) shows, High Concept is used in different ways:

1. About 25% is a "sales pitch", either during production or during marketing. (Too similar to Tagline?)
2. Over half of the examples are heavily abridged and uncredited summaries, so I assume these are made by the tropers. Laconic Wiki exists specifically for this.
3. Some inversely elaborate the title if it matches what the work is about, which is redundant to Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
4. Some are in-universe recaps what the adventure was about. Sometimes with a Title Drop.

The best suggestion so far was marking it as Trivia and adjusting the description, but there are always other possibilities.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 19th 2022 at 4:40:35 PM

What's the Laconic for the Trivia if you make it?

If it's Trivia and the concept is Sales Pitch, it sounds like we'd need to source them from interviews and such.

And then there's In-Universe ones too...

Edited by Malady on Jan 19th 2022 at 5:39:02 AM

The "kicker" proposed before the creation of the work, the rest of the production is about elaborating that idea. / The marketing hook of the movie (book, etc), buy the ticket to know what happened next.

I think it’s Fan Speak.

I wonder if there's value in making a JFF page for High Concept, so that the examples can go somewhere. I think it might work.

High Concept is definitely a term used in the publishing industry to describe a certain type of media (so arguably not "fan" speak, since it's an industry-term, too), but honestly, even publishing people tend to have difficulties describing it sometimes.

The idea is that it's an idea that a premise and concept sums up the work and what it does well, rather than having to try to explain all the themes, character arcs, etc. in the fiction just for it to even make sense, like some literary fiction, for example.

That said, I'm not sure what purpose to make it have on this site.

I still think the examples can be reworked into JFF somehow.

IDK about moving the examples to JFF, but we can definitely salvage this as a definition-only page.

If High Concept is used by publishers but with varying definitions, perhaps an explanatory page akin to Mary Sue would be warranted.

I can volunteer to draft that if we go that direction.

"High Concept" does sound more like a Industry Terminology than a trope.

Question, some work pages have "general trivia" section alongside the Trivia tropes list, is that kosher? If examples that border on "interesting production facts" don't get their own trope page, it could be a way to save them.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 19th 2022 at 11:24:34 PM

Question, some work pages have "general trivia" section alongside the Trivia tropes list, is that kosher? If examples that border on "interesting production facts" don't get their own trope page, it could be a way to save them.

Yes, but I don't think they would fit under this trope.

What I was thinking was, we could have a Definition-Only page for the meaning, and a JustForFun.High Concept page where people could basically try to describe movies in one sentence. If not High Concept that might work as an unrelated concept, similar to Better Than It Sounds or Worse Than It Sounds.

If this idea wouldn't work though I'm fine as well.

So, how's that different from the Laconic subpage?

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 19th 2022 at 12:31:47 PM

I think a closer fitting game would be, like, "Pitch the work"- try and write marketing pitches for the works.

I think I've seen something like that in Forum Games, or at least considered asking if there is a thread for it.

Edited by Amonimus on Jan 19th 2022 at 12:36:56 PM

To clarify my previous comment of it being Fan Speak, I definitely agree it's Definition Only (I always get those two mixed up). Basically I think being it's not really a trope, but a term with vague offsite use that we can't really repurpose (outside of a game/JFF format, I guess).

Yeah, "Pitch The Work" might be closer to what I was talking about.

Beyond that, to making High Concept Definition-Only.

I'm fine with making this a Definition-Only Page. We have other industry terminology on that index.

Definition only sounds good to me. I could go either way on "Pitch the work" as a JFF page... perhaps as a neutral equivalent to Worse Than It Sounds and Better Than It Sounds?

I suppose it would work similarly to Better Than It Sounds and Worse Than It Sounds. I don't think we'd need to spoiler tag the work's name on JustForFun.Pitch The Work (or whatever we call it), since the other rely on readers not knowing the work's name until the last minute while this is merely about writing a faux-sales pitch, but I won't complain if most people would prefer spoiler tagging the works' names.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 20th 2022 at 4:31:38 AM

I haven't thought about it, but giving the work description first then obscuring the work name (if interested, click here) sounds fun.

The work name would still be listed first, as it is on Better Than It Sounds and Worse Than It Sounds — it would just be spoiler tagged. When I said people wouldn't know the name of the work until the last minute, I meant that they'd have to do some extra clicking to find out the name, not that it's the last thing listed in the text.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Jan 20th 2022 at 4:55:13 AM

Would the JFF page have to be drafted in the TLP? If nothing else it'd make it easier to quickly gain examples, especially if the draft is just open for edits. The last JFF thing I saw there was TV Tropes Café, and that one got pretty popular.

I don't think it would need to be. I don't think TLP was used for JustForFun.I Heard That As.