Misused: Tuft Of Head Fur

The problem: Tuft of Head Fur is defined as when a character has a tuft of head fur that is meant to distinguish them in some way. Per the description:

Unfortunately, as with many tropes about appearance, many examples skimp out on context. They often simply say a character has a Tuft of Head Fur, without explaining why this is significant. I found this trope after repeatedly clicking on "Random Trope" and immediately noticed problems. I subsequently decided to do a wick check to see what the usage looked like.

Wick check: Link here, but here's the quick results:

• 10/50 examples gave an actual reason for why a character has a tuft of head fur, or 20%
• 37/50 examples just mentioned a character having a tuft of head fur with no other context, or 74%
• 2/50 examples were unclear, or 4%, and
• 1/50 examples were unclassifiable, or 2%

Wick analysis: So, as mentioned, most examples skimped out on context. While there were a number of examples that actually gave context as to the significance of the tuft of head fur, most didn't, simply saying "this character has this" or "these characters have this". Of the ones that did have context, the actual reasons given for why a character had a tuft of head fur were all over the place, but usually it was to make a character distinct appearance-wise from other characters—that concept may be salvageable.

Possible solution: So since 10/50 examples were correct, I propose keeping the meaningful Tuft of Head Fur examples with the (new) name Meaningful Tuft Of Head Fur or Significant Tuft Of Head Fur. If enough examples aren't found we could also yard that concept. The old name would then be disambiguated between other, similar tropes, or cut if no tropes can be found.

What does everyone else think? Any other ideas or solutions?

I don't think it's meaningful or significant. It appears to be a subtrope of Distinctive Appearances but I kinda feel that the fur tuft is just a "hairstyle" some animal characters happen to have at this point.

Maybe just disambiguate (Distinctive Appearances, Meaningful Appearance, and Non-Mammalian Hair)

Edited by MacronNotes on Feb 28th 2023 at 11:49:25 AM

From the description, fur emulating as hair to make an animal stand out or seem more humanoid seems like what this trope is going for, since it makes it look far more natural than Non-Mammalian Hair.

I think renaming it to something like Head Fur As Hair would help, as it would encourage people to describe the character and hairstyle more.

Edited by BlackMage43 on Feb 28th 2023 at 8:59:32 AM

I'd rather disambiguate because of the high amount of ZCEs. The fact that this only has 110 wicks means culling the bad wicks only would probably leave this wick-starved when we're done, meaning any attempt at retrying this in a way that avoids ZCEs would probably be a job for TLP anyway.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 28th 2023 at 11:13:33 AM

Disambig between Distinctive Appearances, Meaningful Appearance, and Non-Mammalian Hair for now.

I've thought the trope is about animal characters having mane or head fur shaped like a human hairstyle (not Non-Mammalian Hair, Furry Female Mane seems to be a gendered version), so there's a yarding potential.

Disambig

+1 Disambig + yard anything that has potential.

I'm actually going to argue that this is a valid trope, considering it's a deliberate artistic choice that gives animal characters more human-like characteristics, so I'm not so sure it needs much more than a cleanup.

Edited by FernandoLemon on Feb 28th 2023 at 2:45:13 PM

I still think it would need a rename if we do that to help discourage future misuse.

Noting here though that I support a disambiguation.

If it was ever salvaged as a trope, yes, it'd need a rename. Not just for the sake of it, but bc such tropes that are just [name of the appearance trope] without any indication that it has some sort of meaning/significance are bad names. If the trope has some significance the title should preferably imply so.

Reading the ZCE on the wick check I'm not sure I agree they're all ZCE.

Some make a point about describing the fur/feather as a hairstyle

Or mention the tuft of hair as a key part of the character's design.

I dunno, this seems salvageable to me. Am I seeing it wrong?

Since it looks like I fucked up the wick check, I apologize.

Should we still rename (my original proposal) or no?

I'm not a big fan of including the words "meaningful" or "significant" in trope names to try to head off misuse for non-meaningful examples. Tropes by definition should be meaningful patterns; if people aren't getting that, it's a problem with the wiki's culture rather than with any given trope's name.

I meant like, should we rename in general?

Depends. BlackMage argued there's actually no issue. If he's right, there's no need for a rename. So, is he right or not?

Edited by FernandoLemon on Feb 28th 2023 at 8:31:06 AM

I think this is just an anthro animal design trope akin to Fur Is Skin (Fur Is Hair And Also Skin, whatever). I don't think there's a context issue with the examples present, and I don't really know what type of 'significance' we would like.

So we should just clock/close this then?

I was more undecided about the trope being about a specific style of fur-hair as distinguisher than being about fur hair in general which was why I was leaning on disambiguating (I also thought fur hair was covered by another trope for some reason) was covered elsewhere. If this is like the hair equivalent of Fur Is Skin like Synchronicity said. In that case, we can probably leave it alone

We also have Ears as Hair in the same ballpark.

Edited by FernandoLemon on Feb 28th 2023 at 9:45:25 AM

Idk if I agree with Black Mage's re-categorization, though. Some examples in the first folder, I would agree have some tropeworthy context, specifically those that phrase it as "animals fur / feathers were styled into a hairstyle" with the implication that such hairstyle is atypical for those kinds of animals (like a form of Artistic License) or are done to specifically resemble more human-like hairstyles like a mohawk since these animals are further along in the anthropomorphization scale. But others (3-6) I agree with classifying as ZCE.

And saying "is part of their design" isn't really context as all design traits for characters are intentionally given as part of their design. It'd be akin to writing an example for a red-headed character like "Character has red hair as part of their design" which does't explain the specific significance of the hair color. Not saying there isn't any significance, but that the example doesn't say how because as written the trope itself doesn't state any.

This feels like it's in the same issue area as some of the convos on Stock X tropes, where we know the unified look of the X is a stylistic choice done for simplicity/appeal to quickly convey to the audience what this thing is, but focusing on each individual example doesn't do much help in explaining the phenomenon.

If this doesn't get reworked to be closer to Artistic License, then maybe it would be better off rolled into a larger article on Animal Anthropomorphization design choices, like the animal section on Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism. Or on a trope page for anthropomorphism broadly since we don't currently have one and I know there has been some talks on making one.

The "character has a tuft of head fur to distinguish them" examples could be merged with Uniformity Exception.

From what I gather, either:

• The trope is fine as-is and doesn't need "significance" plugs because it's Funny Animal Anatomy (it's not indexed there), but it attracts ZCE (or these examples are actually fine even if too short), so we may deter to a cleanup thread and check if the description is vague there.
• There's something lacking that makes it a ZCE magnet Personal Appearance Tropes.

Now that it's brought up, tbh I'll default to the first one.

I added it to the Funny Animal Anatomy index for now. I previously added Unintentional Uncanny Valley to Unexpected Reactions to This Index, so this isn't the first time something brought to TRS wasn't on an index it fits on.

I know this thread is clocked, but since I've basically conceded that this thread was a bad idea, and most of the other participants here agree, I think we can just close this.