To-do list:
- Move the wicks to one of the tropes on the Loads And Loads Of Characters disambiguation if they fit, and delete them if they don't. For reference purposes, here's the disambiguation page's trope list:
- Cast Calculus: Choosing the right cast size and splitting traits between them.
- Cast Herd: Large cast split into groups.
- Cast of Snowflakes: All characters are visually distinctive, even minor ones.
- A Day in the Limelight: An episode focused on a secondary character.
- Ensemble Cast: The story spends a roughly equal amount of time on all or most of the characters rather than having a single protagonist.
- Four Lines, All Waiting: A large cast means that there are multiple simultaneous plots in a single episode/work.
- Girl of the Week: A new Love Interest shows up every week, and is usually gone by the end.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: A Crossover between three or more continuities you'd never think would ever meet. Ever.
- Monster of the Week: Facing an unrelated monstrous threat once per weekly episode.
- Rotating Protagonist: Each character (supporting or minor) has equal or significant screentime as with the main characters.
- Victim of the Week: Someone gets killed or otherwise messed with every episode.
A Trope Talk
discussion several months back, however, raised concerns that the usage of the trope didn't match the description, and that the trope was actually being used as "any large cast of characters". Furthermore, as Rust Beard pointed out in the thread, everyone seemed to have their own version of what they believed the trope was.
I decided to start a collaborative wick check, which was done by me, War Jay 77, Rust Beard, and Orbiting, to see what kinds of use the trope got. The results were, to put it mildly, not very good. Here's the quick results:
- 0/84 wicks, or 0%, were used correctly
- 64/84 wicks, or 76.19%, were just "any large cast of characters"
- 3/84 wicks, or 3.57%, were other kinds of misuse
- 16/84 wicks, or 19.05%, were ZCEs, and
- 1/84 wicks, or 1.19%, were unsorted
Yes, that is correct. There were 0 correct uses of this trope in the wick check. Evidently this trope is suffering much worse than was initially thought.
As for possible solutions, Crossover-Enthusiast pointed out in the Wick Check Project thread that while "work has large cast of characters" could be People Sit on Chairs, the idea of, in their words, "work has large cast, so the perspective switches frequently" might be worth sending to the Trope Idea Salvage Yard. I am personally in favor of doing that, and disambiguating Loads And Loads Of Characters into other tropes about large casts of characters. What does everyone else think?
Edited by GastonRabbit on May 16th 2022 at 5:43:03 AM
(she/her)
I don't understand what the redefinition means either as there wasn't clearly written out plan for it. We might have to throw the crowner and regroup because I don't know what we are doing.
Macron's notes
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
My original plan was that the redefinition would just basically boil down to "story has a lot of characters, and it affects the world building and narrative as a result". But I'm no longer sure if that idea actually holds water anymore.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I'm fine with doing that if we've hit an impasse.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 22nd 2022 at 11:59:22 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
I discussed the impasse with Macron and both of us decided that disambiguating was the only thing worth redoing the vote for, since redefining led to an impasse and YMMV was downvoted (neither of us wanted to put YMMV back on the table).
So, I hooked a crowner to see what happens, and unstarred the thread for good measure.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 22nd 2022 at 12:25:43 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Yeah, it's an older draft with lots of wicks. I can imagine people coming in and voting to save it on principle, rather than reading the thread fully to see what the issues were
Looking at the proposed disambig page, I don't think we should include the X of the week tropes. I thought the consensus was that one off characters shouldn't count towards a large cast. As for Ensemble Cast, maybe we should make it clear that just because a work has a large cast doesn't mean it's an Ensemble Cast.
- Ensemble Cast: A work with multiple protagonists, which may lead to a large cast.
It's either real or it's a dream
This only seems to work with either a Fighting Game with a large roster, or Long-Runners with an extensive Expanded Universe. Since both ideas apply to things tropers tend to like, I think that's where the idea came from. But you can see how limited it is, so I'm onboard for a disambiguation.
I do think the idea is tropeworthy because writers tend to limit the number of characters to keep the audience from being confused. So to have a large cast is a deliberate decision by the writers to flesh out the world. The issue is coming up with a standard for what is large. This is a trope that works in theory, but doesn't work in practice.
It works with a lot of RPGs too. Even Baldur's Gate III which is still in EA and only has the first act released, has more than 100 unique characters, all of whom have some sort of backstory and varying levels of usefulness to the plot, whether that's the main plot or a subplot.
Or Dragon Age, which has 45 character pages on this site, 27 of which are pages with multiple characters on them. Dragon Age: Inquisition – Non-Playable Characters has 22 folders.
Edited by Hello83433 on Feb 22nd 2022 at 11:54:19 AM
CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors
Nintendo Fanatic Extraordinaire
...and that's not mentioning NPCs in MMORPGs yet.
