"Stock Animal" tropes

So, joining the ranks of other TLP trends people are becoming split on, Stock Animal tropes, such as the recently Cartoon Whale and the in-TLP drafts for the general concept and Cartoon Monkey have been controversial as of late for boiling down to "work portrays a simplified animal".

Here are the specific issues I myself have noticed:

• A trend of ZCE examples, of the "is this" variety. It's not enough to just say an animal is stock if their appearance isn't elaborated on.
• A lack of noteworthy examples. Stock Food Depictions managed to get through, but it was because the examples placed were played with or used commonly in the works. Meanwhile, before a very recent cleanup attempt, many examples on Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions were just things like "this work has an animal that looks like this".
• An over-eagerness to split off subtropes; see Cartoon Monkey as well as a short-lived discussion on "Legless Butterfly".

I don't think these things are inherently chairsy, but I definitely think people are being too overzealous about the concepts and that we need to address it.

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 7th 2022 at 1:33:52 PM

The debated overlap between Stock Cartoon Penguin vs Penguins Are Ducks, in both TLP and IP, is also relevant.

I've been mostly staying out of these so far; Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions is probably the most tropeworthy, and I suspect there's some unnecessary splitting going on, but I don't otherwise have an opinion yet.

I recently added the following example to Cartoon Whale:

• The mascot of the clothing brand Vineyard Vines is a pink cartoon whale, with a square head and giant smile.

Now, I brought this up in the Is this an example thread, asking if this was enough context, and at least one troper gave me the go-ahead to add it.

I felt weird about doing so, though, as this still isn't really much context for an example, but I literally couldn't think of how much more context I could add. I wonder if this isn't a specific example problem, but a trope problem—as in, the concept inherently attract Zero-Context Examples. War Jay 77's OP touches on that a bit here too:

I bolded the last part because my example most likely fits that problem.

Don't really know what else to say, just some food for thought.

EDIT: Another observation—I feel like we're having this conversation a lot lately. It seems there's been several patterns of problematic TLP trends that end with various items and indexes of questionable tropeworthiness being mass-created at once. I wonder why this is happening so much lately—are there more people now in TLP?

EDIT 2: For added context, here's the Vineyard Vines whale◊. Not sure how much context I could glean from just that.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 8th 2022 at 1:51:10 PM

Even if the examples do have context, the problem is that they just give repetitive descriptions of what the cartoon animal looks like, which often reads like someone is just rattling off some check list items from the trope's description.

IDK if it has to do with the amount of people in the TLP. I think if anything it's because it's a trend that's easy to create drafts about and mine examples for, just like those indexes; it's efficiency and simplicity put before quality and originality.

Perhaps you're right. I'm not as active in the TLP as you are so I could be dead wrong anyway.

with most of these trends it tends to be the same 2-4 users making these drafts. It's a cascading and ease of making effect stacking, IMO. You make one, see how easy it is to "get enough examples" to pass the minimum requirements, so you make another and since the idea these drafts rest on are fairly broad, there's the potential for many, many splits that can be made. Whether they should be made is a different story entirely. On that note...

To me, Adept's comment on the Cartoon Monkey draft rings true:

Animation is almost always going to have some kind of standardized depiction of real world objects as animation is rarely trying to accurately render a real life object. They're trying to capture its form simply and in a way that is easily recognizable. What I mean to say is in theory, we could have these tropes for every object that an animator has ever drawn so long as there's enough examples and someone willing to make the draft (along these same lines there was a similar draft for cartoon tv sets) and I don't really find that all that useful.

I'm of the mind that these should all go the way of Supernatural Is Purple and Supernatural Is Green, once a similar trend was found: merge them all under one trope for all stereotypical/stock depictions of real world objects. I feel like such a trope could be a Necessary Weasel trope thats on-page examples only and that's it.

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 8th 2022 at 10:28:44 AM

I sort of like the current splits because I like how some of the subtropes try to dissect why an animal species gets drawn a certain way, buuuuut I partially agree that some pages need to be merged if they can't offer anymore substance beyond "looks like a mix of X and Y".

It'd be nice if there were historical reasons, like if a particular species became such a public sensation that it started an art trend depicting ALL of its relatives a certain way. Or just any other artistic reason beyond stylization.

Out of all of them, Cartoon Whale is a little odd. I did hat it and contribute an example to it a long while back, but was surprised the description never gotten more fleshed out before launch or have a title change, and yet there it is as a new trope. But that's a separate discussion for another day (and probably requires a little research to actually pinpoint where the square head whale thing started).

That can probably be discussed in the Analysis/ subpage instead of creating a whole new trope about it. Kind of like what we have on Analysis.Good Animals Evil Animals.

