Thread current status:
- We have agreed by crowner to place a moratorium on new Works by Subject indexes until we can thoroughly go through the existing ones.
- We have created the Works About "X" Indexes sandbox to track progress.
- Works by Subject has been added to the TRS Queue for a batch thread.
Original post below.
This was prompted by the Trope Launch Pad discussion of Ursine FictionRecently we've had a proliferation of indexes like Ghost Fiction and Demon Works, and folks are questioning whether they're actually needed. The draft at issue for whatever reason attracted a Troper Critical Mass saying it wasn't needed, and the discussion turned to "well, what about these other indexes"?
Personally, I recall a rule against Search Generated Indexes, and I don't think "work is about bears" or "work is about ghosts" properly counts as a genre.
Edited by StarSword on Jan 18th 2024 at 12:46:01 PM
Forgive me. The reason I was so into creating so many indexes at the time was to create pages on which certain works can be organized so people can find specific things they may be looking for.
For Samurai Stories, which I noticed was discussed here, here's what I had to say. Not every work with samurai in it is necessarily a Jidekai, hence why I felt the need to make that trope. And while they may be close with ninja, does that make the two inseparable?
![]()
But our pages for Our Monsters Are Different exist for fictional, mythical, supernatural creatures because the fictionality/otherworldliness of them makes them tropeworthy. "Our X Are Different" could exist for literally any Noun to discuss "how that X shows up across different works". That's basically what the vast majority of our weapons tropes and "Everythings Better With X" tropes are and we have been culling those for years because of their lack of tropeworthiness. The discussion of the myriad of ways a real world X shows up in a work isn't in of itself tropeworthy as there's no real pattern to document and often ends up being a chairsy collection of examples. In theory, we have all of the different Our Monsters Are Different pages (and other fictional creature pages) because the monsters are all riffing off of a basic set of qualities that are inherently meaningful because their fictionality/otherworldiness means those qualities were created with a specific intention in mind, which makes deviations from them meaningful, too.
And I don't think that a disambiguation is needed. Disambigs are done to help with searches and retain inbounds, but as an index for internal sorting, no one is really looking for this page, which is pretty clear from it's 6 wicks and only 300 inbounds. Also, all except 1 of those tropes are on These Tropes Are Fishy and the one that isn't (Sea Monster), Megalodon is already a subtrope of. That's why I suggested a cut. If people are really pressed to keep it in some fashion despite that, we could redirect to These Tropes Are Fishy, but I personally don't think it's necessary.
![]()
![]()
![]()
And the above applies to your comments Twiddler. Basically, I agree with what War Jay said. "Killer Shark" stories is functionally equivalent to stories that include Threatening Shark. This is why I say "if a genre page or trope page can reasonably be made", because some of these indices are narrow-enough in their focus to be covered by a single trope (like Time Travel Tales and Time Travel, which I've brought up before).
And Shark Stories is not even limited to just works that focus on an antagonistic shark: "To qualify, the shark in question must be a main character, main villain, or otherwise central to the plot." That's it.
For Samurai Stories, not every samurai story falls under Jidaigeki, but every work under Samurai Stories will / should be captured by Samurai and as I say here
, Western Samurai, Samurai Cowboy, Everything's Better with Samurai, and Bushido Index.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 17th 2023 at 9:43:37 AM
I'm not arguing for keeping Shark Stories, I'm arguing that there's a tropeable concept in there that would be better served by having its own genre page.
As for redundancy between such a genre page and Threatening Shark, most of the examples on Threatening Shark are not examples of the genre.
On-page examples of Threatening Shark (managed to get through Advertising through Live-Action TV):
On-page examples
Advertising: 4 examples, all either ZCEs or not examples of the genre.
Anime & Manga: 34 bullet points across 26 works, no examples of the genre.
Arts: 3 examples. Maybe 2 of them could count:
- John Singleton Copley’s ''Watson and the Shark''
depicts a real shark attack in which a cabin boy lost his leg. Copley, however, had never seen a live shark, leading to some slightly wonky anatomy in the eyes of a modern viewer.
- Winslow Homer’s ''The Gulf Stream''
shows a man adrift in a small boat with a broken mast surrounded by sharks, with possible blood in the water. And an ominous waterspout on the horizon.
Asian Animation: 1 example, not the genre.
Card Games: 3 bullet points across 2 works, no examples of the genre.
Comic Books: 29 bullet points across 23 works. This one might count:
- One of the "possible" stories included in Hack/Slash: Trailers feature a slasher shark named Blackfin, who was big enough to devour the great white mistaken for him in one bite.
Comic Strips: 2 examples, neither is the genre.