Even Nintendo games can have numerous NPCs. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has well over 200 NPCs, including the 136 shrine monks.
Edited by Nen_desharu on Feb 22nd 2022 at 12:07:38 PM
Kirby is awesome.
HoMM Fan
+
My only issue with a lot of these examples is that a massive majority of the characters in question are one-note, flat characters who exist to hand out a couple of quests or fill out a scene.
World of Warcraft has thousands of NPCs, but how many of them are just "person who gives you a handful of quests" or "person who exists as living scenery to make a town seem more alive"?
While they make technically have a high number of characters, most of them are living props or one-offs rather than characters with even a small amount of development or personality.
"Grandmaster Combat, son!"
Blapper of Water
Idgi. Are we voting again because certain people didn't like the outcome or because the first crowner should not have had the other options in the first place? "Redefine to fit misuse" makes sense, but why was it on the first crowner if we're just voting again anyway?
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
See, the "living prop" idea is sort of one of the things I've always considered a consequence of using this trope. The more characters you have, the less development you can give each of them, to the point where the more minor characters have none at all.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
HoMM Fan
Because while a majority liked the idea of redefining to fit misuses (because this is an old trope that a lot of people enjoy), when it came down to actually doing the redefinition, it fizzled out because it was hard to really set a definition without it becoming chairs or being too murky to be a good definition.
"Grandmaster Combat, son!"
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Yeah; my post was made really early in the discussion. Since then, a lot of holes got poked in my idea, to the point where even I voted for "disambig" in the end. Nobody who actually participated in this thread thinks that the redefinition will work.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
I guess what I'm thinking is that there is something here. I think it's a notable difference when games put effort into all of their characters, rather than just label unimportant NPCs as "Adventurer" or "Grunt #6732" or not even naming them at all.
CSP Cleanup Thread | All that I ask for ... is diamonds and dance floors
I think many people in the thread agree that there is something here, but as the previous pages showed, there currently isn't a good non-chairs option in determining what that is specifically and set clear criteria for it to be a viable trope at this point in time.
That's why the thread shifted to disambig and yard the idea. If someone can come up with a better idea sometime down the line, they're free to take it up
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Right. I still think that there's something to the pattern I outlined... but I also think that troping said pattern is way more headache than it's worth.
Maybe we could leave behind an exampleless page that just explains the purpose and consequences of having a lot of characters in a story. Actually, it could be similar to what we did with Stuffed into the Fridge, though admittedly this term definitely isn't fanspeak.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
My only hesitancy in doing that is that Stuffed into the Fridge currently has over 500 wicks. There may be a long term clean up still ongoing that I'm not sure of (and if so, then I guess this point is moot), but for a page that has "don't add on to other pages" in bold, that's quite a bit.
Old tropes like these will keep getting used, especially if the page when clicked looks like a trope page
Big Catch, Sparkle Edition
Well, tbh, Stuffed into the Fridge is a fanspeak page and thus is allowed to have wicks, as long as they're used to define the term (and not as examples).
My idea doesn't need to use the LALOC name, I just thought it'd be convenient.
Edited by WarJay77 on Feb 22nd 2022 at 2:39:17 PM
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
I could see the utility of keeping the Write Loads And Loads Of Characters page. People could use that for advice on writing large casts. Whatever happens to Loads And Loads Of Characters, could we keep that page?
the Retromancer
Could be a problem. Would probably be kept, but the title would be an Orphaned Reference.
An idea has popped up in my head to somewhat give the current page a saving grace, is to make Sliding Scale Of Cast Size or rewrite Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters, besides disambiguating.
Edited by Amonimus on Feb 23rd 2022 at 3:54:59 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
I like this idea!
Sounds good on paper (he/him)
That was already addressed — it's not that people didn't like the outcome in the usual sense, it's that it was unclear and everyone had trouble figuring out what it meant. Macron and I discussed redoing the crowner in the mod chat as a result, and at least one other mod agreed with the decision.
"Redefine to fit misuse" can make sense for other threads (for example, it worked for the Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things thread because the misuse it was expanded to cover fit a consistent pattern), but in this case, everyone ended up getting stumped as to what it would entail for this trope, so we hit an impasse. We're redoing the vote to solve the impasse problem.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 23rd 2022 at 12:08:28 PM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.
Crown Description:
What should be done with Loads And Loads Of Characters? The previous crowner led to an impasse.
I know it was outvoted, but I'm really not seeing exactly how this can be kept as a trope without turning into Chairs.
Works having a lot of characters is kind of inevitable if it's a Long Runner, or features an Ensemble Cast. I just personally don't see how "has a lot of characters" works as its own independent trope.
"Grandmaster Combat, son!"