Needs Help: Beastess

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

Beastess is an older trope (2010) with several problems. Before even starting with the wick check, it's got a fairly low wick count (79, not terrible, but distinctly low given how old it is), an extremely questionable name source (a fandom character created by a Rule 34 artist, for Rule 34 purposes, who was never used outside of Rule 34), and a description that spends a lot of time meandering around without really establishing what the trope is supposed to be (as far as I can glean, it's basically an Always Female Beast Man crossed with either Amazonian Beauty or Brawn Hilda).

As far as the Beastess Wick Check went, it shows a lot of problems, per the results...

• 3/50 of the examples fit the definition as written, Beast Man + Amazonian Beauty or Brawn Hilda
• 8/50 of the examples (excluding pot holes) just used it as a Distaff Counterpart to Beast Man (which is a gender neutral trope)
• 2/50 of the examples just described a female monster
• 2/50 of the examples were other misuse
• 17/50 of the examples were ZCEs
• 18/50 of the examples were potholes, index entries, and mentions

This of course is a very unhealthy usage pattern, the largest fraction being mentions and ZCEs. The name also has the problem of people just using it as a female version of Beast Man, which it is not. It reeks of "A name looking for a trope", it's certainly not a bad name (without the source of course), but the trope itself is very narrow and seldom gets used for its intended purpose.

I also noticed that many of the examples are used to refer to the same character multiple times over, At least 5 of the wicks refer to Cheetah, for example.

It has nearly 2k inbounds, so I'd propose either

• Disambiguating it between Amazonian Beauty, Brawn Hilda, and Beast Man
• Redirecting it to Beast Man (I lean this way, as it's rarely used to refer to the former two)

I don't think the concept itself is worth yarding, it's just a bad example of trope arithmetic even when used completely correctly, and not a particularly tropeworthy one on top of it all.

Anyway, I'm leaning toward merging with Beast Man, possibly making Beast Woman a redirect to Beast Man in the process.

I made the Beast Woman redirect anyway since the beginning of Beast Man's description says "or woman" in it. However, I neglected to page ~Tonwen in my previous post.

Seems to be mixing a lot of different ideas and actually being a Beast Woman doesn't seem to be the most important, so I'm in favor of disambiguating.

In that case, I'll change my vote to disambiguating, though I'd imagine Beast Man will be the primary target of the merge (or Beast Woman since gendered redirects are acceptable).

Disambig

Yeah we can probably disambig this between the tropes it's apparently mixed up of: Beast Man, Amazonian Beauty, Brawn Hilda, Barbarian Hero and maybe Cute Monster Girl.

When an article this old has more than 50% ZCE wicks and isn't some form of industry terminology, I'm inclined to an outright cut. Less than 2k inbounds for something older than most page histories is fairly low, and given the Rule 34 link, something that I assume was popular during/because of one of the Google Incidents.

I'd rather eliminate it entirely. We can put a faux-disambiguation as the cut reason.

I'm more for merging with Beast Man, but disambig. is fine too.

I'm in favor of merging it with Beast Man, tbh.

Disambiguate sounds good.

Disambiguate; the examples can still go to Beast Man if they fit, but IDK if it's worth a redirect.

Disambig

Disambig

I think I'd also rather eliminate it or redirect it to Beast Man.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 13th 2022 at 7:52:52 PM

I'm going to set my new preference to "Cut, make the page a psuedo-disambig, move appropriate examples to Beast Man"

Especially seeing as, based on its index in the TLP, this was originally going to be called "The Beastess" instead.

Redirecting to Beast Man sounds good.

Oh God, the original YKTTW has malformed link syntax, starts out by saying it's "a mish-mashing character archetype of the [[beastman Beast Man]] and [[Hotamazon Hot Amazon]] tropes", and was launched without any actual input on the thread. This by someone who's actually since become a pretty decent wiki contributor... who doesn't seem to have touched the page going as far back as the per-person edit history does.

There might be the germ of an idea surrounding a "beastly" female character that's nonetheless considered attractive because they can't quite escape Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty, but even that's probably fairly well covered by existing tropes.

Edited by MorganWick on Sep 13th 2022 at 8:16:54 AM

Related to that, this exchange from the discussion tab in 2010:

Evidently this trope wasn't launched in the best condition.

Cut if we're allowed to, redirect to Beast Man if not

Hmm, I think I'm changing my vote to cut or redirect rather than disambig.

My issue is that I don't see exactly how it really stands out as its own trope, or, possibly, whether there are really enough examples to build one.

You're free to give the concept a swing at the TLP I suppose, because I don't see this one staying regardless of exactly how we deal with it.

Malady's TLP banned.

Well... all I'll add on that is "if you wanna launch a trope, you gotta resolve that ban", TRS is not the place to discuss new tropes unless we're doing a split.

And I'm not really sure there's anything here with salvaging in the first place even if they do get unbanned from TLP.

Edited by Tonwen on Sep 14th 2022 at 12:00:11 PM