Ambiguous Name: Exty Years From Now

Exty Years from Now has a significant misuse problem- a wick check found it was being used correctly only 34% of the time. Much of the misuse is in the form of it being mistaken for either the similarly named trope Exactly Exty Years Ago or for Year X. Another significant portion of misuse is people using it for anything that happens in the future, with no mention of it having any relation to the year the work was published.

Wick check: here

Summary of findings:

• 34% correct use
• 16% misuse as Exactly Exty Years Ago
• 14% misuse as Year X
• 18% misuse for anything happening in the future
• 18% ZCEs and miscellaneous misuse

As much of the misuse seems to come from the name being both too similar to Exactly Exty Years Ago and not very indicative in the first place, I think renaming it to make it more clear that it's about the relationship between the year the work was published vs when its story is set would help, in additional to cleaning up the other misuse.

Opening. Due to the amount of misuse, a rename sounds warranted. I don’t have any name suggestions though.

Macron's notes

I was thinking that this should be merged with Exactly Exty Years Ago, but it being setting-specific I think is still distinct enough to be its own trope.

In terms of names, the ones I thought of are Round Number Year Gap, Setting Year to the Tenth's Place, and Back to the Round Number.

Edited by prettycoolguy on Jan 27th 2022 at 1:23:03 PM

The thing is that it's going to be important to get across that it's a round-year gap from the work's year of publication: a round-year gap between events in general is Exactly Exty Years Ago.

Signifigant Setting Publication Time Gap? Set Exactly X Years In The Future?

I honestly think something like Set Exactly X Years In The Future would work if it weren't so close to the name Exactly Exty Years Ago. Maybe this trope can be named Set Exactly X Years From Now and the other trope can be renamed Exactly 'X Years Ago' Event?

I wouldn't be opposed to that. I didn't bring it up in the OP since I didn't think it was relevant, but I also did a wick check of Exactly Exty Years Ago to see if it was also having misuse problems... and it is. It's doing better than Exty Years from Now, but its still not great: the correct use rate is only 56% (plus 8% that have gaps that are divisible by 3, 5, 7, or 12 years, which are correct according to the description but don't align with what the trope seems to be). Wick check: here.

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 27th 2022 at 5:00:39 AM

A small correct: The Ark II example currently listed as misuse in the wick check is set in 2476 while the series started in 1976. So it's a valid example.

It's a ZCE; it should stay where it is because from the context given, nobody would be expected to know that.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

My lumper instincts kinda think we just need one trope for “<milestone number> of years before or after x”, where x is sometimes the year of publication.

Ark II has been fixed; its entry now reads "The show takes place in 2476, exactly five hundred years from the year when it was produced and first aired."

Until next time...

Anon e Mouse Jr.

Anyway, I'd rather just merge this, I don't see the concept as being all that unique and different.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 27th 2022 at 5:32:00 AM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Is "years ago" and "years from now" super distinct? I'm also leaning toward Exact Year Time Gap or something for a merged trope.

The difference between the two is that Exty Years from Now covers when the date the work takes place is an even number of years away from the release date, while Exactly Exty Years Ago covers when in-universe events happened (or will happen) an even number of years before or after they're first mentioned. Both tropes can apply to a future or past date.

Technically, Exactly Exty Years Ago could just be considered an in-universe variant, the only main difference being that it seems to be about the past.

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Merge. It's not that distinct to warrant separate tropes.

Currently mostly inactive. An incremental game I tested: https://galaxy.click/play/176 (Gods of Incremental)

Not sure about merge. For Exty Years from Now you always need to know the release date of the work to make the connection (borderline trivia) while Exactly Exty Years Ago is spelled out in the work by connecting two in-universe points. That may be a meaningful enough distinction.

I'm opposed to a merge. EEYA is comparing two in-universe events. EYFN is comparing the year of publication to the setting of the work.

