Needs Help: Stock Episode Titles

Note: This thread was proposed by ~underCoverSailsman, who gave others permission to make the thread.

Stock Episode Titles and Stock Subtitle are fraternal-twin concepts that have some very similar issues. I've got some grave concerns on whether or not they are "Tropeworthy." On the one hand: these are certainly patterns that keep coming up in media, which is certainly on-mission here. On the other: I did wick checks, and could not identify a single example of either that looked like an actual, crosswickable example-with-context.

The main page for Stock Episode Titles is a list of common episode names, arranged by number of IMDB entries with that episode title. Pretty much all the links on the page are either to IMDB, or See Also/Don't confuse with wicks. Essentially no wicks to episodes that are using these titles.

Wick Check: (mod note: Pasted here for record keeping)

This page also lists Several subtropes that may need attention themselves. Those might best be handled separately, but Title: Requiem has it's own Title Requiem Wick Check done, if it appears to require similar treatment.

Stock Subtitle Wick Check highlights:

• unsorted 8/51, 16%
• outright misuse 4/51, 8%
• ZCE 24/51, 48%
• Entries that are trying to be actual examples, but feel more like ZC Es filled in with natter. 15/51, 30%

I'm having a difficult time imagining an actual entry for either of these that isn't Department of Redundancy Department Shaped Like Itself. Perhaps they should be treated more as indexes?

Edited by Berrenta on Aug 23rd 2022 at 8:24:50 AM

There wasn't even punctuation next to the ping (I edited the post to add a comma after initially putting a space there, because I rewrote that line after making the thread) and it still didn't go through. ~underCoverSailsman

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 15th 2022 at 2:54:25 PM

Sorry for the triple post (or double post if you count the opening post as underCoverSailsman's and not mine), but I agree with the proposal to turn these into indexes.

Edit: I tagged the pages.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 15th 2022 at 3:29:08 AM

How about merging and moving to UN/? These have very interesting information but practically nonfunctional as tropes or indexes.

I don't have a problem with merging them, but I think the merged page would work better as a Definition-Only Page instead of a Useful Note if we're defining the term(s) without allowing examples.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 15th 2022 at 5:55:57 AM

Considering it may be Tropes in Aggregate, the pages rely on showing examples, so if they won't allow examples they'd need to be restructured completely (merging descriptions aside) or allow select few ones for reference.

Though maybe just a list of links to IMDB statistics is fine for an example-less page. Another question if we even want to use another site for reference.

I wasn't meaning we should get rid of the stock titles if we make this definition-only (especially since they're technically already not examples sine Examples Are Not General), since I was thinking the page should still provide that analysis. I just meant we wouldn't have specific examples of specific works that use any of those titles.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Aug 15th 2022 at 6:13:28 AM

What relation to Ambiguity Index or Similarly Named Works since Nightfall and a few others list episodes too?

Edited by Malady on Aug 15th 2022 at 5:08:47 AM

I really dislike this "relying on IMDB" metric; it should be gotten rid off no matter what happens.

Definition only may be the best way to go, honestly.

How would a definition-only version of these work, exactly? Where would you expect to be potholing the concept?

In other descriptions of Stock items, perhaps on pages describing series of works?

Even if it's only wicked in a few places... so?

honestly? i'm going to go out on the wide limb and say cut both. I don't really see the point of these tropes which feel like a Search-Generated Index except the search is happening on imdb instead of here.

like, I see these and I wonder why just tv episode titles and subtitles? why not a stock book title trope? Stock movie title trope? stock song title trope? what's so significant about tv or subtitles that they need be broken out? I don't think there is any significance tbh

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 18th 2022 at 6:46:55 AM

I agree with . I don't really see any usefulness in listing "words/phrases that are commonly used as titles"

Edited by Adept on Aug 18th 2022 at 5:54:51 PM

We have the Genre Title Grab Bag family, but at least it's a title convention through combinations of words rather than "a lot of other things have this title honest".

I'm going to agree with a cut. I've thought on and off about how to salvage this and don't really have good ideas. Perhaps there's the occasional Conversational Troping use but that's not much, and we don't need to host IMDB metrics.