Fairy Tales: 1 example, not the genre.
Fan Works: 15 bullet points across 13 works, no examples of the genre.
Films — Animation: 15 examples, no examples of the genre.
Films — Live-Action: 69 works. 40, maybe 42 examples of the genre:
- The TV Movie 12 Days of Terror is based on real events that happened in the summer of 1916 where seemingly the same shark attacked five swimmers in a series of shark attacks along the New Jersey coast and up a freshwater creek.
- 2-Headed Shark Attack: Double trouble!
- 5-Headed Shark Attack: Because two wasn't bad enough!
- 47 Meters Down: Two sisters are trapped in a shark cage at the bottom of the ocean. With great white sharks circling nearby, they must fight to survive.
- Atomic Shark gives us one that boils the water, sets things on fire, and/or blows things up by its mere proximity.
- Bait 3D: A tsunami engulfs an Australian beach town, and a handful of survivors are trapped in an underground convenience store. Then they discover that a great white shark is there with them, which starts picking them off one by one.
- Dam Sharks: A ferocious coastal storm sweeps several dozen bull sharks far upstream into a wildlife park, where for some reason they start emulating beavers by both hunting as a pack and building dams made up of equal parts floating logs and bodyparts from their kills as a combination of water trap and food locker. The fact that this kind of behavior has no precedent in reality is actually lampshaded, but the film never explains it.
- Dark Tide 2012: Features great white sharks (not sure)
- Deep Blue Sea: The only thing worse than sharks? Super-intelligent sharks. The scientists were extracting some kind of fluid from the sharks' brains for their research. They genetically modified them to grow larger brains so they could extract more fluid. Of course, larger brains also meant smarter sharks. Most notable is how the character played by none other than Samuel L. Jackson is eaten by one of these sharks
while indoors. Notably, the sharks were explicitly mentioned to be mutated makos and not great whites.
- Deep Blue Sea 2: Seems to follow the trend set by its predecessor, featuring mutated bull sharks instead of makos.
- The second sequel, Deep Blue Sea 3, plays this straight with the genetically-engineered offspring of the previous film's shark. Interestingly, the film portrays this trio as unnaturally aggressive, while the ordinary sharks living in the area are accurately portrayed as animals with little interest in human divers. Then there is "Sally", a large female Great White the protagonist has spent years studying — while she makes a threatening dominance display at the beginning of the film, Sally later ends up saving Emma from an attacker.
- Devil Fish is a bizarre aversion: The film seems to be aiming for this trope (it was originally titled Shark — Rosso nell'oceano and elsewhere Monster Shark) but fails seemingly due to the filmmakers' ignorance about what a shark is. (not sure)
- Ghost Shark: The ghost of a great white shark. That can appear in any body of water, no matter the size.
- Great White: After the seaplane is sunk, the five passengers are stranded in a life raft being circled by a giant great white shark.
- Jaws is the Trope Codifier, to the point that it has inspired hundreds of attempts to capitalize off its critical acclaim and blockbuster status. Impressionable audiences feared it enough to significantly lower beach attendance that summer. Unfortunately, the film is often incorrectly blamed for inducing a Real Life, war of extermination against all sharks, but in truth, shark populations were drastically declining
for completely different reasons well before this movie was made. Though efforts have been done to reduce the stigma that is levied against sharks, the initial war upon a keystone species made the original writer, Peter Benchley, denounce the film as an old shame. He often stated in later years that he could never again write a book like Jaws, and he devoted much of his post-Jaws career to ocean conservation.
- Needless to say, the sequels to Jaws all play this trope straight to ridiculous effect.
- Jersey Shore Shark Attack: a parody of the TV series Jersey Shore... with sharks added. It has nothing to do with the actual Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 that inspired Jaws.
- Mako (2021): The main obstacle that the film crew faces in the movie is the Mako shark that's swimming in the vicinity of the Salem Express shipwreck. By the end of the movie, it's taken the lives of five of them.
- Mako The Jaws Of Death: A telepath uses sharks to kill anyone who threatens the sharks themselves.
- Malibu Shark Attack: Combined Disaster Movie (tsunami) with shark film. Also a case of Somewhere An Ichthyologist Is Crying, as real goblin sharks are sluggish, flabby-muscled wimps by shark standards.
- The Meg: How do you top a Great White? With an even bigger prehistoric shark awakened from the bottom of the ocean! One poster
◊ homaging Jaws had the shark coming up under the swimmer getting chased by an even bigger shark behind it.
