Paging ~Synchronicity to the thread.
Anyway, due to the two proposed options mentioning other tropes, I'm concerned whether at least the first one would result in redundancy, so I wonder if disambiguating would be a good idea.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 14th 2023 at 2:11:45 PM
I got a rock for Halloween.Calling in favor of the following:
- Focus on the juxtaposition of innocent beauty/tragedy (akin to The Ophelia) and limit to the examples where a bad thing does happen to her
Get a sandbox ready.
I got a rock for Halloween.I’ll have something up later if nobody beats me to it at Sandbox.Unrequited Tragic Maiden
I swapped in the sandbox.
Edit: I removed the rewrite from the sandbox since it was swapped in, but since the sandbox is also being used to keep track of namespaces that have been gone through for wick cleanup, it's staying up for now.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 20th 2023 at 6:30:38 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.

Unrequited Tragic Maiden is a trope I admit to being fascinated by (to the point that two of the entries on Sandbox.Unrequited Tragic Wick Check were written by me). I have always interpreted it as a beautiful, ingenue-type woman who meets a sad end in pursuit of a man she can't have, and this is an idea that's shows up in 'classic' stories: from several tragic Greek nymphs (e.g. Clytie, Echo, Oenone) to more modern fairy tales like Giselle and The Little Mermaid.
However, during the Image Pickin' discussion
and subsequent Trope Talk thread
I realized that a lot of on page examples don't mention the tragic fate: several of them are just "her crush doesn't like her back". The wick check appears to support this: while a good number of wicks (30%) have the maiden commit suicide, sacrifice herself, or turn evil, and some (10%) mention tragedy that happens as a result of the unrequited love even if it's not to her, almost half (46%) just talk about a woman's unreciprocated feelings. Yes, they may be sad for a time and look pretty while mourning their doomed romance, but the girls in the latter category make it out of the story okay. Functionally, this trope is just a list of women with unrequited loves.
Note: Despite the name, tragedy doesn't appear to have been a requirement in the original TLP
, which just focuses on a sweet girl pining away. (Not that the examples in the wick check make a big deal of the woman's sweet personality, anyway.)
But is 'woman has unrequited love' by itself tropeworthy? On either end, I think the concepts that are are:
Wick check:
This wick check aims to determine if tragedy is a necessary factor for Unrequited Tragic Maiden.Results:
Potholes are in bold, my commentary in bolded gold
** One case revolves around a judo champion and friend of Eri killing her husband because he was having an affair with the wife of a close friend of theirs, and his wife's crush for years. When Eri solves the case and tells her that her husband likely had the affair to get some attention from his wife, the wife sees the issue.
You'd Expect: The husband to have realized what a stupid idea it is to have an affair with the wife of a good friend, and specially just to get the attention of his own wife who once crushed hard on the lady's husband, but was self-respectful enough not to pursue it. He was an adult and he should've spoken to his wife about something this important to their relationship.
Instead: He had the affair and made it pretty obvious that he was having an affair by having matches from a restaurant where he met the woman easily visible in their home and using easy-to-see-through methods to give himself a reason for coming home late. And he ended up infuriating his wife so much, specially because said affair broke off the other guy's once genuinely happy marriage, that she snapped and ultimately killed him. Kills her own husband
Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 17th 2023 at 4:30:29 AM
I got a rock for Halloween.