Needs Help: The Love Slap Of Epiphany

I'll run another crowner after this one to see which name we use. For now, I trimmed the crowner option to remove the disambiguation text (while leaving the part about merging) since which name we disambiguate will depend on which name we use.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 28th 2023 at 11:43:59 AM

Wait, is Love at First Punch getting condemned to the disambiguation graveyard?

Not if we call the merged trope Love at First Punch. Then The Love Slap Of Epiphany would be the one that gets disambiguated.

See the crowner. What's currently being voted on is whether to merge the two tropes. From there, we're going to decide which name to keep the new merged trope under.

Personally, The Love Slap Of Epiphany is really clunky and unintuitive to me in a way Love at First Punch isn't, so I'd rather keep the latter.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 29th 2023 at 12:51:04 PM

But Love at First Punch is inaccurately intuitive. From having occasionally read people making fun of old romance comics I could immediately guess what "The Love Slap of Epiphany" was, but there's no way I would've ever guessed that "Love At First Punch" was a closely related/mergable trope, because that name just makes me think of a character literally falling for someone who punches them, most likely because they like 'tough' people.

but that is what the trope is more or less. Love at First Punch is when a haughty/bullyish/snobby/generally mean or abusive character falls for another character that stands up to them, typically by hitting them. See the 4th paragraph:

What do you think Love at First Punch is meant to be (not from the name, but from the description)?

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 29th 2023 at 4:06:29 AM

The bolded part is the problem. I would never have gotten that from that name. Just the literal "falls for a character that punches them" makes me think more of like Blood Knight types who are attracted to equally violent people - as I said, I would've guessed In Love with Your Carnage as a way more closely related trope than this one just going off the names alone.

In contrast, The Love Slap Of Epiphany (a page I'd never actually heard of until I saw it come up in ATT) immediately made me go "oh yeah, this is that kinda sexist trope from old romances where the female lead is 'bitchy' to the male lead until he slaps her and she goes 'wait I'm actually attracted to him'".

Like, I don't really disagree that what the description describes is a trope - I just think Love at First Punch is a bad name because it only conveys part of it, and as a result is fairly misleading.

Edited by nrjxll on Apr 29th 2023 at 3:09:54 AM

The Love Slap Of Epiphany doesn't get at the necessity of the one being slapped needing to be haughty/snobbish/bullying either, just that being slapped causes a Love Epiphany in someone. Likewise Love at First Punch plays off of Love at First Sight, i.e. a character falls in love upon being hit. At best they're both equally vague on the same aspect. Love at First Punch is just, well, punchier than The Love Slap Of Epiphany in my eyes. But again, that's just my personal preference.

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 29th 2023 at 4:21:18 AM

I mean, I'll admit that I'm also coming from a point of having actually seen a fair few of the works that use this (or at least having seen people MSTing them), so that may be why The Love Slap Of Epiphany seemed intuitive to me. I certainly wouldn't object to proposing a third option name.

Honestly, where's the option for a third name? I actually wound up downvoting both after that discussion - I'd bet actual money that Love at First Punch is going to confuse people, but I don't really disagree with amathieu13 about The Love Slap Of Epiphany not being entirely self-explanatory either.

Well, I think it may be one of those things where we have to have name options first. Otherwise we're voting for a new name without knowing if such a thing is even possible.

There's no third name option because nobody suggested a third name as far as I know. Besides, I never intended to put any names other than the two that already exist, since the question is which direction the merge goes in, rather than being a regular rename.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 1st 2023 at 10:26:36 AM

This trope has some significance for me because I rewrote the entire description (on my old account, RJSavoy) to get away from its focus on a single example.

I have to agree with nrjxl that, clunky though it is, tLSOE is better than LaFP, mostly because "slap" gets the idea across much better than "punch". Punching is something you do in a real fight when you want to hurt or disable an opponent. A slap is more a symbolic gesture to show indignation. In the Kuragehime example that the article seems to use as prototype, the woman simply doesn't think of the damage she's done with her manipulation, and the crucial part is the man making her see how angry he is, and from there she comes to realise how much she hurt him.

There might be a supertrope here, without the "love" part: someone lashes out at an abuser, and the abuser sees how damaged they are. I can't think of any examples though.

However what puzzles me most is the low wick count. In the TLP draft there are comments saying that this is found all over romance comics, but no-one has actually added them. I guess they are on the more formulaic, less interesting to trope end.

I still think Love at First Punch is a better name, sorry. It's shorter, snappier, and easier to understand, which is probably why people flock to that rather than tLSOE. The punch vs slap thing I think is kinda nitpicky, tbh.

Edited by badtothebaritone on May 2nd 2023 at 10:31:17 AM

Again, though, it's not easier to understand, because it doesn't get across several important parts of the trope. I'd argue it's actively misleading.

re: slap vs punch, I'm fairly certain this is a gendered difference. When a man is the one doing the hitting, it is typically going to be a slap. But this is not the case for when women are doing the hitting. Everything from punches, suplexes, kicks, and of course slaps are present because of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male, especially for more comedic takes because of the rules of Slapstick.

As to your point about a Missing Supertrope, I think the end of this post is relevant here, re: what this trope may actually be trying to get at versus how users have interpreted the trope and are using it.

While I can appreciate the past attempt to clarify the description, unfortunately I think the Example as a Thesis did little to make this trope clearer. And re: the low wick count, if you need a stronger sign that something is wrong with this trope either description or name-wise, that should be it. Because even poorly described tropes (so long as they aren't a Forgotten Trope and given the comments on the draft about how prevalent it is, I don't think it is/was back when the trope was created) will often have more (mis)use based on the name or laconic, especially if it's been properly indexed as this trope has been. The fact that it doesn't means something's not being communicated well.

Edited by amathieu13 on May 2nd 2023 at 5:27:25 AM

Hey, quick question: I know they recently made disambigs show up as green text, but does that also apply to redirects to a disambig?

Yes. It originally didn't, but that was fixed a few days ago.

Edited by badtothebaritone on May 2nd 2023 at 4:37:54 AM

OK, it's disambiguated, and for some reason I can't get rid of the indexing from Administrivia.Example As A Thesis. I tried re-adding and re-removing it, I tried fiddling with the page type and the "does indexing" check box, and nothing seemed to work, so I'm not sure what to do here.

OK, it was actually the Main.Example As A Thesis redirect that was still indexing despite being a redirect. I overlooked that because I didn't notice that the bottom of the page listed Main/ combined with the fact that I didn't notice that I was being redirected when I clicked the index link (it's past midnight and I'm sick, so brain farts will happen). I temporarily broke the redirect and did a null change to the page type and that fixed it.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 3rd 2023 at 12:44:33 PM

Everything's done, so closing.