- Open Water: The first film, anyway. Double subversion, since nothing bad happens the first time a shark appears. The problem is later when it, presumably, gets curious and comes back... with friends. From then on, it just gets worse. Also notable is the fact that not only are the sharks all real (even the ones interacting with the actors) but are all species one would have a reasonably good chance of encountering in Real Life, compared to, say, the more-famous-but-rarer great white.
- The third film has the imperiled protagonists on a shark-watching trip. Their boat capsizes, and thanks to to all the chum that their tour guides threw in the water to attract the sharks, they now have to contend with a myriad of them hovering around.
- The TV-movie adaptation of Peter Benchley's Creature changed the title creature from a man-turned-Nazi weapon with metal teeth and claws into an American military-made bipedal great white shark.
- The Reef: This Aussie film features four tourists forced to swim to an island ten miles away when their boat capsizes. Through a known shark zone. And yes, they do encounter great white sharks.
- Sand Sharks. A bunch of armored demonic-looking sharks that breathe air and swim through sand terrorizes a cliffside beach.
- Syfy, née the Sci-Fi Channel (you could almost say that this is a regular monster in films made by The Asylum):
- There have been times when this network has shown several movies of sharks attacking people back to back. Megalodons (giant prehistoric sharks) are quite often involved, e.g.. Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.
- Incidentally, if the title has Shark vs. anything, it's probably by Asylum — if they make anything that isn't a Mockbuster or a bad Christian flick, it's a giant shark fighting something else equally nasty.
- Mega Shark has returned to face off against another giant prehistoric predator: Crocosaurus.
- Blake Lively finds herself menaced by a shark in The Shallows. It's later indicated that the aggressive great white in question has a bad history with humans, given the spear fragment lodged in its mouth.
- Shark Attack: A freak record of shark attacks are plaguing a South African fishing town. It does vary it a bit, showing other species such as Tiger Sharks and Makos besides the familiar Great White.
- Shark Attack 3: Megalodon: Which, of course, features a Megalodon.
- Sharknado: It's a tornado... carrying tons of sharks.
- Sharknado 2: The Second One: It's a blizzard tornado... carrying tons of sharks.
- Shark Night 3D: Obviously centers on this trope. A group of college students spends a weekend at a lake which has inexplicably become home to various man-eating species of sharks. The kicker? The sharks were supplied by a couple of rednecks who want to cash in on the Discovery Channel's Shark Week craze...by feeding college students to the sharks, and recording video footage of the attacks to post online, sell to various channels, etc.
- Sharktopus: Combines this with Tentacled Terror.
- Shark Week: This Asylum-produced film combines Jaws with Saw.
- Spring Break Shark Attack: This Made-for-TV low-budget-gore-fest. Exactly What It Says on the Tin: attractive coeds in bathing suits and sharks.
- Super Shark features a giant walking, flying shark. And a Walking Tank.
- Swamp Shark: A mutant shark with the ability to breathe fresh water and covered in crocodile-like scales terrorizes a swamp.
- Toxic Shark: A tropical island resort set up as a singles retreat is attacked by a mutated shark that has become a Poisonous Person after coming into contact with some toxic waste (well, it's presumed, no explanation for its mutations are ever given in the movie). The titular Toxic Shark is covered in a poisonous slime, supposedly arsenic based, which will eventually drive anyone grazed by its skin or bitten by it and surviving into a murderous lunatic whose bites spread the same madness, so you get a Threatening Shark and a Technically Living Zombie outbreak at the same time. It's also grown a "horn" from which it can spray the slime, causing it to burn like acid.
Gamebooks: 5 examples, no examples of the genre.
Literature: 44 bullet points across 37 works. 5, maybe 6 examples of the genre.
- "He" is a short story by Alan Dean Foster about an oceanographer who ends up encountering a Megalodon that has survived for millions of years living in an atoll in American Samoa. (not sure)
- Jaws, the original book by Peter Benchley. Benchley also wrote White Shark (later re-titled Peter Benchley's Creature), about a genetically engineered Half-Human Hybrid Nazi shark. A keen environmentalist, he later regretted his contribution to the Threatening Shark trope and wrote several non-fiction books about sharks and their important place in the ecosystem.
- Killer Sharks The Real Story is a 1977 book by 'Captain' Brad Matthews with an unforgettable cover of a screaming bathing beauty being swept into the bloody toothed maw of a shark. Supposedly written by a survivor of the USS Indianapolis whose experience caused him to dedicate his life to the study of sharks, it's actually Based on a Great Big Lie by novelist Nelson DeMille to cash in on Jaws.
- Rip Tide 1984, a novel by Donald Cheatham, involves a 26-foot tiger shark stalking Florida shores. Halfway through the focus of the novel switches to an incoming hurricane which dramatically increases the death quotient, with the shark only a bit player.
