Duplicate Trope: The Doll Episode

Also Unclear Description, Ambiguous Name, and Not Tropeworthy.

I mentioned in the open Trope Talk discussion about episode plot tropes that The Doll Episode is kind of a mess. The description specifies that "every horror, suspense and mystery series that runs for long enough will have a doll-themed episode" and lists several common forms that the plot can take, all of which are their own pages (Replacement Goldfish, Human Resources, Kitsch Collection, Living Doll Collector, Demonic Possession, Toy Transmutation). The examples section, on the other hand, largely consists of works that just have dolls in them, so overall the page seems to be "Creepy Doll for one episode, but creepiness is optional and so is the episode". That's all in addition to the general concern that stock episode tropes aren't actually distinct from their standalone equivalents if they aren't Formula Breaking Episodes or otherwise involving the nature of the format. ~The Mayor of Simpleton and ~War Jay 77 supported it as a TRS candidate, so I've done the wick check based on what I observed about the main page examples:

• Many examples on the page, fewer in the wick sample (6/51, 12%) are for non-episodic media. These should all be safely moveable to Creepy Doll. ^note There was some discussion in Trope Talk over whether or not, e.g. a video game sidequest might be an "episode", but I erred on the conservative side for the wick check.
• Monster of the Week-style shows with doll episodes (11/51, 22%) are technically correct use, but per above, horror-adjacent series using horror tropes seems like chairs. Whatever we decide to do with those will likely set a precedent for other problem pages on the Episodes index.
• There were more examples remaining than I expected, but I didn't notice any obvious patterns. They include multiple ZCEs and non-notable aversions (i.e. "this episode has a doll, but it isn't played for horror"). These are also the plurality of the wicks (24/51, 47%).
• Finally, I separated out non-horror series based on whether their dolls were creepy (5/51, 10%) or ordinary (3/51, 6%), mostly for the data. The ordinary dolls are evidence that people think The Doll Episode is any episode with a doll, even when they do go to the effort of providing context.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 25th 2022 at 7:35:20 PM

Opened. It looks like we can disambiguate this based on the large amount of tropes you found that cover this already.

I've already expressed my distaste for Episodes before, so disambiguate this between mentioned tropes.

disambig. majority is misuse (including non-episodic media) or ZCE, much of the rest is covered by other tropes.

Edited by amathieu13 on Sep 26th 2022 at 7:13:01 AM

Disambig.

Disambig

Aside: Gotta love how the very first reply on the original YKTTW is a) a non-episodic medium where the creepy doll is the premise and b) a "subversion" that's just a straight example undermined by the Audience Reaction. TV Tropes really was the Wild West for quite some time in its early days.

Disambiguate

Just noticed I was pinged. It didn't go through for me—so paging ~War Jay 77 since the OP wanted them pinged.

Technically you weren't pinged, since the ping markup doesn't do anything in opening posts. In hindsight, I should have sent the pings after opening the thread, but I hadn't been awake for very long at the time.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 26th 2022 at 10:51:06 AM

Wasn't pinging fixed? In IP at least.

I don't know about IP, but pings still don't work for opening posts on TRS. I checked the PMs of the poster of this thread and no pings were sent via the opening post.

Disambig.

I did see this last night but was too tired to read any of it which is why I didn't respond until now.

That's fine—I only pinged you because the OP pings didn't go through, so I did it since Noaqiyeum attempted to. (Hopefully the admins will fix that bug soon.)

I wasn't too concerned about whether you got the ping since I figured you'd both see it sooner or later, I just thought I should mention you as part of how the Trope Talk thread went.

Oh OK. Wasn't sure—thanks for clarifying.

Anyway, if it wasn't clear, I favour disambiguating or redirecting to Creepy Doll. If that can be generalised to other pages on Episodes that are duplicating a non-episodic trope, so much the better.

...why is "redirect to Episodes" more popular than "redirect to Creepy Doll"? That seems counterintuitive to me.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 30th 2022 at 7:10:40 PM

Because The Doll Episode is an Episodes trope (it's in the title) and Creepy Doll is a characterization trope. And not every The Doll Episode has a Creepy Doll. While there's a correlation, I personally find redirecting to Creepy Doll not a good idea.

I guess that makes sense. Not every The Doll Episode is an episode, either, though, and it seems more likely to me that someone using that link will be more interested in the specific quality looking for doll-related works without episodes, than in the general quality and be directed to episodes that have nothing to do with dolls.

Not that it matters, I guess, since the disambiguation option is in the lead.

not necessarily. if the redirect is supposed to correct misuse, then redirecting to episodes is the better option because not every doll episode is an episode, as that's a common form of misuse of episode tropes broadly that this thread is trying to address

but yeah since disambig is in the lead, it's a moot point either way

Edited by amathieu13 on Sep 30th 2022 at 12:05:51 PM

Been dewicking this. 68 wicks left.

32 left