The only feasible reason I think people use the current pages is whenever a person is either trying to point out another work's lack of creativity, or fan fic writer is going through their "I'll use TV Tropes as a way to avoid being unoriginal" phrase and using stock title pages as a reference, though can't confirm how frequent that behavior is and that mindset is already discouraged by many trope pages across the site anyway (Tropes Are Tools).

Not a strong argument, but my vote goes to merge at the moment. There is a purpose, but a very weak one.

Also I'm curious if there's a way to track when certain stock titles/subtitles came into effect, like if certain ones were popularized after big films/books in a specific time period (probably when copyright expired) or came after some new slang/idioms started entering the picture.

That would make the pages more interesting beyond "this title is just common" but it would take heaps of work to do that ;w;

I have a divided opinion. On the one hand, it's definitely true that the page as written has almost no actual trope content - the description briefly discusses in broad terms why a variety of titles are so common, and that over, immediately refocuses on counting things. Any meaning a particular title or its overuse may have for the series in question is undiscussed, and the table structure generally isn't beneficial for that.

However, I do think there is useful information here. It isn't just a Search-Generated Index (as I understand it) - it doesn't list all the episodes that are titled "Homecoming", it ranks titles against each other by usage and links to the IMDB searches as a citation, and I wish more pages were even that diligent. (I don't believe there's a way to just ask the search engine for a word or phrase that returns the most results, either.)

There's also room to talk more about why individual titles are so common, or what they say to the audience. For example, Revelation as a title is my personal peeve, because it promises to contain a dramatic secret of biblical proportions but it's so generic it can be applied to any story and if the writer put so little thought into the title then why should I have any confidence in the plot? It's Vagueness Is Coming and Meaningless Meaningful Words in title form. The reasons and implications why specific idioms are such common titles compared to others is a tropeworthy space, and this page at least does the preliminary work to explore it.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Aug 18th 2022 at 7:00:43 PM

but if we wanted a page that discusses why specific titles are so common, we could just have that page as a trope page (and again, none of this seems tv or subtitle specific to me).

I stopped myself from typing this before because I'm not sure I think this would be necessarily useful either, but let's say you look at the list and realize that a lot of the titles are one word topics like "Love" "Revenge" "Jealousy", then perhaps there's a "Topical Title" trope that can be made. Or you notice some titles feature a prominent trope like The One That Got Away and Battle of the Sexes, then perhaps there's a "Trope in Title" idea there (the reason I question the tropeworthiness of both ideas is because summarizing the contents of a work in some way just is the function of a title and because the path of causation for the second one is murky—did the trope exist and then was used as a title or did the title pattern exist enough for people to recognize it and then use it as a trope name—but I digress).

In your last paragraph you even point to two actual tropes that may be applicable to explain the actual patterns in titles we see.

Point being that these aren't really trope pages, and they aren't even Title Tropes, which are weird themselves, since they don't document any singular pattern.

Edited by amathieu13 on Aug 18th 2022 at 3:18:45 PM

I agree, more or less - I don't think it's television-specific (I imagine that was just the easiest thing to collect the data from), and the page as it is seems only halfway to several tropes, though if it is worth talking about about some title tropes being noticeably much more common than others (maybe, maybe not) then separating the page out would make quantifiable comparisons more difficult.

Topical Title and Trope In The Title are both good ideas. I had been thinking of Idiomatic Title for certain entries, too.

Topical Title feels very close to Meaningful Title, which I think I've run across elsewhere as being soooo omnipresent it's chairs.

What, exactly, would Idiomatic Title mean?

We might need to get into the specifics of how titles are meaningful. Ah, right, we have Event Title, for events. Like Weddings, and Wars, and so on.

The most stocks are: Finale, Reunion, Homecoming, Wedding, Revelation, Party / The Party...

Hmm, if The Party might be like a Player Party, then that's Protagonist Title?

Edited by Malady on Aug 18th 2022 at 1:20:36 AM

Ahh, see what you mean. Also Title: Requiem (Currently listed as a subtrope of Stock Subtitle, though often it is an actual title.)

Idiomatic Title would be things like (going down the first folder) "Second Chances", "Double Trouble", "A Family Affair" - common turns of phrase recycled as a generic title. They suggest a tone or an unspecified event without being particularly tied to the specific story. There'd be some overlap with Trope As A Title for things like "The Morning After", or Literary Allusion Title like "My Brother's Keeper".