- In Shark Island by Chris Jameson, a team of scientists mucks about with acoustic signals to control seal patterns, which also happens to make the great white sharks in the area become highly aggressive killing machines.
- Snow Shark is about a seemingly ravenous man-made shark designed by the military to attack its victims in snowy terrains. It ends up accidentally being released into public territory that just so happens to be only a few miles away from a heavily populated snow lodge.
Live-Action TV: 38 examples, no examples of the genre.
Out of ~263 examples that I looked at, there's somewhere between 45 and 51 (at a generous count) examples of the genre (about 18%), the vast majority being in live-action film. (And judging from a skim of the rest of the on-page examples, that percentage would be further lowered by looking at more media categories.) Within live-action film, there's 40, at most 42 examples out of about 69 (about 60%). For a subtrope, that would be far more than enough for the new trope to stand on its own while still leaving the parent trope thriving.
In contrast, a case where I do think overlap between the trope and the genre based on the trope is probably close to a circle is Trapped in Another World vs. portal fantasy/isekai.
Twiddler, you're missing our point. We know that not every example under Threatening Shark is a Killer Shark story. We just don't believe that Killer Shark story is unique enough to separate since there is no Killer Shark story that couldn't just be listed under Threatening Shark.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI mean, I guess? IDK. It just doesn't feel like it even has much substance as a genre, other than "shark attacks people". Like, I'm just not seeing the real difference that would warrant a subtrope.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI guess it'd be the difference between Slasher Movie and the slasher villains themselves?
Maybe, Slasher Movie just seems to have more, though; specific recurring elements like Out with a Bang, Final Girl, and The Black Dude Dies First. Like, there are so many specific elements that you can pin point for a Slasher film. The same doesn't seem to be true for Killer Shark stories. And I could be wrong, so correct me if I am.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallCome to think of it, I think a number of them would probably share some tropes with slasher films. Checking the related page for Final Girl, here's some killer shark movies that list or mention that trope: Shark Night, Shark Week, Super Shark, Deep Blue Sea, Deep Blue Sea 3
ETA: also Blood Is Squicker in Water
Edited by Twiddler on May 20th 2023 at 12:05:40 PM
"Horror stories about sharks" is probably too narrow, but it occurs to me that "Horror stories about a dangerous animal antagonist" might be justifiable, if there are enough tropes in common between Jaws, Nope, Cocaine Bear, and Cujo (possibly even if they just amount to Animal Slasher).
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NO
That idea is currently covered by Primal Fear which has a subsection on ferocious animals and links Threatening Shark already.
![]()
![]()
To WarJay's point, there isn't really a set of standard tropes for Killer Shark stories outside of "Threatening Shark as the antagonist." As you pointed out, some take after Slasher Movie, others are written like Kaiju films. At best, you could do as Noaqiyeum
is suggesting and try to lump it together with other "antagonistic animal" works, but again, see the above point.
The old time block Creature Features
is probably the closest thing but that's more of a marketing term than a singular genre with consistent tropes given that the "Creature Features" program showcased works as disparate as The Phantom of the Opera, The Thing from Another World, Dracula (1931), and King Kong
Edited by amathieu13 on May 20th 2023 at 4:57:49 AM
Primal Fear honestly is as much of a mess as Adult Fear was: it's pretty much just a list of things that scare people. I think an Animal Slasher or Animal Horror genre page is workable.
I just created Sandbox.Works About X Indexes to catalogue this thread and consensuses reached.
Trust me, I'm an engineer!
Primal Fear is indeed a mess. As is Attack of the Killer Whatever, which also covers this idea already, looking at that page some more (to the point that I'm not so sure what the difference is between these two tropes in practice, given how broad they both are. "Anything humans seem to fear on an instinctual level" and "Any seemingly mundane thing that has been made into a horror film" certainly sounds different but looking over the def and example lists...).
If Animal Horror is pursued, I do think you should address either/both of these tropes' existence first to avoid redundancy, but I won't fight against its creation.
I'll also say that I'm bringing Scary Animal Title into TRS for being an index masquerading as a trope and a redundant index at that. Perhaps that thread can be used to advocate for converting it into the Animal Horror genre page, since that seems to be what SAT is vaguely trying to go for anyways.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 20th 2023 at 12:35:48 PM
Primal Fear is another thing that would work better as an index or def-only supertrope. But, this is a little off track.
Edited by WarJay77 on May 20th 2023 at 12:26:49 PM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallThe first time I ever saw Primal Fear on this site, it was misused as "this species has an instinctual fear of this fictional thing". There could be a trope in there.