Before I consider it on TLP, I thought I might ask if a trope about penguins wearing bowties/tuxedos is tropeworthy (I'd think it would be an Appearance Trope). ArmourLeFou was the only troper who gave me feedback, and she said it sounded like a good idea.

Edited by MylesHenryVigilSr on Aug 8th 2022 at 8:51:36 AM

this isn't really where you'd get that question answered/that's off topic. Penguins in tuxes isn't how every penguin is depicted. That's just a common gag since penguins kind of look like they're wearing tuxes.

Trope Idea Sounding Board is where you'd get it answered. Or make the draft and see how the TLP responds

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 8th 2022 at 10:55:37 AM

Sorry. I had already asked on Trope Idea Sounding Board and got no responses. I didn't want to ask again, as it seemed like a broken record.

@I Never Well, Stock Beehive doesn't offer any substance beyond "looks like a mix of X and Y", either.

I don't understand why Cartoon Monkey is getting bombed. Fuzzball Spider didn't get any bombs, despite boiling down to "cartoon spiders aren't drawn accurately". Maybe War Jay 77 was right that people are starting to get wary about stock cartoon animal tropes.

I mean, I also generally found Fuzzball Spider easier to provide context for, instead of having to try and describe all the attributes an animal has that make it stock, because that trope is literally just "fuzz and legs".

"Cartoon Monkey", meanwhile, has a whole list of traits these monkeys can have, and it ironically is making things harder to provide context for. In my experience the more qualities someone needs to cover, the less likely it is that the example will catch them all.

But also yes, people are getting sick of these drafts, especially as the more we try and split the concepts off the less interesting it all gets.

^^ I wasn't aware of those tropes when I wrote my post.

Stock Beehive I don't take issue with because it gives info on why the depiction arose beyond just hybridizing species. 19th century bee hives look similar to the cartoon version, and there's also the plot convenience of putting the hive entrance in a place where a character can get their head stuck in.

Fuzzball Spider I'm... not sure what to do about this one? It'd argue that spiders are given a simple design on purpose to make themselves look cuter/less scary to a child audience (they're round and friend-shaped), but that's too speculative for me to say seriously. Also I'm tempted to cut one or two examples because they seem to be fantasy creatures as opposed to actual spiders, like the Mune: Guardian of the Moon example. Seems a bit reaching.

I guess I can kiss my idea goodbye for a Fuzzball Bat trope, which would’ve been like a bat being portrayed as a head with wings and ears (i.e. Fangs from The Loud House), maybe even to include bats having pterodactyl-like wings with fingers on top. I actually had this idea for over a year now, long before the Stock Animal tropes took off.

I mean, we're having this discussion to figure out what to do with these concepts, not to immediately declare a ban.

What's so speculative about it in a way that makes it more speculative than other trope justifications?

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 9th 2022 at 2:16:57 PM

^ fair point, but for me, it just simply boils down to "I can't for the life of me remember where I got it from".

Edited by INever on Aug 9th 2022 at 11:36:42 AM

I mean, most of my tropes don't come from pre-established knowledge, it's just me connecting the dots and saying "if this is how it's used, it's probably because of this reason".

Before Stock Animal Depictions was drafted, it was suggested on the Trope Sounding Board thread that it would be best to make the supertrope and then see what examples could be split off of it but that didn't happen. Like I said before, the over splitting doesn't make much sense to me if the supertrope hasn't been launched yet (and it still has some issues regarding example criteria)

@Amour Le Fou Some issues can't be fully seen in isolation. We've just hit the critical mass given that more of these drafts keep coming. Again, as written on Administrivia.The Same But More Specific "we don't need a new page for every last variation possible" and given the trend, it's becoming more obvious we're heading down the road of "every variation of animal/object is not animated 100% accurate to real life".

So in light of that, it's time to see how to cover the general idea of "there are common depictions of real world objects artists use either for stylistic purposes or as animation shorthand" without flooding the site with near identical versions of the same basic concept

Stock Dinosaurs is a weird trope. It doubles as an index of Useful Notes, and it's hard to give examples any context besides being exhaustive lists.

You mentioned that a lot of the examples on "Stock Cartoon Animal Depictions" weren't noteworthy, but the same could be said for a lot of the General examples on Typical Cartoon Animal Colors. None of the examples in the Video Games section or Western Animation section seem noteworthy.

Then maybe that trope is problematic and needs to be sent to TRS. In any case, another page having bad examples is not a precedent to allow bad examples elsewhere.

Yeah, you say that like I'd defend Typical Cartoon Animal Colors. I always found that "trope" really weird and I'm genuinely not surprised it has problems.