Note that EEYA applies to a far broader category of genre works than EYFN does, which generally only happens in Science Fiction stories. EEYA does not require that characters are using the Gregorian calendar, whereas EYFN requires that the characters/narrator be aware of it at least (substitute another modern calendar to ignore the European bias here).

The description is very distracting, especially the third paragraph, going off on confusing tangents that don't clearly explain their relationship to the trope. That may be part of the problem. Generally speaking, however, misuse of greater than 50% isn't going to be solved only by a description fix. With that in mind, I support a rename (in addition to a description rewrite). Here are a few suggestions:

• Setting A Hundred Years From Now
• One Hundred Years From Publication
• Exty Years from Publication
• Predicting The Next Century

I sorta liked Setting Publication Time Gap

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

~Tropers/Orbiting — I was checking your Exactly Exty Years Ago Wick check and you seem to be treating "Often used with Time Skips and Distant Prologues or Epilogues." as misuse for "Time Exists". Why?

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Those instances either give a specific number of years that isn't round, or give an approximate number of years instead of an exact one.

That's true for half of them, but Mega Man is made complicated by using Year X, so more information may modify whether it counts as an example or not, and the three Asimov examples don't follow that objection at all; multiple Time Skips that are always a decade long for two, and the days leading up to an event that happens for a few hours every thousand years for the third.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

If the Mega Man example isn't written to have enough context to know whether it's correct or not, it's misuse until proven otherwise.

I counted the Asimov examples as misuse because they're all about a significant birthday of the person, with the intial flashback to his birthday not being a round number of years. That makes the timeskips from the inital event 8 years, 18, etc.

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 30th 2022 at 5:54:19 AM

Flashback? 18 years? None of those words are in the description. The first part of the Foundation story begins eight years after the previous story, when the character is forty (a round number of years). Each time skip occurs 10 years after that, a round number of years from the start of the book, with four time skips. Also doesn't address Nightfall.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Jan 30th 2022 at 10:47:44 AM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

Sorry, meant flashforward. It says it "starts eight years after the end of Prelude to Foundation", and the rest of the example is written in terms of that.

Nightfall says that it's about something that happened "almost 1,000 years ago." How is something that happened an inexact period of time ago relevant to a trope about things always happening exactly a round number of years ago?

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 30th 2022 at 10:56:39 AM

The rest of the Foundation examples were written in terms of Seldon's birthday, which decade they were. There was nothing about 18 years or 48 years, it was 40, 10, and 60. It is relevant to the reader to know that the sequel is not a decade since the previous story. The examples could be written without reference to the previous work, in which case they'd look like this:

• The story begins so that Hari Seldon is 40 years old, exactly. Each Time Skip between the parts is ten years long, causing Seldon to be fifty, sixty, and seventy. During "Dors Venabili", they throw him a birthday party.
• The first part, "Eto Demerzel", starts when Department Head Seldon is 40 years old. The next part, "Cleon I", is ten years after that, when First Minister Seldon is 50. The third part, "Dors Venabili", takes place during Professor Seldon's 60th birthday.

---

Is July 1st, 2776 exactly a thousand years since USA's declaration of independence or almost a thousand years? The bulk of the movie takes place in the several 24-hour periods leading up to the titular event, but saying "days" is nonsensical because of the story's cosmology where one "day" is a thousand years long. In another part of the wick check, from the same work, you included the following:

• Aside from the characters changing almost completely (two characters use names from the original, but really aren't the same at all), this adaptation adds in Psychic Powers and changes the cycle to last 1,000 years instead of 2,049 years.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Jan 30th 2022 at 11:20:10 AM

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

I'll concede on the Foundation example, but I have no idea what you're getting at with Nightfall. This is the entire example you're talking about: "Gnomen is again talking to people about the destruction of civilization that last happened almost 1,000 years ago." No other information is given. There is another example on a different page about the same work that claims it is actually exactly 1,000 years, but outside information on the work isn't relevant to whether the example as written is misuse.

Edited by Orbiting on Jan 30th 2022 at 11:36:29 AM