The idea of Primal Fear is to distinguish fears which the human mind seems to have been sensitive to even before it was self-aware, which seems like a valid concept for a trope or at least Useful Notes. But there are a lot of sections that probably don't count ("existential dread", "humiliation", "psychopaths", "spiders") and/or are so broad as to be useless ("monsters and evil beings", "dangerous objects and substances") and we'd probably want to refer to an actual psychology source as well as TRS.
Edit to add - I do agree with amathieu, I don't think every horror movie with an animal villain necessarily shares a genre. I wouldn't say Phase IV or Shin Godzilla has much in common with the others I mentioned, for example, at least not without examining them in more depth.
Edited by Noaqiyeum on May 21st 2023 at 8:28:49 PM
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NORegarding Samurai Stories, there is a recognized genre
of films about samurai, a sub-category of Jidaigeki. But it's just called "samurai cinema" or "samurai films" in English.
In that case, the best solution would be to either discuss the subgenre on Jidaigeki (the path of least resistance) or create a more fleshed out version of a "Samurai Film"/chanbara genre page—similar in structure and depth to what we have for Martial Arts Movie.
Our current page for Samurai Stories is named too broadly, contains non-film entries, and doesn't seem to be limited to historical pieces, so it isn't the equivalent to "Samurai Film". For that, I still stand by either cutting or merging the page into either Jidaigeki or Samurai.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 21st 2023 at 6:41:23 AM
All of these changes require TRS, but considering that we're dealing with indices, I don't think a wick check is needed, since off-page wicks are basically meaningless. What matters more is how the index is defined and what's included in the index, rather than how the page is being linked to.
I suppose a check of the on page works would be fine, but I'm not sure if that's needed. We can double check with the TRS meta thread.
What we're doing now is making sure there's some kind of gameplan for if/when these indices go through that process so we don't waste time rehashing the same debate again and again in TRS.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 21st 2023 at 10:30:45 AM
I don't think we need a wick check for Samurai Stories.
In fact, if I can get a good description of the problems, I can draft an OP and queue it up for TRS myself.
EDIT: Drafted one up in the TRS Queue anyway. Is my OP OK?
Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 21st 2023 at 11:58:48 AM
Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall
Looks good to me. In fact I think we can probably use that reasoning as our TRS template for indexes deemed cuttable.
ETA: Also, amathieu, good thinking with that alteration to the sandbox.
Edited by StarSword on May 21st 2023 at 1:50:17 PM
Trust me, I'm an engineer!Ok, so indexes that I think are safe/valid, those excluded need more examination or are unnecessary:
- School Stories: This is a known and popular genre, not just a setting.
- Most of the "theme" section tropes since many of them are actual genres, except: Christian Fiction, Immortality Works, Video Game Stories (?), and Time Travel Tales.
- LGBT Representation in Media.
- Physical Disability in Media: This has context, so it's not completely an index; the sub-indices aren't necessary except for Autism in Media.
- Safe indexes from the "Other stock characters" section in the "Characters and creatures" folder: Spy Fiction, Superhero Stories, Mecha Show, Detective Drama, and Criminal Procedural and its sub-indices. These are obvious ones.
- Confused about Sports Stories and Gaming and Sports Anime & Manga. Yes, sports stories are popular in animanga, and the game/sport is treated very seriously, but why does it warrant its separate index? In the end, they all have the same tropes, Western or Eastern, revolving around sports, just with some different themes.
- Ambivalent on Queer Media. I think it can be salvaged by turning it into a trope that requires context on how the work deals with the LGBT subject.
thanks. i honestly meant to make that sandbox myself weeks ago but it slipped my mind completely. so thank you for that.
![]()
I would rather we take things one index at a time so we can discuss each one collectively, particularly b/c for those that may be genres (like School Stories, though tbh I'm not sure I agree with that assesment), the page would need to be edited so it's written like a genre page: a full description, list of associated tropes, etc. as opposed to how they currently exist.
Edited by amathieu13 on May 21st 2023 at 3:45:29 PM
Crown Description:
There have been concerns that certain Works By Subject indexes like Dinosaur Media and Bovine Fiction are suffering from loose criteria, redundancy issues with related tropes, contribute to index bloat, and may not be needed in the first place.

Tropers/amathieu13, Well, it's not an ideal concept, but it's like all the Our Monsters Are Different tropes.
A cut or a disabmig with Threatening Shark, Megalodon, Shark Man, and Sea Monster, might be the better solutions.
Uncanny Valley Hot Babes in Your Area Are Looking To Know YOU! Click Here to Sign Up for FREE! | Not quite back tbh. Don't expect much.